Why I Care About Legalizing Prostitution

Photo "Fishermen's Memorial" by Flickr user ricardo.martins. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Y'know, it's not like I'm a prostitute, it's not as though I'm a customer. I've known a couple of people who've been (out, non-closet) prostitutes at least once in their lives, and I've become friends or acquaintances with a handful more online, but not that many. Thanks perhaps to the internet, and persistent police patrols and neighborhood watches, and maybe the rise of "escort" the old urban highway sidewalks a mile from my home is no longer athwart with "hitchhikers" in too-short skirts with too-long sleeves and too much makeup covering too many bruises nor are there as many single-occupancy, older American cars slowing and stopping to "offer rides." I'm not tremendously libertarian. While I don't specifically object to prostitution I strongly believe they're not a solution to any known problem including all the standard "problems" they're supposed to be solutions to.

So why do I care? This paragraph might seem like a digression. It's not. The photo accompanying this post is of the Fisherman's Memorial at Fisherman's Terminal in Seattle, for generations the home port for the main body of the Alaskan fishing fleet. (In a lot of ways, going back to the days of the Alaska Gold Rush, Seattle's lower-48 proximity has made it the mercantile capital of Alaska.) The memorial lists the names of all the many fishermen and women who've been lost at sea in what's widely considered one of the most dangerous professions in the nation. It's a sobering list... so many lives lost, so many of them young, and each the beloved of so many surviving parents, friends, partners, children. And yet...

And yet in the last 30 years or so more prostitutes in the Northwest have died at the hands of serial murderers, casual murderers, pimps, customers, and occasionally the random passer by than are listed on the Fisherman's Memorial.

More street prostitutes have died in America than loggers (they're not "lumberjacks" here.) More prostitutes have died than coal miners. More have died in the modern era than have construction workers, steel workers, perhaps even police. Certainly more than have firefighters.

Even more have been robbed, beaten, raped, mutilated, *left* for dead but survived. And most of them too have been young, and each of them were beloved by surviving parents, friends, partners, and children.

And yet there is no memorial to prostitutes.

Not surprising. Not surprising because prostitutes aren't seen as people. Not surprising because the condition of their labor is the condition that makes them vulnerable -- forced to the margins, to darkened streets, to warehouse districts, to docs and warves, to airport rows, to gaslight districts. Not surprising because when police cruise by they must melt away... not just for fear of arrest but for fear as well of shakedowns for "complementary" "services" in order to *avoid* arrest.

It's not just in the Northwest that prostitutes are the victim of choice. Today I read from Renee of Feministe that another murderer, or murderers (though it scarcely matters how many) has been stalking shadowed-from-the-law prostitutes in the Niagara Falls area of New York.

When you think of the Niagara region immediately the mind turns to the majestic falls. Some who have spent more than an afternoon here will think of places like the Welland Canal, The Skylon Tower, Fallsview Casino, Clifton Hill, and maybe even the dearth of reasonably priced hotels, and restaurants. The aforementioned sites are the Niagara region you are supposed to think about. It is what you will find printed in all of those handy little pamphlets, that the tour guides like to give out. Yes the safe family destination, where everything is bright and sunny. What you will not hear about are the women that have been killed here since 1996. What if I were to whisper these names in your ear?

31-year-old Dawn Stewart - her skeletal remains and those of her six-month old fetus were discovered in March 1996 in a wooded are of Pelham six months after her disappearance.

26-year-old Nadene Gurczenski – her body was discovered in a Vineland ditch in May 1999. She had a two year old child. Cause of death undeclared.

32-year-old Diane Dimitri - her body was discovered in a ditch outside of Welland in August 2003. She had four children. Beaten to death.

26-year-old Margaret Jeanette Jigaru - her body was discovered in the parking lot of Princess Margaret Elementary school in Niagara Falls in July 2004. She had a four year old son. Shot in the back of the throat, execution-style.

22-year-old Cassey Chicocki - her body was found in a wooded area off of Whirlpool Rd. in Niagara Falls in December 2005. She had suffered the loss of her 3 month old child and the suicide of her brother in the few years just prior to her murder. Beaten to death, her teeth were in her stomach.

29-year-old Stephine Beck - her body was discovered in a Vineland ditch , one concession south of where Nadene’s body was discovered 8 years earlier, in march of 2007. Stephine was 14 weeks pregnant. She died of strangulation.

36-year-old Shari Bacon - found beaten to death in Sean Paul Christie’s apartment in April, 2008. She had to be identified by her tattoos.

Do they resonate with a kind of familiarity in your memory? How about if I said the name Kristen French? The difference between Kristen French, and the aforementioned women, is that French was a young school girl brutally murdered and raped by the serial killer Paul Bernardo, and the other women were all sex trade workers who were brutally raped, and murdered. French is memorable for her innocence and potential, while these women are forgotten for their occupation, and addictions; yet were they not all women, all worthy of justice?

These are just the women whose bodies have been found.

Read the rest of Renee's post here.

I care about prostitution because *what ever else* you care to say about them, or the job the do, or the "legitimate" customers they service, nor how you feel about how they should or shouldn't work...because they *do* work, or how their customers should or shouldn't seek them... because they *do* seek them, nobody deserves working conditions so desperate that they have to fear a police car more than they must fear the cars of the men they *hope* seek only the service of their bodies and not the use of their lives.

At least in America, at least since the "sexual revolution" (and really since well before), at least since the economic and social value of women has increased beyond the utility of their bodies, the profession of prostitution has been dwindling. Some estimates say up to a 90% decline since the dawn of the 20th Century. One can imagine that for all the scandal and fuss and fulminations of "family values" politicians, and religious and moral activists, that in time their trade will die away... or if not die away then transform into a profession that's almost unrecognizable by today's standards and inconceivable even 50 years ago.

And while we wait for that eventuality the remaining sex workers -- still mostly women though there are many men and many transsexuals as well -- work in conditions women of 100 years ago would find little changed.

I think prostitution should be legal, legal not so they could be "regulated" or "inspected" or (as in Singapore, evidently) forced to take penicillin every three weeks, but so they could form associations, so they could network, so they could come far enough out of the shadows to be seen and *protected* rather than preyed upon by police, so they could *call* the police when they felt threatened, robbed, beaten, or preyed upon, enough that they can safely *join* crusades to eliminate the (competing-for-their-business-if-nothing-else!) scourges trafficking, of pimping, of prostituting of the unwilling, the unwary, the unwell, the undocumented, and the underaged and all others for whom the work is thrust upon instead of undertaken with a will.

As I've said I don't think prostitutes solve any problems, including the problems they, their customers, and society since antiquity imagine they solve. And as I've said I believe that as society progresses the services they offer, under the conditions they're sought today, will grow ever less demanded of them.

But I don't think their interests nor the interests of their moral, ethical, gender, or social antagonists are served by keeping them shadowed and preyed upon.

And *that's* why I care. I've never known any of the victims who've been murdered, or robbed, or raped, or beaten. But ya know what? I don't know any of the fishermen listed on the memorial at Fisherman's Terminal either. But I care deeply about their well being as well. Enough so that I'd oppose efforts to decertify their unions, associations, and benevolent societies, or to outlaw their profession. Why should I, or anyone else, oppose similar treatment for an even more dangerous profession. You want to eliminate prostitution? So did Gary Ridgeway. He eliminated somewhere between sixty and eighty. Someone in Niagara Falls is eliminating them, possibly, as I write. Your way, no matter what, is better than theirs. Why not make it so that while you do your work the Ridgeways, and Pictons, and Niagara's Michael Durant were less able to as well.

It's not just the Northwest, it's not just the Niagara area. Chances are it's your area too. And if it's not your area? It's not because it's not happening, or hasn't, or won't. It's because, as Renee says

One of the things that angers me the most about the sparse reporting that has taken place on these brutal homicides, is the fact that these women are constantly only referred to as sex trade workers. Yes, that was their occupation but does anyone’s job make up the totality of their identity. It is a way of devaluing their humanity. To the world at large they don’t constitute a loss because they are represented as dirty, foul, carnivorous vaginas seeking to profit through dirty acts. “Good girls” don’t sell sex, and “good girls” don’t become addicted. Yet there was a time when they must have danced in the rain, built snowmen, or even just enjoyed the warmth of the suns rays as it kissed their bodies. As long as we continue to see them as what they did rather than who they were, there will never be a push to achieve justice for them.

I care because like Renee I stopped being able to look away.