Legalizing Prostitution in New York

Legalizing Prostitution in New York City

Historically, one of the criminal problems that has proven most pervasive and difficult to eradicate in New York City is prostitution. Prostitution has a long history in the city, and was legal for much of the city's history. In fact, until prostitution seemed to be interfering with New York City's development as a major metropolitan area and tourist destination, the city seemed disinclined to do anything to regulate prostitution. By the late 1800s, much of New York, particularly the area around Times Square, was gaining notoriety for its sex workers. "In 1880 it was estimated that a dozen brothels each lined West 39th and 49th streets alone.On weekend nights young men lined up outside brownstones in the district while streetwalkers made use of Broadway and 42nd street."

While there were periodic attempts to clean up the area and prostitution was criminalized, parts of New York City, notably Times Square, remained notorious for its sex trade. By the 1970s, the presence of visible prostitutes and pimps soliciting customers in Times Square was one of the things that prompted a crack-down on criminal activity in the area, so that tourists could feel safe and secure visiting that part of the city. By the 1990s, Times Square had been cleaned up, but the sex trade had hardly moved from New York City; instead, it had been driven underground. While this may have been beneficial for tourism, it had no real positive impact on prostitutes, johns, or overall community health. Therefore, this paper will investigate whether prostitution should be legalized in New York City.

Those who argue in favor of the legalization of prostitution believe that it legalizing prostitution would lead to significant improvements. While many of them may start from the position that criminalizing prostitution has done nothing to impact the numbers of people utilizing prostitutes, their arguments are not based solely on the notion that it is going to happen anyway. Instead, their arguments are largely based on the social benefits that they perceive would follow legalization. These benefits include a reduction in crime, an improvement in public health, and the ability to tax and regulate the industry, providing prostitutes with legitimate business locations, giving women another legal tool to help them combat poverty, and the notion that adults should be able to make decisions about their own bodies.

However, opponents of prostitution suggest that legalization of prostitution would only legitimize a very serious societal problem. The start with the premise that prostitution is immoral, not necessarily because it involves extra-marital sex, but because they view the buying and selling of a human body to be inherently immoral. They suggest that legalization would increase rather than decrease the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. They believe that legalizing prostitution would lead to an increase in human trafficking. Perhaps their most significant argument is that legalizing prostitution would lead to an increase in rapes and homicides, two crimes that have long been associated with prostitution.

While there are a variety of different arguments for and against legalizing prostitution, the most vigorous debate seems to focus on whether legalization will drive down associated crime rates. Obviously, legalizing prostitution will impact crime rates in so far as there will be no more arrests of convictions for the crime of prostitution. However, there is a well-established link between prostitution and the violent crimes of rape and murder. Because prostitutes must keep their occupations secret, they are a vulnerable population and they are frequently the targets of violence. However, when prostitution is legalized, prostitutes no longer have to fear the consequences of reporting crimes against them that occur during the course of their jobs. "In fact, there is evidence that some systems of legalization provide a relatively safe working environment."

This does not mean that no prostitutes are victimized in the course of their employment, but, unfortunately, all people have some degree of risk in their work environments. Despite that caution, women working under legalized prostitution appear to be at much lower risk of violence than women working illegally as prostitutes. "Although no system is risk free, women working in legal brothels and window units in the Netherlands experience very little violence. Workers and managers have instituted elaborate procedures to respond to violent customers quickly and effectively. Similarly, in Nevada's legal brothels, the risk of violence is very low."

However, one of the arguments against prostitution is that, by promoting negative attitudes towards woman and the idea of women as sexual objects, it might increase the overall incidence of sexual violence in society. However, some theorists have suggested that sexual violence is caused, partially, by a lack of other available sexual outlets. While this theory contradicts with the power and control theories that dominate most American theorists about rape, there is some empirical support for the theory. Kirby Cundiff sought to determine whether the availability of prostitutes was positively or negatively correlated with sexual assault. What he found was a significant link between the availability of prostitutes and lower rates of sexual violence in society as a whole.

In fact, by importing prostitution figures and costs from the Netherlands and using rape statistics from a variety of countries, Cundiff came to the conclusion that if prostitution were legalized, it would result in a decrease of about 25,000 rapes per year.

Of course, that figure was a nation-wide reduction, but it certainly argues against the idea that legalizing prostitution would result in an increase in sexual violence against women.

While Cundiff's figures are appealing, opponents of legalization argue that they are simply inaccurate. They make the argument that sexual violence is an inherent part of prostitution. Melissa Farley suggests that "Regardless of prostitution's status (legal, illegal or decriminalized) or its physical location (strip club, massage parlor, street, escort/home/hotel), prostitution is extremely dangerous for women. Homicide is a frequent cause of death.... It is a cruel lie to suggest that decriminalization or legalization will protect anyone in prostitution. It is not possible to protect someone whose source of income exposes them to the likelihood of being raped on average once a week."

Moreover, anecdotal evidence suggests that rather than protect women, brothels actually help hide violence when it occurs, so that the prostitutes are not safer working in legal brothels than they are on the streets. Furthermore, because paying for sex is no longer a crime, the thought is that johns accused of rape are not presumptively criminals when prostitution is legalized. While Farley's observations may be valid, at worst they seem to argue that legalization will not positively impact the rates of violence towards prostitutes; they do not suggest that violence against prostitutes would increase if prostitution were legalized.

Another significant public health issue related to prostitution is the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Proponents of legalization argue that the regulation that would presumably accompany legalization would require health checks that would reduce the likelihood of spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Opponents suggest that this is not always the case, and that regulation might provide a false sense of security and encourage people to engage in risky behavior. They also argue that only testing the prostitutes, who are overwhelmingly female, is discriminatory. However, the prostitutes are the constant in the sex trade; in a regulated industry, they are the ones who can be tested. Moreover, STD testing, particularly for HIV / AIDS is a time-sensitive scenario as well. While clean test results are better than test results showing a disease, incubation periods of various diseases suggest that clean results should not be taken to mean that a prostitute is not infected.

Putting aside issues of the limited nature of testing and the sex-based discrimination that arises when only women are tested, the question still remains whether legalization actually decreases infection rates. As far as disease rates among prostitutes are concerned, Loff, Gazee, and Fairley compared the rates of infection among prostitutes working in legalized brothels and working illegally on the street. What they discovered was that "the prevalence of sexually transmitted bacterial infections was 80 times greater in 63 illegal street prostitutes than in 753 of their legal brothel counterparts.... Legally sanctioned encouragement of prostitutes to use condoms or access screening services, both major determinants of the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, is impossible because of their illegal status. Occupational health and safety law is applied to prostitutes in lawful brothels but not to their counterparts on the street."

This may be in part because, when not required to try to maximize profit in short periods of time and conceal their behavior from police officers, prostitutes have more ability to refuse to engage in unprotected sexual acts.

Of course, physical health is only one dimension of health. Many opponents of prostitution suggest that prostitution is inherently bad for a woman's psychological health, and therefore should not be a legalized profession. Farley found that prostitutes had higher-than-normal levels of psychological disorders including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, and dissociative disorders.

However, the studies suggesting that prostitutes experience more mental health issues than the normal population suffer from a significant flaw; they are usually conducted on streetwalkers. Streetwalkers are generally the lowest-paid of all prostitutes. They are also in the most danger. As a result, those who work as streetwalkers are likely to be more desperate than other prostitutes, suggesting that, regardless of chosen profession, they would experience greater levels of mental distress than the normal population.

What is fascinating is that when research does not look at streetwalkers, but at higher status prostitutes, prostitutes do not seem to suffer from a greater rate of mental health issues than women in other professions. Ine Vanwesenbeeck examined burnout levels of indoor sex workers in the Netherlands and compared them to nurses and to mental health patients. Her results suggested that prostitution did not necessarily lead to psychological issues. "Female indoor sex workers in the Netherlands do not exhibit a higher level of work-related emotional exhaustion or a lower level of work-related personal competence than a comparison group of female health care workers (mostly nurses)."

They did exhibit higher levels of depersonalization and cynicism than the nurses in the control group, but, while that might be a sign of mental illness in a different population, depersonalization may be a positive adaptation for sex workers.

Furthermore, even if prostitution does have a negative impact on the psychological health of sex workers, would that be a compelling reason not to legalize prostitution? There are a lot of horrible and demeaning jobs that negatively impact mental health that are perfectly legal. Should the state be able to suggest that because prostitution may have a negative impact on the mental health of some prostitutes that all people should be prohibited from engaging in prostitution? Moreover, there is no suggestion that legalization of prostitution makes prostitution more harmful for a prostitute's psychological health. Oh the contrary, indoor sex workers seemed to have better psychological health than streetwalkers.

When taken as a whole, the public health dimensions seem to support legalization of prostitution. There is no evidence that legalizing prostitution increases violence rates, either towards prostitutes or in the population as a whole. On the contrary, evidence suggests that access to prostitutes may result in reduced violent crime rates in the general population. There is substantial evidence that prostitutes working in legal brothels have lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases than prostitutes working in illegal conditions, supporting the idea that legalization and regulation of sex workers helps reduce the spread of disease. Finally, there is no evidence that legalizing prostitution would negatively impact the mental health of prostitutes. Instead, it appears that indoor sex workers, who are working in legal situations, have better mental health than sex workers working in illegal conditions. Therefore, from an overall public health perspective, the results suggest that prostitution should be legalized.