User:Fikas101/should prostitution be legalized?

Allow me to introduce my self my name is PETRUS FIKAMENI, a first year student currently pursuing my career at the Polytechnic of Namibia in Information Technology, to acquire my national diploma in information technology. I would refer to myself as a vivacious young man that is determined to make a great success of myself by having taken a course which I am passionate about.

DEFINITION:” Prostitution is the provision of sexual services for negotiating payment between consenting adults. So defined, prostitution is a service industry like any other in which people exchange skills for money or other rewards”. Jan.16.2009 –[Prostitutes’ Education Network][link title]

SHOULD PROSTITUTION BE LEGALIZED...? “Proponents of legalizing prostitution believe it would reduce crime, improve public health, increase tax revenue, help people out of poverty, get prostitutes off the streets, and allow consenting adults to make their own choices. They contend that prostitution is a victimless crime, especially in the 11 Nevada countries where it remain legal”. The prostitutes’ Education network wrote in its “Prostitution Act of 1996” provided on website (accessed Jan. 16, 2009):”“No person’s human or civil rights should be violated on the basis of their trade, occupation, work, calling or profession. No law has ever succeeded in stopping prostitution. Non consenting adults and all children forced into sexual activity (commercial or otherwise) deserve the full protection of the law and perpetrators deserve full punishment by the law. Workers in sex industry deserve the same rights as workers in any other trade including the right to legal protection from crimes such as sexual harassment, sexual abuse and rape”.

“Opponents believe that legalizing prostitution would lead to increase in sexual transmitted diseases such as AIDS, global human trafficking, and violent crime including rape and homicide. They contend that prostitution is inherently immoral, commercially exploitative, empowers the criminal underworld, and promotes the repression of women by men”. Cecilia Hoffman, Secretary of the coalition against Trafficking in Women – Asia pacific (CATW-AP), wrote in the Aug. 1997 paper “SEX: From Human Intimacy to ‘Sexual Labor’ or Is Prostitution a Human right?” published on the CATW-AP website: “ Prostitution violates the rights to physical and moral integrity by the alienation of that appropriated, debased and reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold. It violates the prohibition of torture and of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or it violates the right to liberty and security, and the prohibition of slavery, of forced labor and of trafficking in persons because millions of women and girls all over the world are held in sexual slavery to meet the demand of even more millions of males buyers of sex, and to generate profit for the capitalists of sex. It violates the right to enjoy the highest standards of physical and mental health because violence, disease, unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, and AIDS stalk, presenting constant and grave risk for women and girls in prostitution, and militating against a healthy sense of and relationship with their own bodies.

From my own point of view I think prostitution should be legalized because nothing has changed ever since it has been illegal. Sex workers are being killed now and than. They face rape, violence, and murder every day they are out there. Now it has become a normal thing in the country. People tend to take advantage of this, for instance most of the clients of this sex workers take advantage of the fact that prostitutes are illegal and tend to rape, abuse and even murder them and get away with this, because the law is on their side. Prostitution is not legal so this sex workers have no rights to defend themselves or even to report such matters to the authorities. Some of them do not do prostitution because they want to but because they have no option but to do it for a living. Sex workers have limited rights for example they can be forced to have unprotected sex but will have no option but to do so if they are threatened by their clients because they have no one to turn to for protection .This might increase the rate of HIV and AIDS in the country. So I think it will be better if we try what we have not tried before and legalized prostitution and see if this high crime rates of rap, violence and murder against prostitution will drop or increase more including the rate of HIV and AIDS among prostitutes.

Reference:

Prostitution ProsCon.org. (2004) Retrieved July, 07, 2011 from http://prostitution.procon.org/