Here's an article from the U.S. Department of State
The Link Between Prostitution and Sex Trafficking
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/38790.htm
Prostitution and related activities—including pimping and patronizing or maintaining brothels—fuel the growth of modern-day slavery by providing a façade behind which traffickers for sexual exploitation operate.
Where prostitution is legalized or tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and nearly always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.
Of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders annually, 80 percent of victims are female, and up to 50 percent are minors. Hundreds of thousands of these women and children are used in prostitution each year.
Women and children want to escape prostitution
The vast majority of women in prostitution don’t want to be there. Few seek it out or choose it, and most are desperate to leave it. A 2003 study first published in the scientific Journal of Trauma Practice found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape.[1] And children are also trapped in prostitution—despite the fact that international covenants and protocols impose upon state parties an obligation to criminalize the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Prostitution is inherently harmful
Few activities are as brutal and damaging to people as prostitution. Field research in nine countries concluded that 60-75 percent of women in prostitution were raped, 70-95 percent were physically assaulted, and 68 percent met the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder in the same range as treatment-seeking combat veterans[2] and victims of state-organized torture.[3] Beyond this shocking abuse, the public health implications of prostitution are devastating and include a myriad of serious and fatal diseases, including HIV/AIDS.
A path-breaking, five-country academic study concluded that research on prostitution has overlooked "[t]he burden of physical injuries and illnesses that women in the sex industry sustain from the violence inflicted on them, or from their significantly higher rates of hepatitis B, higher risks of cervical cancer, fertility complications, and psychological trauma."[4]
State attempts to regulate prostitution by introducing medical check-ups or licenses don’t address the core problem: the routine abuse and violence that form the prostitution experience and brutally victimize those caught in its netherworld. Prostitution leaves women and children physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually devastated. Recovery takes years, even decades—often, the damage can never be undone..
If you want to argue that the only women in prostitution are there by their own choice, there's a lot of evidence that says otherwise. What's your evidence? Choice is not the word I would use to describe a woman that becomes a prostitute out of fear, hoplelessness, desperation, or a lack of alternatives. A genuine consent, a genuine choice is only possible if a person has a sense of physical safety, a sense of equality with customers, and some real alternatives to choose.
If you want to argue that your own demand for prostitution doesn't increase the demand for human trafficking for sexual exploitation, there's a lot of evidence that says otherwise. What's your evidence? It sounds a lot to me like saying "I buy drugs, but I don't support the drug trade."
If you want to argue that the increase of human trafficking for the purpose of prostitution to places where prostitution is legal is somehow just coincidental, well, you've got blinders on.
If you want to pretend that the women coerced into prostitution aren't also coerced into stripping or making porn, or any other activity there is a "demand" for, and that your own use of porn or strip clubs isn't part of that demand, the go ahead and pretend. It doesn't make it true, though.
We have laws against people selling their own organs for money. Not just because of the morality of buy or selling people's own body parts, but because if there is a market for body parts, a supply of body parts will rise to fill it, and the supply won't come from rich white americans making free choices about what to do with their own bodies. It will come from disempowered desperate people. It will come from people bullied into doing it. It will come from people murdered for their kidneys.
I think the same goes for prostitution. If we say it's ok for a woman to profit by selling her own body, there are a great number of unscrupulous people that then find a way to profit from controlling and selling womens' bodies.
This is no more a "service industry" than the enslavement of African Americans was a "service industry".
And for what? For a bit of "fun". So men with enough money in their pocket can play out whatever fantasy they wish in order to ejaculate. You laugh and make jokes about Jaana's comment, but I think she's right. Supporting any form of the sex "industry" is directly supporting human trafficking. Why is a man's ejaculation so important that whole industries are created to help him do it? Why is _any_ woman beaten, abused, or treated poorly in any way so that a man can ejaculate?
Why does anyone tolerate this?
How is this civilized? How is this enlightened?
