Legalizing indoor prostitution and its effects
The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that, in order to improve the safety and dignity of sex workers, indoor prostitution should be legalized.
Despite the Constitutional challenge of forcing Parliament to make prostitution legal, there are moral arguments that would cause one to question the decisions made by these lawmakers. According to some, this ruling is one of the most important features of the Canadian legal landscape since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms went into effect in 1982.
Despite the objectionable manifestations associated with prostitution, such as pimping, soliciting, and brothels, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled in favour of prostitutes. They argue that the illegality of people who live off the avails of prostitution create severe dangers, especially for vulnerable women, which violate Canadian’s “basic values,” such as rights to life, liberty, and security.
The crux of this issue has less to do with the criminality of sex work and more to do with revising the law, which prevents prostitutes from having a company or house that provides security.
According to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, the prostitution case is about “whether the Parliament’s means of controlling it infringe the constitutional rights of prostitutes.”
Thus, as citizens, we must first ask ourselves what the causes of prostitution are, and realize the effects. We must then also ask ourselves who would be for legalizing prostitution, and who would be against?
Government lawyers state that prostitution is an activity prostitutes have freely chosen. People may become prostitutes for many different reasons, and the cause is clearly not a black and white issue.
But is, for example, a destitute woman who sells her body for sex to survive actually making a choice? Those who have to pay for housing, food, daycare or drug abuse must earn a living somehow.
While some claim that it’s their own sexuality and sexual curiosity that drives them to enjoy prostitution, the main reason is money, which stems from poverty.
In reality, the cause of prostitution is the market place itself. Those who have skills and money are willing and able to buy sex.
The effects of prostitution are more evident than the causes.
Religious groups insist that permitting a voluntary risky lifestyle that degrades both prostitutes and the community as a whole “would lead to a proliferation of exploitative commercial operations run by pimps,” as stated in an article in the Globe and Mail.
Yet according to Justice McLachlin, “Parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances, but not at the cost of health, safety and lives of prostitutes.”
In spite of what some may consider a positive change, this newly altered legal status of prostitution is clearly a case “progressive dilemma.” Questions then are raised about morality and the exploitation of prostitutes. Idealizing a legal hooker as a happy whore is wrong, because the bottom line is that no one should have to resort to prostitution to make money to live.
Some may argue that the issue pertains to what values exemplify “worthwhile sex,” between two willing, consensual people wanting a special, intimate experience. But setting values aside, the Ontario Court of Appeals believe that prostitutes would be safer if they had the right to set up brothels and hire security staff to protect them.
In extreme cases, prostitutes have been beaten and killed in large numbers. In other instances, prostitution is linked with sex trafficking, which is one of the most severe human rights violations in the world today. This results in a modern form of slavery.
Clearly, prostitution is a very exploitative, degrading kind of work. Prostitution is nothing more than a transaction for the sexual gratification of those willing to pay. However if there were more risk in those paying for prostitutes getting caught, the demand would fall, forcing pimps to find a new line of work.
Supreme Court Justice Michael Moldaver states that those in society who turn to prostitution “…are the people found to be the most vulnerable.” However, Michael Morris, a lawyer for the Federal Department of Justice, argues that “there is little evidence to show that prostitutes are safer when they work indoors in brothels…[W]e know that the risks of prostitution are not eliminated indoors.”
Over the years, the judicial and criminal system has “consistently marginalized the most vulnerable people in our society,” the resolution says. The court argues; “limiting sex trade workers to the street puts them at a greater risk of human trafficking, assault, murder and other violent and malicious crimes.”
According to Dalhousie University Law Professor, Elaine Craig, “…there is no constitutional bar to prohibiting the sale of sex for money provided the harm of the law doesn’t grossly outweigh the federal government’s objective in adopting it.”
Notwithstanding the progressive feminist argument, which believes that transactions between consenting adults are voluntary, it seems that the vast majority of prostitutes who sell their bodies for sex do so against their own free will.
This Constitutional challenge does not necessarily mean open season for prostitution. Justice Morris maintains that “…the fact that some operate on a diminished moral capacity does not mean it will invalidate the criminal law from applying to them.”
The slippery slope of legalizing prostitution is obviously not a sustainable solution to the rising rates of unemployment in Canada. Although we live in what is deemed to be a “service industry” economy, the Federal government ought not replace the outsourced manufacturing jobs with legal whoredom.