- I've worked with teenage girls who
are pressured into prostitution by their
boyfriends who acted as their pimps
and have also worked with sex workers who
are basically boss ladies running their own business.
And that is just the very tip of the iceberg
on how complex the issue of prostitution is.
(funky music)
Hi babes, I'm coming at you from Jamaica.
I'm also using a different camera than I normally use
so sorry if the audio and video is not
the same as it usually is.
My question for you is, should prostitution be a crime?
That's a big, complicated question that is currently
being debated around the world because
Amnesty International put forth this proposal
to say "Hey, countries should decriminalize sex work."
Basically what this means is that sex workers,
aka prostitutes, won't be thrown in jail for it
and they will have legal rights protecting them.
I wanna unpack the issue a little bit
because it has been so controversial.
I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert, I'm not.
But I do have some thoughts.
Prostitution has been criminalized around the world,
Mostly because people think that's
a naughty thing that people should not do,
but also because they're worried
about the spread of disease.
Theory is that hey, if we criminalize it,
the sex trade will just disappear, right?
Wrong.
The sex trade is very much alive and thriving.
Amnesty did a bunch of studies looking at prostitution
all around the world and basically came to the conclusion
that look, criminalizing it is failing.
It's not working, guys.
It's creating more stigma and more discrimination against
sex workers which is making it really dangerous for them.
In the U.S. and U.K. police raids have pushed sex workers
underground into more unsafe areas.
They've made it harder for sex workers to negotiate
condom use, what their rules are, to turn down a client.
Police often use condoms as evidence of the crime
so nobody wants to use condoms.
And because it is a crime, sex workers are very reluctant
to report abuses against them.
When they are reported,
police don't always investigate those abuses.
In fact, the police themselves are sometimes the abuser.
In various parts of the world police have used
a sex worker's lack of rights to extort money out of them,
to extort sexual favors.
I mean, after all, the sex workers are the criminals, right?
And that's the ugly side of criminalization.
It empowers abusers by limiting a sex worker's rights,
making them more vulnerable.
So Amnesty's like "Hey, decriminalization could be a better
"direction to go with this issue."
Then a bunch of scholars and feminists and celebrities
wrote a letter that roundly rejected it.
Like, hell no Amnesty.
They say that decriminalizing sex work, wholesale,
only helps abusive pimps and johns because they
can now call it business.
Instead we should criminalize people who are buying sex
and provide lots of services and exit strategies
to sex workers, usually women,
who are trying to get out of the sex trade.
There's nothing wrong with services and exit strategies.
The problem is that the letter sort of implies that
sex workers are the same thing as trafficking victims.
Those are two different issues.
Really need to recognize the difference between sex work,
which is consensual sex trade,
and trafficking, which is not consensual.
It is coercive, it is forced.
Inflating those two only creates more stigmas,
it only makes things more dangerous.
Now of course this is a tricky point, right?
It's not always easy to tell who's being coerced
and who's entering into it freely.
In Amnesty's proposal they wrote,
"We recognize that intersectional discrimination
"and oppression can play a role in an individual's
"decision to engage or remain in sex work.
"Systems of oppression deny people power
"and lead to poverty and deprivation of opportunity."
Women, people of color, and trangendered folks
are over represented in sex work for a reason.
The problem is that we just re-marginalize people who have
come to sex work when we deny them legal protections.
All right, you still with me?
You still following me here?
Let's talk about punishing just the pimps and the johns.
Could be good in theory but it does make the patronizing
assumption that we need to save sex workers
that aren't being coerced.
And perhaps more to the point,
there's no strong evidence that this actually works.
Sweden and Norway have this policy
and it's often seen as a success because street
prostitution dropped off.
However, the data started in 1999,
right as the internet became a thing
and actually just a lot of sex work, sex trade went online.
Reports by experts in Sweden say that
however well intentioned, this law has actually made it
more dangerous for sex workers.
It's pushed their transactions into the shadows
in order to protect their clients,
where it can be harder to tell
if it's a safe or unsafe situation.
Amnesty also noted in their report that Sweden's policy
hasn't made clients any less abusive
and that it may not work in less developed countries.
There might be some way to modify Sweden's model
to make it a little bit stronger
but it's definitely not there yet.
New Zealand, as another example,
decriminalized sex work in 2003.
Since enacting that law sex workers in New Zealand
report that they're better able to negotiate
condom usage, to enforce their rules,
to turn down clients, to talk to health care workers.
They sign contracts, they get paid weekly,
they have typical labor protections that everyone else has.
The U.N. also says that decriminalizing sex work globally
would reduce HIV infections by anywhere between
33% to 46% in the next 10 years.
That's a huge deal if we really are concerned
about reducing disease.
The retort to this is that decriminalization
increases the demand to buy sex
and also increases sex trafficking.
But I actually couldn't find any hard data
that backs this up.
So I'm going to leave that
as a big 'ol question mark for now.
There's so much to think about here
and this is such a hugely important issue.
These are human rights we're talking about,
these are women's rights we're talking about.
We really need to be careful,
we need to listen to what sex workers are saying,
we need to look at the data and really come up
with a complex, humanistic policies
that will really address the core of these issues.
I look forward to your thoughts in the comments down below.
I'll probably hit you up from another country next time.
Maybe not, maybe I'll be home.
♫ Peace be with everyone
♫ Except your mom, oh. ♫
- [ Voiceover] What?