As in most service jobs, the women working in Nevada’s brothels endure better and worse bosses, good and bad customers, and selling sexual services is not for everyone. But the thirty-eight women we interviewed in one multiyear study told us these jobs had far more advantages than their previous straight jobs in restaurants, office management, or medical services. One woman came to the brothels to pay for medicine for her autistic child; another was the first in her family to own a house. One third of the women we interviewed had previously sold sex in underground markets, and they found Nevada’s system to be a far safer option, and were happy to have the police on their side. One woman told us she was able to leave an abusive pimp thanks to the legal brothels. [...]
Peer-reviewed research certainly does not find that all prostitution is “empowering.” But the overwhelming body of global evidence shows that workers are better protected from exploitation and trafficking in systems, like Nevada’s, where prostitution is decriminalized and/or regulated. Health professionals in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet and organizations including Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization have recommended decriminalization. A wide range of scholars, sex workers, and politicians in Bindel’s home country also support decriminalization, including the Liberal Democrats (a mainstream political party) and a parliamentary report co-authored with the English Collective of Prostitutes. In New Zealand, where prostitution is not a crime and brothels are regulated, bad behavior by brothel owners is subject to disciplinary action, and one brothel worker won a sexual harassment case against her employer. [...]
The only way that the women in Nevada brothels are safer is that they are not arrested by law enforcement for prostitution. That is a good thing. Brents dismisses Farley’s study as self-published, but her survey, which involved interviewing forty-five women, remains one of the largest surveys to date of Nevada’s legal brothels. Farley found that 81 percent of the women interviewed said they wanted to escape prostitution but could not, often because of poverty or homelessness (almost half reported having been homeless); nearly a quarter had entered prostitution as children. [...]
Brents’s insistence upon the prevalence of condom use is also misleading. In Nevada, and everywhere else, men who buy sex pay extra for sex acts without a condom. Several Canadian studies found that about 50 percent of all sex buyers report non-condom use with women in prostitution, endangering the women’s health. Women from the Lyon County brothels reported that it is common to agree not to use a condom in exchange for a generous tip, according to Melissa Holland of Awaken in Reno, an agency that offers services to women exiting and thinking about exiting prostitution. The State Department of Public Health may never see a positive test for a sexually-transmitted disease, since the brothels can use private labs for testing and are essentially on an “honors system” to let the licensing boards know if they have prostituted women who have tested positive.
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