Plenty of local folks will tell you there are many and better ways to approach the sex work industry and sex workers. There are advocates who want to start by making prostitution legal, while others say the best approach is to stop criminalizing prostitutes and figure out ways to steer men and women from prostitution.
A recent AlterNet story gives hope that may some states are getting closer to taking the criminal focus away from prostitutes:
The latest example of this shift to view people in prostitution as victims rather than criminals is last week’s passage of a bill removing the felony penalty in Illinois — which has some of the harshest prostitution laws in the country. The legislation sailed through the Illinois Legislature, after a decade of work by End Demand Illinois, a coalition that wants to see prostitution eliminated. The highest penalty for selling sex in the state will now be a Class A misdemeanor.
“There are very, very few crimes, in my view, that exist in the criminal code, that you can truly say in this instance, the perpetrator is likely as much a victim as they are a perpetrator,” said Illinois state Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican and former prosecutor, when the bill was being debated. “People who would disagree with that would say, ‘there’s a notion of personal responsibility here. They decided to do it.’ And you know, in the strictest of legal terms, there’s no doubt that that’s true. But the situations that most of these young ladies find themselves in are unlike any situations that I bet any of us have encountered, and I hope none of us ever have to encounter.”
[AlterNet]
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2013.
Certain people need to stop worrying about what others choose to do as a lifestyle or an occupation. The U.S.A. should adopt the model used in The Netherlands, a country with far less sexual disease and sexual crime than America the Beautiful could ever hope to have. The time to shed archaic religious and moral beliefs is WAY overdue. I think it’s great that certain people are old fashioned, but it irks me when they attempt to push their holier than thou beliefs on everyone else. They need to mind their own goddamned business.
They should legalize prostitution and offer ways to help the workers make it safer and healthier for them. You cannot force or coerce anyone to not want to engage in that industry, yet I do believe that they should be offered assistance like any other job field, and perhaps they can decide for themselves what life style they prefer. You arrest these people, throw huge penalties and fines on them, knowing what they are trained or skilled in for work, and in a way force them stuck in their profession to cover the legal costs in the end. Are these people against prostitution going to offer these women jobs or money for college to better their ability for another line of work? The problem here is the judging, and the complete self righteousness…get over yourself America.