December 4, 2024 - 10:00am
Belgium, long notorious for a series of child abuse cases, has now become a somewhat surprising pioneer of “progressive prostitution”. A new law, which came into effect on Sunday, has pulled pimps from the shadows, giving them the status of legitimate employers. In principle, women — and some men — who sell sex full-time in brothels are now entitled to contracts offering maternity pay, sick leave and pensions.
The legislation has been welcomed by organisations including Human Rights Watch (HRW). “This is radical, and it’s the best step we have seen anywhere in the world so far,” HRW researcher Erin Kilbride told the BBC. “We need every country to be moving in that direction.”
Despite the decriminalisation of prostitution in Belgium in 2022, conditions have remained grim for many in the country’s brothels. In the same BBC piece, Sophie, a mother of five, recalled that before the recent reform, “I had to work while nine months pregnant […] I couldn’t afford to stop because I needed the money.”
For her and many others, the right to rest and receive pay during maternity leave is life-changing. But what remains unsaid is revealing. Absent from her words is any judgement of men who would pay a broke and heavily pregnant woman for sex she didn’t want. Arguably, in a society in which selling sex is simply a job, criticism of a buyer’s habits puts your livelihood — and perhaps your life — at risk.
For those who have no moral qualms about selling sex, the new law makes sense: it mandates basic hygiene standards, checks on pimps and panic buttons in rooms where sex is sold. But it’s also clearly an attempt to sanitise prostitution. Whether this is possible, or desirable, remains a moot point.
While Sophie might make a good interviewee, she is unlikely to be representative of most who sell sex. Estimates suggest around 70% of women and girls in prostitution across Europe are migrants, a group far less likely to quibble about employment contracts or indeed to rally under the slogan “sex work is work.” Will a Ukrainian woman really be in a position to refuse a sex act without risking either her income, a bad review on Punternet, or violence?
The legal sex industry generates billions for some countries. In Germany, where prostitution is fully legalised, over a million men visit brothels every day, and the country has more prostitutes per capita than anywhere else in Europe. Mega-brothels are now a feature of German cities. Yet estimates suggest only 44 out of an estimated 400,000-1,000,000 prostituted people have chosen to register as prostitutes in order to access benefits.
German feminist campaigner and presenter of the Red Light Exposé podcast Elly Arrow told me the pro-prostitution lobby is looking to Belgium to be “the figurehead of the movement to decriminalise pimping” as negative headlines on the outcomes of legal prostitution in Germany and New Zealand pile up.
“Whether in Central Europe or elsewhere, there simply hasn’t been a widespread adoption of full employment contracts and the workplace hazards of prostitution still include robbery, rape and homicide,” she said. “Meanwhile the much narrowed definition of what now constitutes a trafficker means prosecutions are all that much harder.”
NGOs including Amnesty International and UNAIDS have promoted decriminalisation as the humane, progressive option. These powerful groups could ensure that the ripples from Belgium’s new law are felt across the continent.
Ultimately, the sex industry is built on lies. Just as the middle-aged trucker who pays a foreign teenager for sex chooses to believe she loves her work, NGOs and governments have swallowed the idea that prostitution can be made safe. All of those who voted for the law would do well to ask themselves: if sex work is a job like any other, would you do it?
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
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SubscribeAs they have just legalised euthanasia for under-18s, I think the rest of the international community should start to treat them as a pariah state.
But not Britain, of course, who supports applying an ICC arrest warrant. And would we ever treat this regime not to go much, much further than Canada, Oregon and the Benelux on assisted suicide?
Have the Belgians yet ‘progressed’ as far as legislating for men to have full equality with women in this ’employment’ arena?
In the final sentence the author asks “if sex work is a job like any other, would you do it?”
The answer for many people, as she full well knows is a resounding no.
However, there are many jobs that women will not do – such as oil rig roughneck, construction jobs involving physical labour, electrical lineman, most farming work, etc.
The article is laced with straw man arguments.
Let me give a couple of quotes:
Ally Fogg (Left-wing Guardian commentator, generally pro-feminist, believer in men’s rights, strong believer in facts):
If you are hooked on hard drugs, there are very few jobs open to you, Apart from prostitution there is dealing, theft, begging, and scrap metal collecting. The alternatives are no less soul-destroying than prostitution is.
Mechanima (Guardian BTL commentator, Irish, teenage runaway and ex-prostitute):
I really hated prostitution, and I was extremely reluctant to take it up, but I never blamed the punters. If it had not been for the punters, I would not be alive today. I blame my family, the social workers, all those who could have helped me, but did not.
Prostitution is indeed a sorry business, and women who are brought there by deception, force or slavery certainly need rescuing. But in other cases: Are you really doing somebody a favour by forcing them out of prostitution – and into something that they like even less – because they could have chosen it themselves, but did not?
I’ve upticked the comment because I think it is valid but I’m not impressed by Mechanima.
In the sentence “I hated prostitution,” you could substitute ‘burger flipper, chambermaid, coal miner,’ any number of less than desirable jobs. She decided prostitution was a better bet but then blames other people for it. Would she blame others for a job at Macdonalds or take personal responsibility for that?
I’m sure her backstory is grim but plenty of people with grim backstories make different choices. If drugs were involved, again, it wasn’t her family or social workers who put the needle into her vein.
That lack of personal responsibility, and a zeitgeist that unthinkingly endorses it, is relevant to a discussion on those who choose prostitution but regret it.
I suspect the majority are trafficked, an entirely different set of circumstances.
There are also no doubt a small minority who see it as a way to make easy money and make an informed choice – another different set of circumstances. Wrapping these different constituencies into one doesn’t help the discussion.
Fair enough, but I disagree with you. As a sixteen-year-old runaway I do not think she had the option of becoming a chambermaid or coal miner. And I do think that society, that is us, collectively, should give people some better options than prostitution. If someone decides that protitution is better than being poor and working at MacDonalds, you can talk about informed choices. If someone is living on the street or starving it is fair enough to put some blame on those who did not help.
This goes the more for those who campaign against prostitution. Instead of closing that possibility off they would do better to be offering some better alternatives.
Absolutely. Good post. And I’d go further and say that if society simply stands by and let’s young peoples lives go to waste then it deserves any payback it gets.
The argument that some people do well in spite of bad backgrounds is just the argument from exception. The more obvious thing is that many successful people would have failed utterly if faced with the difficulties some have to deal with.
What level of cheap journalism is this!!
So what changed? Previously prostitution was legal but pimping was not? Now it’s legal too as long as you provide workplace benefits? Bottom line: the old abusive pimping is less punishable now? Because it’s not criminal code but only the workplace conditions violation?
Albanians are famously law abiding + love to pay tax.
“ if sex work is a job like any other, would you do it?”
No, but by that logic we should be outlawing chiropodists…
Not to mention cleaning public toilets. At a fraction of the pay.
Would you be happy if your child married a chiropodist! The shame of it. What would the neighbours say.
Traditionally many brothels were run by women, known as madams. These were often older ex prostitutes. This was the case in Ireland, before the brothels were closed down and the women sent to the laundries to work. The Geisha system in Japan was also female run.
Why does the author assume the system in Belgium will be run by male pimps?
like the illegal drugs industry, no amount of legislation will ever stop supply and demand.
Crime is an integral part of any society.
Does this mean that we should stop fighting crime? According to your logic, the answer is “Yes”
It is a more complex, and ironically simple too, than mere misguided ” logic” , and Crime reflects the laws passed that create crime: Under most European laws everything is illegal unless made legal, whereas under English law everything is legal unless made legal, a division that was always going to make EU membership impossible.
Drugs such as heroin and cocaine were not made illegalin Britain until the 1920s. The international illegal drugs industry is the highest margin, most operationally efficient, and regulation free ” business” on our planet, and due to the volume of money it creates makes bribery, threats and corruption an efficient weapon against every form of law enforcement.
Prostitution has its links to the drug industry, and has existed since homo sapiens ” dawn of time” and no form of law enforcement has stopped it- However, laws exist, aside from laws against prostitution itself, to prevent the capture and abuse and forced prostitution by third parties, and the lack of law enforcement against the illegal immigration industry, is another issue.
I hate to put a damper on things but the mother of five named Sophie has larger issues than a lack of maternal leave in her chosen profession.
It is said to be the oldest “profession” as you put it. If so it is time for it to be properly professionalised. A Royal College of Prostitutes granting practice certificates to young people who have undertaken a 5 year University course with modules in DEI, unconscious bias training, professional techniques both theoretical and practical, psychological counselling, safeguarding, philosophy, social work and social justice advocacy.
To ensure that reckless amateurs are driven out from providing substandard psychologically damaging services sex would have to be made illegal except through the NSS (National Sex Service) that your doctor could refer you to if you became depressed as a result of a lack of sex. It might be a bit frustrating to be be waiting for some time on the waiting lists that would build up but diagrams could be provided by the NSS on safe self southing techniques in the meantime.
it would also provide useful employment to a vast army of administrative staff to oversee the NSS.
What’s marriage but prostitution with a salary, meal ticket, and pension plan? Plus the option to give up the sex part and keep the rest, so that desperate women pick up the sex as piece work. Like having a cleaner, butler, cook, and gardener, really.
Nice bit of provocation. Anybody else remember when this was how feminists described marriage? When they weren’t comparing it to slavery that is.
Whenever I am somewhere like (is there anywhere ‘ like’ ? I cannot stand the place!) St Tropez, nee St ToileTrop, whenever I see a woman of particular physical attributes in partnership with a man with nothing but particular financial attributes, the word ‘ prostitute’ tends to pass briefly through my mind…
Tough call. Sex is as, or even more powerful than drugs or alcohol. There are good arguments for both legal and illegal but it still going to happen, witness a million men a day in Germany, so why not apply the practical solution? Make it legal, regulate it, and let the people decide to be sex workers or johns. Their will always be the illegal and dangerous part of black-market sex, but that is always going to happen when folks get desperate.
If you think about it, the legalise prostitution and assisted dying debates have much in common
They do. When you reduce all morality to a thin veneer of “consent”, with no consideration for the intrinsic morality of the acts envisioned, or the myriad pressure people are under to give “consent”, you will end up authorizing some really ugly things.
I was thinking they are both facts of life which no want really wants to talk about and when Parliament looks to legislate all kinds of contradictions come to the surface and it all gets very ugly.
Perhaps they’ll make it a legitimate job centre option here so if you refuse, your meagre income gets stopped.
Don’t give Rachel Reeves ideas.
The way things are going for her it might be a viable career choice
Nice to see that the working class man has been promoted from wolf whistler to child abuser.
Why not try slipping a group of men in there, some of whom actually have been paying for sex with teenagers – and on our own shores. Funny how it’s OK to stereotype some groups, but not others.
When sex is viewed merely as cheap entertainment with no moral or spiritual content, sexual abuse of all kinds is going to be rampant. If sex is no big deal, why not? Western society needs to re-engage with the deeper meaning of sex.
The question is, would you be happy for your daughter, sister, mother or wife to do it?
Sex ‘work’ is OK if you’re happy for your daughter/son/grandchild to give blowjobs to strangers
If the proles survive the womb what better use for them before euthanasia than sexual services? No education cost, routine health checks which double as general supervision, self-supporting during working life, and a contribution to the general trend away from family relationships and towards self gratification. So very post modern.