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 What happens in Las Vegas might stay in Las Vegas, but what happens in New Zealand is legal
By Crystal Jackson
01/10/07
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman would love to develop a Little Amsterdam downtown. Perhaps the Hard Rock could house a brothel, and live up to its local nickname ("rock" rhymes with....). If our laws were similar to New Zealand's, we could. But here in fabulous Sin City, law mingles with culture and custom in the most ironic way. Is Las Vegas or the state of Nevada actually ready for legal sex work in the form of decriminalized prostitution?
In a city rife with strip clubs, card flickers offering Strip tourists "hot models to your hotel room in 90 minutes!" and scandalous billboards (stationary and now, on the backs of trucks), what's the big deal? An outsider might assume the city has a very progressive, open sexual ideology. But burlesque at Forty Deuce and faux nude acrobatics at Zumanity are just theatrics. Strip clubs combine such theatrics with a customer service element. Prostitution is just too touchy for some people to handle.
Tim Barnett, one of 120 members of Parliament from New Zealand, made a one-day stopover in Las Vegas earlier this month to brainstorm with local political activists and community members about decriminalizing prostitution. He successfully sponsored a bill to do the same in his own country.
While it was a tight win, New Zealand now possesses the three characteristics identified by the United Nations of a country actively slowing the spread of HIV: decriminalized needle exchange, decriminalized same sex relationships, and decriminalized prostitution. New Zealand has it all! Nevada has none.
As he explained "the role of sex work" in society, Barnett relies on sensible legislative positions and non-judgmental research. Barnett recounted several "truths" about sex work. First, prostitution is inevitable in every country (excluding China during the Cultural Revolution and a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan). Prostitution is illegal, yet it happens and thereby prohibition leads to corruption. A corrupt police force inflicts more harm against sex workers then assistance. About 10% of adult males are clients, across country boarders and class lines. Finally, Barnett points out, practical laws that deal with the real harms of sex work are useful to societies and good for the workers.
Barnett notes that unfortunately "the conservative government here [in the U.S.] has gone international by using funding to intimidate other countries" into aligning with its moralistic legal perspectives. Confusing trafficking with sex work, the U.S. maintains a staunch moral stance that hurts more than it helps.
Last year, a 90-officer task force known as "Operation PIMP" (Prostitutes Incarcerated by Metropolitan Police) arrested 185 people in a single night sting. They targeted outdoor (less than half of sex work in the U.S. is public, street sex work), lower class female sex workers, not high-class escorts, not male sex workers or transgender sex workers. And far from being compassionate saviors of desperate, duped women, police often waited for the act to finish before arresting the woman, her client, and, Metro hoped, the pimp.
The women were not released on their own recognizance, but forced to make bail. In an odd turf war, Metro claimed to be "sending a message to the pimps" who lost money due not only to lost time but also to bail. Barnett and other sex worker activists point out that this message implies, "These women are ours. Not yours." Plus I don't think it is the pimp who shells out bail money at the end of the night, but the women themselves, who then go back to an illegal job that offers them no labor rights and deal with an unsympathetic, pissed off boss.
But New Zealand is, in many ways, light years ahead of Nevada and the U.S. socially. The country has a history of rights based movements and legislation. New Zealand was the first country to offer women the right to vote. Their current Prime Minister is a woman. Their Parliament is one third women, and there are, percentage wise, more Maori (the indigenous people) parliamentary members than the 17% Maori found in the general population.
New Zealand operates from a human rights' perspective. The U.S. operates from a human-unless-you're-gay-transgender-poor-immigrant-not-white rights perspective. But what else could you expect from the birthplace of Xena, Warrior Princess, and lesbian icon Lucy Lawless (now hottie Number Three cylon on Battlestar Galactica)?
Independent sex workers- women independent of men- does not exist in the U.S. Whether police or street pimps or legal brothels (which offer a form "pimping" ironic considering our stance and stereotypes of pimps (that movie/song not withstanding)), women who want the freedom to engage in sex work harassment and violence free cannot. Laws which criminalize aspects of labor stigmatize prostitutes and result in human rights violations in the workplace and by the state.
In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt presented a United Nations convention paper in favor of decriminalizing prostitution. The U.S. never supported this paper, although it's been ratified by more than fifty countries. Our own Wild West state maintains its brothels, but tumbleweeds of yore and modern moralities prevent sex workers from establishing themselves as legitimate workers entitled to a safe work place and legal, economic, and social rights. Though some industrialized countries have realized that the discrimination against sex workers is not worth the time, money, and energy, the U.S. has not. Apparently New Zealand is Sin Central, not us.
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