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

The toxic avenger

by Sarah McNaught

One of the biggest problems with prostitution is the role it plays in spreading disease.

Take "Candy." The 22-year-old heroin-addicted streetwalker is painfully thin, her collarbone protruding from beneath her meager flesh. AIDS has left her riddled with health problems, apparent as she nearly coughs up a lung and spits into the weeds growing by the chain-link fence behind her.

Her wide eyes darting, Candy says that she was raped by several family members before the age of 12. A guidance counselor at her junior high school started to catch on that something was wrong, but Candy was afraid that the counselor would approach her family. For the next four years, she hid not only from the men who molested her but also from people who could have helped her. Finally, terrified that someone would find out her secret, she ran away. No one came looking for her.

"I am the toxic avenger," she explains in a cold, calculating tone. "I am going to get revenge for what happened to me."

Candy is a creature of the system society has created. She left home troubled and desperate, and was pushed further and further underground. And in the black market where she makes a living, there are no rules. Outside a brothel, there is no way to insist that the men use condoms. Now Candy has AIDS (and, she says, syphilis and gonorrhea), and is intent on spreading it. Her only comfort is the thought of revenge.

"This doesn't surprise me," says "Annmarie," a 36-year-old school crossing guard who solicited sex for money during high school. "Of the over 50 prostitutes that I knew, a good 90 percent of them were infected with at least one disease, and many of them had more than one."

Many prostitutes do not seek treatment because, for whatever reason, they fear imprisonment. "I have some friends who know a doctor who can help," says "Josie," a former resident of Atlanta. "But I know too many girls who were `getting help,' and they ended up in jail," she insists. "I'd rather just deal with it than be turned in."

Even carrying condoms can get women into trouble. According to a 1996 study James Geffert presented at the 1996 Nevada HIV/AIDS Surveillance Conference in Mesquite, Nevada, it is common practice in most states for police to use condoms as the basis for making an arrest. This is what happens in Boston.

"It's like showing a cop a gun," one streetwalker says. "He's going to take it from you and use it against you -- so you don't carry the gun. I don't carry condoms for that same reason."

In Australia, where prostitution is legal in some areas, preventing prostitutes from spreading disease is simple. The government provides free condoms, free needles and syringes, free HIV/AIDS testing, and free AIDS-related counseling. No licensed female sex worker is known to have transmitted HIV during commercial sex activities, and among resident Australian female sex workers, only a small number have been identified as HIV-positive. Those few were probably infected by unclean needles.

"Right now you have a situation where there is no real health monitoring of STDs, pregnancies, or family health care," says Gerry Cheney, a former outreach worker in central Massachusetts who now works with prostitutes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Izzy is a good case in point. Standing on a corner with midday traffic whizzing by, her very stance practically screams that she has given up -- on society and on herself.

"Disease?" she jeers. "You name it, I got it -- herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis. Or at least that's what I've been told. I can't go to a real doctor."

Prostitution, Izzy points out, doesn't come with health care. "In fact, care doesn't have anything to do with what I do," she says as she walks over to a blue hatchback, leans in the window, and climbs into the passenger's seat.

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