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Australian studies in law, crime and justice
"No bad women, just bad laws"
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Working girls : prostitutes, their life and social control / Roberta Perkins
ISBN 0 642 15877 0
Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1991
(Australian studies in law, crime and justice series)
The title for this section is one of the slogans arising from the world prostitutes' movement. It seems to sum up most grievances felt by prostitutes. They do not consider they are "bad women" because they do no harm to society and their lives, apart from working in the sex industry, are undifferentiated from other women. And they accuse society's laws based on social misconceptions for their oppression. The problem for prostitutes continues to be reinforced by conflicting views in the recent literature on prostitute women. On the one hand, are the works of Jennifer James (1979), Nanette Davis (1971) and Mimi Silbert (1982), whose studies of juvenile street prostitutes disclose a social background of family violence and child sexual assault. On the other, are such accounts of prostitutes by Eileen McLeod (1982) and Gail Pheterson (1989), whose treatments of adult prostitutes illuminate women from ordinary social backgrounds asserting themselves sexually through sex work. Both sides offer a sympathetic view of the prostitutes' position as victims of a harsh society. But, whereas the first sees them as damaged women beyond repair with prostitution as a continuing arena of violence and abuse, the second argues they are women victimised by a male privileged economic system where they make clear choices for survival through prostitution. Both sides make claims to their subjects as "typical" prostitutes. There is little of William Isaac Thomas' (1967) "unadjusted girls" moving from "normal" to "abnormal" then back to "normal" situations as their economic position demands or certain aspirations are realised in the first scenario, and little of the battered woman syndrome in the second.
So, what is the "typical" prostitute, one that might satisfy both sides of the argument and find agreement with the prostitutes' own viewpoint? To endeavour to discover this let us return to the survey of the 128 prostitutes that have formed the empirical data base for this book. If we divide the entire sample into three "types" according to age of entry into prostitution, that is those who commenced sex work as early adolescents, those who did so in mid- adolescence, and those who became prostitutes in late adolescence or early adulthood, we discover three distinct groups with emphases on different social factors. Table 5.1 compares the three groups' responses to a list of experiential variables often associated with negative aspects in prostitution.
Seven women (5.5 per cent of the sample) commenced prostitution under the age of 16. For the sake of convenience, these shall be referred to as "kids". Thirty-four (26.5 per cent) commenced it between the ages of 16 and 18 inclusive. These shall be termed "girls". Eighty-seven (68 per cent) began sex work over 18 years of age. We shall call them "women". The disproportionate numbers of the three groups is a reasonable reflection of the dimensions of women entering prostitution in the various age groups.
As Table 5.1 indicates, the "kids" have higher ratios of broken homes, problems with mother and are drug users. The "girls", on the other hand, have the highest ratios of sexual assaults and arrest by the juvenile authorities. The "women" have much more moderate figures for broken homes, poor relations with mother, sexual assault, drug use and juvenile arrest. The latter are probably much closer to a general profile of women, as their larger influence on the comparative figures between the prostitute, health-worker and student samples throughout this book suggests. This is most apparent when we note that only a third of the "women" experienced coitus before 16 years of age, compared to almost half for the entire prostitute sample. What inferences might we draw from this data?
The emphasis on home life problems for the "kids" leads us to imagine that prostitution and drugs were the results of escapes from a torrid natal home and/or a strained relationship with their mothers. We might suppose that these represent the so-called "kids of the Cross" or adolescent children who drift to the Kings Cross area as unwanted children by their families. There they communicate with other "kids" of both sexes in similar situations who moved to the area earlier. The newcomers learn survival techniques from the established "kids", experiment with drugs which lead them into an addiction, and take up prostitution as a means of paying for their drug commitment. It is likely their prostitution began as a casual way of acquiring cash from men who approached them in pin-ball parlours. As their drug intake increases so does their commitment to commercial sex until finally they end up as "professional" street prostitutes.
With the "girls", sexual assault in family situations is as much a cause of their disjunction with their natal homes as broken homes through parents divorcing one another. The extraordinarily high ratio of rape beyond work among this group suggests that these young women's sexual lives were a series of violent episodes, a fact which may have played no little part in their decision to become prostitutes. But they also had high drug consumptions, another reason why many of them turned to commercial sex. Of most significance, however, is this group's involvement with the juvenile authorities. Since most girls are punished for sexual "misbehaviour" when brought before the courts (as opposed to boys, who are more often punished for acts of aggression, theft or violence), this group may well have internalised an official attitude of "bad girl" based on their sexual exploits. They would then fit the drift theory of Nanette Davis (1971) by which these "wayward" girls have identified with prostitutes before they even begin earning money through commercial sex work. The "girls" differ from the "kids" mainly through their process into prostitution. The latter are the unwanted children who learn to survive through commercial sex, while the "girls" are mainly products of a juvenile justice system which persists in condemning adolescent females for their sexual experimentations.
Finally, the "women" fit more easily into the general assumptions made about prostitutes throughout this book. There is little in their early lives to suggest that their social experiences are very different to most women in society. Some (the dissected figures on Table 5.1 suggest about a fifth) have much earlier coital experiences than other women, but most seem to have reached late adolescence without particular social traumas that might lead them into prostitution.
What leads them into prostitution is an economic situation, or financial survival for themselves and, in many cases, their children, coupled with a knowledge about the sex industry which removes the barriers of mythological notions enough for them to perceive prostitution as a viable economic option.
What we have found in this analysis of prostitute sub-groups based on age of entry into prostitution is not one "typical" prostitute type, but three. James (1979), Davis (1971) and Silbert (1982), by their concentration on "kids" and "girls", arrived at findings for those groups which suggest a scenario of abuse leading into prostitution. McLeod (1982) and Pheterson (1989), on the other hand, concentrated on adult prostitutes and correctly concluded that female prostitutes are in sex work because of economic circumstances and not broken homes, drug use, juvenile delinquency or child sexual assault. Prostitutes across the world have rightly objected to being lumped in with the "kids" and "girls". On the other hand, they must realise that very young females do enter prostitution because of some of the social factors used to stigmatise all prostitutes. These young females are closer to the popular stereotype. But, society too has a responsibility to realise that the "kids" and "girls" in prostitution as an outcome of difficulties at home, juvenile "misbehaviour", sexual assault as children, or drug addiction, represent a minority among prostitutes. Adult prostitutes should not be made to bear guilt for the social flaws in juvenile prostitutes' backgrounds. And nor should the juveniles be made guilty for circumstances affecting them over which they have no control.
On the one hand the world prostitutes' movement has arisen as a challenge to the legal notions that continue to criminalise those who work in the sex industry. But, on the other, it is also a response to common attitudes in society that continue to strengthen the whore stigma. These attitudes and the laws are, of course, inter-related: the law exists as an outcome of the attitudes, but the attitudes continue to exist because of the illegal nature of sex work. Take the common notion that prostitutes "get what they deserve", for example. It motivates police to arrest prostitutes much more often than clients even where laws exist to prohibit "gutter crawling" as well as "soliciting" (such as in Victoria and England). The in-built attitude here is pure mate chauvinism, whereby men are doing what comes "naturally" cruising for sex, while the women on the street are considered to be "unnatural" initiating sexual contact. Prostitutes receive little sympathy in the law even when they have been clearly wronged, as the classic example of the torture, murder and mutilation of the English prostitute Patsy Malone illustrates. Malone was sadistically tortured and then stain by police constable Peter Swindell, who only received a three-year gaol sentence for his heinous crime. In summing up the case, the judge justified his light punishment by saying that Swindell's crime "was not of the type from which others need deterring" (The Times, London, 28 July 1982). Rightly so, English prostitutes were outraged. Some demonstrated in front of the courthouse, while most cringed in fear with the knowledge that the judgment had virtually declared open season on them all.
Another attitude given legal sanction which angers prostitutes is the common belief that the women are helpless victims of some brutal pimp, of which the legal response is the prohibition of men "livings on the earnings of prostitution". Usually, the pimp figure in the popular consciousness is a brute, a working-class man or a black man. All sorts of racist and classist concepts are tied up in this notion, not the least of which is a shadowy figure conveniently distanced from the bourgeois law makers. Where the "bad women" image no longer seems viable to legislators, the pimp figure is a scapegoat for explaining why the state has failed to contain so many women in prostitution. The pimp becomes a "bogey-man" enticing innocent young girls from their loving families and trapping them in an environment of sexual slavery. Tied into this picture is a sexist attitude that women depend on men, even to the point of wanting to finance them to stay. Another sexist attitude related to this situation is that pimps defy a "natural" order of men supporting women (which is why an earlier Australian colloquialism for "pimp" was "bludger", now synonymous with "freeloader" or lazy person; Wiltes 1978). Firstly, prostitutes are outraged by the suggestion that they must have a man to dominate them, and, secondly, they insist that they should be allowed to support whomever they like without their husbands or lovers being stigmatised as brutal pimps. They correctly assess this as another attempt at isolating them from mainstream society in a classic state manoeuvre to make them legal outcasts.
A third example of popular attitudes which are at the heart of prostitutes' grievances with society is that which believes that the sex industry, including the workers, are controlled by some sinister criminal forces. The common assumption is that the prostitute is at the bottom of a hierarchy of devious criminals, with a "Mr Big" at the top and "sleazy" brothel keepers in the middle ranks. Within this kind of fanciful regime we can perceive patriarchal notions of social order at work. The prostitute represents feminine powerlessness dependent on masculine economic power, while the brothel keeper is imagined as a slimy low-class man extracting huge profits from female helplessness. It is significant in this kind of fantasy to see him as a basically weak man unable to compete in the "real" world of male capitalism. The "madam" on the other hand, is perceived as a tough old tart ruling the brothel with the iron hand of a one-time underling suddenly granted dictatorial powers by the graciousness of some benevolent vice lord. She is no longer a helpless female but a male surrogate with masculine powers granted her. At the apex of this imagined power structure is a Mafia style crime boss ruling everyone and everything. He is, of course, representing male political power in this "natural" order, but it is important for the bourgeois power brokers of society that our "Mr. Big" is perceived as a migrant Italian or Middle Eastern man so that the law and order politics remain in the hands of white Anglo-Saxon men.
Prostitutes rebuke such notions because not only are they far from true but it also once more imagines the women involved in sex work as unable to control their lives without male hegemony. What many of the prostitutes in this book have pointed out time and again is just how much more control over their lives, including the inter-sexual contact with male clients, they have in sex work compared to social situations beyond prostitution.
Attitudes detrimental to prostitutes are so intrinsic that most dictionaries carry two meanings for "prostitute". At the beginning of the book (p. 3) both meanings in The Macquarie Dictionary were cited. It is easy, therefore, for a lay person to convey these two expressions as having the same essential meaning, so that the woman "who engages in sexual intercourse for money" is also "one who debases (her)self... in an unworthy way". This kind of inter-locking meaning is at the core of the whore stigma, which Gail Pheterson goes to lengths to explain:
If a prostitute is a woman who "sells her honor for base gain or puts her abilities to infamous, unworthy use", then by definition she has no honor and does no good. The definition does not limit the unworthy use to sex, but, if one indeed collapses the noun and verb definitions, as public opinion is apt to do, then sex work becomes a specific case of dishonor and wrongdoing. It is important to recognise that the woman's shame is based upon what she offers (her body and her sexual abilities) whereas the unworthy cause to which she puts herself is presumedly men's sexual desire as customer... or man's financial interest as "pimp". We are in fact then talking about female dishonor and male unworthiness (Pheterson 1986, P. 9).
The law is, of course, uneven in its application to this logic because it represents a masculine viewpoint, and as such perpetuates the hypocrisy of sexism in yet another area of sexual relations. The cries for equality from libertarians and feminists demanding the arrest of clients as much as prostitutes misses the point here, that punishing men for seeking prostitutes does nothing to remove the stain of dishonour from the prostitute's reputation, or, in other words, two wrongs don't make a right.
Dishonour derives also from the popular notion that prostitutes are "cheap", not of course in price, but due to their giving sex too often to too many partners. It is another common term applied in an effort to keep women under male control.
San Francisco prostitute campaigner Scarlot Harlots's sardonic response is well understood by most prostitutes:
- Cheap is when you fuck them just to shut them up.
- Cheap is when you do it because they are worth so much.
- Cheap is when you suck them till your jaw hurts so they won't say you're uptight.
- Cheap is when you do it to keep them home at night.
- Cheap is when you want less than pleasure, a baby, or a hundred dollars.
- Cheap is when you do it for security.
- Cheap is what you are before you learn to say "no".
- Cheap is when you do it to gain approval, friendship, or love.
The advent of AIDS, an event which should have brought endangered groups together, has done little to bring a greater understanding of prostitutes to the wider community. Much of the blame rests with the health authorities who have treated prostitutes as a potential threat to the health of the heterosexual population. The bureaucratisation of AIDS control and prevention among prostitutes has witnessed the health bureaucrats desperately trying to find a way to communicate with women they have been taught are distasteful to the moral palate. One attempt to bridge the gap has been the bureaucrats' use of the term "sex worker" and its acceptance by prostitutes. This enables the bureaucrats to overlook their notion of "bad women" and it acts as a soft sell to gain easier access to prostitutes by using "nice" terms of reference. But, it does little to disguise the fact that these bureaucrats and health-workers have the opinion that prostitutes need health protection since they are unable to protect themselves. The low rate of viral infection among prostitutes should have convinced them to the contrary.
There is a problem allowing others to define you. The word "prostitute" has for so long been used as a social control weapon that prostitutes themselves find the ten-n repulsive. Its Roman origin meant rebellious women, but Christianity has made it mean immoral women. European prostitutes are currently referring to themselves as "whores" in an effort to "take back" the word (just as gays have done with "poof') and defuse it as a weapon to perpetuate stigma. So too should prostitutes make the word "prostitute" their own and give it a dignity as an interchange with "sex worker". Eventually then, society would redefine the dictionary meanings by a positive word association, instead of the current negative one. If the words so long used to denigrate prostitutes are reclaimed by them, the stigma will lose its sting with moralists continually trying to re-invent new words as weapons.
Throughout this book the evidence should be sufficient for our legislators to rethink the prostitution laws and to consider decriminalisation seriously. If empirical social facts are not enough,, then costs should be. Earlier (p. 140) the New South Wales Women's Advisory Council's paper on the high cost of law enforcement of prostitutes leading to law reform in that state was mentioned. In the United States, Julie Pearl (1987, p. 769) pointed out that irrational application of harsh laws against prostitutes is one of the most costly exercises in law enforcement in the country. Between 1976 and 1985 violent crimes, she notes, increased by 32 per cent yet the rate of arrest for perpetrators of those crimes rose by only 3.7 per cent, while prostitutes were being arrested at an increasing rate of 135 per cent, in spite of no apparent rise in prostitution activities. In 1985, 16 American cities spent over $53 million on police, nearly $36 million on judicial procedure and almost $32 million on the correctional process in combating prostitution with little or no effect on deterring further prostitution. Pearl concludes:
Many Americans may never wish to condone prostitution, but the time has come to ask whether we can afford to keep it illegal. In the face of rising complaints of violent crime in virtually all major cities, the thousands of highly skilled vice officer manhours devoted weekly to prostitution represent tremendous opportunity costs... A decision to reallocate our resources need not be a declaration of the acceptability of prostitution. Rather it would be a well-founded statement concerning the proper use of criminal justice resource (Pearl 1987, pp.789-90).
Social attitudes expressed through newspapers in response to the New South Wales Select Committee Upon Prostitution from 1983 to 1985 prompted a number of prostitutes and brothel owners to form a group to present an alternative report to the Select Committee through a submission direct to Premier Neville Wran. It was in a desperate bid to persuade the Government not to reintroduce harsh laws but to consider a regulatory system not disfavourable to prostitution. At that stage these women anticipated much more severe recommendations from the Select Committee than actually eventuated with the Committee's Report in April 1986. After a series of meetings with members of the Australian Prostitutes Collective, a small group representing workers and "madams" of East Sydney and Darlinghurst in December 1985 met with graduates in town planning from the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales to endeavour to arrive at a solution on prostitution that would satisfy the community, the legislators and those in the sex industry. It was to be a compromise solution for all concerned. Even though those involved in these meetings worked in East Sydney, consideration was given to workers in Kings Cross and to parlours in the suburbs. Although the prostitutes' submission to the Premier was overlooked by the Government in favour of the Select Committee Report five months later, it represents the first time Sydney prostitutes themselves initiated an action through official channels of government.
The prostitutes' submission recognised certain claims by the community as valid and accepted the government's attempt at regulating street prostitutes. Some of the street workers in the group thought that their operations in Darlinghurst residential streets had gone beyond the pale, but agreed that it was unfair that they should have been singled out by the law while the hooligans and sightseers who were the real source of most nuisance problems in the area got off scot-free. Likewise, while the brothel workers could appreciate the potential problems associated with parking in a residential street for large parlours and residents, they considered it unacceptable to object to the presence of private prostitution involving one or two women in a residential area. They devised a system of regulation with the help of the town planner and law graduates which they felt should be acceptable to all but the more extreme moralists.
The prostitutes' recommendations for regulating street soliciting sought to define the legal term of "near to" by replacing this with an actual distance of, say, 100 metres from a residence, a school, hospital or church, only if these buildings were in current use. In addition, to reduce violence perpetrated upon street workers-especially doing "car jobs" - licensed venues for streetwalkers to take their clients were recommended. These could be houses especially rented for the occasion of street workers servicing their clients, or "love hotels" fashioned after the Japanese idea, within close proximity to traditional areas of street operations. The purpose behind these recommendations was both to respect residents' privacy and provide protection for the women. Attempts at eradicating street prostitution for the past three-quarters of a century had failed dismally and did little more than mercilessly persecute economically-deprived women who did no harm to anyone. The prostitutes' recommendations were thought to be the most practical and humane solution to the age-old practice of street soliciting.
Parlours, or brothels with more than four bedrooms, were recommended by the prostitutes as fully commercial operations subject to the current environmental laws. These would be restricted to strictly commercial zones, and licences would be issued for their operation as legitimate businesses. It would be the responsibility of the state government to ensure that venues complying with criteria for obtaining a licence were not obstructed by unreasonable municipal ordinances and Council Chamber decisions.
Smaller parlours, or brothels with no more than four bedrooms and no more than four women working at any one time, were recommended as small businesses with the same legal fights in the environment regulations as a similar-sized doctor's surgery or a partnership of accountants' office. These could receive licences to operate in mixed zones provided they complied with criteria laid down by the laws regulating prostitution operations. This would not apply to private operations of no more than two women, who should under any reasonable consideration be able to work on premises rented or owned by them as residential without the need for official approval in accordance with the "home occupation" provision within the Environmental and Planning Assessment Act 1979.
The final group of recommendations were concerned for a regulatory body to issue licences and inspect premises and to ensure all conditions in the regulation statutes are complied with. A board of three was suggested, consisting of a representative each from the Departments of Planning and Health and from the Australian Prostitutes Collective. The departmental representatives' roles were to ensure that environment and health regulations were upheld before issuing licences, and the latter ensured that workers were not abused.
Licences would be issued on a triennial basis, but the licensing board would have the power to inspect premises at any time and to cancel licences as it saw fit. The board would also receive complaints from workers and managers and deal with them appropriately.
Social attitudes and legal reflections of them have long been a source of outrage to prostitutes. Only recently, though, have they sought to do something about this. The above action is one example, and the world prostitutes I movement outlined in the next section is another. But governments also have a responsibility here. Before introducing harsh laws to deal with the supposed misbehaviour of prostitutes, the lawmakers should ascertain the truth and advise the community accordingly.
- Next section: A decade and a half of struggle : the prostitutes' movement
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