The Trap of Prostitution

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 rarely corresponds with reality.

While there are those who adopt prostitution as a way of making quick money, especially those at the high end of the industry, most women (and some men) in the sex trade enter that life not out of free choice, but through the circumstances in which they find themselves.

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 (which 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 of them continue a life of transactional sex.

Testimony given at last month’s International Human Trafficking Conference for Africa held in Cape Town that children as young as ten are prostituting themselves to truck drivers in Beaufort West for as little as R10 must alarm us.

This situation of child prostitution is replicated in variations throughout South Africa.

Many prostitutes emerge from a childhood of sexual abuse. Obviously most who have suffered such abuse do not become prostitutes, but 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 cities or countries where they are then systematically brutalised and forced to submit their bodies to transactional sex in inhumane conditions.

Not every story of prostitution is necessarily rooted in tragedy, but 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.

Pope Francis, who has encountered women jailed for prostitution during his visits to prisons, counsels us to offer real compassion to the marginalised and oppressed.

This means that we must find ways of helping sex workers find a way out of the situation that traps them in that profession.

For example, funding must be made available to provide skills-training for women who wish to escape the iniquity of transactional sex. Such programmes should include ancillary but necessary services, such as counselling and, where required, drug rehabilitation.

These programmes might reach only a small number of sex workers, and even then only those who are in a position to extricate themselves from prostitution. Nonetheless, it is necessary that alternative options are made available.

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 government ought to revise legislation governing the sex trade to include greater protection for vulnerable women and children trapped 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 regulation of the sex industry, some have called for just that, even as they condemn 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.