Legal Prostitution Can Never Be Safe

Norma Ramos is the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

Updated April 19, 2012, 9:53 PM

At its core, prostitution is violence against women. Safe prostitution is an oxymoron. Prostitution creates a class of human beings who are not supposed to feel when they are most supposed to feel, who are not allowed to say no to unwanted sex. It is the world’s oldest oppression.

The way to address oppression is to end it -- not legalize, regulate or make it more tolerable. The most effective way to address this commercial sexual exploitation is to penalize the buyers and offer those caught up in the sex trafficking industry a way out. This is the model in Sweden, Norway and Iceland -- known as the Nordic model. This approach has discouraged sex trafficking. It is premised on the idea that women and girls have the right not to be bought and sold for sexual exploitation.

Legalization would support the idea that women have no right to be free of sexual exploitation.

For argument’s sake, say 1 percent of the prostituted women in the United States freely chose to be in prostitution. But the vast majority of prostitution results from conditions like childhood sexual abuse, gender inequality, poverty, racism etc.

For the majority, prostitution has proved very hard to get out of, particularly since many women enter it at a very young age. To have been sexually exploited since childhood is to have educational and other opportunities robbed of you. Women and girls in the sex industry are also routinely exposed to high levels of abuse and can even suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Prostitution teaches men and boys that women and girls can be rendered into sexual commodities that can be bought or sold for sexual use and abuse. It creates a callousness among men that undermines the human rights of all women and girls.