Democracy is subverted. Women's bodies and emotions must belong to them alone. They must not be traded or sold. The sex industry targets and consumes young women, usually under age 25, often girls in their teens. If a state permits prostitution to flourish, a certain portion of each generation of young women will be lost.
Prostitution causes extreme harm to the body and the mind.
Women who survive the beatings, rapes, sexually transmitted diseases, drugs, alcohol, and emotional abuse, emerge from prostitution ill, traumatized, and often almost as poor as when they entered. The enormity of the sex trade throughout the world is overwhelming, but the only way to proceed is to acknowledge the violence and exploitation for what it is and create remedies accordingly. Legalization will only benefit traffickers and pimps and compromise individual women and the status of women in the long run. Donna M. Hughes is the Education and Research Coordinator of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, an international nongovernmental organization that has drafted a new United Nations Convention Against Sexual Exploitation. She holds the Eleanor Carlson Chair in Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island.