PRESS STATEMENT ON PROSTITUTION, 3 August 2001

Legalising Prostitution Promotes Abuse of Women

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Christians for Truth

We agree with Judge Spoelstra when he said that he is at a loss to understand why only the prostitute is guilty of a crime "whilst the party paying for the services is not". The logical answer is to expand the law to punish those who abuse women by paying them for sex. Prostitution is there because of immoral men who are willing to fork out money (which they should be using to support their families) to pay for the use of a woman's body. The prostitution trade in South Africa won't be well served by decriminalisation. Instead we need more stringent laws to clamp down on those who abuse women. The latest scientific research is generally against the legalisation of prostitution since there are a number of problems associated with the trade:

• public nuisance - from street prostitutes who accost passing men, and "gutter crawlers" who accost passing women, and are noisy and abusive;
• the spread of sexually transmitted diseases to prostitutes, clients and their partners;
• serious depression and drug addiction in prostitutes;
• violence by customers and boyfriends (actually pimps) of prostitutes;
• child sexual abuse (a significant percentage of customers prefer very young prostitutes);
• other crimes such as trafficking in drugs, weapons and stolen goods, often conducted as a sideline by groups who dominate the closely-linked sex and drug trades.

For an academic study "COMMENTS ON CURRENT MOVES TO LEGALISE THE PROSTITUTION TRADE", published 4 July 2001, download or read it on the CFT website (under Articles) : www.cft.org.za  Christians for Truth, an association of about 100,000 members from various denominations, seeks to uphold Christian norms and values. For more information on the Pretoria High Court ruling on 2 August 2001, see http://www.sabcnews.co.za/SABCnews/south_africa/general/0,1009,18721,00.html