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Maybe standards and regulations would do away with the young minor on the street, hooked on crack or heroin, getting abused or even murdered by johns and pimps. But, is this considered? Nooooo. Puritan attitudes in government will make sure of this, looking the other way and not realizing that they too are the reason so many of these women and boys are dead. They are Accessories to Murder if you ask me. Isn't it the governments duty to protect their citizens?
This, it strikes me, is one of the cruces of the matter. Government, certainly in the UK, is failing completely to look after people who are in great need of help. Because their entire existence - the drugs they take, the the way they get money for the drugs, often the places they live - are criminalised. As Laurence might suggest, the issue here is not gender (boys, although a smaller group, are perhaps no less at risk) but class - these people are targets because, on some level, "nice" people sort of expect them to die in squalour. It's what is expected of them.
Problem is, there's a dangerous road to hoe here between protection and paternalism. The Dutch model seems to work pretty well in the main - if I understand correctly, prostitutes are licensed, declare their earnings, some actually work for state welfare agencies (although whether this is still prostitution is ambiguous - one woman specialised in having sex with the severely disabled as a therapeutic measure), but are no more expected to declare the identities of their customers than a shopkeeper would be obliged to tell who exactly had given him each note in his till. The cash economy is a wonderful thing here.
In the extreme situations Maggie o' Kane is talking about, maybe something more is requird - a sort of halfway house cum shooting gallery cum brothel where former streetwalkers can cut back on their drug consumption while still keeping their hand in, as it were. The main problem I can see with this is that the punters might be rather antsy, but what's materially different as long as the transaction remains anonymous.
As to whether the availability of clean bedding, anonymity, no fear of police persecution, prostitutes with (at least) access to clean needles and so on could induce johns to give up the illicit thrill of the nasty....well, I don't know. I find it very hard to think myself into the role of somebody who would pay for sex, as opposed to lie, manipulate, deceive, emotionally blackmail and browbeat like all right-thinking folks. My common sense suggests that, if a john likes young women, he might choose a safe, licensed, legal 16-year old over a 14-year old being caught in an act of congress with whom would result in a very serious ass-kicking by the powers that be, they having now made a start on separating ambivalence about the sexual act from the need to protect the people at the bottom of the scale most likely to be exploited.
So, those would be your pornai, and then the next level up you would have the sort of position Ms Tricks seems to occupy - a small businessperson, in effect, paying taxes on her earnings but being able to write off business expenses against that tax, with their own venue, equipment and so on, who cater to a more solvent and/or specialist crowd, and who are through situation less in need of the protection of the state and thus able to function largely independently of it - the Amsterdam model. Which I suppose would put the "high class call girls", professional partners &c. at the top of the pile...
Hang on. I just described Classical Athens, didn't I? I thought it sounded familiar. |
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