Decriminalize Prostitutes, But Not Prostitution, Argues Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter has a new vision for the way that Americans punish prostitution. “Let’s see this crisis for what it is: gender-based violence,” he writes, in a op-ed for Politico Magazine, co-authored by NGO founder Swanee Hunt. For those of you who thought that prostitution was already considered gender-based violence, Carter and Hunt point out an astounding fact. “In America’s abusive sex industry, the number of women arrested is astoundingly higher than the number of men.” In Los Angeles, where I live, the ratio is three-to-one. (Forgiving the slight errors in data -- male prostitutes and female pimps; in fact, this entire article is going to ignore that anomaly for the sake of brevity). If you think that prostitution laws in most U.S. are meant to protect women, you’re wrong.

Take our immigration laws, which routinely discriminate against women who are former prostitutes, not because it was bad for their well-being but because it’s an “immoral purpose.” Prostitution laws are at least equally meant to protect men from immorality. Selling sex has historically been seen as a crime against the consumer, and assault on the family. That’s probably why in almost every place where prostitution is illegal prostitutes are punished equally or worse than their clients. Carter, however, has never been one to see religious morality as a reason so subjugate women.

“It’s no surprise that Sweden and Norway—nations that rank high on gender equity—have pioneered this progressive approach to ending sexual commercial exploitation,” Carter and Hunt write. “The new approach we advocate moves away from hunting down and punishing those being exploited—the sellers—and focuses on the true perpetrators: those who profit and those who buy. By taking steps to reduce demand rather than supply, we can make this market less profitable.”

What the op-ed doesn’t mention is that Norway and Sweden (and Iceland) decriminalized prostitution. They haven’t just shifted enforcement to Johns, they’ve stopped punishing prostitutes entirely. Prostitution is still illegal and pimps are still getting pinched, but not a single sex worker will go to jail today on solicitation charges. In my city alone, there will be around ten prostitutes that will get fingerprinted and end up with their faces on mugshot.com, looking at not only embarrassment and inconvenience but also a year in jail and $1000 fine.

The Carter/Hunt piece is entitled “We Can End the Illegal Sex Trade,” shouts down naysayers who “For generations, [other have] dismissed attempts to end ‘the world’s oldest profession’ as an impossible [pipe dream].” As a once-optimistic pursuant of an Israel/Palestine peace treaty, Carter’s appetite for hope is admirable. Yet him and his co-author's omission of the obvious -- the impossibilities of prohibition -- come across as a bit naive. The Nordic model still keeps women in the shadows. Even if they’re against some form of legalization, It would be interesting to hear them address the debate.

“It’s kind of a legal fiction to think we can only criminalise one part of a transaction,” says Gira Grant, author of "Playing the Whore" told the Telegraph. “In Sweden, sex workers aren't regarded as criminal but they’re not regarded as workers either. So they’re not able to access benefits that other workers can. They’re not equal in society because they’re participating in a criminal activity, even if they themselves aren’t criminal.”

The devil is often in the details of the Nordic laws, which still allow prosecution of prostitutes for all kinds of ancillary crimes. Any kind of abuser, boyfriend or John, can hold those crimes over a woman’s head as blackmail, in the same way that employers can threaten an undocumented immigrant with deportation. For example, prostitutes who working together can get charged with pimping, as can landlords.

“If you rent an apartment, your landlord can be charged with pimping,” Pye Jakobsson, of Sweden, a former sex worker and the coordinator at the Rose Alliance told the Washington Times. “If you perform sex work in an apartment that you own, you have forfeited your right to own it under renter laws and the pimping law.”

Carter and Hunt are not proposing a radical idea. They’re not trying to make America into England, with it’s Craigslist call girls and Essex escorts. They’re not trying to transform the country in a German virginity auction on an iPhone app. What they are proposing is a new moral purpose for prostitution laws. They intentionally omit the fact that prostitution has never protected people from premarital sex, adultery or any number of “immoral acts.” Diplomatic as ever, Carter doesn’t let moralists think about it. With their new vocabulary of domestic violence, they authors might be keeping women out of the L.A. County Jail in the future.