Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (18 page)

better working conditions and job satisfaction, less fear about the nature of their work, and a higher degree of sophistication and confidence. … Registration and monthly checkups appear to encourage behaviors that are protective of health as well as provide a barrier against police harassment.
Registration increases the sense of legitimacy and community and is correlated with much lower levels of depression and mental stress.
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Moreover, the “social stigma attached to these [legal] work settings is also lessened.”
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And legal work is safer than illegal work, partly because of an improved relationship with the police, who are now more prepared to intervene in disputes between customers and workers: “for legal workers, the policing of customers offers protection against customer violence.”
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Illegal workers, by contrast, experience police harassment, violence, fines, and incarceration; they have less stable social support networks; and they are about twice as likely as the legal workers to have been assaulted, robbed, or kidnapped. Illegal prostitution thus remains problematic in Tijuana, and Katsulis’s study serves as a reminder that legalization may bypass many sex workers. The one unanswered question is
why
many Tijuana workers opt out of the legal system, but we know from research elsewhere that the reasons include fear of being formally labeled a prostitute and the increased risk of being discovered by friends and family members.

In a 2005 survey, only 25 percent of Australians took the view that prostitution can “never be justified,” fewer than in 1995 (29 percent) and 1981 (35 percent).
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Prostitution is legal and regulated in several states, but each state does it differently.

Victoria was the first to decriminalize indoor prostitution, in 1986. The regulations on brothels include licenses and planning permits. Local councils have the right to refuse permits; although such decisions can be appealed, the time and cost involved discourages owners from going through the process and leads some of them to operate illegally. After the law’s passage, the number of large brothels shrank from around 160 to 60 in a short span of time, because many owners were simply unable to comply with the costly new regulations. The remaining brothels were able to exercise more control over workers, who now had fewer options for employment elsewhere. Owners became more selective in hiring decisions, took a larger share of the proceeds, and imposed stricter working conditions (e.g., required attire, lineups instead of rotation, fines for being late or absent, summary firings).
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In theory, the 1986 law held owners accountable for violations, but workers were averse to reporting them, as Alison Arnot’s interviews revealed: “Generally, women were reluctant to report illegal or unethical practices of business
owners and operators unless it involved the hiring and manipulation of women too young to work in the sex industry or physical attacks.”
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Reluctance to report was due to the women’s unwillingness to publicly identify as sex workers. Most said that they would leave and work elsewhere if employer misconduct was a problem for them.

The situation in Victoria improved after a new law came into effect in 1995. The Prostitution Control Act contained measures designed to improve working conditions—including safe-sex rules, workers’ rights to negotiate or refuse sexual services, alarm systems in brothel rooms, and so on.
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Street prostitution remained illegal under the new law, and the penalties for street soliciting increased for both buyers and sellers. But the 1995 law did not rectify other problems. Local councils continue to issue few planning permits for new brothels; the application process for permits remains lengthy and expensive; and Victoria still has a sizeable illegal market parallel to the legal sector.
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There are 95 licensed brothels in the state today, out of a population of 5.5 million inhabitants.
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Two types of sex work were decriminalized in Queensland in the 1990s: independent operators (in 1992) and brothels (in 1999). Street prostitution remains illegal, so the category of legal sole operator applies only to those who work indoors (it is estimated that only 2 percent of prostitution in Queensland is street based).
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As of January 2009, there were 23 licensed brothels in the state (whose population is 4.5 million), and an unknown number of independents sell sex legally. There is a much larger illegal market involving persons who work (1) in unlicensed brothels, (2) cooperatively (two or more providers), or (3) for escort agencies, brokers, and other third parties.
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The latter operate illegally because third-party involvement outside a licensed brothel is outlawed (and legal brothels are not permitted to provide out-call services). An assessment by a government agency concluded that “the inability of legal brothels to provide an escort or out-call service is the most crucial impediment to the success of the Act.”
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It is estimated that three-quarters of prostitution in Queensland involves in-call or out-call services, including both the legal sole operators and those illegally employed by third parties.
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A contrasting case is Australia’s Northern Territory, where
only
escorting is legal under a 2004 law that decriminalized both escort agencies and independent escorts. Agencies employing more than one provider must be licensed, but independent escorts are not licensed.
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Sole operators in Queensland are not required to hold a license and can provide services either in their own residence or elsewhere. However, their work premises must not cause a public nuisance, which the law defines as an
“unreasonable annoyance” to another person.
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It is also illegal for more than one provider to work at the same premises, even at different times of the day—which heightens their risk of victimization. Two or more workers at a single location constitute a “brothel” and would thus require licensing and the high fees associated with it, just like any other legal brothel (this differs from Victoria, where two workers may work together without being designated a brothel). Sole providers are prohibited from having any involvement with third parties (including procurers, financers) and may not employ anyone (a receptionist, broker, or driver), as this would render them no longer fully “independent.” This provision of the law is enforced. In the 2007–2008 fiscal year, for example, 92 persons were charged with illegal third-party involvement in prostitution.
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The main reason for the sizeable illegal market is the exorbitant cost of operating a legal brothel. The start-up costs alone are staggering: a $5,500 application fee, a $7,165 license fee, and $2,867 for each room in the brothel; this puts the total initial fees for a standard five-room brothel at $27,000.
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(Brothels are limited by law to a maximum of five sexual-service rooms, and no more than eight sex workers are allowed on the premises at any one time.) On top of the start-up costs, there is an annual license fee of $20,555 for a five-room brothel, and every three years the license must be renewed at an additional cost of $12,665 plus $2,867 for each room.
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The flip side of these costs is that illegal brothel operators typically receive a $2,000 fine if they are caught, which means that they would have to be caught several times a year to bear the same costs as a legal operator.
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The high licensing fees stem from the government’s interest in limiting the number of brothels. In addition to reviewing applications for licenses as well as complaints against existing brothels, the Prostitution Licensing Authority is also required to advise the government on ways of helping “prostitutes to leave prostitution,” arguably an inappropriate function for a licensing board.
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(The board has no members from the sex industry or sex workers’ organizations.) The Queensland government seems especially interested in keeping a lid on the legal sex industry, both by facilitating the exit of workers and by imposing very high fees on business owners.

If some of the regulations are questionable, Queensland’s legal brothels themselves have been rated favorably. They are smoke- and alcohol-free, have a compulsory condom policy, and are required to train their workers in negotiating safe sex and in personal protection. A major government evaluation concluded, “There is no doubt that licensed brothels provide the safest
working environment for sex workers in Queensland. … Legal brothels now operating in Queensland provide a sustainable model for a healthy, crimefree, and safe legal licensed brothel industry” and are a “state of the art model for the sex industry in Australia.”
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The report found that both legal brothels and sole operators had little adverse impact on the local community, whereas the (illegal) street workers “arouse significant community disquiet.”
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Other assessments are similarly positive regarding health, safety, crime, and community impact: “There is ample evidence to show … that the operation of licensed brothels does not have any negative impact on local areas and surrounding neighborhoods.”
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Moreover, according to the government, organized crime and corruption “are not of significant concern for the legal prostitution industry in Queensland”
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and are essentially confined to the illegal brothels. Independent analysts agree: “Ten years of prostitution regulation appear to have been highly effective in reducing the nexus between Queensland’s sex industry, [police] corruption, and organized crime.”
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Research on legal providers in Queensland indicates that many of them are satisfied with their work. In one study, 70 percent of the 103 independent call girls and 102 licensed brothel workers interviewed said they would “definitely choose” this work if they had it to do over again, and half of each group felt that their work was a “major source of satisfaction” in their lives.
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Almost all (97 percent) of the brothel workers said that an advantage of working in a legal brothel was the safety it provided. Only 3 percent of brothel workers, compared to 15 percent of the independents and 52 percent of a sample of illegal street prostitutes, reported that they had been “raped or bashed” by a client in the preceding 12 months, and the illegal street prostitutes were significantly more likely than the two groups of legal workers to have mental-health problems.
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When a sample of prostitutes (drawn from all sectors in Queensland) was asked in another survey which venue was the “safest place to work,” the top choice (of 77 percent) was a legal brothel, followed by private work in cooperation with others (31 percent), which is currently illegal. None said that the streets or bar work were the safest, and only 9 percent said that being a sole operator was the safest.
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The high rating of legal brothels is a function of their extensive security measures and presence of co-workers.

Yet Queensland’s system remains quite deficient: the cost of running a legal establishment is excessive and provides a strong incentive to operate illegally. Licensed brothels are at a substantial competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis their illegal counterparts, and many of the legal businesses go bankrupt
in a fairly short period of time, causing instability in the legal sector.
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The high licensing fees also preclude workers from creating their own small brothels. If the fees were dramatically reduced, this would probably induce some currently illegal operators to transition into the legal sector. In addition, it is not clear why the government has outlawed escort agencies or why it prohibits private work by two or more independent operators. The higher safety rating given to private work with colleagues over being a sole operator, noted earlier, suggests that the former should be decriminalized. Decriminalizing these providers would dramatically reduce the size of the illegal market, with added potential benefits for the health and safety of the newly legal providers. If the state’s overriding goal is to limit the size of the legal sector, it has excelled magnificently, but at the expense of catalyzing the growth of a much larger, more lucrative, and potentially more exploitative and dangerous illegal sector.

Another Australian state, New South Wales (whose capital is Sydney), decriminalized street soliciting in 1979 and in the 1990s decriminalized brothels (large and small), escort agencies, and sole operators. This gives prostitutes a wider range of options than in Queensland. New South Wales does not license sex businesses, which frees owners of the costs associated with licensing and thus the temptation to operate underground that we see in Queensland. Instead of a license, local council approval is required for a brothel to operate in a particular location, and some councils have used this power to restrict brothels to industrial areas. The constellation of lawful venues makes it difficult to generalize about prostitution in New South Wales’s legalized system. An example from the top echelon is described in a recent television documentary segment on a brothel in Sydney. The narrator stated that “the working conditions at Stiletto exceed those in many regular workplaces”: the place is equipped with showers, a fancy dressing room, a pool table, and a gym that workers may use, and the top earners make $170,000 a year.
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At the other end of the spectrum, street prostitution remains a problem in New South Wales. Because it is prohibited near residences, churches, and hospitals in central Sydney, there is almost nowhere that street soliciting is possible. Street work is allowed in the outer suburbs and at some highway rest stops, but the police often use their “move on” powers to disperse street workers from these locations and will arrest those who return after being told to leave.
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In other words, street prostitution continues to be struggled over even where it has been decriminalized. Still, the overall situation in New South Wales can be judged superior to that in Queensland.
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