Prostitution and it’s never-ending affects and effects
Melissa Farley of Prostitution Research and Education has once again verified the harm of prostitution. In the past her global research has proven the extensive physical and psychological harm to women in prostitution and the resulting PTSD, dissociation, depression, and self-loathing. Torture survivors have the same type of responses. For this study they interviewed 45 women who had exited prostitution and were in supportive programs. The women reported strangulation; rape; beatings; bodily constriction; denial of privacy, sleep and food; and being forced to watch the torture of others. Labeling these acts what they are – torture – would strengthen the health care interventions for the victims and help their psychological recovery to understand they were not responsible for these actions as women are taught to blame ourselves.
One definition of torture is:
… any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as punishing him … or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.
The only difference here is that it’s not done by a public official or a person acting in official capacity – or is it? In the countries and cities where they have legalized prostitution, it can be argued that it IS being inflicted at the instigation of or with the consent of or acquiescence of a public official. That is one reason many women in New York City are in such a bind because they would like to vote for Mamdani but he supports the complete decriminalization of prostitution i.e. turning the pimps into businessmen, turning trafficking into a business, and subordinating women to a state of sexual slavery. They can’t vote for someone who wants to do this.
The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984) has a broader definition that includes the violence that is prostitution.
… any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or … mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind.
Discrimination against women is both a cause and effect of prostitution. The Swedish government said it clearly in 1999 – equality of women and men cannot exist alongside the right to purchase women. If we want equality, we must not legalize prostitution. The Nordic Model, now called the Equality Model, has proven across the globe to be the only model that decreases prostitution and helps women.
While torture is recognized in international law and the obligations in the treaties cannot be derogated under any circumstances, even war, torture against women is often not recognized such as within marriage, within parent/child relationships, and within sex crimes.
Indifference to torture of certain victims was created by the racist hierarchy developed to condone colonialism. The British in India and Kenya, the Americans toward Native peoples and Africans, the Australians toward the Indigenous people, the South Africans toward the majority of the people, the slave trade – all tie back to Britain and colonialism as do we. As Reem Asalem pointed out in her 2004 report on Violence against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences, racist fetishization and stereotyping of prostituted women exacerbates harms to individual women and allows the sexualization of racism to flourish. Stories are legion here too about Black girls as young as 12 being treated like adults and the persistent myth that Blacks feel pain differently.
Prostitution is dehumanization – turning a person into a commodity owned and controlled by someone else. Pimps use the same strategies as other torturers – debilitation, dread, and dependency. Intermittent reinforcement builds the strongest bond which is why traffickers randomly beat or reward the victims. The victim is taught that they are no good, especially after having been prostituted, and no one else will want them.
I just finished reading a book about the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda that kidnapped thousands of children and turned them into child soldiers by precisely these methods. They forced the children to stomp on the head and body of another child until dead and took pictures of them saying they would send the photos to their parents and teachers so everyone would know the child was no good and would never be accepted back home. The camera had no film, but the children did not know that. But it helped to convince the child this was their home now and they could never leave. Pimps use very similar tactics. The LRA kidnapped girls precisely for sexual slavery.
The women who were in the study were on average 44 and had entered prostitution at 22 but 35% had been prostituted as children. Four of those were between 9 – 13 and 12 were between 14-17. There are some sick men out there having sex with a 9-year-old. More than half were women of color with the highest number being African American. Almost all (87%) had been the victims of childhood sexual abuse. It is the gateway, the training ground, for forcing women into prostitution. The victims suffered from emotional and sexual abuse (60% & 57% respectively) and 50% had experienced physical abuse.
All the women had been beaten by the sex buyers (2/3rds) or traffickers (1/3rd) , 95% had been threatened with death, 93% had been beaten on the head. The kind of abuse the women experienced included blows with whips, being strangled, tied down, flogged, thrown from heights, burned, waterboarded, suffocation and more. 80% had concussions, some had miscarriages, and 50% lost teeth. Is this a job that should be “legalized?” Ask Mamdani to withdraw his approval of prostitution.
98% of the victims had been raped by sex buyers or pimps. More than half had foreign objects inserted into them such as fruit, a broomstick, a ferret, a perfume bottle, nightsticks, and nun chucks. 94% were forced into performing a specific sex act they did not want to do. Some sex buyers brought pornography and forced the woman to act out the scene. 76% had pornography made of their prostitution.
98% were prevented from leaving a location and physically restrained; 91% had threats made against their family, friends and colleagues; 82% were forced to do acts that disturbed or repulsed her; 58% saw an “unnatural death” aka murder; 47% were forced to watch or listen to the murder or torture of others; 33% were mock executed; and 33% saw others murdered. Should this be legal in New York City?
Now that the women had escaped, a third were in fair or poor health and substance use was common. The more sexual torture the woman had experienced, the higher the PTSD numbers. A score of 55 of higher indicates a dissociative disorder: the women’s average score was 68, the median was 48. The higher the physical torture, the higher the dissociation score. I think separation from my own body and mind may be the only way I could survive it too.
For recovery, the women said they needed counseling followed by drug treatment. They also needed a safe home, a job, and peer support along with legal assistance. Some needed ongoing protection from a pimp and some needed childcare. Half of the women kept 10% or less of the cash paid for abusing them; the rest had none. Is this “work” for which you are not paid? Or is this sexual slavery that is and should be outlawed?
Liberals get themselves tied up in knots about allowing people to do what they want. But we learned in law school that my freedom to swing my arm ends where your nose begins. These women do not “want” this. They did not choose this. They were sexually abused as children, they were trafficked as young women, they were beaten and burned and psychologically manipulated – why do liberals think this is all right so long as men get to have sex? Feminists have long known that often the liberal beliefs of men about women end when it comes to them. They want their wives to make dinner and bring them a beer; they want their wives to kowtow to their demands; they want their wives to change the diapers, clean the house, and bring home the bacon too; and they want their sexual demands met regardless of whether the woman is willing. Most of the men who visit prostituted women are married. Men who do not do this or believe in this must stand up and oppose it but they don’t, like Mamdani, they succumb to the sex traffickers and pimps.
While the study says we need more study (they all say that), we don’t. We need to stop it. We have known the harms of trafficking and prostitution for centuries. We haven’t cared. We have tried to cover it up by saying oh but they choose it, oh but men need sex, oh but it’s not harmful, oh but but but …. Women did not choose it. Men sexual needs cannot be met by abusing someone else. It is harmful. Stop it now.
As the paper concludes, “Herman (2004, p. 1) noted the great difficulty people have in recognizing prostitution, which is ‘ … the reality of sexual violence as exercised by an organized criminal enterprise that operates freely in every community, hidden in plain sight, and in engaging with victims who have been systematically reduced to the condition of slavery.’” We need to name it as torture and treat it accordingly. We certainly should not be decriminalizing it. (Melissa Farley & M. Alexis Kennedy (2024) Torture and its sequelae among
prostituted women in the United States, European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 15:1, 2404307, DOI: 10.1080/20008066.2024.2404307: https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2024.2404307)
The Red Roof Inn hotel is one example of what happens when you treat trafficking/prostitution as a business. This commercial chain has been warned repeatedly of sex trafficking in their hotels but chose to ignore it for profit. Now they will pay. At least 42 lawsuits, 2 in Arizona, have been filed against them across the country for their blatant failure to act in the face of obvious trafficking of minors.
Malnourished and underaged girls had up to 50 “visitors” a night and came to the desk to ask for more condoms. Senior employees “joked” about “pimps and hos.” Teen girls paid for hotel rooms during the week. Staff members removed garbage full of bloody towels and condoms. Customers even posed about it online in their reviews at least 176 times. One woman was held for three years in Red Roof Inn hotels in DC and Maryland, and the staff saw her abuser physically and verbally abusing her yet did nothing. Her payment – some French fries the next day.
One woman who testified told about how the pimps would congregate in the parking lot to coordinate the traffic. It reminded me of a hotel stay in Russia where I could see and hear the pimps standing around the cars in the parking lot drinking, talking, and laughing as the women called each room repeatedly to ask if we wanted women. I had to take the phone off the hook.
The hotels defense is – it’s her own fault, she asked for it, why didn’t she leave? We have heard those same excuses repeatedly from rapists and batterers. Tonge, the lawyer in the Atlanta case, put it succinctly: “If you get rid of all prostitution, then you get rid of all sex trafficking. So just do that.”
Please let Red Roof Inn corporate office know your thoughts about this. 7815 Walton Parkway, New Albany, Ohio 43054, (614) 744-2600
If you or someone you know is experiencing human trafficking and is in need of support, contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline by calling 1-888-373-7888, by texting 233733, or online via webchat at humantraffickinghotline.org. The hotline operates 24/7 and help is available in 200 languages. All calls are confidential.