Just in case anyone’s interested:
In Australia the states have different laws governing prostitution. Western Australia has legalised brothels and prostitutes.
Queensland - a state so often seen as conservative - has legalised prostitution ut not brothels. In fact a ‘working girl’ in Qld cannot have sex with a client in a house where other people are present (nywhere in the house). This rather stupid law was an attmept to prevent organised crime from running brothels (by making brothels illegal) but offered no protection for the ladies of the night themselves. Thi slaw is currently being addressed.
In Italy the situation is as follow:
Prostitution in itself is legal, “earning from prostitution” in not.
The definition of what’s “earnings” is rather ambiguous (IMHO, intentionally) and has been initially justified as an attempt to prevent someone, organized crime presumably, to exploite/force woman into sex-for-money and/or to run brothels.
However now the law is sometimes applied also as a deterrent against the prostitutes by theatening to arrest their husband/partner or in general any person connected and leaving out of that money.
the sitution in Canada is similar to the British laws that Cecil describes.
Prostitution per se is legal, but all the ancillary activities are prohibited. Soliticitng in public (both customer and prostitute), keeping a bawdy house, and living off the avails are criminal offences.
There was a court challenge about 10 years ago, on the basis that if prostitution itself is legal, prohibition of the necessary ancillary acitivies violated the Charter’s guarantees of liberty and freedom of association.
The Supreme Court dismissed the challenge: [url=http://www.droit.umontreal.ca/doc/csc-scc/cgi-bin/repere.cgi?corpus=pub_en&tout=prostitution&language=en&form=doc%2Fcsc-scc%2Fen%2Findex.html&range=2&numdoc=29]Prostitution Reference.
“There was a court challenge about 10 years ago, on the basis that if prostitution itself is legal, prohibition of the necessary ancillary acitivies violated the Charter’s guarantees of liberty and freedom of association.”
It makes sense (at least to me) for someone to argue that you can’t legalize prostitution
while criminalizing ALL the ancillary activities. Generally speaking, prostitution is either:
1)“streetwalking” (soliciting customers in public),
2)brothels (the customers come to the prostitutes), or
3)“call girls” (soliciting customers through advertisements, “escort services” etc.).
(If someone can think of another method of prostitution that I haven’t, feel free to post your correction.)
The argument would be that forbidding public solicitation precludes 1, banning “bawdy houses” precludes 2, and the crime of living off the proceeds of prostitution precludes 3. Ergo, prostitution is legal but not legal.
However, the nuisance aspect of prostitution is really public solicitation. Large numbers of scantily-clad women walking up and down the street – not by itself a bad thing (^; – and drunken or boorish men driving slowly down the street, calling hookers over to their cars using vulgar language. Beyond congesting traffic, driving away most merchants’ foot traffic, and generally attracting a “bad element” (more so the customers than the hookers), women who live in neighborhoods with rampant street solicitation often complain of being solicited repeatedly as they wait for buses or walk to their cars, and some have been threatened or attacked by “johns” who resented that (someone they misperceived to be) a hooker wouldn’t do business with them. It seems to me that a ban on street solicitation is MUCH more defensible than an outright ban on brothels (though they should be regulated and inspected) or on living off the proceeds, since it’s more closely tailored to the practical “non-moral” problems caused by prostitution.
One working dominatrix I met a few years ago (I didn’t know she worked as a dominatrix when I first met her) got around the anti-prostitution laws by insisting that her “customer” was actually just her friend (i.e. there was no business relationship involved), that she was engaging in sex-related activities with her friend for free, and that her friend also happened to be giving her gifts for free.
This strategy had two advantages: (1) Since the sex activities and the gifts were supposedly unrelated, it didn’t count as prostitution; and (2) gifts aren’t subject to income tax in the U.S., they’re subject to Gift Taxes instead, and the first $10,000 of gifts given per giver per year incur no Gift Tax at all.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Sweden recently changed their law - as I understand it, selling sex isn’t illegal, but buying sex is. Hokay. Elsewhere in Scandinavia, prostitution is legal, but pimping or running a brothel is. In other words, you can rent out your own body, but you can’t make a living renting out other people’s.
The column mentions Nevada. Prostitution is legal there on a county-option basis. It’s allowed in six of the state’s 14 counties, last time I checked. Working women are required to take a medical exam once per week. Brothels generally require condom use. As a result, STDs are rare.
Despite their legal status, brothels are often harassed by the government. The legendary Mustang Ranch was recently shut down due mostly to various financial problems, but a nuisance complaint also figured in the proceedings. Three Nye County brothels came under scrutiny years ago because one guy owned all of them. I’ve not heard what became of that.
Prostitution was legal in Clark County (Las Vegas) until 1943. When most of the county’s men were at war, the women got together and voted it out. The issue hasn’t been on the ballot since, so far as I know. That doesn’t stop women from hiring out in Vegas, though. It’s only made them more expensive.
I haven’t been there since '95 (and miss it terribly), but isn’t prostitution also legal in some forms in Victoria and New South Wales? I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall seeing ads for such services in the tourist magazines…
“The dawn of a new era is felt and not measured.” Walter Lord