Rhode Island Bans Indoor Prostitution

The end has finally come to a long and often malicious battle in Rhode Island over a 30-year-old legal loophole which allowed indoor prostitution to legally occur. Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri signed the bill into law today, and it is effective immediately. The debate which took place around this bill and the Rhode Island prostitution law ended up being about far more than just legalese and statutory distinctions. It encompassed the growing debate about the relationship between human trafficking and prostitution.

To say the personal attacks that have been broadcast through the blogosphere during this debate escalated to vicious is like saying people had strong feelings about Obama's election. Both the pro-legalizing indoor prostitution camps and the pro-making indoor prostitution illegal camps did their fair share of demonizing the other side. Those who fought to keep the loophole in the law were accused of being unsympathetic to human trafficking victims, shells for the commercial sex industry, and anti-feminist. Those who fought to close the loophole were called autocratic moralists, Bush administration cronies, and anti-feminists. If you listen to the rhetoric that went on, is sounds like the biggest group of misogynists to ever fight for the rights and welfare of women. At one point I was called an "intellectual malcontent," which I believe was intended as an insult, but which I consider somewhat of a compliment (I strive to be intellectual and I'm am certainly not content with the prevalence of human trafficking and sexual violence against women in the world). But the mud-slinging was more than just meanness, it was symptomatic of how long before today, this debate stopped being about Rhode Island and its residents, and started being about polarizing and conflicted ideologies on how best to protect women.

I've made no secret that I believe that human trafficking thrives in areas with legal and heavily tolerated commercial sex markets, nor that many, many women enter into prostitution as children, due to coercion, or because of a lack of other options. So it won't come as a surprise that I support Gov. Carcieri's signing the bill into law, and that I anticipate it will help protect women and children from exploitation. But it would be naive to think the broader debate is over now that the Rhode Island question is settled. And it would be negligent to think that the next debate should also devolve into the level of petty name-calling and unreasonable accusations that this one did. These questions are not going away of their own accord, and all of us who care about women -- women in prostitution, women who are victims of trafficking, women in need of economic options -- owe it to them to not lose sight of our common goals in the darkness of our differences.

So please, see this message as an open invitation to anyone who was dissapointed by the Rhode Island decision and wants to have a respectful discussion about the relationship between human trafficking and prostitution and how that affects or should affect legislation. Let's do something truly radical to change the world together: let's listen to each other. Let's listen and learn how we can be better advocates, and how we can create better policies. We cannot hide from each other any more than the women we try and help can hide from violent pimps or violent police men or violent clients or the violence of poverty. And we cannot afford to lose ourselves in petty insults when there is so much work still to be done.

This blog will always be a space where people can respectfully discuss these important issues, even when we disagree. All I ask is a willingness to listen.

Photo credit: keepwaddling1