Prostitution is a violent, disruptive business. Which is precisely why it needs to be legalized.

Prohibition

by Sarah McNaught

At the beginning of this century, moral concerns were the driving force behind the temperance movement. Alcohol was seen as an evil substance, a destroyer of lives and families. In 1919, the manufacture and sale of alcohol became illegal under the 18th Amendment.

But the solution soon became worse than the problem. A massive black market opened up to meet the demand for alcohol. The brisk trade fueled the spread of organized crime, and with this development came police corruption, smuggling, and an increase in street violence as turf wars escalated. Meanwhile, people continued to drink. Finally, in 1933, Prohibition was repealed.

The situation with prostitution is similar. Because prostitution is illegal in America, there is a huge black market to meet the demand, along with the attendant corruption, crime, violence, and disease.

"Gina" knows what the black market can do. The 33-year-old single mother of two sits in her modest one-bedroom apartment in Roslindale. Her jaw seems slightly off, jutting just a little too far to the right. Her left eyeball wavers -- almost as if it isn't properly attached -- and rolls uncontrollably in its socket. These disfigurements represent eight years on the streets of Boston with abusive pimps, violent johns, and nowhere to turn.

Gina pulls down the collar of her green-and-white striped polo shirt to reveal numerous small, round marks from what appear to be cigarettes. "I have been beaten with shovels, kicked in the head, set on fire, raped, and then raped again with things like car jacks, crowbars, and even beer bottles," she says.

"How moral is it to allow disenfranchised citizens to be beaten, abused, diseased, and uncared for?" asks James Geffert, a Wisconsin economist who recently conducted a study on public health and prostitution. "Legalizing prostitution means facing the reality that morality-based laws don't work."

Legalization is an idea that has been tried in the real world. In Nevada, 13 of 16 counties have permitted prostitution since 1986. The government oversees privately-run brothels, but they must be far away from residential areas, and streetwalking is still illegal. (Most of the counties that currently allow prostitution are rural.) The government regulates contraceptive use, medical testing, advertising, revenue, and licensing.

It seems to be working. Since HIV testing began in 1986, there has not been one positive test among the state's prostitutes, according to Randall Todd, chief of the Nevada State Health Division's Bureau of Disease Control and Intervention Services. The number of syphilis cases among sex workers has dropped to between 20 and 25, from 400 to 500 prior to 1986.

Sheriff Robert Del Carlo of Nevada's Story County says very few working women fall victim to violence in the brothels. Each house has its own security force, and there is an on-site manager at each brothel to screen customers and teach prostitutes how to examine a client for disease.

The secret of Nevada's success is regulation: although prostitution is legal, it is controlled. That makes the situation very different from the one in a countery like Thailand, where prostitution is legal but has not been regulated carefully enough. Many of the prostitutes there are underage, some as young as 12. And the pimping system in Thailand is considerably more brutal than in the US. Some women are forced into prostitution against their will -- sometimes after being kidnapped, or being sold by their families. And the government has also done a bad job of making sure that men use condoms. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the rate of HIV infection is 50 percent or higher among female sex workers in Northern Thailand. On top of that, many Thai prostitutes, under the orders of their very visible pimps, commit crimes to bring in more revenue.

But those are not reasons why legalization could not work; they are reasons why it needs to be done carefully.

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Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught[a]phx.com.