Michael Webster: Sex workers in greater danger

In January 1898 Emile Zola, the most famous French novelist of the day, published a celebrated article, "J'accuse!" American law professor Donald Wilkes says Zola's piece was "imbued with a tone of outrage" as he exposed the prejudice against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army wrongfully convicted and sentenced for espionage.

Zola's polemic engendered an extraordinary public opinion turn-around which saw the judicial decision reversed. Moral outrage still has a place in public debate. The homicides of two sex workers in Christchurch obliges us to examine our social conscience by asking how we could create circumstances which resulted in such awful events.

Jarrod Booker's report in the Herald recounted witness accounts of "two men who brutally attacked a young woman laugh[ing] as they crushed her against a wall with their car".

Individual acts of evil will always be with us but societal attitudes are arguably created, or at least influenced, by legislation. The obverse is also true - legislation is informed by social opinion. Either way, we define community frameworks of conduct by states. In that context, we owe it to ourselves to ask: "Did the 2003 Prostitution Act facilitate the Christchurch tragedies?' I think it did.

The sponsor of the bill spoke of his hope for the proposed legislation. On the third reading Tim Barnett MP said: "What we have here tonight is the best answer we can manage to the question: What law best ensures the well-being of sex workers?"

In his own words, he was motivated by "remov[ing] the last significant vestige of Victorian moral law from the New Zealand statute book". But a certain homely aphorism comes to mind as we consider the outcomes of the Act's passage: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

What was the message conveyed to New Zealanders by the decriminalisation of the world's "oldest profession"? Far from providing the safety for prostitutes working out of brothels, envisaged by the Act, local bodies have found that street soliciting has increased - anecdotally, including teenagers of less than 16.

Legitimising prostitution has demonstrably increased the danger to sex workers - and yet, incredibly, all the occupational safety and health mechanisms are now in place and OSH has issued instructions to its staff regarding inspection standards.

To what avail? If an industry is covered by OSH requirements an unanticipated consequence must be that it is endorsed as a legitimate industry by legislators - and ipso facto by society. But prostitution can only be destructive, never safe.

What are the options to address these issues? Our parliamentarians rejected the Swedish approach which instead of decriminalising soliciting, criminalised the customer - leading to a tenfold decrease in the numbers of street workers in cities.

In contrast, when prostitution was officially regulated in Melbourne, the number of "street walkers" increased. The two Christchurch victims might be alive today had we used the Swedish model. Why didn't we?

This opinion piece revisits Emile Zola's moral outrage a century ago. What appalling messages have we given to our young people?

Multiplying the risk of sexually transmitted disease is one. The effective widening of the trade to include 14-year-olds is another.

An endorsement of the notion that the most intimate human act is deemed to be nothing more than a commercial transaction, sanctioned by Parliament, is a third.

And the terrified pleading for her life by a sex worker only two weeks before Christmas is the most unconscionable of all. The risk of increasing street walker numbers was known. Criminalising the customers was dismissed. By permitting prostitution, the trade will only swell.

* Michael Webster is a lecturer in applied social sciences at the University of Auckland.