Name: PROSTITUTION = CRIME?
Uploaded: 2016-08-23T08:30:51.000Z
Duration: 5 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

and have also worked with sex workers who

are basically boss ladies running their own business.

And that is just the very tip of the iceberg

on how complex the issue of prostitution is.

Hi babes, I'm coming at you from Jamaica.

I'm also using a different camera than I normally use

My question for you is, should prostitution be a crime?

That's a big, complicated question that is currently

Amnesty International put forth this proposal

to say "Hey, countries should decriminalize sex work."

Basically what this means is that sex workers,

aka prostitutes, won't be thrown in jail for it

and they will have legal rights protecting them.

I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert, I'm not.

Prostitution has been criminalized around the world,

a naughty thing that people should not do,

Theory is that hey, if we criminalize it,

the sex trade will just disappear, right?

The sex trade is very much alive and thriving.

Amnesty did a bunch of studies looking at prostitution

all around the world and basically came to the conclusion

It's creating more stigma and more discrimination against

sex workers which is making it really dangerous for them.

In the U.S. and U.K. police raids have pushed sex workers

They've made it harder for sex workers to negotiate

condom use, what their rules are, to turn down a client.

Police often use condoms as evidence of the crime

And because it is a crime, sex workers are very reluctant

police don't always investigate those abuses.

In fact, the police themselves are sometimes the abuser.

In various parts of the world police have used

a sex worker's lack of rights to extort money out of them,

I mean, after all, the sex workers are the criminals, right?

And that's the ugly side of criminalization.

It empowers abusers by limiting a sex worker's rights,

So Amnesty's like "Hey, decriminalization could be a better

Then a bunch of scholars and feminists and celebrities

They say that decriminalizing sex work, wholesale,

only helps abusive pimps and johns because they

Instead we should criminalize people who are buying sex

and provide lots of services and exit strategies

who are trying to get out of the sex trade.

There's nothing wrong with services and exit strategies.

The problem is that the letter sort of implies that

sex workers are the same thing as trafficking victims.

Really need to recognize the difference between sex work,

and trafficking, which is not consensual.

Inflating those two only creates more stigmas,

Now of course this is a tricky point, right?

It's not always easy to tell who's being coerced

"We recognize that intersectional discrimination

"and oppression can play a role in an individual's

"decision to engage or remain in sex work.

"and lead to poverty and deprivation of opportunity."

Women, people of color, and trangendered folks

are over represented in sex work for a reason.

The problem is that we just re-marginalize people who have

come to sex work when we deny them legal protections.

Let's talk about punishing just the pimps and the johns.

Could be good in theory but it does make the patronizing

assumption that we need to save sex workers

there's no strong evidence that this actually works.