This commentary is by John Steen of South Burlington, who began as a scholar and teacher of philosophy, had a 20-year career in health planning, health regulation and public health, was a professor of health policy, and is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association. He is now retired.
What motivates me to write this is Rachel Foster’s commentary, “Burlington controversy part of effort to decriminalize sex trade” in VTDigger March 16.
As a moral philosopher, I react with moral outrage at so prejudicial an attack against those she calls “sex trade survivors.” To label them all as such is demeaning to them as members of the Helping Professions.
The Helping Professions include doctors, nurses, mental health, community health, and other public health workers, social workers, psychologists, teachers, lawyers, ministers and librarians. The professions are best characterized by their finest practitioners through interpersonal interactions with those they serve, sharing their own persona to nurture and help to heal those who are suffering.
Prostitution must be legal not only to protect those who work in the sex trade, but to provide protection under the law against all forms of exploitation to those in the profession. The sex trade deserves to be regulated humanistically as the right to purchase sex services from another human being, not “to purchase another human being for sex.”
That critically important distinction goes to the very heart of the issue involved here — that enlightened regulation of sex services should be seen as required by human rights. It should promote the occupational health and safety of workers, prohibit the underaged from entering the industry, and guarantee job protection, pay protection, and police protection to all those in it.
The sex trade does not need to be either exploitative or violent, and its workers deserve to be protected against all forms of abuse just as much as other workers, including abuse from their clients.
Whatever “increased violence, organized crime, trafficking and child exploitation” ensued in Rhode Island post-1980 had nothing to do with prostitution. What did was a 31% decrease in rape offenses, and 39% fewer cases of female gonorrhea.
In 1994, the Netherlands made street prostitution legal in certain zones. “In Dutch cities that did this, researchers found a 30% to 40% drop in sexual abuse and rape during the first two years. They also found evidence of long-term decreases in drug crimes, but no evidence of effects on other crimes, such as violent assaults and possession of illegal weapons.” More information about the regulation of prostitution is available here.
Many of the countries of the world furnish good examples of intelligent regulation, such as Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand. It is amply clear that public safety and public health benefit from decriminalization.
The public interest here consists in ensuring that workers and clients are both protected against harm — whether that harm is prejudice, violence, or the law itself.
The change in Burlington’s City Charter is long overdue. Government has no right to police our bodies. Most fundamentally, every person must have bodily autonomy and labor autonomy as a matter of right, human right.
