MOTERIS Blogpost
While it would hardly come as a surprise that women experience astonishing amounts of sexual violence in public spaces, states tend to minimise how much that acts as a deterrent to venture out.
Findings show that one in three women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence during adulthood. As a direct consequence of this treatment, 37% women deliberately avoid ‘risky’ situations, and a whopping 83% of young women limit where they go as a protective step. These surveys also point out that under-reporting is a major barrier with only one in eight women reporting crimes.
When we see the phrase ‘shrinking civic space’, we associate it with media censorship, surveillance of journalists or political dissenters, and barriers to freedom of assembly. We limit it to the state’s curtailment of civil society ‘bad’ actors. For women as a political class, civic space contracts in a distinct and material manner. It manifests physically and structurally. The restriction of women’s civic space arises in liberal democracies when state policy institutionalises systems that commodify women. One such mechanism is the legalisation of pimping of women.
Visible, but only as Sex Objects
A number of European states have legalised pimping and the commercial sale of women. Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands regulate the sexual exploitation of women as a legitimate market activity. Belgium has entrenched this model further.
In Belgium, pimping is unlawful only where “abnormal” profit is made, yet the law does not define what constitutes abnormal profit. The result is broad legal protection for those who profit from the sale of women. Under the Belgian framework, a woman in prostitution who refuses sexual acts ten times within six months may be brought before a tribunal by her pimp, legally recognised as an employer, with mediation involving the King’s Counsel. When refusal of sexual access results in legal proceedings, the law enforces sexual compliance. This is state-sanctioned sexual coercion of women.
Consider a woman Member of the European Parliament working in Brussels. The legal order of the state in which she operates permits men to purchase sexual access to women. A male colleague may leave a brothel and return to a legislative chamber. The law has affirmed that women’s bodies are purchasable. That affirmation enters the political atmosphere.
“Prostitution is the foundation of male dominance. It is the template for how men see women.”
— Andrea Dworkin
Where pimping is lawful, that template is endorsed by the state. Legalised pimping operates as a public affirmation of male sexual dominance. It communicates who buys and who is bought, who pays and who is paid for, and sets the terms under which women appear in public life.
History Repeats Itself
Slavery was formally abolished, but not for women. Legalised pimping preserves a central feature of slavery: the legitimised control of one human being’s body by another in exchange for payment. Brothel windows and regulated commercial premises function as visible confirmations of hierarchy.
It is therefore unsurprising that the feminist movements in countries that legalised pimping have been considerably weakened, and feminist groups opposing prostitution have been marginalised. Organisations advocating for abolition receive little to no state support. Instead, abolitionist feminists are routinely branded as moralistic, regressive, authoritarian, far-right and SWERFs. They encounter institutional barriers, reputational attacks and financial exclusion.
This exclusion is also perpetuated through private funding structures. From the Open Society Foundations to the Gates and Ford Foundations, major philanthropic actors have invested heavily in recent decades in the normalisation of the sale of women. Large international non-women’s rights organisations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation( IPPF), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Médecins du Monde, as well as large LGBT groups such as ILGA-Europe and Transgender Europe (TGEU), advocate the normalisation of pimping. A legal challenge requesting to annul the new pimping law pending before the Belgian Supreme Court illustrates the imbalance: nine feminist organisations stand on one side demanding the law to be scrapped, the Belgian state and large corporate non-feminist NGOs stand on the other, defending the law.
How Do We Move Ahead?
Meaningful discussion of women’s equal participation in civic life cannot proceed while the sale of women remains lawful. As long as men are permitted to purchase sexual access to women, the premise of equal civic standing is structurally undermined. Prostitution, as one of the oldest forms of oppression of women, will not disappear instantly through the criminalisation of buyers, yet criminalising sexual purchase is the necessary condition for dismantling the system. Enslaved persons did not campaign to improve the organisation of slavery; they demanded abolition so that those enslaved would acquire equal legal standing. The same applies here: the system of prostitution must be abolished as a prerequisite for women’s equal civic participation.
This principle is already entrenched in international human rights law: the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against women (CEDAW) defines women’s human rights – all of them listed in the convention – as indivisible. It treats exploitation of prostitution as violation of rights under Article 6, and women’s civic and political participation as essential rights under Articles 7 and 8. Separating these articles means cherry picking women’s rights at best, and dismantling the convention at worst. The European Court of Human Rights too has recently affirmed that the Abolitionist model on prostitution fully complies with human rights law.
While most EU states are dragging their feet to implement what’s best for women and girls and abolish the system of prostitution, feminists will continue organising across borders despite limited resources and ongoing political hostility. They will continue supporting women seeking to exit prostitution and running awareness-raising campaigns. They will continue building networks, documenting abuse, exposing facts, and advocating legislative changes for women’s substantive – not nominal – equality and rights. The MOTERIS project is part of this European feminist effort and we are far from being alone.
MOTERIS is coordinated by the Swedish Women’s Lobby, in close partnership with the European Network of Migrant Women, the Hungarian Women’s Lobby, the Coordination Française pour le Lobby Européen des Femmes (CLEF), and the Lithuanian Women’s Lobby.
MOTERIS is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.