Sex workers deserve full human rights in society

 
Prostitution involves engaging, agreeing, or offering to engage in sexual conduct with another person in return for a fee. It is a crime throughout the United States except in a few rural counties in the State of Nevada.

A New York court, for instance, noted that sexual conduct as it relates to prostitution may include sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse, and masturbation or certain acts that are suggestive of conduct done to satisfy a sexual desire in People v. Hinzmann. Likewise, a California court noted that sexual conduct may include lewd acts where the genitals, buttocks, or female breasts of either the prostitute or the customer come in contact with some part of the body for sexual arousal or gratification of the customer or of the prostitute in California v. Campbell.

Moreover, the provision of such service is relatively indiscriminate: just like any other type of service, within certain limits, anybody willing to pay the price asked will be accepted as a client. This distinguishes the prostitute from the mistress and the gigolo, as well as from the spouse in what used to be called a marriage of convenience. In the latter arrangements, sex is just as commercial as in prostitution, but it is confined to a relationship with a single partner over a period of time.

Religious thinking on men's prostitute use varies, but there is no major world religion that actively sanctions female prostitution and, in secular societies, ‘scientific’ thinking has done little to displace traditional attitudes. Mainstream medical, psychological, psychoanalytic, and sociological research on the topic has generally assumed that while men's prostitute use is based on natural, biologically determined sexual drives, women who prostitute are somehow abnormal, unnatural, a threat to public health and order. Prostitution law varies from country to country and even within individual nation states, but typically enshrines this kind of stigma by treating female prostitutes as a distinct class of persons, separate from other workers and/or women in terms of their rights to protection, privacy and self-determination.

The regulation/registration model, which legalizes prostitution providing it takes place in licensed brothels or designated geographical zones, has been associated with a variety of civil rights violations, such as requirements for prostitute women to register with the police and/or other authorities, have compulsory health checks, and so on. In some countries, there have been moves to deregulate prostitution either explicitly or by default, a shift which is taking place largely for reasons of ‘financial exigency, prosecutor indifference, court deadlocks, and resistance to the overreach of the criminal law among some social sectors.

Sex workers are also human beings and they deserve full human rights in society.