Prostitution : A personal choice | The Economist

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  • Enquête dans « The Nation » sur les différents modèles de législation sur la prostitution en Europe - Should Buying Sex Be Illegal ?
    http://www.thenation.com/article/180835/should-buying-sex-be-illegal#

    Aux Pays-Bas (prostitution légalisée en 2000), intéressante anecdote, au passage, de la prostituée heureuse dont le blog (Behind the Red Light District) se révèle écrit par son petit ami :

    Her boyfriend, who speaks excellent English, has longish brown hair and a hint of a mustache and goatee; he’s wearing a gold-colored chain around his neck and another around his wrist. He works in IT, he says, but never seems to make much money. He met Anna two years ago as a client; before they got together, he lived outside the city because he couldn’t afford an apartment in Amsterdam. Her earnings—about 300 to 400 euros per shift, which can run anywhere from four to ten hours—are more than five times as much as his.

    As we talk, it becomes clear that the voice of the blog is at least as much his as hers. In conversation, he compares the Swedish model to Prohibition in the United States, a point also made on Behind the Red Light District. And while the online Felicia Anna says she’s been endangered by a client only once, the Felicia Anna sitting across from me says she’s had to call the police two or three times. Nor does she feel that she can call for help every time a client gets aggressive and starts demanding his money back: “You can’t call always the police, because sometimes then you have to call almost the whole night.” Her boyfriend chimes in to compare it to working late at night at a bar. “You can also get drunk guys late at night,” he says. “You can also have problems with them.”

    When I mention that Behind the Red Light District sounds like him, Anna tells me: “He help me a lot with it, because I work in the nighttime and I have to sleep, too. And I have my own stuff that I have to do—cleaning the house, shopping, sometimes cooking. I can’t do everything by myself.”

    Sinon, constat d’échec de la légalisation par rapport aux buts qui étaient recherchés :

    At the time, the idea was to bring the business out of the shadows. Brothels were already tolerated, and the authorities believed that by legalizing them, they could better regulate what went on, fighting trafficking and organized crime and protecting the rights of sex workers. A 2007 report by the Dutch Ministry of Justice states: “In general, the starting point used for policy is that the amendment of the law should result in an improvement of the prostitutes’ position.” But that is not what happened, according to the report, which found that “the prostitutes’ emotional well-being is now lower than in 2001 on all measured aspects, and the use of sedatives has increased.”

    La légalisation a aussi augmenté la traite, parce que « la demande excède l’offre » :

    Academic evidence suggests that trafficking is exacerbated by legalization. A 2012 article by the scholars Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher and Eric Neumayer, published in the journal World Development, concluded that “countries with legalized prostitution have a statistically significantly larger reported incidence of human trafficking inflows. This holds true regardless of the model we use to estimate the equations and the variables we control for in the analysis.”

    This can seem counterintuitive—shouldn’t legalization reduce the role of force in the industry, since it allows more women to enter sex work legally? The explanation, according to Cho, Dreher and Neumayer, is that while more women enter prostitution voluntarily in a legal market, the increase in the number of clients is even greater. Demand outstrips supply.

    Curieusement, même si la journaliste semble pleine de préjugés contre le modèle suédois de pénalisation des clients (elle parle de « féministes radicales », ce qui est le terme pour dire « féministes » quand on parle de prostitution), c’est clairement le modèle qui apparaît comme le moins pire dans son enquête.

    Il ne semble pas avoir eu pour effet de « simplement rendre la prostitution moins visible », comme on l’entend beaucoup dire :

    To some extent, this is just a sign of sex work moving online and indoors, yet there are data to suggest that there’s still less prostitution overall than there would be without the law. The government review, for example, found more Internet prostitution in neighboring countries than in Sweden. It’s possible to conclude, it asserted, “that the reduction of street prostitution by half that took place in Sweden represents a real reduction in prostitution here and that this reduction is also mainly a result of the criminalization of sex purchases.”

    Anecdotal evidence from websites where patrons of prostitutes trade advice and reviews back this up. On the International Sex Guide site, for example, a man planning a trip to Sweden asked for tips, only to be dissuaded by other posters. “Bros, don’t waste your time looking for anything. Mongering is illegal and totally dead in Sweden,” said one. (“Mongering” is slang for buying sex.)

    Et, ironiquement, les prostituées qui exercent encore semblent bénéficier des bonnes conditions de travail qu’on espère en général obtenir de la légalisation :

    The price for sex with a prostitute in Sweden, meanwhile, is widely understood to be the highest in Europe. “The minimum price here is 150 euro,” says Häggström. “Prices are higher because we have a much lesser amount of persons in prostitution compared to the legalized countries.” Not only do Swedish prostitutes make more money than their colleagues in other countries: thanks to lobbying by sex-worker activists, they also have access to the country’s generous welfare state, including sick leave and parental leave. And they’re safer than sex workers elsewhere: not a single prostitute has been murdered on the job in Sweden since the law was introduced.

    (J’écris sur le sujet pour le @mdiplo de septembre)

    #prostitution