The Decriminalization Of Prostitution

There is a double standard when it comes to female and male sex workers in this risky industry. Much like society, female workers are expected to be submissive and catering to men’s needs. Therefore, any man who chooses this as his trade of choice is compared to a woman and seen as feminine and thus weak. (Stoddard, 2014). Most male prostitutes that do partake in the trade, regardless of their willingness and consent to work, have been stereotyped as weak victims of overpowering, more dominant men. They are not seen as consenting male sex workers and are instead seen as “ignorant” men that have fallen victim to the more superior, older men. Those who argue that men and women still do not have equal rights in modern society would also agree …show more content…
(Vance, 2011). These groups tend to release extravagant statistics in the cases of U.S. victims of trafficking, with the intention of scaring critics of anti-prostitution, and yet they refuse to release newer, corrected statistics in order to defend their stance. For instance, in 2002 the U.S. Department of State released that a tremendous 50,000 women and children were victims of sexual exploitation in the United States each year. Despite the certainty of the U.S. Congress in this figure, the Government Accountability Office released a very different number in 2006. They stated that the amount of victims of sex trafficking each year was closer to somewhere between 14,500 and 17,500. Vance (2011) also stated that these anti-prostitution groups are more likely to show statistics involving women forced into sex work than those depicting men and women forced into various other types of trafficking, and not simply sexual labor …show more content…
More often than not, victims are placed into domestic violence homes to be rehabilitated. (Thompson, 2003). However, these shelters are intended to assist women who were battered and raped by domestic partners, not those viewed as prostitutes. Therefore, many cases have been studied in which the victim is forced to lie about their situation. Pretending to be a victim of domestic violence leads these victims to avoid their existing situations and ignore the traumas they had faced, which is an emotional strain in its own. One victim in a DV facility claimed that she, “tried to escape several times, but the shelters would not take [her] because [she] was not a battered woman, even though [her] arm was in a cast, and [she] had stitches and a broken jaw, cheekbone, and nose.” This situation only occurs if the victim is lucky enough to be placed in a DV home, considering these facilities tend to avoid housing risky clients with the threat of returning criminal