Every women has a right not to be prostituted

Debates on prostitution rage on, as they have for over a hundred years. But if the commerce of sex was once a more hidden or at least discreet business, today there's no ignoring the bombardment of sex sales talk; we live, it has been said, in a culture of pornography. With the worldwide explosion in recent decades of industries based on the production, sale and consumption of sex primarily personified in women's bodies, there is an even more pressing need to understand the commodification of sex in the range and diversity of forms that pornography, "sexual entertainment" and prostitution are taking, and for feminists to analyze the significance of and impact of these developments on women's status.

Economic Stakes

Perhaps because a powerful economy has arisen around the sale of sex, totally integrated into local and national economies and hugely profitable for industrialists and for states, more voices are being raised to suggest and in some cases, to demand that prostitution be accepted as commerce and as legitimate work for women and a valid means for women's economic empowerment. The flesh trade in Thailand has been estimated by ECPAT to generate between US$18 - 21.6 billion a year or over half of the entire 1995 budget of that country, and in Japan equals the defense budget; attesting to the fact of the huge revenues generated.

Diverging Feminist Analyses

Some arguments claim to find in prostitution a practice of women's resistance to and sexual liberation from norms and traditional moral precepts of sexuality that have served to control and subordinate women.

Radical feminist thinking, on the other hand, has analyzed prostitution as a cornerstone of patriarchal control and sexual subjugation of women that impacts negatively not just on the women and girls in prostitution but on all women nas a group because prostitution continually affirms and reinforces patriarchal definitions of women as having a primary function to serve men sexually.

Human Rights Arguments

Human rights arguments are being marshaled on both sides of the divide for and against prostitution, particularly in light of the feminist movement to apply a human rights framework to women's condition while at the same time posing challenges to and redefining mainstream human rights principles with a women's perspective.

The Right To Self-- Determination

For the pro-prostitution advocates, foremost among the human rights principles invoked to defend the right to prostitute is the right to self-- determination. This is understood as the individual's right to make autonomous choices and decisions which can include engaging in consensual commercial sex as well as of setting the terms of that sexual exchange.

There are many problems with this position starting with its failure to acknowledge the social, economic and political structural imbalances and the sexual relations of power between women and men which constitute the context within which these choices and decisions are being made. Further, it fails to ask the crucial question of whether prostitution can lead to social and sexual equality for women or will in fact continue to reinforce gender disparities of rights and status. As has been pointed out by human rights advocates, "By failing to take the phenomenon of male domination of women in both the public and private worlds into account, the right to selfdetermination (...) can in fact reinforce oppression against women through its complicity in systemic male oppression and violence." (Charlesworth 75)

Worse, it is predominantly a North and class-blind perspective that trivializes the massive phenomenon of the abduction, deception and trafficking into prostitution of women and girls, mostly from countries of the South but today, also from the dislocated economies of eastern Europe, and which constitute by far the most prevalent procurement methods worldwide.

Still less does it take into account the plain fact that the male users of prostitution do not ask to know or care if the human merchandise they purchase consent to being put at their sexual disposal. The stated consent of some, therefore, can damn others, women and girls who by no means have consented to prostitution.

The issue of choice and consent as an analytical tool is worthless to understand prostitution as an institution. Prostitution pre-exists as a system that requires a supply of female bodies and therefore, women and girls will be kidnapped, deceived, enticed or persuaded to ensure that supply. How women get into prostitution is irrelevant to the functioning of the prostitution system, rather, prostitution maintains itself as a system by what is and can be done to women in prostitution, and what sexual privileges prostitution allows the male clientele.

What is one to make, for example, of the case of the hundreds of Nepali girls trafficked into India who in the first two or three years of their confinement in Bombay brothels are kept closely guarded and not allowed outside because at any opportunity they will try to escape. In later years, they will stand displayed in their finery outside the brothel door with no risk of their running away. They may even leave for a time and then return. What has happened to them in the interval? What is the quality of that later "consent" that would define the prostitution exchange as consensual activity? In recommending the recognition of prostitution as legitimate commerce, the government of the Netherlands goes so far as to propose the concept that a person may "fully and freely, consent to his/ her own exploitation." (Cited in to Monde Diplomatique March 1997). For women (as for workers, indigenous or colonized peoples) whose historical condition has been one of subordination and exploitation, this is clearly a barbarous and unacceptable concept.