Thursday, March 25, 2010

LISTEN: the GIRLS are SPEAKING, with 10 Reasons NOT to Legalise Prostitution: lecture by Sheila Jeffreys (list and other writings here by Janice Raymond), Supported by anti-prostitution Radical Feminist Activist Ruchira Gupta


[image is from here]

From Facebook and *here* and *here*.

Very privileged people speaking out about making prostitution legal is part of the propatriarchal problem that needs a radical remedy. The remedy is the eradication of prostitution and patriarchies. And to settle for nothing less. See below for some events on this subject and for the list of ten reasons NOT to legalise prostitution... if you give a shit about girls and women around the world, that is. Let all readers here be fully accountable to the girls and women around the world who are enslaved, trafficked, and coerced into systems of prostitution. If you think being a prostitute is a meaningful choice, willfully made, you have one hell of a lot of privilege!
 

Listen....the girls are speaking

Type:
Start Time:
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 10:30am
End Time:
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 5:00pm
Location:
American Center, New Delhi
Street:
24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg
City/Town:
New Delhi, India


*          *           *

4th Apne Aap Annual Lecture-
'10 reasons not to
legalize prostitution'


Type:
Informational Meeting
Friday, March 26, 2010
Time:
6:30am - 8:00am
Location:
Conference Room II, India International Center
Description

4th Apne Aap Annual Lecture by Dr. Sheila Jeffreys on '10 reasons not to legalize prostitution' ; to celebrate the International Women's Day

Dr. Sheila Jeffreys is the author of 7 books on the history and politics of sexuality and has a long record of feminist activism against sexual violence, pornography and prostitution in the UK before moving to Australia in 1991. She set up the Australia branch of the INGO-Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and currently teaches sexual politics and international feminist politics at the University of Melbourne.

Come for the talk and say no to legalizing exploitation of women and girls.

Other Information

  • Guests are allowed to bring friends to this event.
*          *          *
    10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution by Dr. Janice Raymond
    Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW)

    Summary
    The following arguments apply to all state-sponsored forms of prostitution, including but not limited to full-scale legalization of brothels and pimping, decriminalization of the sex industry, regulating prostitution by laws such as registering or mandating health checks for women in prostitution, or any system in which prostitution is recognized as "sex work" or advocated as an employment choice.

    As countries are considering legalizing and decriminalizing the sex industry, we urge you to consider the ways in which legitimating prostitution as "work" does not empower the women in prostitution but does everything to strengthen the sex industry.

    10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution

    Janice G. Raymond

    Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW)

    March 25, 2003

    The following arguments apply to all state-sponsored forms of prostitution,
    including but not limited to full-scale legalization of brothels and
    pimping, decriminalization of the sex industry, regulating prostitution
    by laws such as registering or mandating health checks for women in prostitution,
    or any system in which prostitution is recognized as sex work or advocated
    as an employment choice.

    As countries are considering legalizing and decriminalizing the sex industry,
    we urge you to consider the ways in which legitimating prostitution as
    work does not empower the women in prostitution but does everything to
    strengthen the sex industry.
    1. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps, traffickers and the sex industry.
    2. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution and the sex industry promotes sex trafficking.
    3. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control the sex industry. It expands it.
    4. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases clandestine, hidden, illegal and street prostitution.
    5. Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution.
    6. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect the women in prostitution.
    7. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the demand for prostitution. It boosts the motivation of men to buy women for sex in a much wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable settings. 
    8. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote women's health.
    9. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance women's choice.
    10. Women in systems of prostitution do not want the sex industry legalized or decriminalized.

    ARGUMENTS:

    1. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps,
    traffickers and the sex industry.


    What does legalization of prostitution or decriminalization of the sex
    industry mean? In the Netherlands, legalization amounts to sanctioning
    all aspects of the sex industry: the women themselves, the so-called
    clients and the pimps who, under the regime of legalization, are transformed
    into third party businessmen and legitimate sexual entrepreneurs.
    Legalization/decriminalization of the sex industry also converts brothels,
    sex clubs, massage parlors and other sites of prostitution activities
    into legitimate venues where commercial sexual acts are allowed to flourish
    legally with few restraints.

    Ordinary people believe that, in calling for legalization or decriminalization
    of prostitution, they are dignifying and professionalizing the women
    in prostitution. But dignifying prostitution as work doesn't dignify
    the women, it simply dignifies the sex industry. People often don't realize
    that decriminalization, for example, means decriminalization of the whole
    sex industry not just the women. And they haven't thought through the
    consequences of legalizing pimps as legitimate sex entrepreneurs or third
    party businessmen, or the fact that men who buy women for sexual activity
    are now accepted as legitimate consumers of sex.

    CATW favors decriminalization of the women in prostitution. No woman
    should be punished for her own exploitation. But States should never
    decriminalize pimps, buyers, procurers, brothels or other sex establishments.

    2. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution and the sex
    industry promotes sex trafficking.


    Legalized or decriminalized prostitution industries are one of the root
    causes of sex trafficking. One argument for legalizing prostitution in
    the Netherlands was that legalization would help end the exploitation
    of desperate immigrant women trafficked for prostitution. A report done
    for the governmental Budapest Group* stated that 80% of women in the
    brothels in the Netherlands are trafficked from other countries (Budapest
    Group, 1999: 11). As early as 1994, the International Organization of
    Migration (IOM) stated that in the Netherlands alone, nearly 70 per cent
    of trafficked women were from CEEC [Central and Eastern European Countries]
    (IOM, 1995: 4).

    The government of the Netherlands promotes itself as the champion of
    anti-trafficking policies and programs, yet cynically has removed every
    legal impediment to pimping, procurement and brothels. In the year 2000,
    the Dutch Ministry of Justice argued for a legal quota of foreign sex
    workers, because the Dutch prostitution market demands a variety of bodies
    (Dutting, 2001: 16). Also in the year 2000, the Dutch government sought
    and received a judgment from the European Court recognizing prostitution
    as an economic activity, thus enabling women from the EU and former Soviet
    bloc countries to obtain working permits as sex workers in the Dutch
    sex industry if they can prove that they are self employed. NGOs in the
    Netherlands have stated that traffickers are taking advantage of this
    ruling to bring foreign women into the Dutch prostitution industry by
    masking the fact that women have been trafficked, and by coaching the
    women how to prove that they are self-employed migrant sex workers.

    In the one year since lifting the ban on brothels in the Netherlands,
    NGOs report that there has been an increase of victims of trafficking
    or, at best, that the number of victims from other countries has remained
    the same (Bureau NRM, 2002: 75). Forty-three municipalities in the Netherlands
    want to follow a no-brothel policy, but the Minister of Justice has indicated
    that the complete banning of prostitution within any municipality could
    conflict with the right to free choice of work (Bureau NRM: 2002) as
    guaranteed in the federal Grondwet or Constitution.

    In January, 2002, prostitution in Germany was fully established as a
    legitimate job after years of being legalized in so-called eros or tolerance
    zones. Promotion of prostitution, pimping and brothels are now legal
    in Germany. As early as 1993, after the first steps towards legalization
    had been taken, it was recognized (even by pro-prostitution advocates)
    that 75 per cent of the women in Germany's prostitution industry were
    foreigners from Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and other countries in South
    America (Altink, 1993: 33). After the fall of the Berlin wall, brothel
    owners reported that 9 out of every 10 women in the German sex industry
    were from eastern Europe (Altink, 1993: 43) and other former Soviet countries.
    The sheer volume of foreign women who are in the prostitution industry
    in Germany, by some NGO estimates now up to 85 per cent, casts further
    doubt on the fact that these numbers of women could have entered Germany
    without facilitation. As in the Netherlands, NGOs report that most
    of the foreign women have been trafficked into the country since it
    is almost impossible for poor women to facilitate their own migration,
    underwrite the costs of travel and travel documents, and set themselves
    up in business without outside help.

    The link between legalization of prostitution and trafficking in Australia
    was recognized in the U.S. State Department's 1999 Country Report on
    Human Rights Practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights
    and Labor. In the country report on Australia, it was noted that in the
    State of Victoria which legalized prostitution in the 1980s, trafficking
    in East Asian women for the sex trade is a growing problem in Australia.
    Lax laws, including legalized prostitution in parts of the country, make
    [anti-trafficking] enforcement difficult at the working level.

    3. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control
    the sex industry. It expands it.


    Contrary to claims that legalization and decriminalization would regulate
    the expansion of the sex industry and bring it under control, the sex
    industry now accounts for 5 percent of the Netherlands economy (Daley,
    2001: 4). Over the last decade, as pimping became legalized and then
    brothels decriminalized in the Netherlands in 2000, the sex industry
    expanded 25 percent (Daley, 2001: 4). At any hour of the day, women of
    all ages and races, dressed in hardly anything, are put on display in
    the notorious windows of Dutch brothels and sex clubs and offered for
    sale -- for male consumption. Most of them are women from other countries
    (Daley, 2001: 4) who have in all likelihood been trafficked into the
    Netherlands.

    There are now officially recognized associations of sex businesses and
    prostitution customers in the Netherlands that consult and collaborate
    with the government to further their interests and promote prostitution.
    These include the Association of Operators of Relaxation Businesses,
    the Cooperating Consultation of Operators of Window Prostitution, and
    the Man/Woman and Prostitution Foundation, a group of men who regularly
    use women in prostitution, and whose specific aims include to make prostitution
    and the use of services of prostitutes more accepted and openly discussible,
    and to protect the interests of clients (NRM Bureau, 2002:115-16).

    Faced with a dearth of women who want to work in the legal sex sector,
    the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking states that in the future,
    a proposed solution may be to offer [to the market] prostitutes from
    non EU/EEA countries, who voluntarily choose to work in prostitution.
    They could be given legal and controlled access to the Dutch market (NRM
    Bureau, 2002: 140). As prostitution has been transformed into sex work,
    and pimps into entrepreneurs, so too this potential solution transforms
    trafficking into voluntary migration for sex work.The Netherlands is
    looking to the future, targeting poor women of color for the international
    sex trade to remedy the inadequacies of the free market of sexual services.
    In the process, it goes further in legitimizing prostitution as an option
    for the poor.

    Legalization of prostitution in the State of Victoria, Australia, has
    led to massive expansion of the sex industry. Whereas there were 40 legal
    brothels in Victoria in 1989, in 1999 there were 94, along with 84 escort
    services. Other forms of sexual exploitation, such as tabletop dancing,
    bondage and discipline centers, peep shows, phone sex, and pornography
    have all developed in much more profitable ways than before (Sullivan
    and Jeffreys: 2001).

    Prostitution has become an accepted sideline of the tourism and casino
    boom in Victoria with government-sponsored casinos authorizing the redeeming
    of casino chips and wheel of fortune bonuses at local brothels (Sullivan
    and Jeffreys: 2001). The commodification of women has vastly intensified
    and is much more visible.

    Brothels in Switzerland have doubled several years after partial legalization
    of prostitution. Most of these brothels go untaxed, and many are illegal.
    In 1999, the Zurich newspaper, Blick, claimed that Switzerland had the
    highest brothel density of any country in Europe, with residents feeling
    overrun with prostitution venues, as well as experiencing constant encroachment
    into areas not zoned for prostitution activities (South China Morning
    Post: 1999).

    4. Legalization/decriminalzaton of prostitution increases clandestine,
    hidden, illegal and street prostitution.


    Legalization was supposed to get prostituted women off the street. Many
    women don't want to register and undergo health checks, as required by
    law in certain countries legalizing prostitution, so legalization often
    drives them into street prostitution. And many women choose street prostitution
    because they want to avoid being controlled and exploited by the new
    sex businessmen.

    In the Netherlands, women in prostitution point out that legalization
    or decriminalization of the sex industry cannot erase the stigma of prostitution
    but, instead, makes women more vulnerable to abuse because they must
    register and lose anonymity. Thus, the majority of women in prostitution
    still choose to operate illegally and underground. Members of Parliament
    who originally supported the legalization of brothels on the grounds
    that this would liberate women are now seeing that legalization actually
    reinforces the oppression of women (Daley, 2001: A1).

    The argument that legalization was supposed to take the criminal elements
    out of sex businesses by strict regulation of the industry has failed.
    The real growth in prostitution in Australia since legalization took
    effect has been in the illegal sector. Since the onset of legalization
    in Victoria, brothels have tripled in number and expanded in size; the
    vast majority having no licenses but advertising and operating with impunity
    (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001). In New South Wales, brothels were decriminalized
    in 1995. In 1999, the numbers of brothels in Sydney had increased exponentially
    to 400-500. The vast majority have no license to operate. To end endemic
    police corruption, control of illegal prostitution was taken out of the
    hands of the police and placed in the hands of local councils and planning
    regulators. The council has neither the money nor the personnel to put
    investigators into brothels to flush out and prosecute illegal operators.

    5. Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the
    sex industry increases child prostitution.

    Another argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that
    it would help end child prostitution. In reality, however, child prostitution
    in the Netherlands has increased dramatically during the 1990s. The Amsterdam-based
    ChildRight organization estimates that the number has gone from 4,000
    children in 1996 to 15,000 in 2001. The group estimates that at least
    5,000 of the children in prostitution are from other countries, with
    a large segment being Nigerian girls (Tiggeloven: 2001).

    Child prostitution has dramatically risen in Victoria compared to other
    Australian states where prostitution has not been legalized. Of all the
    states and territories in Australia, the highest number of reported incidences
    of child prostitution came from Victoria. In a 1998 study undertaken
    by ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) who conducted research
    for the Australian National Inquiry on Child Prostitution, there was
    increased evidence of organized commercial exploitation of children.

    6. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect
    the women in prostitution.


    The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW) has conducted
    2 major studies on sex trafficking and prostitution, interviewing almost
    200 victims of commercial sexual exploitation. In these studies, women
    in prostitution indicated that prostitution establishments did little
    to protect them, regardless of whether they were in legal or illegal
    establishments. The only time they protect anyone is to protect the customers.

    In a CATW 5-country study that interviewed 146 victims of international
    trafficking and local prostitution, 80% of all women interviewed suffered
    physical violence from pimps and buyers) and endured similar and multiple
    health effects from the violence and sexual exploitation (Raymond et
    al: 2002).

    The violence that women were subjected to was an intrinsic part of the
    prostitution and sexual exploitation. Pimps used violence for many different
    reasons and purposes. Violence was used to initiate some women into prostitution
    and to break them down so that they would do the sexual acts. After initiation,
    at every step of the way, violence was used for sexual gratification
    of the pimps, as a form of punishment, to threaten and intimidate women,
    to exert the pimp's dominance, to exact compliance, to punish women for
    alleged violations, to humiliate women, and to isolate and confine women.

    Of the women who did report that sex establishments gave some protection,
    they qualified it by pointing out that no protector was ever in the room
    with them, where anything could occur. One woman who was in out-call
    prostitution stated: The driver functioned as a bodyguard. You're supposed
    to call when you get in, to ascertain that everything was OK. But they
    are not standing outside the door while you're in there, so anything
    could happen.

    CATW's studies found that even surveillance cameras in prostitution establishments
    are used to protect the establishment. Protection of the women from abuse
    is of secondary or no importance.

    7. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the
    demand for prostitution. It boosts the motivation of men to buy women
    for sex in a much wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable
    settings.

    With the advent of legalization in countries that have decriminalized
    the sex industry, many men who would not risk buying women for sex now
    see prostitution as acceptable. When the legal barriers disappear, so
    too do the social and ethical barriers to treating women as sexual commodities.
    Legalization of prostitution sends the message to new generations of
    men and boys that women are sexual commodities and that prostitution
    is harmless fun.

    As men have an excess of sexual services that are offered to them, women
    must compete to provide services by engaging in anal sex, sex without
    condoms, bondage and domination and other proclivities demanded by the
    clients. Once prostitution is legalized, all holds are barred. Women's
    reproductive capacities are sellable products, for example. A whole new
    group of clients find pregnancy a sexual turn-on and demand breast milk
    in their sexual encounters with pregnant women. Specialty brothels are
    provided for disabled men, and State-employed caretakers who are mostly
    women must take these men to the brothels if they wish to go (Sullivan
    and Jeffreys: 2001).

    Advertisements line the highways of Victoria offering women as objects
    for sexual use and teaching new generations of men and boys to treat
    women as subordinates. Businessmen are encouraged to hold their corporate
    meetings in these clubs where owners supply naked women on the table
    at tea breaks and lunchtime.

    A Melbourne brothel owner stated that the client base was well educated
    professional men, who visit during the day and then go home to their
    families. Women who desire more egalitarian relationships with men find
    that often the men in their lives are visiting the brothels and sex clubs.
    They have the choice to accept that their male partners are buying women
    in commercial sexual transactions, avoid recognizing what their partners
    are doing, or leave the relationship (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001).

    Sweden's Violence Against Women, Government Bill 1997/98:55 prohibits
    and penalizes the purchase of sexual services. It is an innovative approach
    that targets the demand for prostitution. Sweden believes that by prohibiting
    the purchase of sexual services, prostitution and its damaging effects
    can be counteracted more effectively than hitherto. Importantly, this
    law clearly states that: Prostitution is not a desirable social phenomenon
    and is an obstacle to the ongoing development towards equality between
    women and men.**

    8. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote
    women's health.


    A legalized system of prostitution that mandates health checks and certification
    only for women and not for clients is blatantly discriminatory to women.
    Women only health checks make no public health sense because monitoring
    prostituted women does not protect them from HIV/AIDS or STDs, since
    male clients can and do originally transmit disease to the women.

    It is argued that legalized brothels or other controlled prostitution
    establishments protect women through enforceable condom policies. In
    one of CATW's studies, U.S. women in prostitution interviewed reported
    the following: 47% stated that men expected sex without a condom; 73%
    reported that men offered to pay more for sex without a condom; 45% of
    women said they were abused if they insisted that men use condoms. Some
    women said that certain establishments may have rules that men wear condoms
    but, in reality, men still try to have sex without them. One woman stated:It's
    regulation to wear a condom at the sauna, but negotiable between parties
    on the side. Most guys expected blow jobs without a condom (Raymond and
    Hughes: 2001).

    In reality, the enforcement of condom policy was left to the individual
    women in prostitution, and the offer of extra money was an insistent
    pressure. One woman stated: ;I'd be one of those liars if I said "Oh
    I always used a condom." If there was extra money coming in, then
    the condom would be out the window. I was looking for the extra money.
    Many factors militate against condom use: the need of women to make money;
    older women's decline in attractiveness to men; competition from places
    that do not require condoms; pimp pressure on women to have sex with
    no condom for more money; money needed for a drug habit or to pay off
    the pimp; and the general lack of control that prostituted women have
    over their bodies in prostitution venues.

    So called "safety policies" in brothels did not protect women
    from harm. Even where brothels supposedly monitored the "customers" and
    utilized "bouncers," women stated that they were injured by
    buyers and, at times, by brothel owners and their friends. Even when
    someone intervened to control buyers' abuse, women lived in a climate
    of fear. Although 60 percent of women reported that buyers had sometimes
    been prevented from abusing them, half of those women answered that,
    nonetheless, they thought that they might be killed by one of their "customers
    (Raymond et al: 2002).

    9. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance
    women's choice.


    Most women in prostitution did not make a rational choice to enter prostitution.
    They did not sit down one day and decide that they wanted to be prostitutes.
    Rather, such choicesare better termed survival strategies. Rather than
    consent, a prostituted woman more accurately complies to the only options
    available to her. Her compliance is required by the very fact of having
    to adapt to conditions of inequality that are set by the customer who
    pays her to do what he wants her to do.

    Most of the women interviewed in CATW studies reported that choice in
    entering the sex industry could only be discussed in the context of the
    lack of other options. Most emphasized that women in prostitution had
    few other options. Many spoke about prostitution as the last option,
    or as an involuntary way of making ends meet. In one study, 67% of the
    law enforcement officials that CATW interviewed expressed the opinion
    that women did not enter prostitution voluntarily. 72% of the social
    service providers that CATW interviewed did not believe that women voluntarily
    choose to enter the sex industry (Raymond and Hughes: 2001).

    The distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution is precisely
    what the sex industry is promoting because it will give the industry
    more security and legal stability if these distinctions can be utilized
    to legalize prostitution, pimping and brothels. Women who bring charges
    against pimps and perpetrators will bear the burden of proving that they
    were forced. How will marginalized women ever be able to prove coercion?
    If prostituted women must prove that force was used in recruitment or
    in their working conditions, very few women in prostitution will have
    legal recourse and very few offenders will be prosecuted.

    Women in prostitution must continually lie about their lives, their bodies,
    and their sexual responses. Lying is part of the job definition when
    the customer asks,did you enjoy it? The very edifice of prostitution
    is built on the lie that women like it. Some prostitution survivors have
    stated that it took them years after leaving prostitution to acknowledge
    that prostitution wasn't a free choice because to deny their own capacity
    to choose was to deny themselves.

    There is no doubt that a small number of women say they choose to be
    in prostitution, especially in public contexts orchestrated by the sex
    industry. In the same way, some people choose to take dangerous drugs
    such as heroin. However, even when some people choose to take dangerous
    drugs, we still recognize that this kind of drug use is harmful to them,
    and most people do not seek to legalize heroin. In this situation, it
    is harm to the person, not the consent of the person that is the governing
    standard.

    Even a 1998 ILO (UN International Labor Organization) report suggesting
    that the sex industry be treated as a legitimate economic sector, found
    that prostitution is one of the most alienated forms of labour; the surveys
    [in 4 countries] show that women worked "with a heavy heart,""felt
    forced,"or were ";conscience-stricken" and had negative
    self-identities. A significant proportion claimed they wanted to leave
    sex work [sic] if they could (Lim, 1998: 213)."

    When a woman remains in an abusive relationship with a partner who batters
    her, or even when she defends his actions, concerned people don't say
    she is there voluntarily. They recognize the complexity of her compliance.
    Like battered women, women in prostitution often deny their abuse if
    provided with no meaningful alternatives.

    10. Women in systems of prostitution do not want the sex industry
    legalized or decriminalized.


    In a 5-country study on sex trafficking done by the Coalition Against
    Trafficking in Women and funded by the Ford Foundation, most of the 146
    women interviewed strongly stated that prostitution should not be legalized
    and considered legitimate work, warning that legalization would create
    more risks and harm for women from already violent customer and pimps
    (Raymond et al, 2002). "No way. It's not a profession. It is humiliating
    and violence from the men's side. Not one woman interviewed wanted her
    children, family or friends to have to earn money by entering the sex
    industry. One stated: Prostitution stripped me of my life, my health,
    everything.

    CONCLUSION

    Legislators leap onto the legalization bandwagon because they think nothing
    else is successful. However, as Scotland Yard's Commissioner has stated:
    'You've got to be careful about legalizing things just because you don't
    think what you are doing is successful.

    We hear very little about the role of the sex industry in creating a
    global sex market in the bodies of women and children. Instead, we hear
    much about making prostitution into a better job for women through regulation
    and/or legalization, through unions of so-called sex workers,and through
    campaigns which provide condoms to women in prostitution but cannot provide
    them with alternatives to prostitution. We hear much about how to keep
    women in prostitution but very little about how to help women get out.

    Governments that legalize prostitution as sex work will have a huge economic
    stake in the sex industry. Consequently, this will foster their increased
    dependence on the sex sector. If women in prostitution are counted as
    workers, pimps as businessmen, and buyers as consumers of sexual services,
    thus legitimating the entire sex industry as an economic sector, then
    governments can abdicate responsibility for making decent and sustainable
    employment available to women.

    Rather than the State sanctioning prostitution, the State could address
    the demand by penalizing the men who buy women for the sex of prostitution,
    and support the development of alternatives for women in prostitution
    industries. Instead of governments cashing in on the economic benefits
    of the sex industry by taxing it, governments could invest in the futures
    of prostituted women by providing economic resources, from the seizure
    of sex industry assets, to provide real alternatives for women in prostitution.

    NOTES:

    *Budapest Group. (1999, June). The Relationship Between Organized Crime
    and Trafficking in Aliens. Austria: International Centre for Migration
    Policy Development. The Budapest process was initiated in 1991. Nearly
    40 governments and 10 organizations participate in the process, and about
    50 intergovernmental meetings at various levels have been held, including
    the Prague Ministerial Conference.
    **The National Rapporteur on Trafficking at the National Swedish Police
    has stated that in the 6 months following the implementation of the Swedish
    law in January 1999, the number of trafficked women to Sweden has declined.
    She also stated that according to police colleagues in the European Union
    that traffickers are choosing other destination countries where they
    are not constrained by similar laws. Thus the law serves as a deterrent
    to traffickers. Quoted in Karl Vicktor Olsson, Sexkopslagen minskar handeln
    med kvinnor, Metro, January 27, 2001: 2.

    REFERENCES

    Altink, Sietske. (1995). Stolen Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery
    (London: Scarlet Press).
    Budapest Group. (1999, June). The Relationship Between Organized Crime
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    Policy Development.
    Bureau NRM. (2002, November). Trafficking in Human Beings: First Report
    of the Dutch National Rapporteur. The Hague. 155 pp.
    Daley, Suzanne. (2001, August 12). "New Rights for Dutch Prostitutes,
    but No Gain. New York Times, pp. A1 and 4.
    Dutting, Giseling. (2000, November). Legalized Prostitution in the Netherlands
    Recent Debates. Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights, 3: 15-16.
    IOM (International Organization for Migration). (1995, May). Trafficking
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    Lim, Lin Lean (1998). The Sex Sector. International Labour Office, Geneva,
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