A perfectly serious article on the editorial page in Monday’s Vancouver Sun: “Prostitution expert doesn’t like what she sees in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.”
Unlike some people, I don’t have to pretend to be an expert to agree with popular opinion on that one. Prostitution and the way it is practiced in our country is an abomination.
That’s not what I’m arguing with. It’s Ms. Bindle’s solution I find ludicrous. She apparently interviewed 250 participants in the trade. Now, in a spontaneous eruption of creativity, she has come up with the ultimate solution to the evils of prostitution. Ban it!
The “Look At Us Doing Something About It” Solution
Banning, criminalization, proscription, satanifying, or what-have-you is one of the oldest and most useless methods of dealing with prostitution. Like the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and all other violent knee-jerk solutions, such an approach drives the practice into the hands of criminals and ensures that the wrong people get punished while the true villains get rich.
I suppose everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. However, nobody is allowed to give that opinion in a reputable newspaper and support it with specious arguments. Not and get off scot-free.
Ms. Bindle supports her theory with such statements as, “we are winning, because there are more countries now with the abolitionist model than there are countries that have legalization.” Correct data, crazy conclusion. As recently as 1984, more countries in the world had capital punishment than those who had abolished it. Did that mean that the murderers were winning? I hardly need to remind this lady that it’s the direction the trend is moving that denotes progress. Her argument puts her in bed with the perpetrators of Sharia law and other very edgy thinkers.
Another bit of great argument: apparently the evidence from the 15 countries in the world that have legalized prostitution shows that “it has been an unmitigated disaster.” What evidence? She gives precisely none. Donald Trump at his best couldn’t do better.
What is Prostitution?
The fact is, all of these behaviours that we are trying to deal with are businesses. They wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have a product and clients who want to buy it. There are two good ways to destroy a business: remove the product or lower the demand. If you remove the product, demand goes up, and the price just gets higher. If you remove the demand, the business disappears.
At least we have made progress in the odious practice of criminalizing those providing the service. These people are created by the other ills in our society and then abused by their clients. Having the law attack them as well creates a triple jeopardy. The latest trend, attacking the customer, is likewise doomed to failure. Criminalization of any sort drives the practice underground, with predictable results for the victims.
The Solution?
In the short term, decriminalization and government regulation are the best harm reduction methods. Besides the obvious benefits of safety and health, there is a third plus that comes up in all areas where people are trying to help the needy, such as the homeless or the addicted. It’s a matter of contact. Many of the victims are not aware of the help that is available, and those providing help don’t know where the victims are. The added beneficial contact made necessary by a legalized situation allows agencies to find those in need of aid and direct them to the proper sources.
But the long-term solution goes much deeper into the problems of our society. Psychologists reassure us that sexual abuse has very little to do with sex, and a whole lot to do with abuse in general. It is not difficult to assume that someone who has been sexually abused may turn into an abuser. Perhaps less obvious is that if you take the sexuality out of the equation, abuse of any sort is likely to create an abuser, whether sexual or not.
Taken to its logical extreme, then, any step we take in lessening any type of abuse of people in our society will reduce the amount of abuse of all sorts passed on to our children. Removing capital punishment as tool for the government to use against its people. Removing corporal punishment as an accepted disciplinary tactic in schools.
Spanking
Moving to deny spanking as a disciplinary method in the home would be the next big one, in my opinion. My experience as a teacher during a time when corporal punishment was just going out of practice has shown me that the most disruptive students, who were the most likely to be strapped, usually behaved that way because of abusive practices of whatever sort in their homes. Thus the children being strapped the most were the ones who needed it the least, because it simply confirmed in their developing minds that violence was the solution to conflict. And heaven help their children.
Violence as Justice
Just as allowing the government to kill people is a useless deterrent to murder, allowing parents to solve conflict by physical violence creates more trouble than it solves. The use of violence to solve conflict only serves to teach children that violence is acceptable, and leads to further violence. So, anything society and government can do (and both need to be on side for this one) to lessen the violence of one person towards another, and especially the violence of those in power towards those with none, the closer we will come to solving a lot of the ills we fall prey to. And it will go a long way towards removing prostitution from being the canker that it presently forms in our society.
As far as banning anything we don’t like; that’s the kind of authoritarian nonsense that has led to the epidemic of violence that causes the ills we are speaking of. Julie Bindel’s ideas are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem
So let’s leave the age-old non-solution of banning prostitution bobbing in the wake of society along with all the other outmoded solutions to complex problems. Let’s legalize, protect, and help the victims. Then let’s turn to the real problem, which is the prevalence of violence as a method of solving conflict, a practice we need to evolve out of, if our society is going to make any progress at all in the next hundred years.