Those in favour of decriminalization in SA say it will give prostitutes dignity, give more protection against violence and exploitation, reduce their risk of getting or spreading HIV, give labour rights to prostitutes, and allow for greater regulation of the sex industry. They also believe that human trafficking in terms of the commercial sex industry will decrease. The government has stated that the existing legislation criminalizing prostitution possibly violates a number of constitutional rights. Gauteng premier Nomvula Mokonyane supports decriminalization. The UN and WHO support decriminalization if no victimization is involved. However, no consensus exists among sex workers, NGOs and advocates.

Organizations promoting legalisation cannot be trusted to tell the whole story. It is necessary to ask hard questions about who funds each group and how funds are used; about whether and what alternatives to prostitution are advocated; and whether the organization has any goal other than sexually transmitted disease (STD)/HIV prevention. Organizations must be asked what they know about violence in prostitution, whether they view prostitution as sex work, and about housing options and job training because these are what women tell researchers that they need most to escape prostitution.

There are moral and practical reasons not to decriminalise prostitution. One of these reasons is that it will hurt marriages. A survey by African Response last year reported 79% of South Africans were against the legalisation of prostitution for the World Cup. This article explains the rest of the reasons we should not legalise it. Many countries have tried legalizing it and have seen the harm it has caused.

Germany and the Netherlands have seen the expansion of human trafficking and commercial sex industries since its legalization. Legalization of prostitution in the State of Victoria, Australia, resulted in massive expansion of the sex industry.

Some people believe that, in calling for legalization or decriminalization of prostitution, they dignify and professionalize the women in prostitution. But dignifying prostitution as work doesn’t dignify the women, it simply dignifies the sex industry.

People often don’t realize that decriminalization means decriminalization of the whole sex industry, not just the women in it. And they haven’t thought through the consequences of legalising pimps as legitimate businessmen, or the fact that men who buy women for sexual activity are now accepted as legitimate consumers of sex. A sponsor of the New Zealand decriminalization bill admitted, “it’s going to be the owners or the operators [of brothels and other sex businesses] who are going to be the long-term beneficiaries [of decriminalization]”. Governments should never decriminalize pimps, buyers, procurers, brothels or other sex establishments, who are exploiting vulnerable women.

Jo-Ann Downs, deputy president of the ACDP, said most women in the industry were there purely for financial reasons. She said that in Durban, prostitution was also linked to drug trafficking. There was also a lot of child prostitution in the city. Prostitution has been linked to organised crime.

Legalising prostitution make anti-trafficking enforcement difficult at the working level. Most of the prostitutes in the Netherlands are from other countries and were probably trafficked into the Netherlands. Prostitution often brings illegal immigrants.

The New Zealand law keeps the names of brothel owners secret, thus making public health inspections of brothels an impossibility. The outraged mayor of Auckland, NewZealand, wrote, “This so-called legitimate profession remains partly hidden behind a veil of secrecy [under the new law]”. In fact, the law protects the privacy of pimps and generally represents the interests of johns.

Pimps say the law could control and regulate prostitutes’ health. But a legalized system of prostitution often mandates health checks and certification, but only for women and not for male clients. But the clients can transfer HIV to prostitutes. Between 45 to 60 percent of the sex workers in the Wits outreach project are HIV-positive.

There is despair, degradation, decline, and early death among prostitutes who survive on average only four years after entry into prostitution. The main health problems of women in prostitution are exhaustion, frequent viral illness, STDs, vaginal infections, back aches, sleeplessness, depression, headaches, stomachaches, and eating disorders. Women who were used by more customers in prostitution reported more severe physical symptoms.

It is assumed that women will seek health care as soon as the stigma of arrest is removed from prostitution. If the stigma is removed, advocates argue, women will then file a complaint whenever they are abused, raped, or assaulted in prostitution. They assume that the complaint will be followed with a police response that treats women in prostitution with dignity and as ordinary citizens. Unfortunately, health care workers and police too often share the same contempt toward those in prostitution that others do. The example Germany has set is one in which prostitutes are able to join unions and access health insurance, however even after four years of legalisation many sex workers still prefer not to register due to stigmatisation. Many prostitutes do not go for mandatory health checks and forfeit their anonymity. Explaining this situation, a NZ Prostitutes Collective member stated, “They don’t want to draw attention to themselves and what they’re doing.” The phrase silence is consent is mistakenly applied to women in prostitution. The silence of most of those in prostitution is a result of intimidation, terror, dissociation, and shame. Thus, legalization may actually drive some women into street prostitution to avoid registering.

Some advocates of prostitution suggest that legalization or decriminalization would remove social prejudice against women in prostitution. Yet the shame of those in prostitution remains after legalization or decriminalization. In the Netherlands, where prostitution is decriminalized, women in prostitution point out that legalization or decriminalization of the sex industry does not erase the stigma of prostitution.

Governments who legalise prostitution usually end up zoning it into certain areas. No one wants the business of prostitution operating in his or her community. Since passage of the New Zealand law, there has been conflict over the zoning of prostitution. Pimps often rent homes in suburban areas for the purpose of prostitution and trafficking. Homeowners, on the other hand, want prostitution zoned out of the suburbs and into city centers in Auckland and in the more rural Tauranga District.

Therefore, women in zoned prostitution are physically isolated and socially rejected by the rest of society. The remote areas where prostitution is zoned put them at increased, not decreased, risk of physical danger. Lauren Jankelowitz, the manager of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit’s commercial sex worker project, visited several derelict hotels, with their neon lights, bar fights, strip shows and sunken beds. It’s clear that many women work in unsafe conditions. As well as this danger, the sharing of a special alienation and distance from the conventional society forces the prostitute back to other prostitutes for her social life.

In a lot of countries which have legalized prostitution, many men who previously would not have risked buying women for sex now see prostitution as acceptable. When legal barriers disappear, so too do the social and ethical barriers to treating women as sexual merchandise. Legalised prostitution endangers all women and children in that acts of sexual predation are normalized. What will be the outcome of struggles against sexual harassment and violence in the home, the workplace, or the street? The Family Policy Institute warns that removing the laws against prostitution would mean “buying a woman would be socially and legally the equivalent of buying cigarettes”. This results in prostitutes usually have a low self-esteem and body image.

In the Netherlands women are dressed in hardly anything, are put on display in the notorious windows of Dutch brothels and sex clubs and offered for sale. This is an example of how women will be seem as simply products for others to consume, and their naked bodies will be sexually objectified in public where your children can see it. This degrades a woman’s body and self-esteem. In Australia, advertisements line the highways of Victoria offering women as objects for sexual use. Businessmen are encouraged to hold their corporate meetings in clubs where owners supply naked women on the table at tea breaks and lunchtime.

Sexual objectification is objectification of a person. It occurs when a person is seen as a sexual object when their sexual attributes and physical attractiveness are separated from the rest of their personality and existence as an individual, and reduced to instruments of pleasure for another person. Feminist scholars say that the objectification of women involves disregarding personal and intellectual abilities and capabilities, and women’s reduction to instruments of sexual pleasure for men. This can lead to negative psychological effects including depression and hopelessness, and can give women negative self-images because of the belief that their intelligence and competence are not being acknowledged. If anything, a prostitute treats herself like a chair for someone to sit on. Her mind goes blank. She just lies there. She become just an object. . . . After a while it becomes just a normal thing.

Some members of Parliament who originally supported the legalization of brothels on the grounds that this would liberate women are now seeing that legalization actually reinforces the oppression of women. A psychoanalytic account documents how pleasure derived from sexual intercourse is transformed into power and destruction. Instead of dignifying women, legalizing prostitution degrades them. The notion that prostitution is work tends to make its harm invisible.

Advoacates of decriminalisation say that to deny women the “right to prostitute” violates their civil rights. However, one advocacy organization in another country admitted that johns could be seen to be “taking advantage of a prostitute’s economic vulnerability. The exploitation prevalent in this industry can be seen as a form of modern-day slavery. Jo-Ann Downs says, “The woman is a victim, a victim of circumstance, for a start.” Child prostitution, human trafficking for sex work, and exploitation of migrant sex workers are serious abuses of human rights. Prostitution is an institution that systematically discriminates against women, against the young, against the poor, and against ethnically subordinated groups. And it contributes towards the inequality of the sexes.

One goal of legalized prostitution was to move prostituted women indoors into brothels and clubs where they would be allegedly less vulnerable than in street prostitution. However, many women are in street prostitution because they want to avoid being controlled and exploited by pimps.

Countering the argument that legalized prostitution provides safer venues for women, prostitutes indoors have even less control over what services they will perform. It has been argued that legalized brothels or other “controlled” prostitution establishments protect women through enforceable condom policies. But indoors, the owners, who obviously don’t want their punters going away disappointed, decide what the women will do, and very often that is anal sex and sex, oral and vaginal, without a condom. On the street, very few women will do anal sex and few do sex without a condom. A lot of men become abusive if the women insist that the men use condoms.

Generally, it is class prejudice to assume that street prostitution is far worse than what is called high-class escort prostitution. Prostituted women in Chicago reported the same frequency of rape in escort and in street prostitution. Some prostitutes in the United States and in New Zealand have said they felt safer in street prostitution as compared to brothels where they were not permitted to reject customers. They are not encouraged to complain about violence to pimps or owners. Sometimes, they are fired for these protests, even after being raped.

Prostitutes in strip clubs experience verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, which includes being grabbed on the breasts, buttocks, and genitals, as well as being kicked, bitten, slapped, spit on, and penetrated vaginally and anally during lap dancing. A bouncer in an Australian (legal) brothel said that when the women ring the buzzer, he breaks the door open, but there is really no way to prevent violence and, according to this bouncer, clients beat women with some regularity. In a survey, murder caused 50% of the deaths of women in prostitution. Similar studies show that murder caused between 29% and 100% of all prostituted women’s reported deaths in Birmingham, UK; Nairobi, Vancouver, Canada; and London.

Prostituted women have an increased risk of cervical cancer and also chronic hepatitis. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) occurs in prostitution as a result of being beaten, hit, or kicked in the head, strangled, or having one’s head slammed into objects such as car dashboards. Many of the chronic symptoms of women in prostitution are similar to the long-term physical consequences of torture, such as Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The harm of toxic verbal assaults against those in prostitution is emotionally devastating, often outlasting the physical injuries. Some prostitutes get nightmares from the assaults. Explaining the process, one woman said that over time “it is internally damaging. You become in your own mind what these people do and say with you. You wonder how could you let yourself do this and why do these people want to do this to you?”

In two studies in which 186 victims of commercial sexual exploitation were interviewed, women consistently indicated that prostitution establishments did little to protect them, regardless of whether the establishments were legal or illegal. One woman said, “The only time they protect anyone is to protect the customers.” Any surveillance equipment is for the client’s benefit. Protection of the women from abuse was of secondary or no importance.

In a 5-country study on sex trafficking, most of the trafficked and prostituted women interviewed in the Philippines, Venezuela and the United States (3) strongly stated their opinion that prostitution should not be legalized and considered legitimate work, warning that legalization would create more risks and harm for women from already violent customers and pimps. Forty-six percent of prostitutes interviewed from six countries felt that they were no safer from physical and sexual assault even if prostitution were legal. One woman said, “No way. It’s not a profession. It is humiliating, and violence from the men’s side.” Another woman stated, “Prostitution stripped me of my life, my health, everything.”

Dutch prostitutes say although legalisation of prostitution was promoted as a way to improve their lives, they view it primarily as a way for the government to tax their earnings. Often they do not think that their health has benefited or that they are offered more protection under legalised or decriminalised prostitution.

Researchers found that women prostituted in strip clubs had higher rates of dissociative and other psychiatric symptoms than those in street prostitution. This is a way to deal with the fear and abuse they experience. Most women who have been in prostitution for any length of time experience sexual dysfunction with their chosen partners. Feelings are disconnected from sexual acts. It becomes nearly impossible to view their partners as anything but clients. A prostitute who worked behind the glass said, “at work, what my hands find when they touch my body is ‘product’. When [her partner] kissed me I inadvertently shrunk from his touch. Shocked, we both jerked away and stared at each other. Somehow the glass had dissolved, and he had become one of them.” One prostitute explained how she coped with her work: “I would numb my feelings. I wouldn’t even feel like I was in my body”. “You make yourself empty inside.”

New York City Mayor’s Midtown Citizens Committee chairperson said, “The seamy realities of the prostitution trade” take an “enormous toll upon the environment and the economic resources of a neighbourhood or community”. Prostitution also does not accomplish anything for society.

Instead of abandoning women in the sex industry to state-sponsored prostitution, laws should stop male predators who buy women for sex. Sweden’s Violence Against Women Government Bill prohibits and penalises buying “sexual services”. This approach targets the male demand for prostitution. Most importantly, women who are attempting to leave prostitution support the law. Swedish NGOs that work with women in prostitution also support the law and say that since passage of the law, increased numbers of women contact them for assistance. The very existence of the law, and the fact that people know it will be enforced, they say, serve as an aid to young women who are vulnerable to pimps and abusive clients.

It would be a great step forward in the campaign against sexual exploitation for governments and UN agencies to prohibit their diplomats, military personnel, UN police and peacekeepers from getting involved prostitution activities on or off duty. One country’s law describes it as “constitute acts of gross misconduct and are therefore grounds for termination.”

Rather than getting money from the sex industry by taxing it, governments could take the assets of sex businesses and then use the money to provide real alternatives for women in prostitution. Strategies to prevent trafficking and prostitution, or to prosecute traffickers, recruiters, pimps and buyers, will be inadequate unless governments invest in the futures of prostituted women by providing economic resources that enable women to improve their lives.

These women need skills for the workplace and a place to live. Peer education, outreach programmes and appropriate educational materials have effectively improved the lives of women trafficked for sex work. Wits outreach programme is doing this. Telephone hotlines should be set up for sex workers. Counselling and shelters should be available.

To conclude, women in prostitution are only there for the money. They are not happy with hat they are doing. Rather, their lives are filled with shame, fear, abuse and isolation. Most do not agree that legalizing prostitution would help them in any way. If they had the chance to escape, they would.