June 17, 2019

Executive Director Kaethe Morris Hoffer’s response to Steve Chapman’s June 7, 2019 opinion piece “Are Americans ready to legalize prostitution?”

I’ve spent 25 years listening to and working with people who’ve been prostituted. Based on their hard-won knowledge, I find Steve Chapman’s arguments in his recent column—which painted a pretty picture of the sex trade and analogized it to marijuana—hard to take.

The damage sex buyers do to the bodies, psyches, and lives of people in the sex trade make fentanyl or meth a better analogy than marijuana. Because while there are some people who choose to engage in sex work, and while a few come out of it unscathed, the evidence is clear: sex work isn’t safe. We can and should stop arresting those who sell sex, but legalizing what buyers do just makes the industry bigger and more profitable without addressing the harms of prostitution.

People in prostitution experience staggering levels of psychological and emotional trauma. Their rates of PTSD are higher than those of combat veterans. Drug and alcohol addiction isn’t typically a precursor to selling sex, but a common human response to unwanted sex and a means of dissociation and self-medication. Buyers are often men that disgust, scare, and hurt the people they pay to penetrate. One survivor-leader told me that during her many years in prostitution, she felt like men used her as if she was a toilet.

Making it legal for men to buy sex won’t make prostitution appealing or less traumatic for the majority of people who are bravely enduring the sex trade because they lack better options. It won’t undo the poverty and violence most are navigating. It will, however, incentivize businesses to enter the market—just imagine the money Amazon or Walmart could make with brothels. Corporations will work to increase demand and keep down labor costs, which will fuel the sex traffickers who provide supply. It will make prostitution seem like what it has never been: harmless, acceptable, and inevitable. Legalization is not a real solution.

Instead of legitimizing men’s sexual access to the bodies of marginalized people, we should ask if Americans are ready to take prostitution’s inherent harms seriously. Are we ready to provide paths out of poverty? To stop criminalizing the most vulnerable people? To hold sex buyers accountable for the damage they do? To expand the liberation and dignity of humans, rather than liberating markets to commodify and exploit them? We need to be if we want real progress.