Australia is seeing a divisive battle of rights. On the one hand are those arguing against people being forced into sex work and needing to perform sexual services for money. On the other are politicians and sex industry advocates calling for legislation to entrench the right for those with disabilities to be able to access sex workers.
There are some major questions at play in this particular issue. First and foremost is the question of why access to sex is being portrayed as a human rights issue in Australia.
This issue is being played out in South Australia by Kelly Vincent, a disabled woman who was elected to South Australia's upper house under the Dignity for Disability ticket at the 2010 state election.
Disability rights advocates are divided over Vincent's push to bring about the legal use of prostitutes by people with a disability. Vincent said: 'For those who are feeling frustrated, alienated, alone and sad because they can't access this experience, and for those people for whom the services of a sex worker could make a genuine huge, positive difference to their lives, in a private, intimate manner, then I don't see why that can't be allowed.'
South Australian Labor MP Stephanie Key has unsuccessfully advocated decriminalisation of the sex industry since 2010, now in 2012 Key has reframed the debate as prostitution being needed to allow people with a disability to experience intimacy.
Due to Key's past of pushing for legalisation of the sex industry, it is questionable whether she is using people with disabilities to further her pro-sex industry agenda and whether the reframing of this debate is an attempt to evoke sensibilities of political correctness by portraying access to prostitutes as a disability rights issue.
In both a national and a global climate, legalisation is on the nose and states such as Victoria and New South Wales are now considered failed experiments which have led to a massive expansion of both the legal and illegal sex industry. Such a claim was backed by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon who stated 'Serious and organised crime is well entrenched in regulated industries such as prostitution and gaming.'
Vincent promotes the benefits of allowing access to sex workers stating it will improve the mental and physical wellbeing of those with a disability. What Ms Vincent has failed to concern herself with is the negative mental and physical impact sex work has on a prostituted person.
Many prostitutes are victims of childhood sexual abuse. Evidence backing this claim can be found in a 2009 study conducted by the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. Women were surveyed from three sections of the sex industry; 103 private sex workers, 102 legal brothel workers and 42 illegal sex workers, 33 of whom were street workers.
The results showed that 83 per cent of illegal sex workers had been exposed to sexual abuse during childhood, and 45 per cent of licensed brothel workers and 48 per cent of private sex workers also reported childhood abuse. It also showed that 52 per cent of illegal sex workers had been raped or bashed by a client; 15 per cent of private sex workers and 3 per cent of brothel-based sex workers had had this experience.
The study highlighted that street workers were four times more likely to have mental health problems than brothel workers, but overall prostitutes from all sectors had poorer mental health than Australian women of comparable age who were not involved in the sex industry.
Vincent has stated that she believes the wonderful thing about her campaign push is that it's all about 'choice'. What needs to be questioned is how much 'choice' is present in this debate when one disadvantaged group, prostitutes, needs to stay disadvantaged in order to service another disadvantaged group, disabled people.
Sexual exploitation in relation to men with disabilities is revealed in a UK study in 2005 showing that 22.6 per cent of men with disabilities had accessed prostitutes compared to 1 per cent of women. This shows that men make up the majority of those utilising sex workers who are primarily women.
The other concern is whether the male right to sex could lead to sexual abuse of women, girls and boys. Anthony Walsh of Family Planning Queensland told Radio National's Damien Carrick:
Our experience at Family Planning Queensland suggests that many men with significant intellectual disabilities are perpetrating sexual offences. Now those are usually against other men, women or children who also have a disability, because they're the people to whom those men have access. So in effect, denying those men sexuality education and appropriate support could be increasing the risk of sexual assault against vulnerable people in our society.
In this instance it is important to discuss the need for sex education among those with disabilities; Sheila Jeffreys responded to Walsh's comments in her article 'Disability and the male sex right'. Jeffreys states:
The worrying possibility is that service providers might consider prostituted women as the appropriate deliverers of this form of 'education', especially when brothels set themselves up as specialists in the field and specially train their workers, as is happening in legalised brothel prostitution in Australia.
The sexual use of prostituted women, who are paid to dissociate emotionally whilst their bodies are entered, is not an appropriate means of sex education, or of reducing men's sexual violence. Rather than teaching boys and men with disabilities about mutual sex, respect for the personhood of women, relationships and intimacy, prostitution teaches the exact opposite.
The issue was also raised by Naomi Jacobs, a disability rights advocate from the UK. Writing in the Guardian, Jacob's argued against the unfair assumption that disabled people can only have sex through accessing prostitutes. Jacobs concludes: 'When we are seen as equal people, equally sexual people, we will be empowered to move on from the idea that we can only have sex by exploiting others.'
Robbi Williams, a disability advocate from the Julia Farr Association, also attacked the position of Vincent, stating that linking prostitution with disability rights creates a risk of association and potentially stigmatised people with a disability. Williams states:
The danger with the periodic focus on disability in the sex industry is it may create the impression the only way a person living with disability can have sex is if he or she pays for it. Presumably this is because some people assume the person's disability renders that person unattractive to every potential partner out there in community life. This doesn't seem fair or true.
A push to limit critical debate has denied the voices of sex workers and failed to correlate the evidence based approach currently taking place in European nations such as Ireland, France and Israel. All these nations are pushing for Nordic style legislation in a move to protect sex workers and end the crossroad which is liberalised sex laws, sexual exploitation, slavery and trafficking.
Equally people with disabilities are being further stigmatised and fed the notion that they are incapable of forming intimate relationships. This reinforces a notion that they are incomplete human beings, incapable of having sexual relations through any means other than a financial transaction.
Through arguing access to prostitutes as a human rights issue there is a failure to recognise the correlations of prostitution as a harmful cultural practice which furthers inequality and has silenced dissenting voices and those of sex workers themselves. Australia needs to question the motives of politicians and sex industry advocates in their push to normalise prostitution and reframe prostituted people as entrepreneurial sex therapists.
The premise that access to sex workers is a right and offers choice is a limited view spawned from a failed notion that prostitutes themselves have choice.
Legalising prostitution in the name of disability access to sex will do little more than create state sanctioned stigmatising and discrimination against prostituted persons and the disabled.
Matthew Holloway is a freelance writer and social justice advocate from Tasmania, where he stood for state and federal parliament and co-founded Tasmanians for Transparency. He was awarded Second Prize in the 2012 Margaret Dooley Award for Young Writers for the above essay.
Judge's citation for Matthew's essay:
This article addresses an important contemporary issue. It is not simply whether or not people with a disability should have access to prostitutes (or sex workers, as they are now euphemistically called).
More than that, it is whether or not agencies which provide services to people with a disability should facilitate these encounters. It is whether or not these encounters should be paid for with government money. And it is whether all of us should support or question these encounters.
As I read this article, I recalled several conversations with people who work in agencies which provide services to people with disabilities. I remembered their anguish as they tried to strike some balance between their duty to facilitate the wishes of their clients, and their instinct that encounters with sex workers would ultimately be harmful to these people whom they serve and obviously care about.
This article adds another important perspective to this debate. It reminds us that many sex workers are already the victims of childhood sexual abuse, and that they are further harmed by their involvement in the sex industry.
In this way, the article exposes the moral dissonance between claiming a right for people with disabilities, while at the same time ignoring the abuse which is inherent in the sex industry.
The author of this article is obviously very well informed about this debate, and I was impressed by the number and variety of sources on which the author drew. This great familiarity with the debate also allowed the author to present the debate in an interesting way by reporting the positions taken by two South Australian politicians.
I do offer two critiques. Firstly, I wonder whether the article relied too much on the findings, comments and views of others. The author offers his own views in the concluding paragraphs. These comments and arguments are very good, and I wonder if the article would have been improved if we had heard more from its author.
In the eighth paragraph, the author reports the view of South Australian MP Kelly Vincent that access to sex workers would 'improve the mental and physical wellbeing of those with a disability'. This is a strong claim, and I think that it should have been more strongly refuted.
For example, I found myself adding the following sentences to the penultimate paragraph: 'South Australian MP Kelly Vincent claimed that access to sex workers would improve the mental and physical wellbeing of people with a disability. Given this stigmatisation, the real effect may be exactly the opposite of this.'
All things considered, however, this is a very valuable article about a very important topic. It certainly merits Second Prize in the 2012 Margaret Dooley Award for Young Writers.