According to a study made in the early nineties in Stockholm, Sweden (a country considered as “civilised western society”) the most common cause of death among the studied prostitutes was violent assault. Average age of the prostitutes: 29.
Two-thirds of the prostitutes had been abused as children and almost every one of the prostitutes had a serious drug addiction. They had started to take drugs because they couldn’t endure the profession. Several prostitutes, especially the ones that originated from third world countries had been forced to prostitution or sold to sexual slavery as children, some by their own relatives. Others couldn’t find other work because their pimp had threatened to beat or kill them if they tried to leave. Some were abused equally by clients and pimps.
The clients weren’t bothered by the prostitutes’ drug use because it made the prostitutes indifferent about what happened to them, thus more obedient. All the prostitutes had tried to quit the profession or wanted to quit. Most prostitutes believed that as they had no right to say no to abuse, they might as well charge for it.
IMHO, I think there’s more to prostitution than just “they’re choosing to do so”. I think it’s an institutionalised version of rape. If you think this is a choice based on free will, you could ask yourself “would I want my daughter to be in this profession?”.
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girlie3k, I’ve mentioned before in other threads that I feel uneasy about prostitution because of the crimes that are often associated with it (abuse of women, selling of children to brother owners e.g. in thailand, etc…)
So I am somewhat sympathetic to your point of view. But some of your comments seem to me to be too categorical.
e.g.
«almost every one of the prostitutes had a serious drug addiction. They had started to take drugs because they couldn’t endure the profession.»
One often hears the opposite point of view, that the prostitutes turned to their profession to support their drug habit. In that case the root cause of the problem happened to be substance abuse.
«The clients weren’t bothered by the prostitutes’ drug use because it made the prostitutes indifferent about what happened to them, thus more obedient.»
This also seems to me to be a perhaps unwarranted generalization. I would think that a client would prefer to have sex / spend time with a woman that was not obviously a drug addict.
I would think that prostitution is legal in Sweden. Is that not true? If it IS legal, then couldn’t a prostitute get legal redress for abuse by a pimp? If it ISN’T legal, could many of those problems be resolved by making it legal?
And what if a woman choses for reasons of her own to become a prostitute, in the (perhaps mistaken) belief that it’s an easy way to make good money? For example, I had a roommate once who wanted to work in a topless bar because her friend who worked there (as a waitress) told her she made good tips waiting on tables. I know this is anecdotal evidence and not really relevant to the case at hand since we’re talking about prostitution, but it seems to me that it’s not totally unrelated.
Unfortunately, the thread dates from before the conversion of the SDMB to new software so some of the html tags are visible in a post making several of the posts hard to read.
Maria, I’ve never been to Sweden, and cannot comment with respect to the prostitutes there. Here in the US, prostitutes are not sold into sexual slavery, generally speaking. They choose to prostitute themselves. In fact, most of them make this choice several times every day.
Don’t fall into the trap of excusing people for the bad choices they make–people won’t change unless they’re uncomfortable. Like women who stay with abusive partners, there are many emotional factors at play in the choices that prostitutes make, but they are still choices.
Battered women and prosititutes are not weak, feeble-minded children who face overwhelming adversaries, and to make excuses for the women who continue to allow themselves to be abused is to discredit the brave choices made by the women who choose to stand up to their abusive partners or pimps.
Supposing for the sake of argument that no woman willingly chooses prostitution; further supposing for the sake of argument that they really do get drug addicted as a consequence of their profession rather than vice versa; still further supposing that many are prostitutes because they’ve been sold into slavery as children . . .
** How are all these evils to be ameliorated by throwing the poor wenches in jail??? ** * This is the part I can never understand. Has any prostitute * ever * been “rescued” from the life by being thrown into the company of rapists and drug dealers?