We consider the choice of consenting adults to be enough to legitimize most relationships. However, the role of a prostitute is not consent as much as it is compliance.
Sure it is.
The conduct of a prostitute is paid conduct
Which makes no difference to this question.
which is coerced financially
Only in the same sense that any employee who wouldn't do his job for free is being "coerced financially", which is not at all. The fact that you do something only because of the money, does not mean you are facing coercion. (Prostitutes do in fact face coercion, but that's from pimps trying to control them.)
and both disparaging and abusive.
Depending on how you look at things that ranges from often true, to almost always true. But it doesn't amount to coercion.
She understands and accepts as conditions of work that rapes averaging one per week are nearly unavoidable.
In the context of it being illegal and thus not getting full protection from the law or from society.
Also many of those rapes (at least using the term broadly) are from those who enforce it being illegal. A study showed that prostitutes where more likely to be forced to give sex to cops to avoid arrest than to be arrested by the cops.
---
They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who aren't working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest. In fact, prostitutes get officially arrested only once per 450 tricks or so, leading the authors to conclude that "a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.
blog.foreignpolicy.com
How is it different for a pimp to compel a prostitute to submit to sexual demands as a condition of employment, than it would be for any other employer?
Its not different (except that the pimp is more likely to be violent about it, which just makes it worse), but its more likely to happen with prostitution being illegal.
pimps exploit the trade
Because the legal regime makes it fairly easy for them to do so.
I think it is made, and stays illegal largely because people confuse making it legal with support for it, or at least full acceptance of it, but its nothing of the sort. Its support for freedom and/or recognition that making it illegal just makes it worse. |
