Much of the inertia around taking action on the abuse of women in its form as prostitution appears to me to frequently be the result of a problematic conception of the nature of choice.

Opponents of the criminalization of prostitution argue that prostitution is a legitimate occupation that women should be able to choose. They believe that 'sex work' is something a woman is entitled to take on as it is her body and her decision to trade it for money. Yet according to Madeleine Bunting:

In the UK, more than half of prostitutes have been raped or sexually assaulted. Three-quarters have been physically assaulted, 95% are drug users, and 90% want to get out.

This obviously means that at its maximum, only 10% of women working as prostitutes in the UK actually want to be doing the 'work'. The rest, it would seem, have no choice.

Of those 10% who are not claiming that they want to get out, at least some will have been raped or sexually or physically assaulted. How likely is it that women would be freely choosing to take on 'labour' with such a high probability of violence?

Some might suggest that an element of 'risk' comes with the territory which women would be aware of when making their choices. Janice G. Raymond helpfully corrects this misperception in her excellent discussion on the difference between compliance and consent explaining:

A number of women enter the sex industry knowing that they will have to prostitute but having no idea of what this really means and what they ultimately will have to endure.

Meanwhile, the British Government (pdf) itself has pointed out that, 'As many as 75% of women in prostitution were under 18 when they were originally coerced into prostitution.' This means that three quarters of women now in prostitution in the UK were victims of child abuse. It also means they did not choose to be prostitutes, if the word 'coerced' is to be taken seriously. And these statistics do not reflect the experiences of trafficked women, whose numbers - 4000 in the UK - can only be estimated. Men who use trafficked prostitutes may have no way of telling the difference and may not care if the police's figures of women in London being forced to see 20-30 men a day are to be believed.

This data is in no way particular to the UK. A five-country study (South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA and Zambia) that interviewed 475 women produced equivalent results, including the fact (pdf) that 67 percent met the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 92 per cent of respondents wanted to get out. This study also usefully confirmed that almost all women in prostitution are poor and lack the basic infrastructure they need to exit prostitution, including asylum (73 percent), job training (70 percent) and health care (59 percent). A follow-up study (pdf) of more than 850 women in prostitution across nine countries (Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA, Zambia) likewise found that 89 percent of respondents 'wanted to escape prostitution, but did not have other options for survival.' Meanwhile one news story on Germany claims that in that country, prostitution is seen to be so legitimate that women job seekers who refuse to take up such 'job offers' risk losing their unemployment benefits!

If the majority of women in prostitution do not want to be there, did not choose to be there in the first place, are suffering from conditions that are now impairing their judgement (drugs and PTSD), and cannot afford to escape, the questions that begs is whose interests are served by the persistence of the myth of legitimate free choice?

Update: The German news story may be a hoax. 

Photo by j.towbin, shared under a Creative Commons license