It is a cruel lie to suggest that decriminalization or legalization
will protect anyone in prostitution. There is much evidence that
whatever its legal status, prostitution causes great harm to
women. The following sections summarize some of the many
studies that now document the physical and emotional harm
caused by prostitution.
In the past two decades, a number of authors have documented
or analyzed the sexual and physical violence that is the normative
experience for women in prostitution, including Baldwin (1993,
1999); Barry (1979, 1995); Boyer, Chapman, and Marshall (1993);
Dworkin (1981, 1997, 2000); Farley, Baral, Kiremire, and Sezgin
(1998); Giobbe (1991, 1993); Hoigard and Finstad (1986); Hughes
(1999); Hunter (1994); Hynes and Raymond (2002); Jeffreys
(1997); Karim, Karim, Soldan, and Zondi (1995); Leidholdt (1993);
MacKinnon (1993, 1997, 2001); McKeganey and Barnard (1996);
Miller (1995); Silbert and Pines (1982a, 1982b); Silbert, Pines, and
Lynch (1982);Valera, Sawyer, and Schiraldi (2001);Vanwesenbeeck
(1994); and Weisberg (1985).
Of 854 people in prostitution in nine countries (Canada,
Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey,
United States, and Zambia), 71% experienced physical assaults in
prostitution, and 62% reported rapes in prostitution (Farley, Cotton,
et al., 2003). Eighty-nine percent told the researchers that they
wanted to leave prostitution but did not have other options for
economic survival. To normalize prostitution as a reasonable job
choice for poor women makes invisible their strong desire to
escape prostitution.
Vanwesenbeeck (1994) found that two factors were associated
with greater violence in prostitution. The greater the poverty, the
greater the violence; and the longer one is in prostitution, the
more likely one is to experience violence. Similarly, the more time
women spent in prostitution, the more STDs they reported
(Parriott, 1994).
Those promoting prostitution rarely address class, race, and
ethnicity as factors that make women even more vulnerable to
health risks in prostitution.
Throughout history, regardless of its legal status, prostitution
has had a devastating impact on women’s health. In 1858, Sanger
asked 2,000 prostitutes in New York about their health and concluded
that premature old age was the invariable result of prostitution
(as cited in Benjamin & Masters, 1964). Sanger described
conditions of despair, degradation, decline, and early death
among prostitutes who survived on average only four years after
entry into prostitution. A physician, he wondered how they
lasted that long (Benjamin & Masters, 1964). Making the same
observation in the parlance of today’s global marketplace, an
anonymous pimp commented on the “brief shelf life” of a girl in
prostitution.
Pheterson (1996) summarized the health problems of women
in prostitution: 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 (Vanwesenbeeck, 1994). A Canadian commission
found that the death rate of women in prostitution was 40 times
higher than that of the general population (Special Committee on
Pornography and Prostitution, 1985). Amortality survey of more
than 1,600 women in U.S. prostitution noted that “no population
of women studied previously has had a . . . percentage of deaths
due to murder even approximating those observed in our cohort”
(Potterat et al., 2004, p. 783). In this survey, murder accounted for
50% of the deaths of women in prostitution. Reviewing comparable
studies, Potterat et al. (2004) noted that murder accounted for
between 29% and 100% of all prostituted women’s reported
deaths in Birmingham, UK; Nairobi, Vancouver, Canada; and
London.