Sex work in the shadows

by Editor · January 9, 2008

When Jesus ministered to and even socialised with prostitutes, he gave his followers a mandate to aid these most widely reviled women in society.

The popular image of sex workers as women of loose morals engaging freely in sinful behaviour very rarely corresponds with reality.

Most women (and some men) in the sex trade enter that life not out of free choice, but through circumstances. There is little allure in a life of prostitution. Though some high-earning prostitutes might contend that their prosperity beats the alternatives, the inherent sinfulness of prostitution damages all involved in it.

While we must regard transactional sex�even if it is between two consenting adults (often it isn�t)�as sinful, we may not disown those who offer it.

For some women, transactional sex is the only way of feeding their family. For them, the humiliation of prostituting themselves, casually or professionally, trumps the prospect of severe hunger�even at the risk of contracting HIV.

Some impoverished families sell their daughters� bodies in acts of desperation to secure money, goods, services, remission of debts or favours. Thus despoiled, the marriage opportunities for such misused girls diminish. Some continue a life of transactional sex.

Likewise, many prostitutes emerge from a childhood of sexual abuse. While not everybody who suffered such abuse becomes a prostitute, for some the degradation of their sexuality has compromised the scruples which might otherwise have deterred them from entering a life of sex work.

Others sell their bodies to escape a ruinous homelife or to feed an addiction, often falling into the clutches of pimps or organised crime syndicates who exploit and often debase them.

Crime syndicates are behind the most distressing form of prostitution, that involving human trafficking. Women are lured under false pretexts to strange countries where they are then systematically brutalised and forced to submit their bodies in inhumane conditions.

Behind most sex workers� stories resides a chronicle of anguish and desperation, and a future without much hope. Such women need our compassion, not contempt. The Christian response is to find ways of helping and empowering them, not to condemn and marginalise them.

The decision by the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal to make available funds for the skills-training of women wishing to escape the iniquity of transactional sex is therefore commendable.

Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg has rightly recommended that such a programme should include ancillary but necessary services, such as counselling and, where required, drug rehabilitation. By necessity, the process should involve the non-governmental sector.

Even if implemented nationally, as it should, the programme will reach only a small proportion of sex workers, and then only those who are in a position to extricate themselves from prostitution.

Those who are trapped in prostitution�be it by controlling pimps, crime syndicates, or their families�must not be discarded by government or society. The Southern African bishops� new human trafficking desk, a wholly commendable initiative, has a part to play in this, as do many NGOs.

The government would do well to revise legislation governing the sex trade to include greater protection for vulnerable women and children engaged in it.

What such legislation would entail must be a subject of wide-reaching dialogue. While there are many reasons for Catholics to be cautious about advocating the regulation of the sex industry, some have called for just that, even as they condemned prostitution as immoral and degrading.

Like Jesus, we must make explicit our concern for women who sell their bodies, and remove their condition from the shadows of marginalisation.