ANY response to whether prostitution represents a threat to the common good and to the values of a healthy society should be premised on an understanding from sociological and situational perspective that prostitution has always been a metaphor for a social malaise. Its causes, contexts, and consequences alone should decide whether it is socially desirable, and if not whether it can ever be stopped by state and/or voluntary action now when the globalisation monster has already begun to gobble up the sovereign powers of the state and stymie well-meaning state and voluntary actions.
More importantly, the debate should proceed not so much on the assumption that prostitution is unhealthy and unhygienic and hence a threat to the values of a healthy society as on addressing the issues centering on the circumstances of its victims and how extricating them from their social trap and integrating with mainstream society will help in augmenting the common good and the health of society in both of which obviously they should find equal importance as anyone else; without which there cannot be any common good or values of a healthy society.
The emergence of prostitution as a social institution right from the hoary past has been intertwined with the interplay of various social processes and practices.
They include the institutions involved in them such as lineage, descent, property rights, social hierarchies and their discontents, emergence of patriarchy, different types of marriage and family practices such as monogamy, polygamy, matrilocal, patrilocal, and duolocal residence patterns of the married, which existed prior to the emergence of monogamy as the ideal marriage practice.They include the nature of social dominance, power and privilege, which more often than not allowed the entrenched groups to exploit women of the weak and vulnerable social groups, role of religion in legitimising sexual practices in which either women had no say, or they were made to internalise that surrendering their body to priests or persons from the entrenched groups was invitation to their ultimate Nirvana. They include changes in age at marriage over the years, the new-fangled sex-senses or attitudes to sex resulting from modern education, print and electronic media, and the World Wide Web and its myriad pernicious porno-sites, attempts at decimation of developing countries by the imperialist powers in the name of democracy and regime-change leaving women without safeguards and safety-nets, demographic changes resulting in changes in sex-ratios and sexual imbalances, and so on.
Explicit in the characterisation of prostitution as sex-trade is yet another imperialist justification of the commodification of women, who, more often than not, are part of the disposable people of society. The implication of this can be better understood from the market economy vis-à-vis women at the margins of society. It is only fair to expect that very few women, if at all, would resort to making fast bucks by bartering their body. It is possible that some may use their body to move up in the socio-economic and professional ladders. These are exceptions than rules. It is possible that some may have more than one man for sexual satisfaction. That may probably come under adultery and not under sex-trade.
Seen in the above light prostitution is an avoidable social malaise. Legalising it is legalising another facet of man’s inhumanity. As sex is a biological necessity, religion-ordained celibacy such as of the Jesuits also contributes to prostitution, albeit surreptitiously. Tougher anti-prostitution laws passed recently in countries such as
The issue that needs to be addressed is wiping out sex-trade in society by rehabilitating the victims, and by ensuring that the State and society do not give any scope for re-emergence of sex-trade by effectively addressing the socio-economic problems of women, in particular women from the weak and vulnerable sections.
What individuals do as they please in the privacy of their homes is their personal affair so long as they are within legal bounds. However, the question of their doing as they please in places of business should not find a place in any civilised society, inasmuch as the obvious reference to places of business is to places of prostitution. The role that the government and/or community should be playing in all of this should be obvious from what is stated above.
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