A STRAW poll among my workmates almost unanimously agreed that prostitution should be legalised. Not just, they argued, to ensue the safety of sex workers, but to bring them inside society: paying taxes, having health checks, being protected from exploitation and violence.
Given a voice. As one wag suggested, set assessment targets and performance review: accountability. But should it, does it work?
It may be that some clients will be happy to attend legalised “massage” parlours, and how I hate that euphemism. I like massages, and it seems to be to very degrading to those who are real masseurs. But the reality is that many clients will be married men, pillars of their communities; they will not want to be seen entering and leaving a legal establishment with the inevitable pavement CCTV cameras and the chance of being spotted by family, friends or colleagues.
In Holland where it has been legalized, the official brothels are as much a tourist attraction as a profession: it has not removed illegal prostitution, in fact recent research concludes it has increased it, as legalised red light districts do attract punters, but with their checks on drugs, age and health, push many of the sex workers underground.
Most prostitution does not happen in brothels, it happens off the net, through the phone book or the paper, on street corners or across the bar at “entertainment” pubs. I met Susie the other day outside Mike’s bar in central Nicosia. She was British. A jolly, voluptuous blonde girl in her late twenties: she told me she’d been working in Ayia Napa for the summer but had moved to Nicosia for the winter. She also did some “hostessing” in one of the local lap dancing bars.
What would she think about it being legalised? She laughed: “No way. Thank you”. “Why?” “Well what would I gain from it?” She asked. “Security,” I suggested. “I don’t need no security; we look out for each other.”
She told me that most of her customers were soldiers. She provided a cheap and cheerful service, nothing fancy. She didn’t have a pimp, although she told me a lot of the “foreign” girls did have. They were housed in flats around the town.
Her main argument for it not being legalised was money. All her transactions were cash in hand, why would she want to declare her earnings. She told me she’d expect to make about £150 a night for about three hours’ work. She didn’t think of herself as a prostitute; she was, she said, “only doing it for a while until she had saved up enough money with her boyfriend to open her own bar here.” Apart from marijuana, she didn’t do drugs, and she always used condoms.
To be honest, she was likeable. I could see how, if I was a soldier, a long way from home I might be happy to give myself a Saturday night treat. There was something worryingly wholesome about her, and, of course, they can rely on her discretion not to tell their woman back home.
Secrecy is the key, no strings. It is, after all, they would argue, not a proper relationship, but of course she does have her regulars and as she laughingly tells me: “I tell them they are all the best, better than all the rest.”
But it is not all like this: as we know only too clearly from the events in Ipswich. Dysfunctional lives create drug dependent casualties, who, rather than using crime, use their bodies to get the money to fuel their habit. Horrible downward spirals of psychological damage leading to illness and depression, children in care, wrecked lives and physical abuse.
Personally, I don’t like prostitution. I think it reeks of power and exploitation. I think that sex without emotion desensitises people to real feeling. I would like to see sex workers legalised with all the responsibilities that would come from that. I don’t see why I should pay taxes to give them protection and health care if they don’t contribute some of their earnings back. I also think that clients should be protected, that they have the right to know if they are going with a man or woman who is, for example, HIV positive. That they should be allowed to know how many clients she/he has a week and what risks she/he takes with them.
But will legalising prostitution work? No, because there will always be vulnerable, young girls outside the loop, working illegally in countries, or underage, with those who make money from getting them addicted to drugs and then exploiting them. There will always be the growing group of women and men: students, partners, colleagues who are drawn into the work for the easy money and in some instance the thrill of the risk. There will also always be those who are part-timers, who use the net to meet their clients through chat rooms and the ever-increasing number of adult websites. Or who are prepared to fulfil sexual practices that are illegal or provide services that they can’t get at home.
We can legalise brothels, but realistically that is just the tip of a growing iceberg. The most vulnerable won’t join brothels. If we are to tackle prostitution we have to tackle why people think they need it, and we have to ask ourselves, as societies, how tolerant we really want to be and what levels of hypocrisy we are willing to accept. Personally, I would like to live in a world where there is no prostitution, where people make love to each other out of genuine emotion, where sex is an extension of friendship, where there is more honesty about the diversity of sexual needs and sexual practice, but that may be a street corner too far.
