Setting the problem in context

The debate around prostitution has long divided the feminist movement. The perennial dilemma of whether to regulate or abolish it has polarised positions within the movement. New legislation, such as the law popularly known in Spain as the ‘only yes means yes’ act, has brought the importance of this debate back into the light, since it bans the advertising of prostitution with new penalties. So once again the question arises of whether prostitution is a right or another form of exploitation inflicted on women.

Prostitution has been understood as (i) something that exists on the margins; (ii) a matter isolated from reality and, following from that, (iii) a problem with no significant effect on anybody else. In this article we want to insist that prostitution is an international business that rests on gender inequality and on the expulsion of vulnerable women from their communities (Cobo, 2019). Second, prostitution and the trafficking networks that surround it are grounded in the patriarchal society in which they are reproduced, tying prostitution closely to social structures and to the dynamics of power within them. Third, it should be added that shifts in global geopolitics affect prostitution, and vice versa. According to Rosa Cobo, prostitution as an international business rests on power relations (patriarchy), the economic factor (liberal capitalism) and on race and class (Cobo, 2019).

The data on prostitution are clear: its main purchasers are men, while the number of women buyers is practically nil. The most recent survey we have found in this field is from 2008: in it, 32.1% of men acknowledged having paid for prostitution at least once, while women accounted for only 0.3%. In the older age groups (over 55) there is a greater tendency to have paid more than once, although that figure starts to be significantly higher than the one-off figure among respondents from the age of 25. As for regular use , 4.6% of men had paid for prostitution in the previous year (2008), with similar percentages across all age bands up to 65, where it fell to 2.4% (CIS, 2008).

With these figures we are trying to make visible the real problem behind prostitution's continued existence: the buyer. Society tends to focus on the prostituted woman, attacking her once again for being a woman, rather than on the buyer, who, as we have seen, is overwhelmingly male. We therefore want to stress how important it is to put the buyer at the centre, because he is the one treating a woman as an object to be consumed and thus perpetuating the sexism and misogyny that prevail in society. In the same way, behind these practices there is usually someone (apimp) who uses other women's bodies for financial gain, and who must also be brought into focus. It is clearly the prostituted woman who is left exposed, while everyone who perpetuates her exploitation - and they are mostly men - remains invisible.

The causes of prostitution

At the social level

Although the social causes of prostitution are many, the clearest and most important is the sexism that is still present in our society. It is the patriarchal system itself that drives prostitution through various practices, some subtler than others, which objectify the body of women and justify its consumption. These dynamics create a sense of power over women's bodies and of those bodies being available for use. The patriarchal system tries to justify prostitution by claiming its existence is inevitable, arguing that prostitution as an institution has always existed and therefore always will (Cobo, 2019). 

The subtlest way it is introduced to us is through the hypersexualisation of women through their bodies, from a very early age, that takes place throughout society. This translates into the objectification of women, and of their bodies in particular, which serve only as a sexual object. Sexuality and its different expressions are not bad in themselves, but when sexuality is used solely for men's pleasure it becomes a problem. This message is sent continually to young people and can be seen on social media, for example in hypersexualisation to gain likes and followers, because that is what society demands. It has led to the creation of new platforms, such as OnlyFans and SugarDaddy, which justify pornography and therefore prostitution (Jaenes, 2022).

In pornography we find a practice that obviously justifies prostitution. The data on its use are increasingly alarming: according to various studies, the earliest age at which boys use pornography is 8, with use becoming normal at 14 among boys and 16 among girls. This content normalises many unhealthy behaviours towards women, such as violence and objectification (RTVE, 2019). 

Attempts have been made to legitimise pornography as education about sexual relationships. That view is untenable. According to Szil, if pornography were sex education it would inform people about sexually transmitted infections - that is, about the risks of sexual relations - about consent, about sexual and gender diversity, and about contraception. Pornography sends its users no such messages. Moreover, sex education exists to inform and, once it has achieved what it set out to, it stops; pornography does not behave that way (Szil, 2018).

All these factors together build a profile of the buyer who uses prostitution as a power relationship in which he feels superior enough to consume a woman's body. That need comes from everything we have described that society dictates: hypersexualisation and women as objects, the demand for sex and male superiority in pornography.

On the demand side: the buyer

The continuation of prostitution is directly bound up with the demand for it - that is, with the existence of buyers. Clearly, without that demand prostitution would disappear, which makes it another of the main reasons the problem persists. According to the studies consulted, the reasons buyers pay for prostitution vary, and no single profile can be established. Age, sector of work, class, level of education, family background, religiosity and rural or urban setting are some of the determining factors. Young men with higher education, for instance, are less likely to report having paid for sex than those without. 

The justification buyers give today is the neoliberal model : if everyone owns their own actions, then the transaction o exchange the prostituted woman and the buyer enter into is simply sex for money, where both are equally free to consent. This is what Ana de Miguel calls the myth of free choice . In the buyer's eyes, then, prostitution is and should be reduced to its economic dimension, in which buyers have rights as consumers and prostituted women are simply workers using their bodies and sex to earn money. It is worth adding that defining prostitution as sex for money reduces sex itself to male sex, where the encounter begins and ends according to men's satisfaction and pleasure. 

Reducing prostitution to an economic transaction not only blurs how the business as a whole works and what effects it has; it also erases the buyer's own responsibility for sustaining and reproducing prostitution. The buyer detaches himself from the moral dimension, taking the view that an economic transaction leaves no room for ethical values. 

It is important to note that the notion of consent and of willingness in the case of prostituted women is hard to sustain once we look at the problems with free choice and at the context in which that consent is given. The woman who enters the business “voluntarily” does so within a context of vulnerability and need, where consent should be treated with great caution. Expectations, and the manipulation of a woman's dreams and desires, may convince her that prostitution could be a good option. But whoever consents today may not consent tomorrow. This dynamic, unfolding understanding of how consent works is not sufficiently taken into account when prostituted women are told that “they said yes to being in the business”. 

When we question the buyer's defence of paying for prostitution, we must ask whether the fundamental reason for what they do is sex or whether it is, in fact, power. From a gender perspective, maintaining control of sexuality through prostitution is one of the ways men's access to women's bodies is guaranteed, to be used however and whenever they wish (Cobo, 2019). This motivation of power shows up in both occasional and frequent use: the buyer displaying his power in front of his friends when he uses prostitution occasionally is a telling example.

The essayist and University of León professor Enrique Javier Díez argued a decade ago that “more and more men seek out prostitutes in order to dominate them, rather than to enjoy them sexually: men have experienced a loss of power and of traditional masculinity, and they fail to build relationships of reciprocity and respect towards women”. (...) The most recent estimates from the Spanish National Police, at least three years old, point to at least 1,600 brothels in Spain. Brothels alone. (Valdés, 2022)

On the supply side: the prostituted woman

When we talk about what leads women into prostitution, we have to talk directly about women's poverty. Against the false myth of free choice, the main cause feeding prostitution is poverty. Although no exact study can be made of the number of women in trafficking networks for the purposes of prostitution, the Spanish government has estimated that 90% of women in prostitution are victims of trafficking. Most of them are migrant womenwho, in fleeing their country in search of better work, turned to criminal networks that then forced them into prostitution to pay off a debt that never ends (Europa Press, 2022).

Women outside trafficking networks also follow a pattern of poverty, since it is financial need that leads them into prostitution. That need leaves them no alternative but to sell their bodies as the only way out of their economic situation. This is, once again, a situation of violence inflicted on women for being women and, on top of that, poor.

violence and Prostitution are directly linked. In trafficking networks, obviously, this violence occurs, since a person is being forced to act against her will. Beyond that, trafficking networks keep prostituted women in conditions of near-slavery and subhuman living standards. To all this must be added the violence within prostitution itself, where the buyer has free rein to do as he likes with the woman.

Even in cases of “voluntary” prostitution, a study of 854 people in that situation across 9 countries (Germany, Canada, Colombia, the United States, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Türkiye and Zambia) found that 71% of those interviewed said they had been physically assaulted while in prostitution, 63% had been raped, 89% wanted to escape prostitution but had no other way to survive, 75% had been homeless at some point in their lives and 68% suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (Farley, 2003). Indeed, figures like these about women in “voluntary” prostitution should reinforce the view that women in prostitution are, fundamentally, victims.

The very culture of hypersexualising women, at a time when equal opportunities between men and women are thought to have been fully achieved (Cobo, 2019), blurs the line between women's empowerment and the violence symbolic and sexual violence inflicted on them. This dissolving and erasing of what is plainly aggression and violence, and of women's own desires, shows up in the new digital forms prostitution has taken, in which neither the buyer nor the prostituted woman is fully aware that what is ultimately at stake is still the sale and display of a woman's body for a man's enjoyment. For the buyer, the digitalisation of prostitution brings privacy, anonymity and greater convenience. For the prostituted woman, it brings new forms of violence produced by the rankings and reviews buyers feel “entitled” to write about them. For the trafficking network, digital prostitution is bringing a fall in arrests for pimping.

The consequences of prostitution

Effects on the prostituted woman

Prostitution has effects on the health of the prostituted woman that are made worse when it is not voluntary. These effects are psychological, social or directly harmful to her physical health. The clearest one y that everyone can see concerns sexual health. Risky sexual practices without proper precautions are common in prostitution. These can lead to sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and other health risks, and they are directly bound up with the buyer's objectification of the woman and with her having no other economic option.

However, psychological trauma is harder to identify, since it is not visible and tends to be made even more invisible in the case of prostitution. Suicide is the most extreme expression of mental illness and it happens in prostitution too. Online you can find many reports of cases of sexual exploitation that ended in a woman's suicide. Those are visible; the trauma often left by sexual practices, which the vast majority of prostituted women suffer, is not - which does not mean it is not there. Violent sexual practices, working against their will, the need that drove them into prostitution and many other factors wear these women down mentally. On top of this, most of the time they are socially isolated without a support network to help them, which increases the risk of mental illness.

All of this leads to another consequence: isolation and social exclusion. It suits the prostitution networks for these women to be isolated, since having no support network to get them out or help them financially makes them more dependent on prostitution. Moreover, because many of the women in prostitution are migrant women without regular status, their closest family and friends are usually in their country of origin. Added to this, the business itself forces many of them to move constantly between cities, and long hours and round-the-clock availability to buyers leave no real time for leisure or personal life, making it even harder to build close, meaningful ties with other people, so that community integration and beneficial relationships outside prostitution remain out of reach (Pinedo & López, 2015). The risk of social exclusion and isolation for these women is therefore greater than for the rest of the population.

Out of this marginality comes a portrayal of the prostituted woman that dehumanises her completely, and that message, passed on to society, translates into direct violence in public spaces. Hence the mockery, contempt and outright verbal and physical assaults directed at prostituted women. This violence only reinforces the other consequences we have mentioned: the psychological risks, the isolation, the dehumanisation and the objectification of these women.

Effects on the buyer

What leads buyers to pay for prostitution rests on a mistaken idea or an absence of any idea of the relationships and sex education they received, which devalues their own and other people's affections and emotions , focusing attention exclusively on intercourse. The effects on the buyer of paying for prostitution, whether occasionally or frequently, are dependence or addiction, the financial consequences of paying for sex, and the consequences for his family, including abandoning it where he has one. The dependence prostitution produces behaves much like the dependence on pornography found pornography among men: the idea of sexuality they form through pornography, in which no distinction is drawn between fantasy y reality, produces a constant return to pornography to reaffirm that idea of what sexuality is (Szil, 2018). 

Furthermore, the availability of women's bodies to men and the violence present in the act of prostitution may increase the risk of buyers committing sexual and gender violence in settings beyond the brothel. 

Social effects

Despite the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949), the Smuggling Protocol (2000) and the United Nations Trafficking in Persons Protocol (2003), the 2014 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons estimates that trafficking networks exist in every country in the world, and that “trans-regional trafficking flows are mainly detected in the rich countries of the Middle East, Western Europe and North America” and that “these flows affect victims from the Global South, mainly from East and South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa” (UNODC, 2014: 7). Not only is their existence a fact, so is the impunity of the traffickers. Prostitution and Trafficking for sexual exploitation must be understood within the global trafficking network, in the many forms taken by the regional, sub-regional and international flows it creates, and in the vulnerability and desperation that draw women into it. Nor should we forget that trafficking for sexual exploitation is increasing among children, with a ratio of two girls to every boy (UNODC, 2014).

Prostitution therefore has effects on the reproduction and maintenance of a social order that legitimises and accepts profiting from the sexual exploitation of women, that normalises the situation of women who sell their bodies out of extreme need, that is indifferent or turns a deaf ear to the informal economy it rests on, and that reinforces a hegemonic masculinity built on power, violence and male desire. 

feminist movement and academic feminism are blind and partial when it comes to women's needs and to the most urgent demands. They also hold an unrealistic, idealised picture of women's progress when set against the situation of racialised and foreign women in this country. A debate on prostitution in which the dialogue takes no account of fear, desperation and suffering is a superficial, misleading debate that makes no attempt to grasp the scale of the problem behind prostitution as an international business. The social danger lies in lending credibility to freedom, to taking responsibility for one's actions and to consent in the context these women actually live in. 

Solutions and conclusion

The solution we propose is clear: the abolition of prostitution in every form. That policy cannot stand alone, since it would leave a great many poor women with nothing. It must come with an employment support programme that gives these women access to education and a possible professional future. The prosecution of these practices must be aimed in one clear direction: at the buyer and the pimp , who are the ones perpetuating violence against women.

We have likewise identified that the hypersexualisation of women in society turns into the objectification of women's bodies and ends up justifying prostitution. An important factor in this continuing is pornography and how widespread it is in society. That is why, as with prostitution, we must put an end to a practice whose only achievement is to degrade women. Pornography can in no way be compared to sex education: not only does it show practices that are entirely unrealistic and far removed from the pleasure of both sexes, but if it really were only about sex education, people would stop watching it once that education had been acquired - which does not happen.

This brings us to the next solution we see as necessary: relationships and sex education from an early age. Against the dangers public opinion attributes to such teaching in schools, we need to understand what it offers: the ability to teach children when to say ‘no’ to inappropriate touching, when to say ‘no’ to unprotected or non-consensual sex, and so on. Children must be taught conflict resolution without violence, the ability to handle feelings and emotions , their own and other people's, and how to build healthy relationships in which sexuality does not exclude affection. 

Since pornography and prostitution both rely on dehumanising women, relationships and sex education has to be centred on human dignity . That means changing and removing the sexist stereotypes in social media, advertising and the press that show women only as a body, never doing anything meaningful. 

In short, focusing on the buyer and therefore on the demand of prostitution means changing the discourse that sees these practices as normal and acceptable. Regularising prostitution has the effect of protecting pimps and trafficking networks, not the victims , who are the women. We cannot have a society built on equality between men and women if prostitution has a place in it. Any genuine commitment to ending the gender-based and sexual violence women suffer necessarily means ending every practice that heightens, sharpens and sustains that control over female sexuality, as prostitution does.

For all these solutions to work, there must be closer monitoring of the data relating to the purchase of prostitution, with data disaggregated by nationality, class, age and so on. There must also be a unified response from the state and the police to identify trafficking networks, prevent new ones from emerging, and support and advise the women taken out of prostitution, training them, caring for them and offering them another way of life.

Written by: Ana E. Marcos and Guillermo Martínez

Edited by: Nuria de Pablo Sánchez

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