Are Prostitutes Human?

The recent murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich, a small port town in England, prompted varying responses in the British press. As I followed these articles, I became increasingly annoyed. As an ex-prostitute, I found myself resenting all these journalists making easy, specious pronouncements upon a subject they know nothing about. A ‘popular’ view, supposedly liberal and open-minded, on their part, was the advocating of legal brothels to ‘protect’ the women. As I read their views on this topic, I grew from being merely annoyed to deeply offended and angry. Alice Miles, Times journalist, is all for these establishments in her “How We Let Gemma and Tania Down” (Dec. 13, 2006). “Brothels: proper, clean, large-as-you-like, licensed knocking shops, with medical checks and protection for the girls” is what Ms. Miles proposes. What she fails to consider is that legalizing prostitution makes it easier for procurers and pimps and customers to exploit women. Look at Germany and Holland, where sexual trafficking is massive and the few ‘independent’ prostitutes (those who actually benefit from the health care and protection) are extremely rare.

It is the same situation in the legal Nevada brothels in the USA: girls are trafficked in by their pimps, who take the money. Ms. Miles envisions ‘clean’ safe brothels but I’m afraid that these only exist in some fairyland somewhere where men don’t control the actions and lives of the prostitutes. Such places don’t stand a chance on this patriarchy of a planet.

It would be nice if they did: establishments controlled entirely by the women, places where they have complete say as to working conditions, number of customers, etc. Places where no men make money off their bodies: take all the owners and procurers and pimps and drop their greedy deadweight off a huge cliff and then let women define how brothels should operate. They would not resemble, for example, the current ones in Nevada, with their degrading meat-market line-ups. They would not resemble the ones, worldwide, full of trafficked girls fighting to survive the brutality of beatings and terror tactics to keep them compliant and performing so as to bring in the money for their ‘owners.’ They certainly would bear no resemblance to the flesh markets with enslaved youngsters in them, practically babies, that are standard fare in Thailand, India, Cambodia, etc. With 60% of the world’s prostitutes being minors, brothels are places where millions of girls who are mere children are gang raped everyday—by local men, by sex tourists, by the world’s militaries, and by UN Peacekeepers (‘Rape-Bringers,’ I call them) who significantly fuel the sex trade wherever they go since troubled, war-torn places and conflict zones create destitute, vulnerable girls.

The entire sex industry, globally, would be quite different if we prostitutes completely controlled it and no men made money off of us.

What does Ms. Miles mean by a ‘proper’ brothel, I wonder? And in what way does this sort of ‘sex-for-sale zone’ protect the women who work there? What does Ms. Miles mean by ‘protect.’ She only mentions ‘medical checks.’ I’d like to inform Ms. Miles that the sort of protection women really need—the psychological protection from sex without tenderness or love--is not available in a brothel.

In Germany, ‘legalizing’ means that abomination they call a ‘drive-thru brothel’ in Cologne. I shudder when I think of a ‘fast-food’ sex establishment—yet another meat-market endeavor, this time woman reduced to a 99-cent burger on the menu.

Another Times woman journalist, Minette Marrin, also advocates legal brothels (“Now End the Hypocrisy on Prostitution,” Dec. 17, 2006). Doesn’t she even consider, for a moment, that these places promote the cruelest of double standards: women regarded as ‘flesh/meat,’ roped off in a ‘sanctioned’ space, where men are licensed to rape them. (Prostitution is a particularly dreadful form of rape, by the way, Ms. Marrin. Any time the man’s pleasure matters and the woman’s is negligible, we have rape.) The entire idea of a place that contains bodies solely there for male pleasure, while the woman is merely a sex-deposit site, strengthens the notion that men are the entitled and dominant ones, while we women are there to serve them. Why would these otherwise sensible women journalists want to continue to rope off this space, called ‘brothel,’ that enslaves our bodies? That space, called brothel, has been hurting your sisters for centuries, ladies. Why are you promoting the rape of your sisters? Serve up one woman, this way, put her on the menu as sex meat, and you degrade all of us. I think these women journalists need to work in a brothel for a while—just a few nights will do, to totally break their bodies and spirits and give them the true perspective on these rape prisons.

Some of the articles touched on the linguistic dilemma of what do we call these ‘lost’ women outside the domain of society, and presumably, therefore, outside the domain of language. Calling them ‘prostitutes’ demeans them, writers like Matthew Parris claim (“They Were Women, Weren’t They,” Times, Dec.14, 2006). I definitely have my views on this issue: as an ex-prostitute I am fine with being called a ‘prostituted’ woman since the sex I endured was forced upon me and felt like a form of rape. But I detest the phrase ‘sex worker’ since violation of a woman’s most intimate, vulnerable self, in the paid rape that we call ‘prostitution,’ is not work like any other. It is ludicrous and cruel, for example, to call the four-year-old girl, sold to a Bombay brothel, and painted up like a tiny harlot, a ‘sex worker.’ Does she have a 401K retirement plan, and a job as a Starbuck’s barista all lined up for her, after she finishes her fun stint as a ‘sex worker’? I freely call myself a ‘whore,’ in an effort to diffuse the male imposed stigma of ‘slut,’ shame, etc. which clings to the word. I also call myself a whore to distinguish myself from all the non-whore women out there who would label me a ‘sex worker’ and who do not have the remotest notion of the ineradicable damage that selling the body inflicts on a woman.

I realize that the ‘w’ word causes some strong reactions in non-whore women. That’s good. It makes them acknowledge our presence, and what we are there for—to be used and degraded by men. ‘Whore’=degraded, raped, rented genital space, a woman reduced to vagina and its function (place for male to take his pleasure) and our humanity matters not at all. I call myself a ‘whore’ because I felt like all of the above (degraded, raped, rented genital space) when I sold my body. If ‘whore’ makes non-whore women uncomfortable, it should. But at least it might set them to thinking: what does the existence of whores mean for the rest of the women on the planet? If a man can buy the body of the girl labeled ‘slut,’ the ‘bad’ girl who can be subjected to unfeeling sexual use, then he can also mistreat ‘good’ girls. He does not become a gentleman when he switches bodies.

I also like the word ‘whore’ because I make it my own when I use it. I take away the power to degrade that its very presences has inflicted on us women for so long.

There was yet another Times article (“How the Dutch Protect Their Prostitutes,” Patrick Jackson, Dec. 14, 2006) that set up the ‘legal’ system in that country as a shining model of cosy whoredom. This piece puts forth a 'cosy' picture of 'cosy' car parks with 'cosy' counselors, and 'cosy' cups of coffee and 'cosy' showers for the whore bodies, in between sessions of being climbed on by men they don’t know (or having to take the sex organs of men they don’t know into their mouths—a particularly raw and disgusting act). Articles like this one, which make the car parks sound so ‘cosy,’ depress and sadden me because they do not tell the full story. Some of those girls in the Amsterdam car parks are servicing up to a hundred men a night—with devastating impacts upon their bodies and emotions. If I were to go back into whoring (a scenario I devoutly hope I will never have to face), the last places I would want to be are the countries where prostitution is legal because here transnational gangs and mafias and traffickers control a massive trade in enslaved bodies. It would terrify me, knowing the traffickers could get hold of me, too.

Sweden is, I think, the only place that would not terrify me. There they have decriminalized prostitution for the girls and criminalized it for the johns. This law extends to their military abroad as well, since they are now arresting Swedish servicemen who buy women in foreign countries. I do not know if this has also been applied to the sex tourist arena since Scandinavian men, like many others from around the world, take advantage of the young girls available in Thailand. Sweden’s policy has had a marked affect on reducing trafficking into that country.

I was glad to see one woman writer in the Times, Helen Rumbelow (“Who Buys These girls? It Could Be the John in Your Life,” Dec. 18, 2006) pay attention to those to blame for all this ravaging and selling of the body: the customers themselves. She pointed out that johns are pretty much everyone.

How many men buy bodies? The figures vary. In countries like India, where it is the ‘norm’ for young men to lose their virginity on top of a prostituted body, numbers may be as high as 80%. In Cambodia, the same, since local men regard a night out together as a collective visit to the brothel: according to the men, it is no big deal. Buying a body is like buying a bag of potato chips (or fish chips, or peanuts). In America, perhaps 6% of men buy bodies. In Europe, it varies by country from 5% to 20%. Roughly 12% of men, worldwide, buy bodies? I don’t know how accurate any of these numbers are: they are scattered gleanings from various sources across the internet. But anyway you look at it, the money being generated by the sex industry, globally, is massive. So that’s millions and millions of girls forced onto their backs. That’s millions upon millions of rapists out there, doing the buying.

I can say from personal experience that Ms. Rumbelow is on the right track: customers are ordinary men—brothers and fathers and sons and husbands. Ordinary men bought me. I sold myself near a military base after soldiers gang raped me; I thought I was a piece of public garbage, fit only for more rape by men. My gang ‘rapists’ were just ordinary soldiers; so were all the men who bought me, my ‘other’ rapists, as I call them. (Prostitution is a particularly miserable form of rape. I keep repeating this in hopes someone may understand this someday.) Enlisted men bought me; so did officers. Some were cruel and rough and treated me like a disposable piece of rented genital space. Other men were kind. Some were curious: why are you doing this for money? Some guys were lonely and had girlfriends elsewhere and didn’t want to ‘cheat’ on them with another girl while they were in the military. But they needed sex. So they rented a whore body. A lot of the officers were married. Bored with their wives, wanting diversion. Some men wanted to talk. Some just wanted to get in there and drill the hell out of me to get their money’s worth. Some guys had no interest in anything I felt or thought; I was just a piece of meat to be used for quick sex. Others were actually thoughtful and considerate, and the experience resembled a ‘date’ despite the impersonal anonymity of the sex. My point: all kinds of men buy bodies.

In yet another piece, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent (“Where Are the Men in This Horrific Story” Dec. 18, 2006) astutely says of the Ipswich murders: “It isn’t just the killer who is invisible; so are the male pimps and the customers….As with drug addiction, suppliers are the focus of public and police attention, not the consumers, without whom there would be no trade and destruction.”

Dismantling demand” is the phrase some activists are now using in order to focus attention on a good, old-fashioned fact: male attitudes (we can buy bodies, it is what we do, as men) are largely responsible for the sex trade.

Ms. Alibhai-Brown also mentions that the few women in the trade who actually make a great deal and are doing what they like are in the minority. She calls the johns "purchasers of loveless sex." She focuses, as I do, on how, overall “this profession demeans and endangers young girls.” And she brings up the hard-to-argue with fact: “trafficked women—big business now—have no protection at all.”

Except for briefly touching upon the subject, there was, elsewhere, inevitably, little coverage of the johns, the ones actually fueling the industry by raping the bought bodies. It seems evident that they both create the misery and keep it going--and it is no wonder: men are the ones who benefit from a world where they have easy access, with no emotional consequences or responsibilities, to young, vulnerable female bodies. The consequences for the girls who are being raped are enormous. They bear the stigma of being sexual filth while, for the male, use of a bought body increases his manliness and heightens his prestige with his buddies, the men he makes his collective visits to the brothels with (as is particularly the case in military society).

Many years ago, I talked to a military chaplain who said that he feared for the morals and wholesomeness of his boys when they were faced with the temptation of all these ‘bad’ girls in foreign ports. Why, I asked, was it the fault of the girls? His answer: man must follow his penis. It’s how he’s made. (KPIP?)

I would ask is not the male responsible for his sexual choices and the consequences of his sex drive? Perhaps the soldier, as male, and all other males as well, need to be more ‘moral’ and not less when faced with girls who resort to prostitution because alternatives are limited. Perhaps the ones in the military need to spend their shore leave exploring how the girl got into this way of life and searching for ways to help her out of it, rather than satisfying themselves at her expense. After all, these men can always resort to manual stimulation—and give her the money without making her have sex for it. I always think my solutions are sensible and humane. I just wonder why men don’t follow them. Probably because, as the chaplain said, man must follow his penis.

Men need to develop a conscience and some sexual imagination. They need to realize that it’s just a few minutes of pleasure for them but it is a life sentence for the girl. Men need to realize that prostitution destroys girls in ways they never recover from.

Another article (“Out of Darkest Suffolk, Enlightenment,” The Times, Dec. 15, 2006) by Ben MacIntyre contains an amazing revelation: that prostitutes are actually human beings. A humanity inside us, just like the heart that the bodies of decent women harbor, and maybe a brain, and the ability to express ourselves? How many centuries has it taken for this delayed reaction to receive a few lines of coverage in a newspaper? That the same heart beats in all of us women—whore and ‘decent’ one alike.

I find the anomaly that Mr. MacIntyre points out extremely interesting: that these murdered women are actually being regarded as human beings with lives and feelings rather than as disposable bodies, and as filth. During my time in prostitution, I was looked upon, by my crueler customers, as a dirty joke and a hole that a man poked himself into without regard for my pain. Even at my busiest, I only serviced about a dozen men a weekend. It felt like several hundred. Not all were mean. Most were, in fact, pretty decent. Despite this—limited numbers, half-way civilized johns--I always felt like a raped, shredded, fragile woman with a torn vagina and a lot of bruises from the weight of too many heavy bodies.

Because of my personal experiences, Mr. MacIntyre’s own attitudes about prostitution are painful to me. He calls what we prostitutes do “a grimly ordinary trade.” No, it is not ‘ordinary,’ the sale of the body. Widespread, yes, since so many men demand ‘sexless sex’ (my phrasing). But ‘ordinary’ in the sense that the lives of what we call ‘decent,’ non-prostitute women are ‘ordinary,’ no. ‘Ordinary’ is shopping for a treat for your dog, or having a peaceful latte with a friend, or enjoying the Christmas lights strung all over houses once a year. ‘Ordinary’ is far, far away from the sexual violence the prostituted body endures. When I was in prostitution, I couldn’t enjoy Christmas, or even buying a cup of fancy coffee because I knew I was alienated from ordinary life. Christmas looked different. The Christmas lights didn’t apply to me because I was walking around in a rape-battered body. A cup of fancy coffee at a Starbuck’s was so normal and wholesome that I cried when I saw people sitting outside, sipping those comforting cups. Such comfort was not for me because I was not ‘ordinary.’ I was a raped body.

Even a soft day, one with a light breeze, and sunlight, when nature seems especially gentle, made me cry because life was not being gentle with my body. The air on my skin, soft and kind, was a sharp contrast to how it felt to be banged and bruised in order to satisfy men and their impersonal sex drives.

Mr MacIntyre writes that “Germany and the Netherlands do not share British anxieties about paid sex; both countries have regulated brothels—and levels of violence against prostitutes have dropped significantly.” Now, where is this information coming from, I ask? Both countries are destinations for massive trafficking of women, girls, and children from Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe precisely because the ‘legal’ situation makes it almost impossible for the victims to receive any protection at all. And these trafficked girls comprise the majority of bodies being sold. I think it is all the male customers who don’t have any ‘anxieties’ about paid sex. The prostitutes themselves, the girls whose bodies are being raped, these girls have plenty of anxiety--and misery.

Mr. MacIntyre suggests that society must ‘make provision’ for this ‘activity’ called prostitution (note the coolness of his phrasing—all distanced and polite and intellectual is he about ‘making provision’ for this ‘activity,’ as if prostitution were on a level with leaning how to bake brownies after school). Well, Mr. MacIntyre, due to the damage it does to a woman, there is really no way for ‘society to make provision’ for this ‘activity,’ as you so neutrally phrase it. The ‘activity’ is rape, of a particularly cruel sort. Men paid to rape me. I wonder how on earth, on in all the hells that this earth contains, Mr. MacIntyre could ‘make provision’ for rape of this kind, the lowest kind, serial rape, the kind a woman never recovers from. In one-time rape, it happens, then you heal. With the ongoing, massive battering and violation of the body that is prostitution, there is no time to heal because the body is raped over and over again.

Empathy on the part of men like Mr. MacIntyre might lead him to perhaps not so easily believe that society must ‘make provision’ for this sort of rape. Does he have a wife or daughter, any feminine vulnerable being who is dear to him? If so, would he like her body to be the one that is sacrificed, the body that is used to ‘make provision’ for this ‘activity’?

I am particularly sensitive to language and the cruelties it implies. Mr. MacIntyre’s cool, neutral phrasing is on a par with that of those academic women who write about prostitution and talk about ‘reading the liminal space of the bartered body,’ and all that sort of distanced nonsense. Women who do not have the remotest idea of the pain of that bartered body. I call these sorts of academicians ‘vagina-less’ women.

I call the refined Times women journalists who are in favor of legal brothels, vagina-less as well. I do not usually make a practice of attacking others in my prose; in a discussion, you attack the person’s ideas, not the person. But I’m having a tough time refraining from ad feminem here because so many vagina-less women overrun journalism. They talk about ‘sex workers,’ thereby sanitizing the raw ugly reality of the raped vagina; they advocate ‘legal’ brothels without ever having had their own vaginas shredded in one of these places.

They write without passion and pain. They write ‘objectively’ in a way that degrades the pain of all of us who have suffered.

(The Times informs me that many of its columnists opining about the Ipswich prostitutes are ‘award-winning’ journalists. Actually I write as well as these people. I wonder why they are the ones making the money and earning the accolades.)

One day I want to meet the women who espouse legal brothels face to face. I want to sit down to a refined cup of tea with them, and a plate of scones with Devonshire clotted cream and raspberry jam. Over this civilized repast, I want to tell them that I was not a ‘sex worker.’ I was a ‘whore,’ and I am now rather proud of that designation since is distinguishes me from all the non-whore women out there who don’t have the remotest idea of the unimaginable damage selling the body does to a woman.

To continue with the articles, there was of course a “Confessions of a Mad Call Girl” style piece. It was shallow. But out of it came a truth: that you are never safe when you sell yourself because you never know what cruelty or brutality a client who is a stranger (not a regular) may inflict on you.

The article, however, that I found most difficult to take was a tea-and-sympathy Christian piece by Libby Purves called “Once They Were Lost…How the Church Rediscovered Its Humanity in the Prostitute” (Times, Dec. 16, 2006).

The title says it all. The Church is the lost soul, cast out by its own brutal condemnation of the prostitute. Not to mention its own hypocrisy vis a vis these ‘temptresses’ and fallen women. The Church owned brothels during Elizabethan times. And those holy fellows in Rome, in centuries past, used to organized orgies where they hired dozens of prostitutes and had marathon sex sessions to see who could stay on the longest.

As one of those pieces of prostitute filth cast out by religion and society, I definitely think that dividing women up into ‘pure virgins’ and ‘dirty whores’ is certainly one of the more pernicious miseries Christianity has inflicted on us women. In the Middle Ages, under Church law, the scorned whore could not even bring a charge of rape against her attackers since she was regarded as ‘public’ property. Never mind that a common way to turn a virgin into a whore was to gang rape her and then declare her body too filthy for anything but whoredom. This time-honored tradition continues to this day—look at the numbers of prostitutes who have been subjected to previous sexual abuse—they are staggering. Rape her and then turn her into a prostitute so as to rape her even more in order to punish her for being raped in the first place, seems to be the way male logic works.

(I followed male logic myself, not knowing any better at the time. I entered prostitution after being gang raped because I had a really messed-up body and a messed- up mind and a messed-up life and I saw whoring as all I was fit for.)

A recent judge in America ruled that a whore could not be raped because her body was already so abused she couldn’t tell the difference.

The only useful thing Mary Magdalene did was to be a whore, so the rest of us whores would have someone to look up to, but the Church stripped her of that title in the 1980’s.

I think we whores are better than non-whore women because we have endured the worst men can do to us. Instead of being scorned, we should be embraced and comforted.

Too little, too late from the Church, all this tea and sympathy. You have made our lives a torture for centuries. You treated us as disposable outcasts and scorned pariahs. You cannot erase this with a bit of tea and sympathy now.

The high-flown and pious and well-meaning but very limited views continue with “Red-light Reform? Sorry It’s Not That Easy” by Times writer David Aaronovitch (Dec. 19, 2006). His article wanders quite a bit, so I can’t pick up on a central point, but he does talk about women who ‘chose’ to become drug-addicted street prostitutes and how they are not going to set themselves up in “nice, comfy brothels.” Instead he says that there are “already plenty of massage parlours and cheap flats they could use, if they could get together.” His point here eluded me totally. So, I guess I’ll pick up on his rhetoric, what I can hold onto in this slippery article. I’d just like to tell him that there is no such thing as a ‘nice, comfy brothel,’ as he so jovially and cruelly calls these sex prisons. A brothel is a place where a woman’s body is gang-raped on a daily basis. Mr. Aronovitch also uses the term ‘sex work.’ I always have to respond, emotionally, to this phrase since the violation of my most intimate part was not ‘work’—it was rape.

He refers to an “inner self,” that mysterious realm inside which ‘chooses’ prostitution, if I am reading his meaning right. I’d have to say that I really don’t think any woman’s ‘inner self’ is going to choose sex with large numbers of drunk, rough, crude men (yes, many customers are like this—they think if a woman is a whore, they can be at their savage, ugly worst). Maybe Mr. A. needs to go out and whore, go out and get penetrated by a lot of men he doesn’t know before he writes another cruel article like this one. I don’t mind writers being misinformed; but I cry with sadness when they are cruel about our raped bodies. And prostitution raped the life out of more than my body; it killed my heart and soul. His words show he understands nothing of this.

In all of the coverage, I also found little mention of a salient fact of prostitution: although some women sell their bodies to support a drug habit, others take drugs, and drink, in order to bear the pain and degradation of the work.

I know that I wandered in this article as well, but I think that one clear point came through: You cannot create a ‘safe’ brothel. At least not safe for the women in any meaningful sense. As long as the male is the dominant one, the buyer, and the female the body bought for his pleasure, there is no such thing. A brothel is, pure and simple, a ‘rape zone.’

A second major point I tried to make is that all of you non-prostitutes out there talking about us women who have sold sex, you people have to realize that the damage to us is massive. Prostitution was letting men pay to rape me. To this day, I have physical problems from overuse; my emotional problems will fill a book. That fabled “PTSD” which psychologists have discovered and popularized seems to exist in me in neverending layers of depression, sadness, pity, heaviness, sleeplessness, and terrible dreams. When I was in prostitution, getting out seemed impossible because my sense of self worth was non-existent. I was only fit for more rape by men. I have no solution as long as men will pay to do this terrible thing to us. Financial help, a few encouraging words, drug counseling won’t do it. Sticking us in ‘tolerance zones’ won’t do it. I think the main point of my missive (letter to a world that is slowly starting to care) is that we prostitutes are so damaged that psychological support for us will have to be extensive if you want to really help us out of our rape prisons. Maybe ongoing psychological care, over a period of many years, will help. I don’t know. Maybe there is really no solution for this terrible rape called prostitution

One last point: In any discussion of prostitution, trafficking has to be at the forefront, since it is the major form. The majority of bought-and-sold bodies, worldwide, are trafficked. In this sense, there is currently little distinction between trafficking and most forms of prostitution. I was glad to see so many people writing about the Ipswich situation. Misguided as many of these writers are, at least they are now talking about prostitution in open and helpful ways. I would like to see the same coverage devoted to the trafficked. They are the real victims of this pathetic and brutal industry, far more so than the Ipswich women, or me—I did have ‘choice,’ in a limited way. The trafficked have no choice at all.

A recent book I find particularly enlightening is Italian writer Paola Monzini’s Sex Traffic. It is short and concise, and not riddled with fancy academic jargon. From it, I take much of my knowledge about the pathetic lives of the trafficked in Europe. It lays out, in a stark way, how, to train them and break them, the girls are mass raped and beaten and burned and psychologically terrorized. Particularly disturbing is her description of how the Albanian mafia operates: a girl may be broken by one set of pimps, and then sold to another set of pimps, who break her again, to keep her completely passive. The Albanian mafia traffics girls into London. Amnesty International reports the case of one 14-year-old Albanian girl held in a London brothel who was forced to have sex 20 hours a day.

No one can argue that this, the most prevalent form of prostitution, amounts to sexual enslavement. Other London examples are equally appalling. Poppy, a London-based group trying to help the trafficked, reports that one woman who’d escaped her traffickers had been routinely used by 50-60 men a day in a Soho brothel. How her body is still alive is beyond me. My imagination cannot even extend to this level of sexual torture.

This sexual torture isn’t just hidden and overlooked in London. This hidden activity is going on all over the world. In my own city, I know that two miles away from where I live, there is a network of massage parlours full of girls trafficked in from Asia and Eastern Europe. I look at the whole world differently, now that I know this underside of sexual cruelty runs side-by-side with ‘ordinary’ life.

I’ll end with a suggestion for a solution. Don’t put brothels and massage parlours and sex clubs in ‘zones’ or out-of-the way places. Those Nevada brothels, for example, are way out in the desert, not right in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip. Whether it be Las Vegas, or London, or New York, or small-town America, we should put brothels and massage parlours and sex clubs right beside schools and universities and shopping malls and churches, so we can see all the customers going in and out. ‘Ordinary,’ non-prostituted women could go in and talk to the girls, find out if they are trafficked, help them if they are. No more hiding away of the sex industry. Make it open and accessible so that all of us can see what is going on. Under the gaze of us all, most of the cruelty and exploitation would evaporate.