According to an article in the May edition of Reason magazine, the New Orleans police and prosecutors charge their city’s prostitutes as sex offenders. This, in itself, baffles me. The term “sex offenders” has lost its edge. It can be a rapist, it can apparently be a prostitute, or it can be a guy who gets drunk and pees in a public park. Why would we want to lump all these crimes under one heading?
This article goes on to state that, of 863 people on New Orleans’ sex offender list, 483 were charged under this fairly recent prostitution law. These “sex offenders” were engaging in consensual (albeit, paid) sex. These women now have to register as sex offenders, their licenses are stamped with the sex offender status, and they must report their status to all their neighbors and future employers.
Shouldn’t a sex offender be someone we need to worry about? Someone dangerous? We may not all agree with prostitution as a profession but most of us do agree that prostitutes are not in the same league as a rapist or child molester.
What truly bothered me about this article was the absence of the prostitutes’ customers on the sex offender list. If the prostitute is a sex offender, then, by default, shouldn’t her (or his) customer be as well? They are both consenting in the act. They are both well aware of what they are doing. Without the customers, there would be no prostitute. Yet, only the prostitute pays the price with the sex offender stamp.
Furthermore, once we label these prostitutes with the general sex offender stamp, they cannot get a legitimate job anywhere. Who wants to hire a registered sex offender? No one stops and looks into the realities of the “crime”. Prospective employers simply look at that label and there is no way they are going to hire that person. We claim to want to stop prostitution, yet this very law forces these women (and men) to continue in the profession by taking away any reasonable and legal choices.
Tags: law, laws, prostitution, sex offenders
-
Anne
