The Oldest Abuse in the World

By: Dianne Post

April 3rd 2026 | Substack

While prostitution is not the oldest profession, (agriculture is and prostitution is not a profession anyhow), it does seem to be one of the oldest arguments. Once again some persons are attempting to change the position of National NOW from the Equality Model of dealing with the issue (decriminalize the victim, offer exit options, criminalize all aspects of the organization including the buyer) to a model that forces the woman to remain exploited by those who organize it (mostly global big business and violent men) and those who buy women (mostly white married men).

The Equality Model that started in Sweden in 1999 (called the Nordic Model) has been spreading around the world and has proven to be the only model that reduces prostitution and sex trafficking and from which 95% of the women choose to take the exit options. Those attacking that model do not believe in women’s equality and want to keep money flowing from women’s exploitation. But the Equality Model is growing worldwide.

On the international stage, in 2004 the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, examined violence against women and girls as a form, cause and consequence of prostitution. She lists the horrors of prostitution and how it violates the right of women and girls to dignity and constitutes torture, inhumane and degrading treatment. The failure of the legal system to protect women is one of the problems. Rather they system protects and enables the johns, pimps, and organized crime – the Epstein class.

The equal participation of women in society is impossible to achieve when prostitution is normalized. Prostitution is based on an inequality between women and men with men able to purchase women clearly showing the imbalance of power. It not only replicates and reinforces patterns of patriarchy it is the essence of patriarchy.

When the state legalizes it, the state becomes the pimp and is making money off women’s exploitation – literally making money off the backs of women. Violence against women becomes a work incident; rape becomes theft of services. All women become prostitutes as indicated by the law in the Netherlands where it is now legal for a driving instructor to demand a sexual act from students as a means of payment, a practice known as “a ride for a ride.” Likewise In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the University of Leicester issued a “sex worker toolkit” to its female students while failing to develop any financial support dedicated to its most precarious female students. So rather than helping women students find financial aid, they said, go sell your body. If you think it doesn’t affect you, you are wrong.

Several international treaties prohibit the “exploitation of prostitution” in all forms, including procuring and exploiting the prostitution of another person, and knowingly managing or financing places for this purpose, to which no person may consent. They also recognize prostitution as being incompatible with the dignity and the worth of the human person.

International law has established the issue of “irrelevance of consent” within the framework of trafficking crimes and the exploitation of the prostitution of others. Moreover, there is now a universal trend towards regarding lack of consent as the essential element of rape and sexual abuse. If you are being paid, you didn’t consent. If the pimp takes the money, you didn’t consent.

Even those who said they did it voluntarily reveal patterns of abuse of vulnerability and power, manipulation or coerced prostitution or trafficking while in it or have been enticed through “lover boy” or other “romantic” relationships.

Large and highly organized trafficking networks have developed in order to provide the “supply” to answer the increasing demand for the purchase of sexual acts in countries that have decriminalized and/or legalized it.

In 2022, a UN Resolution 77/194 on Trafficking in women and girls was adopted in a plenary session of the UN General Assembly by all Member States calling upon Governments to intensify their efforts to prevent and address, with a view to eliminating, the demand that fosters the trafficking of women and girls for all forms of exploitation and in this regard to put in place or to enhance preventive measures, including legislative and punitive measures to deter exploiters of trafficked persons, as well as ensure their accountability.

Organized prostitution might be criminally charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) under Crimes against Humanity, the doctrine under which newly recognized forms of systematic, even systemic, victimization of civilians is criminal. Industrial brothel chains and links to organized international crime are readily provable in many of the current situations in which prostitution is decriminalized or legalized. Violence against all women is increased and thus when policymakers legalize prostitution, they can be held responsible for crimes against humanity under international law. Not only is prostitution systematically aimed at women but it is also racially directed: African American women and girls are overrepresented in U.S. prostitution; First Nations women and girls are exceptionally overrepresented in Canada; in Europe, the Roma population is “grossly over-represented” among sex trafficking victims. Prostitution overwhelmingly preys on the destitute, who are often kept poor based on their sex, ethnicity, and nationality combined. Legalizing prostitution legalizes racism as well.

Under the ICC, enforced prostitution is inter alia, making people have sex “by taking advantage of a coercive environment or such person’s or persons’ incapacity to give genuine consent.”

A “coercive environment” that negates genuine consent is present in most prostituted peoples’ lives through severe poverty, which is the principal reason people enter prostitution in both industrialized and developing nations. There is also a robust and uncontested association between childhood sexual and physical abuse and entering prostitution. From 60 to 90% of prostituted women have been sexually abused as children compared to 33 to 50% for all women in the U.S.

Let that sink in. Up to one-half of ALL American women are sexually or physically abused as children. Women are groomed from birth to become victims of predators like Epstein and Weinstein. Studies do indicate that the childhood sexual abuse suffered by prostituted women is, on average, more severe than that experienced by the rest of us. Most women entered the system as children like Epstein’s victims and therefore cannot consent under the law.

“Enslavement” is another possible charge under the ICC. It means the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children. An average of 84% of prostituted women around the world are estimated to be controlled by a third-party profiteer, who sells or rents them to others and collects a cut or all of the proceeds for their sexual use. Renting a person to others who buy their use is a form of owning them.

Legalizing prostitution legalizes sex trafficking. Legalization is a state policy that exonerates many acts that formerly were crimes, results in increases in many of the violations that routinely occur in prostitution through official impunity and eviscerates the ability to use law enforcement against acts that remain illegal. Comparative analysis illuminates that decriminalizing sellers (pimps, traffickers) and legalizing buyers increases prostitution exponentially making it far more exploitative and dangerous than under an abolitionist policy, without achieving any of the allegedly beneficial outcomes.

In Europe, a European Parliament resolution of 14 September 2023 recognizes prostitution as a form of violence and calls on Member States to adopt all the pillars of the abolitionist model: the decriminalization of prostituted persons, their access to exit pathways, the criminalization of the purchase of sexual acts and all forms of pimping, and the implementation of awareness-raising programs aimed at men and young people in particular.

France passed the Equality Model in 2016. In December 2019, a challenge to the law was lodged before the French constitutional court, but the constitutionality of the law was upheld. Courts in France have ruled that prostitution is inseparable from pimping and human trafficking, violates human dignity and undermines women’s right to equality. (Decision of France Constitutional Court n° 2018-761 QPC) In its ruling the presiding judges held that the law helped protect women “by depriving pimps of their profits” and that it “fights against this activity and against the sexual exploitation of human beings, criminal activities founded on coercion and enslavement.” The law has also been recognized by the High Council of Equality in France as “contributing to build a society of formal and real equality between men and women.”

In Italy, after they changed their law in 2018, pimps argued that since prostitution was not illegal, recruitment, aiding and abetting could not be. That challenge was rejected by the Constitutional Court. They reversed the lower court and said the law must recognize the “inviolable rights of the person,” both as an individual and in the social groups within which human personality is developed. Italy also committed to removing economic and social obstacles that prevent full development. European law differs from US in that they must take positive actions to guarantee constitutional rights where in the US they only have to prevent obstacles.

The Italian court said they cannot share the referring court’s assumption that prostitution is self-affirmation. The offer of sexual services for valuable consideration is not at all an instrument of protection and development of the human person but constitutes simply a particular form of economic activity. While economic activity is also protected, it cannot compromise other values which the Constitution considers pre-eminent: it cannot, in fact, be conducted “in conflict with social usefulness or in such a manner that could damage safety, liberty and human dignity.”

Even if it were freely consented, the court can consider the dangers to which the women are exposed in the pursuit of their activity: dangers connected to their entry into a circuit from which it will then be difficult to voluntarily leave, given the ease with which they can suffer undue pressure and blackmail, as well as connected to the risks for their physical safety and health, which they inevitably run when they are isolated with the customer (risk of physical violence, coercion to perform unwanted sex acts, contagion resulting from unprotected sex and so on).

Women in Nigeria brought a case in 2019 when they were targeted by the police while the organizers and buyers were ignored. The court ruled that prostitution is a sex-based phenomenon: not only are most prostituted persons female (and nearly all clients male), but women engaged in prostitution are also disproportionally targeted by law enforcement even in countries where prostitution itself is not a criminal offence. Legalization does not stop the abuse of women by law enforcement.

The court also said that laws targeting prostituted women do not take account of the fact that the lack of decent work opportunities, affected by the context of sex discrimination, is one of the major reasons for women’s involvement in certain forms of prostitution.

In a South African Constitutional Court case in 2002, the police committed a sting in a brothel in Pretoria in 1966 and then arrested the women only not any buyers or facilitators. The court said the law was discriminatory against women by applying only to the seller and not the buyer, so they extended the law to the buyer. While they emphasized that the law was not passed to protect the woman, they agreed that most “choices” were constrained by economic and social situations. Prohibiting the commercial exploitation of sex does not infringe on a woman’s dignity, but in fact increases it they said.

A concurring opinion emphasized that prostitution tracks and reinforces in a profound way the double standards regarding the expression of male and female sexuality. The decision to make only sellers of sexual intercourse and not purchasers primarily liable entrenches the deep patterns of sex inequality that exist in our society and that the South African Constitution is committed to eradicating.

The responsibility must shift to men who are the drivers of demand. As Gisele Pelicot in France said after her husband and some of the 50 men he recruited to drug and rape her were found guilty and went to prison, the shame is theirs not hers. The men need to carry accountability, not their victims. Selling sex exists within the framework of deeply structured sexist and patriarchal patterns of social life. The very institution of commercial sex serves to reinforce patterns of inequality.

It’s not about morality. It’s about harm. Prostitution itself is degrading to women; it is conducive to violent abuse of women both by customers and pimps; it is associated with and encourages the international trafficking of women; it leads to child prostitution; it carries an intensified risk of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS; it goes hand in hand with high degrees of drug abuse; it has close connections with other crimes such as assault, rape and even murder; and it is a frequent and persistent cause of public nuisance.

Even agencies formed to promote women’s equality, The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Committee, has been captured by this insanity. They issued a response to the Netherlands report by commenting on “minor sex workers.” No such thing exists. If they are minors, they cannot consent to sex and therefore if someone is having sex with them, it is rape and sexual assault. Global outrage followed especially since the CEDAW convention itself in Article VI prohibits the exploitation of prostitution. They modified the language.

Our northern neighbor Canada declared most of its prior prostitution laws that prevented brothel owning and pimping unconstitutional in 2013 (R v. Bedford). In response, in 2014 the Canadian Parliament passed an Equality Model law while declaring “grave concerns about the exploitation that is inherent in prostitution and the risks of violence posed to those who engage in it.” Repeated constitutional challenges to the new law have failed. Courts in Canada have ruled that prostitution is inseparable from pimping and human trafficking and that it violates human dignity and undermines women’s right to equality. (Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling CV-21-659594)

In the country formerly known as the US, prostitution is legal in 10 of the 17 counties of Nevada and 7 of them have current active brothels in rural areas. It is not legal in Las Vegas. In 2019, trafficked women and girls, mostly from the Midwest, brought a case against the state of Nevada saying prostitution was slavery, a violation of the Thirteenth amendment and a violation of their civil rights under 42 USC 1983. The case was dismissed.

In Arizona we should all be familiar with the New Time Back Page fiasco and its ultimate result. The online brothel was so successful the founders let New Times go to keep their profitable Back Page. While that is now gone, Mind Geek/Pornhub has taken up that online prostitution slot. It too faces a barrage of legal actions around the globe by groups of survivors.

Facts the world over have shown that the Equality Model is far superior to any other method of dealing with prostitution. It is the best way to help women and to reduce prostitution. The belief that women are inferior to men and therefore can be treated as items in commerce both reflects and causes discrimination and violence. The lack of options for women is caused by patriarchal, racial, class, and nationalistic hierarchies – the very structures that must be abolished not fortified by legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution.