Last Updated: Friday - 09/24/2010

Legalizing prostitution adds to the misery

Desperate foreign women flock to legalized countries, but illegal women still outnumber legal ones

WCR PHOTO | RAMON GONZALEZ Author Victor Malarek points the finger of blame for prostitution at the Johns.

The sole reason prostitution exists and thrives around the world is men's insatiable demand for women's bodies, says investigative journalist Victor Malarek.

"Without man, there would be no demand. It would not be profitable for pimps and criminals to stay in this business if never-ending platoons of men weren't prowling the side streets in search of purchased sex."

Malarek said legalization of the sex trade is no solution because legislation "exacerbates demand and further encourages men to buy women's bodies for their sexual gratification by sending out an extremely powerful message to men and even more to boys that it's alright to buy a woman's body for sex.

"Legalize prostitution and you legalize mass rape."

Malarek, a senior reporter for CTV's W-5 and the author of six bestselling books, including The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade, and more recently The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy it, was the keynote speaker at Catholic Social Services' 48th annual meeting at the Hotel MacDonald June 17.

Malarek has reported that more than 800,000 women and children are lured, tricked or forced into prostitution each year to meet a voracious global sexual appetite. This annual total adds to an estimated 10 million women already trapped in the $20-billion sex industry.

BEATEN, MAIMED, ROBBED

"Prostitution is the most dangerous profession - if you want to call it a profession - on the planet and it is almost always under the coercive control of pimps. There is no other so-called job on the planet where employees are routine beaten, maimed, robbed and killed every year by their pimps and by traffickers and by Johns as in prostitution."

"Johns don't want to hear that most prostituted women in Canada and the U.S., for example, are recruited into the flesh trade at ages as young as 12, 13 and 14, that these girls come from shattered homes and abusive families where they have been sexually abused by their fathers and grandfathers, uncles and trusted friends.

Johns would rather believe that somehow "magically an 18-year-old woman is suddenly struck with this idea that prostitution will be a rewarding and wonderful career path, that these young women would enjoy servicing a half dozen to a dozen men a day - strange, smelly men on Viagra - because it's a good paying job."

The Johns driving this modern sex-slave trade include CEOs, bank managers, lawyers, chief justices and judges, professors, actors, professionals from all walks of life and even men of the cloth like Jimmy Swaggart.

They are white, between the ages of 17 and 75, and half of them wear a wedding ring.

"Ordinary men are at the very root of this whole sexual exploitation of women and girls. And because of this, governments worldwide, governments mostly run by men, are reticent to tackle this issue with any sense of urgency because they don't want to mess in the old boys' sandbox."

"Men hold the key to putting the brakes on this sexual insanity and, unlike the millions and millions of women and children snared in the flesh trade, men have a choice."

Sadly, advocates of decriminalization of the sex trade have managed to draw otherwise well-meaning and rational people into thinking that the only way to dramatically curb the violence, the diseases and the drug use associated with the sex trade is to legalize it.

MISGUIDED WELL-WISHERS

Study after study shows that where legalization has been introduced - Germany, the Netherlands and Australia - it has been a colossal and dramatic failure, Malarek said.

"In every single place, the illegal sector dwarfs the legal sector. And far from containing it, the legalization has led to a hugely dramatic increase in the number of destitute foreign women trafficked into the legalized countries."

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