Myth busters
Prostitution is the oldest Profession ?
No – it is no profession at all. What kind of profession is it when the longer you stay within it the worse your health is, the more at risk all your life circumstances become. What kind of profession is it which few mothers, fathers, teachers or ministers would want the children in their care to enter. In what other profession are its members habitually at risk of being beaten, kindapped, bitten, raped, defrauded and murdered?
Prostitution is the most profound and intimate form of exploitation from the beginning of its journey to its exhausted end. The grooming, enticements, deception and abuse undertaken in its ‘career development’ are the grossest form of abuse. Pay as you go sex is a profound denial of each person’s gift of equality and dignity. For men and women, punter and those pimped or prostituted, the image of God which we are called to manifest in our relating to one another is profoundly eroded. For those Trafficked into prostitution this is no ‘professional opportunity’ but violent enslavement into the contemporary slave trade for sex.
Prostitution has always and will always be with us
No – Prostitution is clearly linked to the existence of slavery – the first recorded forms of prostitution occurred after communities invented enslavement (Lerner 1986) So if we are celebrating in this bicentennial year the abolition of enslavement in the West Indies slave trade, we need to see the abolition of this appalling abuse of women’s, childrens and mens lives which was brought into being by the enslavement of populations in conditions of warfare and territorial exploitation.
In the beginning was the word – and the word was with God – not a prostituted and enslaved woman.
Prostitution prevents rape
This is similar to the myth of African enslavement where it was imperative that African lives were brought to the Caribbean and the Southern States of America to pick cotton and tobacco and cut sugar cane because their chances of survival in the environment were better than their Irish predecessors. Now we are aware of the millions who died in the holding camps, during the long trans-Atlantic crossing and prematurely in their working lives in the Caribbean. It needs to be understood that there is habitual rape occurring within the Prostitution Industry in every country every day, endured by women, children and men caught in Prostitution. Rather than preventing rape, the existence of pay-as-you-go sex massively increases the amount of rape occurring in countries in which it is accepted and even legislated for.
Men will always buy sex to meet their sexual needs
So ‘the European is naturally superior to the African and the African is there to fulfil the European’s needs for assistance’. This deeply racist argument which was one of the ideological underpinnings of the trans-atlantic slave trade was bust apart by Clarkson, Wilberforce, Moore and the Wesleys. Today we need to be just as robust with a similarly ridiculous belief.
Neither women nor men were created to fulfil at any cost another’s sexual needs. Men and women are created with the capacity for sexual intimacy, a capacity which the church throughout the generations has found problematic. CHASTE’s acronym alludes to one form of religious adherents managing this capacity through continence. All of us are called to conduct relationships which are imbued with respect, consensuality and sensitivity as part of our imaging of God to one another.
Historically it has been seen to be men’s prerogative to have sexual needs, an outrageous denial of women’s sexual desires and emotional needs in every generation. The fact is both men and women are accountable to God and their neighbours in the way in which their sexual desires and fantasies are managed.
As pay-as-you-go sex is substantially purchased by men there seems to be an acceptance of a gendered disparity in ‘needs’. It is time to call the ‘sexual need’ bluff. Both men and women are graced sexuality as a mode of their individuality and potential for finding unity with another. Union, love, care, pleasure, even ecstasy is there for all to potentially enjoy, women and men alike. Neither has the excuse however ever to abuse the other and justify the deed through ‘need’.
Men who use prostitutes are white, lonely and single
Well no. Research shows that paying for sex is more common amongst men who already have sexual partners, and case studies with those who have been trafficked into the UK reveals that their clients are from all ethnicities and all religions.
Its their choice
designed to remove any lingering so very last century vestiges of guilt from those who use pay-as-you-go sex, and any social responsibility of care and intervention from the wider community or the State. The Oxford Dictionary defines choice as the right or ability to choose, or the provision of a range of things from which to choose. The difficulty is of course when one starts to listen to the life journeys of many caught in prostitution one discovers that there is not much choice involved against a wider story of grooming, inducements, parental sales, familial poverty or involvement of enforced alcohol or drugs. For those trafficked into sexual exploitation choice does not enter into it. From the moment their migration is entered into choice is eradicated in a wave of deceit, kidnap, lies, brutality and rape. No choice in the eighteenth century slave trade and no choice for anyone who is in the thrall of trafficked sexual exploitation.