brekin » Mon Jan 11, 2016 3:14 pm wrote:I know of no abolitionists who advocate criminalizing the sex worker or prostituted person. They support the Nordic Approach which has been implemented in Sweden, Iceland and Norway and decriminalizes the sex provider and arrests the user of their services.
The Nordic model discourages prostitution because most (men) who pay for sex, even if the offense is considered a minor one, will stop if they think that what they do will be made public in some way. The sex workers are not arrested, they are provided with resources like trauma therapy and job training.
The. objective of the Nordic Model is to end prostitution and promote gender equality. Here is a a clear explanation of the Nordic approach
I'm all for solutions to ending prostitution, and the need for it, but criminalizing the John and decriminalizing the prostitute is not gender equality.
No, it's not. It's a response to a gender inequality that is seen as pervasive and universalizing, if not universal. It's a questionable response, but it can't be detached from its understanding of context.
Whether you are for it, or against it, the situation usually favoring the man, exploitation leaning heavily on the women's side, etc, is besides the point gender equality wise.
Only if you block out society and culture and reduce the question to a transactional understanding, of two (or more) individuals engaging in contractual negotiation, presumably with all sides as autonomous actors who have all other alternatives open to them. However, in this view, gender inequality is not an abstraction that ceases to exist because particular individuals are not thinking about it when they make situational decisions. This is analogous to the free labor arguments of neo-classical economists, that no one takes a job they don't want or that is bad for them, and so the market is the only legtimate allocator. The same market that pushes sex (and violence) as power and freedom, in a cultural context that combines aggressive libertinage with repressive puritanism.
Outside the Scandinavian contexts, in most of the world, certainly in the United States, it would invite the existing hardline of punitive, carceral states to go wild. Imagine it in a country where teenagers get prosecuted for rape and child pornography if they happen to send naked selfies to each other on the phone. Coppers would set up entrapment scenarios in all the wrong neighborhoods and it becomes another way to fill up precincts and prisons. It has to apply solely to "real" transactions, but one can imagine a thousand other potential abuses. Can it work just on "she said"? What is the mechanism for observing whether an illegal transaction is actually happening? Another invitation to total surveillance, control and unaccountable judgement by authorities.
So I think it's the wrong approach, very much going after a symptom and not the social machinery that produces or at least contributes to the problem. Real solutions have to address the economy first of all. Personally I'm for basic income and socialization of investment and major production, aren't you? That would also alleviate the tendency of long-term relationships to manifest as forms of soft prostitution. I'm looking at you, marriage.
If two consenting adults decide to enter in an exchange and the male is criminalized but the female is not, that is not gender equality. It is actually the opposite.
Sure, in a world where the neutral context prior to engaging in transactions is one where there was no gender inequality, and at least a massively reduced inequality of labor, money and wealth, in this case all very relevant since we are talking about a labor contract. (I hate these terms but tell me they don't apply at all.) You do have a situation where a lot of actors feel entitled to women's bodies as goods, or feel that somehow it's been promised to them. Some (who are powerful) just take what they like, usually without consequences, while a larger group tends to be frustrated that they don't get what was advertised to them and go nuts from longing. A part of those then end up reading and posting MRA screeds.
Is this relevant to events in my old town, Köln? A mass of phone-networked men, whoever they were in detail that has yet to be established, show up all at once and grab as a crowd at any women who happened to be walking around, and see if they can get away with worse. Put that way the scenario seems a lot more common than the way it's being posed. It sounds like a lot of sports events. It sounds less like institutional contexts that can be exploited to enable rape as a private good, like prisons and asylums and orphanages and a certain variety of men's clubs, but these guys aren't set up as guards, gang alphas, bishops, doctors or managers in the relevant places. What a lot of these guys wanted was probably free tickets to an imaginary New Orleans, but what a lot of them also wanted was probably the freedom to rape and pillage in public and afterwards get crowned as barbarian chief and have sagas sung in their name, or get a promotion within their attack battalion. If we posit free autonomous women showing up in such a context with the intent to engage voluntarily in sex-for-money transactions on a profit basis, they'd get raped.
This is a classic social-democracy paradox, how do we allow people to make free choices with other consenting adults, but also move in and try to curb their freedom of choice when they are making stupid and dangerous ones?
The main component is probably not more criminal law, we probably agree.
