Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1285850
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 6 SEPTEMBER 2020 NEWS MATTHEW VELLA AT the height of his political battle on the Egrant affair in May 2017, just a month away from re-election, Joseph Muscat announced his new legislature would regulate prostitu- tion in a bid to fight sex trafficking. Always armed with his deceptive power of self-awareness, Muscat suggested his bold proposal "could cost [him]" at the polls (he had un- assailable trust ratings). But early in the day, women's groups seemed in agreement that legalising prostitu- tion would increase trafficking. That position has changed little. Most women's rights groups and similar advocates for vulnerable people do not sex buyers to be de- criminalised, and this week, a large coalition of NGOs accused a prosti- tution reform technical committee of being without experts in the field they were consulting on. The coalition of grassroots wom- en's organisations, experts who have worked with people in prostitution, as well as former President of the Republic Marie-Louise Coleiro Pre- ca, said they had been completely disregarded. The flashpoint were comments by equality secretary Rosianne Cutajar, who said Cabi- net will be asked to consider a de- criminalisation of sex buying, keep- ing brothels and pimping illegal, with harsher laws to stop them. The Labour administration's diffidence of the 'Nordic mode' – which pun- ishes buyers of sexual services – re- mained intact, with Cutajar saying it was at odds with the decriminalisa- tion of sex work. But the coalition was clear that the proposal assumes that pros- titutes have the agency to choose when the reality is that they are ei- ther coerced or enslaved by pimps. "Sex trafficking is indivisible from prostitution, and the two can never be tackled separately… Legalising prostitution will further encourage the exploitation and abuse towards individuals caught up in prostitu- tion whilst facilitating the control that pimps, traffickers, and johns will have on those prostituted." A reality of violent dependence But it was Malta's equality com- mission, the NCPE, that provided the most concise and emphatic anal- ysis of the problem at hand: the pa- triarchal control of the prostitution industry. "Prostitution is a form of exploita- tion rife with physical and psycho- logical violence. It is also, primarily, an exercise in power and control of men over women, since the absolute majority of prostitutes are women, while the absolute majority of pimps and clients are men," the NCPE said this week. "While prostitutes should not be punished for suffering exploitation, sex-buyers should be penalised. This disrupts the exploitative sex market and sends a strong message in fa- vour of gender equality." Clearly the problem at hand is the enormous gulf between an indus- try as it stands today with women under the control of criminals, whose lives and even those of their families are held ransom by violent men; and the impression that prosti- tutes can – by the stroke of the legislator's pen – enter into a world of legal- ity, breaking their chains of violent dependence to become "self-employed" sex workers. And the leap from a world of violence and dependence, to one where prostitutes are imbued with full autonomy and agency to deliver a sex 'ser- vice', is huge one indeed. "The discussion surrounding prostitution reform must focus on the behaviour of clients, mostly men, and the existing patriarchal structures of inequality that lead many men to objectify women and buy their bodies," Equality Commis- sioner René Laiviera said this week. "The prostitution reform should embrace efforts to promote gender equality in society and fight gender stereotypes, as well as devise a strat- egy for a crackdown on pimps and traffickers." As things stand, the tide is not in favour of the liberalisation plans started under the former Muscat administration. The equality commission insists sex-buyers should be penalised. If they won't be, the normalisation of demand will only increase the sup- The long shadow of crime, power and violence that hangs over women The reality of violence and men's control of vulnerable women in prostitution is too big to ignore before opening what could be a legal front for pimps and traffickers in Malta "The discussion surrounding prostitution reform must focus on the behaviour of clients, mostly men, and the existing patriarchal structures of inequality that lead many men to objectify women and buy their bodies"