The International Journal of Human Rights

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjhr20

Making the connections: resource extraction,

prostitution, poverty, climate change, and human
rights

Melissa Farley

To cite this article: Melissa Farley (2021): Making the connections: resource extraction,
prostitution, poverty, climate change, and human rights, The International Journal of Human Rights,
DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2021.1997999

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2021.1997999

Published online: 16 Nov 2021.

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2021.1997999

Making the connections: resource extraction, prostitution,

poverty, climate change, and human rights
Melissa Farley
Prostitution Research & Education, San Francisco, CA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article describes the connections between resource extraction, Received 30 January 2020
prostitution, poverty, and climate change. Although resource Accepted 22 October 2021
extraction and prostitution have been viewed as separate
KEYWORDS
phenomena, this article suggests that they are related harms that Prostitution; trafficking;
result in multiple violations of women’s human rights. The resource extraction; human
businesses of resource extraction and prostitution adversely rights; sex work; climate
impact women’s lives, especially those who are poor, ethnically or change
racially marginalised, and young. The article clarifies associations
between prostitution and climate change on the one hand, and
poverty, choicelessness, and the appearance of consent on the
other. We discuss human rights conventions that are relevant to
mitigation of the harms caused by extreme poverty,
homelessness, resource extraction, climate change, and
prostitution. These include anti-slavery conventions and women’s
sex-based rights conventions.

In this article we offer some conceptual and empirical connections between prostitution,
resource extraction, poverty, and climate change.1 These associations are clarified by
Seiya Morita’s visual diagram, in Figure 1.2 In the short term, resource extraction leads
to a sudden increase in the sex trade, as shown by the arrow on the left side of the
diagram. In the long term, resource extraction causes climate change as indicated by
the right arrow. Climate change then leads to crises in peoples’ ability to survive
extreme events such as drought, floods, or agricultural collapse. These climate change

Figure 1. Links between resource extraction, prostitution, poverty, and climate change.

CONTACT Melissa Farley mfarley@prostitutionresearch.com Prostitution Research & Education, PO Box 16254,
San Francisco, CA 94116-0254, USA
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. FARLEY

catastrophes result in poverty which then mediates and channels women into the sex
trade. The arrow on the bottom of Figure 1 illustrates this process.

The initial phase of resource extraction launches and expands

prostitution
At first, colonists and their descendants subordinate indigenous people who live on lands
rich in natural resources. Historically, extraction industries have exploited young, poor
men who are paid well to perform jobs that no one else wants because the jobs are unplea-
sant and dangerous. This initial phase of resource extraction temporarily results in a boom
economy with cash-rich but lonely working-class men. In order to pacify the workers and
enrich the pimps, women and girls who are under pimp control are delivered to workers in
these boom/sacrifice zones such as the Bakken oil fields in USA and Canada, gold mines in
South Africa, coltan mining regions in Colombia, and logging regions in Brazil.3 This
movement of trafficked women increases prostitution both in the boom town and in neigh-
bouring communities. Following is an example of this process.
The Bakken oil fields of Montana/North Dakota/Saskatchewan/Manitoba are located
in lands where the Dakota Access Pipeline causes physical, psychological, and cultural
damage to the community, and ecocidal harm to the land and the water.4 In 2008,
large numbers of pipeline workers moved into the Bakken region’s barracks-style
housing which were named man camps. Sexual assaults, domestic violence, and sex
trafficking tripled in communities adjacent to the oilfield sacrifice zones,5 with especially
high rates of sexual violence toward Native women.6 Adverse consequences of living near
extractive projects include increased rates of sexually transmitted infections and still-
births; general deterioration in health; ecological degradation and climate change;
threats to food security; and political corruption – all of which severely impact women.7
When resource extraction is terminated, for example when coltan mining was halted
in Congo because of environmental protests, the newly expanding sex trade remains in
operation, an enduring legacy of colonisation. Belgium’s domination of Congo gradually
shifted from state to corporate colonisation.8 The Belgian colonists’ commodification of
the nation diminished the people’s social and political power, leaving them poorer, with
fewer resources, and often desperate for a means of survival even before the later phase of
climate change occurred. This sequence happens wherever resources are commodified.
Initially, a boom economy based on resource extraction creates short-term job opportu-
nities and wealth previously unknown. Prostitution is established both to pacify the
workers and to generate money for pimps and traffickers. When the boom economy
goes bust, men’s continued demand for paid sexual access, combined with women’s
need for survival – drive the institution of prostitution, which remains even after the
extraction industry has ended.

Pervasive ecological damage, climate change, poverty, and entrenched

prostitution become evident in the second phase of harms resulting from
resource extraction
Ecological disruption and destruction are paralleled by social disruption and destruc-
tion.9 Entire social systems are harmed, leading to high rates of childhood sexual
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 3

abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and other indicators of damage to individuals and
cultures.10 The long-term impact of colonial resource extraction is evident in Zambia.
The British mining of copper and aluminum poisoned the land and destroyed traditional
agricultural practices. After the colonists abandoned Zambia, illegal mining continued
along with massive environmental degradation, government corruption and human
rights violations.11 Widespread poverty resulted from an exceptionally high rate of
unemployment, with Zambian men selling pencils and washing car windshields.12
When sexism was combined with postcolonial racism and poverty, women were com-
pelled into prostitution. Women farmers in Zambia have turned to prostitution to
survive drought.13 In order to feed her children, a Zambian woman calculated that she
had to perform five blowjobs which would cover the cost of a bag of meal. Despite her
poverty and her children’s hunger, she described herself as a ‘voluntary sex worker’,
using the words she had been taught by sex trade apologists.14 She redefined herself as
a commodity who could sell herself to feed her children.
Environmental damage especially harms indigenous communities and communities
of colour. People who are poor, unstably housed, or who live in dangerous neighbour-
hoods, those without healthcare or sufficient food – are in the greatest danger when
environmental disasters strike.15 Flooding had a more severe impact on the Yankton
Sioux in South Dakota than on communities with more resources.16 In low-income
neighbourhoods after the Houston floods, houses filled not only with water but with
heavy chemicals – a legacy of environmental racism that permitted the existence of
toxic industries in neighbourhoods of people of colour and the poor. Corrupt ‘fixes’ to
industrial pollution like the lethal contamination of Flint, Michigan’s water supply, are
another example of government-perpetrated environmental racism.17
Climate warming causes food and water shortages which are linked to prostitution. In
many countries, women assume primary responsibility for gathering water, food, and
fuel for their households. Climate change–induced droughts make these tasks more
difficult as water becomes less accessible and agricultural production decreases. As
women face greater challenges in gathering water, their risk of rape is increased
because of the increased distances they must travel.18 Young women in Ethiopia and
Bangladesh have reported that climate change has increased sexual violence (including
forced marriages and prostitution) in the following way: in droughts, girls’ task of collect-
ing water in a 30 – gallon jug might take up to six hours a day whereas previously it took
only two hours. Because they were exhausted following this strenuous water collection,
girls found it difficult to concentrate on their schoolwork. Education is a major deterrent
to girls’ entry into prostitution. The increased sexual violence and its psychological after-
math contribute to girls’ inability to resist the sex trade.
The links between climate change and prostitution were apparent in the Indian state of
Andhra Pradesh in 2015. A temperature of 123 degrees Fahrenheit was caused by climate
change. A single mother with three children explained that extreme poverty caused her to
enter prostitution, which she loathed. Her husband had deserted the family after the
drought financially ruined them.
There had been no rain for years, and no work. My friend said how long will you live
without work. He said he has a job that can ensure a good future for my children. So I
took up the job of a sex worker. I had no other option. Many times clients would beat
4 M. FARLEY

me, force me to drink alcohol and travel to different cities along with them. But I have to
tolerate everything.19

The increasing frequency of ecosystem damage destabilises nations and entire regions,
leading to large-scale involuntary migration, civil and cross-border conflict, and the col-
lapse of social and economic systems. Ecosystem destruction in Thailand, for example,
has been linked to trafficking. Corporations who obtain Thai land for industrial
shrimp farms have displaced indigenous people from their homelands, causing defores-
tation, flooding, and a lack of local food. Because of the corporate emphasis on monocul-
ture, indigenous Thai people were fined if they grew fruit trees for their families.20
Prostitution, trafficking, and other human rights violations increase as climate refugees
are impoverished, displaced, and as they migrate.21

Climate refugees and human rights

It has been predicted that by 2050, there will be one billion environmental migrants who
seek to escape droughts, fires, desertification/dust storms, crop failure, sea-level rise, hur-
ricanes, and floods.22 These climate crises affect peoples’ ability to survive, increasing
women’s vulnerability to sexual assault and sexual coercion including prostitution.
Climate change is a threat to the right to life and the right to health.23 The 2008 UN
Human Rights Council resolution stated, ‘climate change poses an immediate and far-
reaching threat to people and communities around the world and has implications for
the full enjoyment of human rights’.24 Since 2008, the UN Human Rights Council has
passed seven additional resolutions which describe the ways that climate change threa-
tens human existence.25 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes negative
impacts of climate change on social justice26 which include the right to a standard of
living that includes food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services.27
Climate change exacerbates existing social vulnerabilities, thus the rights of certain
groups are disproportionately threatened, for example the poor, the unhoused, people
with race/ethnic or religious minority status, female, young age or old age, and those
with various diseases and disabilities.28 These are the same people who are also dispro-
portionately at risk for prostitution.
A ‘healthy environment’ is considered to be essential for enjoying the right to life and
the right to health.29 Both the natural and human-created environments, ‘are essential to
… the enjoyment of basic human rights – even the right to life itself’.30 Health problems
resulting from climate change include heat-related disorders, vector-borne diseases,
foodborne and waterborne diseases, respiratory and allergic disorders, malnutrition, col-
lective violence, and mental health problems.31 According to the 1966 International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), some people cannot
threaten other peoples’ health or their right to life.32 Both the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR) affirm the human right to food.33 The ICESCR asserts ‘the right of
everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family’ and ‘the fundamen-
tal right of everyone to be free from hunger’.34 Yet resource extraction and climate
change reduce water supply and edible crop production, limiting access to food.
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 5

There are inequalities in peoples’ ability to adapt to climate change. The more exten-
sive the previous violations of peoples’ rights, the less able they are to adapt to climate
change.35 Bishop Desmond Tutu referred to this as adaptation apartheid whereby the
world’s poor are left to sink or swim with dangerously limited resources in the face of
life-threatening climate changes while for example, elite Swiss ski businesses adapt to
climate warming by investing in artificial snowmaking machines.36 Climate gentrification
occurs in cities or regions when the wealthy flee unsafe or flooded or heated locations and
seek safe housing in others’ neighbourhoods, driving up prices that become unaffordable
to working class or poor people.37
Poverty is a universal consequence of climate change and a universal antecedent of
prostitution. Understanding what it’s like to be anxious about access to food and
shelter is key to understanding the extreme risks taken by women overtaken by
climate crises and women in prostitution Noting that the poor and disempowered are
likely to engage in what they name desperation exchanges, Radin and Sunder point out
that ‘ … it is unacceptable for society to embrace commodification of aspects of the
self when it is in practice the only avenue of survival for the powerless’.38 Because of
extreme poverty, desperation exchanges occur in which sexual exploitation is tolerated
in exchange for food or shelter. Evidence exists for the severe harms resulting from
these survival transactions: for example, the greater the poverty of women in Dutch pros-
titution, the more likely they are to tolerate violent abuse in prostitution.39
The European Court of Human Rights acknowledged that extreme poverty and cor-
responding lack of dignity are human rights violations, citing the case of a male migrant
who had been homeless for several months, ‘with no resources or access to sanitary facili-
ties, and without any means of providing for his essential needs’, also noting that he had
been a ‘victim of humiliating treatment showing a lack of respect for his dignity’, and
observing that he was undoubtedly subject to ‘fear, anguish or inferiority capable of indu-
cing desperation’.40 The European Social Charter ESC(r) noted that states are required to
take measures to protect vulnerable persons from homelessness. The Social Charter ruled
that the right to shelter is to be granted to all migrants, regardless of their legal status.41
These minimum standards have not been applied to prostituted women, most of whom
are poor, homeless, and are often migrants.42
Rao and Min proposed material requirements that are essential for what they refer to
as decent living standards (DLS), ‘ … a set of material conditions that people everywhere
ought to have, no matter what their intentions or conception of a good life, or what other
rights they may claim’. These conditions include food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare.43
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) similarly
embraces a broad view of living standards including the human right to ‘adequate food,
clothing and housing’.44 Many women explain their prostitution as resulting from a need
to provide for their children. Climate crises jeopardise women’s ability to feed their chil-
dren. For example, after decades of drought and civil war, Guatemalan families migrate
north and along with millions of other displaced climate refugees, they seek safe reloca-
tion.45 Unfortunately the 1951 Refugee Convention which defines the rights of displaced
people, does not yet include climate change in a list of phenomena that people must be
fleeing from in order to be granted asylum.46 Because of this lack of recognition, climate
refugees are often criminalised as illegal immigrants. The refusal of governments to
address global displacement was characterised in 2021 as an ‘epic failure of humanity’
6 M. FARLEY

by the Norwegian Refugee Council.47 The International Refugee Assistance Project

(IRAP) recommended in 2021 that the United States recognise climate change as
grounds for refugee status. The IRAP further recommended that Temporary Protected
Status be granted to those affected by ‘slow-moving disasters’, in for example, Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.48

Links between poverty, homelessness, and prostitution

In a large research sample spanning five continents, a 75% co-occurrence of homeless-
ness and prostitution has been documented.49 Nonetheless, the human right to shelter
has rarely been provided to women who are coerced into prostitution by poverty and
a lack of alternatives. In prostitution, one person has the economic, social, and legal
power to hire another person to act like a sexualised puppet. During economic crises,
women in prostitution are coerced into taking even more risks than usual, such as agree-
ing to sex without condoms or masks. Knowing they were risking their lives, many
women prostituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Poverty will kill us before the cor-
onavirus’, said an Indian woman in prostitution.50 A woman in USA explained, ‘You
might survive the virus, but you won’t survive not eating for two months’.51 Taking
nightmarish risks in order to feed their families, prostituting women in Cameroon soli-
cited sex buyers in hotels that were being used to isolate European men who reported
symptoms of coronavirus.52
Poverty researchers and governments have not yet defined coerced sex resulting from
material scarcity as a violation of women’s human rights. Until we better understand
poverty, there will be an inevitable failure to understand what leads women ‘to take an
active part in exposing themselves to the violation of their basic human rights’, as in
poverty-generated prostitution which includes displaced women who cross borders
because of climate change.53 Poverty-based prostitution has been described as excluded
citizenship in which women are not entitled to public supports and must obtain survival
needs via tolerating coerced sex or prostitution.54 The myth of freely chosen prostitution
allows even human rights advocates to dismiss the poverty-driven need for food and
shelter that results in women’s prostitution. Prostitution has even been framed as an
institution that benefits poor or unhoused women, rather than one that harms them.55
When there is a failure to understand a person’s lack of choice, the poor have been
blamed for not attending good schools, climate migrants have been branded as criminals,
slaves have been blamed for their own enslavement, Jews have been blamed for not escap-
ing Nazi death camps, and women in prostitution have been blamed for what appears to
be the choice to prostitute.56
Davidson observed that only a ‘tiny minority of individuals’ freely choose prostitution
because of the ‘intrinsic qualities of sex work’.57 Several research studies found that 89–
90% of people in prostitution said that they were in prostitution because they had no
alternatives for economic survival or they saw no means of escape.58 The International
Labor Organization noted that in Indonesia 96% of their interviewees wanted to
escape prostitution.59 Despite the fact that prostitution is ‘the choice made by those
who have no choice’,60 there is the appearance of consent. Yet the conditions that
make genuine consent possible are not present in prostitution: physical safety, equal
power with sex buyers, and real alternatives. A woman in a Nevada legal brothel
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 7

explained, ‘no one really enjoys being sold. It’s like you sign a contract to be raped’.61 A
man who was interviewed for a research study on prostitution explained,
On the face of it, the prostitute is agreeing to it. But deeper down, you can see that life cir-
cumstances have kind of forced her into that … It’s like someone jumping from a burning
building--you could say they made their choice to jump, but you could also say they had no
choice.62

The notion that prostitution is a job choice may originate in colonial economic ideology
that promotes unregulated markets via the commodification of land, water, peoples’ bodies
and generally, by ‘creating new commodity markets where there were none previously’.63
The attitude of entitlement to buy sex and to commit acts of aggression against women in
prostitution, is much like the commodifying entitlement of men who build dams that cause
fish extinctions, who hunt elephants for trophies, or who burn Brazilian rain forests for
agricultural development. ‘I use them like I might use any other amenity, a restaurant, or
a public convenience’.64 A Scottish sex buyer explained, ‘Prostitution is where men have
the freedom to do anything they want in a consequence-free environment’.65
Choicelessness links homelessness, poverty, and prostitution. Prostitution occurs
because the person who is paid for would not agree to perform sex unless the sex
buyer paid for it.66 Understanding that desperate people consent to grievous harms,
the 2000 (Palermo) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons
Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention
against Transnational Organized Crime, noted that consent is irrelevant to whether or
not trafficking has occurred.67 Like the ‘consent’ to prostitution, the ‘consent’ to
migrate in order to escape life-threatening consequences of climate change cannot be
considered to be a real choice in that viable alternatives for survival are not accessible.
The critical question is not ‘did she consent to prostitution?’ or ‘did she consent to
migrate?’ but instead, ‘has she been offered alternatives to survival without prostituting
or migrating?’

The Palermo Protocol, CEDAW, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

and anti-slavery conventions are relevant to understanding and
mitigating links between prostitution, poverty and climate change
The Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was
adopted by the United Nations in 1979. A number of CEDAW recommendations address
prostitution and other forms of violence against women.68 In General Recommendation
Number 19, the CEDAW committee warned of traditional attitudes by which women are
regarded as subordinate to men or as having stereotyped roles, including ‘commercial
exploitation of women as sexual objects … [which] in turn contributes to gender-based
violence’. Therefore, state parties are required to take measures to suppress the ‘exploita-
tion of the prostitution of women’. CEDAW General Recommendation Number 19
specifically noted that ‘[p]overty and unemployment force many women, including
young girls, into prostitution’.69
US Congresswoman Barbara Lee also recognised that climate change is one of the root
factors that pushes women into prostitution. Lee’s House Resolution noted that as a
result of climate change, poor women are at risk for prostitution in order to survive:
8 M. FARLEY

… food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situ-
ations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for
HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.70

Increasingly, CEDAW has linked prostitution, poverty, and climate change. General
Recommendation Number 37 reviewed general principles of CEDAW that are applicable
to disaster risk reduction and climate change, specifically noting that women in prostitu-
tion are among the most marginalised groups of women and girls.71 CEDAW declared
that women in prostitution and women who are trafficked are especially vulnerable to
exploitation during disasters, which are increasingly a result of climate change: ‘Domestic
violence, early and/or forced marriage, human trafficking and forced prostitution are also
more likely to occur during and following disasters’.72 Forced prostitution is sex traffick-
ing. More than 80% of the time, adult women in prostitution are under pimp control
which is the same as being under the control of traffickers.73 Forced prostitution and
sex trafficking are pimping. Pimps and traffickers are thugs/criminals who keep
women under their control (in order to profit by selling the women for sex) by any
means including physical control, physical threat, mental control, mental threat, and
threats against loved ones.
The human rights violations of pimp-controlled prostitution are paralleled by the human
rights violations of slavery. The hallmark of slavery and most prostitution is that the
enslaved or prostituted are subject to domination and to the arbitrary will of another
person whether that person is the slave buyer or slave-seller, sex buyer or pimp/
trafficker.74 Slavery is characterised by control of movement, control of the physical
environment, psychological control, measures taken to prevent or deter escape, force,
threat of force or coercion, assertion of exclusivity, subjection to cruel treatment and
abuse, control of sexuality, and forced labour.75 All of these characteristics apply to
pimp-controlled prostitution. Pimp-controlled prostitution is a violation of the British
1927 Convention on Slavery, in which slavery is defined as ‘the status or condition of a
person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the rights of ownership are exer-
cised’.76 Section 270.1 of the Australian criminal code defines slavery as ‘the condition of a
person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised,
including where such a condition results from a debt or contract made by the person’.77
The lack of alternatives for survival is a crucial element of both slavery and prostitu-
tion. Enslavement occurs when victims believe they have no viable alternative but to
serve in the ways in which they are being forced.78 The US Thirteenth Amendment
defined slavery as ‘legal or physical force, used or threatened, to secure service, which
must be distinctly personal service … in which one person possesses virtually unlimited
authority over another’.79 Elements of coercion described in the Thirteenth Amendment
also exist in prostitution, for example being deprived of food, sleep, and money, being
beaten, being raped, tortured, and threatened with death.80 A Florida state law offers
civil remedies for damages inflicted by sex buyers and pimps against prostituted
women, specifically articulating Thirteenth Amendment vulnerabilities as they apply
to prostitution: cognitive impairment, poverty, being undocumented, not speaking the
dominant language. 81
US slave owners commodified the enslaved, attributing characteristics to Africans that
rationalised their treatment as nonhuman property. Racism and colonialism drove the
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 9

objectification and dehumanisation of enslaved Africans, just as sexism and racism drive
the objectification, dehumanisation, and fetishisation of women in prostitution.82 A
woman who had been prostituted in Canada for 19 years explained: ‘they own you for
that half hour or that twenty minutes or that hour. They are buying you. They have
no attachments, you’re not a person, you’re a thing to be used’.83 The unreasonably
high risks of physical assaults, rape, and death in prostitution are clearly threats to life
as described in Article 3 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.84
Women in prostitution are murdered at a higher rate than any other group of women
ever studied.85 A Canadian commission found that the death rate of women in prostitu-
tion was forty times higher than that of the general population.86 A study of Canadian
prostitution reported a 36% incidence of attempted murder.87 A US study found that
the homicide rate of women in prostitution was eighteen times that of the general popu-
lation.88 Another study found that 2.7% of all female homicide victims in the United
States from 1982 to 2000 were prostituted women.89 The homicide rate for female pros-
titutes (204 per 100,000) is much higher than for male taxicab drivers (29 per 100,000)
who are considered to be at high risk.90 A review of homicides of women in UK street
prostitution found that they were 60–100 times more likely to be murdered than
women who were not prostituting.91 Some women ranked COVID-19 lower on the
list of dangers than the ever-present violence of prostitution. A woman prostituting in
Florida explained that she was ‘always worried about “serial rapists and killers” but
she was not so concerned about being exposed to the virus.’92
The probability of physical assault violates prostituted women’s rights to physical
safety. ‘It’s like domestic violence taken to the extreme’, explained a survivor.93 An occu-
pational survey noted that 99% of women in prostitution were victims of violence, with
more frequent injuries ‘than workers in [those] occupations considered … most danger-
ous, like mining, forestry and fire fighting’.94 In a review of more than a thousand studies,
researchers found that the prevalence of any or combined violence in prostitution ranged
from 45% to 75%.95 A study of women prostituting in Scotland found that during a 6-
month period, 50% of prostituted women had experienced some form of violence (for
example being punched, kicked, or an attempted rape).96 Seventy percent of women
suffered rape in San Francisco prostitution.97 Eighty-five percent of prostituting
women in Minnesota had been raped in prostitution.98 Of 854 people in prostitution
in nine countries (Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand,
Turkey, United States, and Zambia) 71% had experienced physical assaults in prostitu-
tion and 62% had been raped in prostitution.99 A prostituting woman explained, ‘what
rape is to others is normal to us’.100
Because of its extremely high rates of rape, prostitution can be challenged as a viola-
tion of human rights conventions that assert women’s rights to be free from rape and
prostitution. Rape has been designated a crime against humanity by the International
Criminal Court.101 Article 2b of the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence
against Women targets ‘physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring within
the general community, including rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and intimida-
tion at work, in educational institutions and elsewhere, trafficking in women and
forced prostitution’.102 Prostitution is also a violation of the Istanbul Convention, a
human rights treaty of the Council of Europe that combats systemic practices of violence
against women and domestic violence.103 Article 6 of the Istanbul Convention notes the
10 M. FARLEY

necessity of affirmative consent to a sex act and declares that ‘consent must be given
voluntarily as the result of the person’s free will assessed in the context of the surrounding
circumstances’. The context of prostitution’s presumed consent usually includes poverty,
the presence of a pimp/trafficker, and the absence of alternatives.104
The lives of women in the sex trade are daily violations of their rights ‘to the enjoy-
ment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’ as articulated in
Article 12 of the 1966 ICESCR.105 In prostitution, the emotional assault on women
and on their sexuality is overwhelming. Survivors describe prostitution as a process
whereby they are turned into objects into which men masturbate, causing great psycho-
logical harm to the woman acting as receptacle.106 Over time, the constant humiliation
and degradation of prostitution result in a core sense of self-loathing in the person
who is paid for sex acts. These harms may become apparent only after exit or after an
extended period of time.
Racist and sexist hate speech, death threats, physical assaults and rapes result in a
severe burden of mental health harms to women in prostitution. These include anxiety
disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, dissociative disorders, eating dis-
orders, suicide attempts and successful suicides, alcohol and drug abuse. In multi-
country research, two-thirds of those in prostitution met criteria for a diagnosis of
PTSD,107 a prevalence that was comparable to battered women seeking shelter,108 and
rape survivors seeking treatment.109 Prostitution results in symptoms of PTSD that are
at the same level as those suffered by survivors of state-sponsored torture.110
There are many accounts of women’s torture under prostitution.111 Specific acts com-
monly perpetrated against prostituted women are the same acts that define torture:
forced nudity, sexual mocking, rape, verbal sexual harassment, physical sexual harass-
ment, and not permitting basic hygiene. Most of the psychological, sexual, and physical
coercion used by pimps meet legal definitions of torture.112 International conventions
opposing torture are applicable to the human rights violations of prostitution. The
United Nations Convention Against Torture defines it as
any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as punishing him … Or intimidating or coercing
him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind.113

A girl in USA described pimps’ torture methods:

When a pimp says he’s going to torture you, what I’ve seen is girls in dog cages, girls being
waterboarded, stripped down naked and put in the rain and cold outside and having to stand
there all night, and if you move, you’ll get beaten. I’ve seen girls get hit by cars and stunned
with stun guns … I’ve seen girls burned and strangled.114

The social tolerance for and denial of torture in prostitution violate standards for the
human right to avoid ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ as described in the Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights.115

The right to information about human rights in the digital age

In the digital age, access to information – facts and evidence about resource extraction,
climate change, prostitution, and human rights – is now recognised as a human right.
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 11

The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (Principle 10) formulated pro-
cedural rights to participate in decision-making about environmental justice. Since
awareness of human rights violations usually precedes a demand for protection, accu-
rate information is essential to asserting human rights.116 Inaccurate and deliberately
misleading information about climate science and prostitution harms have confused
people.117 For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1990) pro-
duced an early report on risks. Although the oil company Exxon was aware of these
severe climate change risks as early as 1968,118 Exxon and other Big Oil lobbyists
created the deceptively named Global Climate Coalition for the purpose of raising
doubts about climate heating so that resource extraction could continue uninterrupted.
Advocating legal prostitution, the Open Society Foundation (OSF) supports efforts to
integrate prostitution (‘the sex sector)’ into countries’ job markets.119 OSF produces
campaigns that function much like Big Oil’s climate change denial crusades. In what
Hedges described as a ‘triumph of misogyny’, OSF funding recipient Amnesty Inter-
national successfully campaigned for men’s rights to buy sex and pimp women in
prostitution.120
There is discord between those in the climate justice movement who demand an
immediate ban on fracking on the one hand, and those who claim to have compro-
mised with oil extraction businesses to mitigate environmental damage. A similar dis-
agreement exists between those who support a harm reduction or regulationist
approach to prostitution and those who prefer a harm elimination or abolitionist
approach. Some argue that harm reduction is sufficient and that we don’t need
harm elimination. Extraction industries allege that fracking for gas and deepwater
drilling for oil can be made safe ‘if regulated’. Despite spill after spill, they steadfastly
maintain they can fix the pipes. Prostitution harm-denialists and sex trade advocates
also claim that prostitution can be made safe ‘if legalised and regulated’. But there is
little evidence to support this allegation, and much evidence to the contrary. See
Appendix A.
Confusion exists about the overlap between prostitution and trafficking. Some place
all prostitution under the ‘trafficking’ umbrella and others place all trafficking under
the ‘prostitution’ umbrella. Neither perspective is entirely accurate. Complicating the
issue is the fact that some definitions of trafficking are unclear. For example, Rossler
and colleagues stated that very few of a Swiss research sample were ‘directly forced
into sex work’121 but went on to describe women in legal prostitution who had been
deceived about the nature of the work they were migrating for or who were subject to
debt bondage. Fraud, deception, and debt bondage are included under most legal
definitions of trafficking.
Trafficking is prevalent in all forms of prostitution. Noting the impossibility of separ-
ating prostitution from trafficking in the real world, the United Nations Special Rappor-
teur on the Human Rights Aspects of the Victims of Trafficking in Persons, Especially
Women and Children, observed that prostitution as it is practiced ‘usually satisfies the
legal elements for the definition of trafficking’.122 The evidence suggests that legal pros-
titution is associated with expansion of sex trafficking. Economists Cho, Dreher, and
Neumayer found that in 150 countries, trafficking increased when prostitution was
legal.123 Similar overlaps between legal prostitution and trafficking have been reported
in the European Union124 and in the United States.125
12 M. FARLEY

Concluding observations
Human rights are interdependent. Noting the connections between racial and climate
justice, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. dryly noted, ‘It is very nice to drink milk at
an unsegregated lunch counter – but not when there’s strontium 90 in it’.126 Awareness
of the connections between resource extraction, poverty, and prostitution may facilitate
the application of human rights laws and conventions to reduce those harms. Implemen-
tation of the human rights conventions discussed here could prevent further harms to
survivors of resource extraction projects, climate refugees, and prostituted women
who in some cases are the same person.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action is a comprehensive global policy
framework for women’s human rights. The Beijing Platform recommended taking
appropriate measures to: ‘ … address the root factors including external factors that
encourage trafficking in women and girls for prostitution and other forms of com-
mercialised sex, forced marriages and forced labour … ’127 Solutions that address
these root factors are programmes that help women avoid or escape prostitution
via provision of food, shelter, healthcare (including mental health care and peer
support), housing, and job training. Climate refugees are in need of similar pro-
grammes for survival. Moreover, the provision of survival needs to all humans
would begin the reduction of stratospheric economic, race, and sex inequality, includ-
ing the elimination of prostitution.
A coerced choice between poverty and prostitution should not be women’s only
alternatives. A forced choice between poverty and pollution should not be governments’
only options. During the carbon elimination transition and during the transition to abol-
ition of prostitution, redistribution of wealth is critical. Economies can and must be
transformed away from predatory colonial expansion in which everyone and every
part of nature is commodified. This is doable, as Sachs noted:
The world income [in 2019] is $90 trillion, more than $11,000 per person. Yet around a
billion people still live in abject poverty. With a transfer of just 1% of the income of the
rich countries to the poor countries, roughly $500 billion per year, we could end extreme
poverty.128

Increasingly, climate scholars are applying a feminist perspective to intersecting injus-

tices. Sultana observed that climate crises, economic recessions, rural-to-urban
migration, and pandemics – all compound existing patriarchal, classed, and racialised
violence.129 The business of sexual exploitation (prostitution, pornography, trafficking)
and the business of resource extraction (natural gas fracking, logging, fishing, mining)
are connected at the deepest level. Making the connections between how the earth and
women are treated, anthropologist Peggy Sanday compared 156 rape-free and rape-
prone cultures. In communities where women were free of rape, the land was free of
exploitation and destruction. And where there was environmental degradation, there
also were high levels of sexual violence.130 Sanday’s findings may be indicative of the
‘intangible cultural heritage’ which reflects a community’s values, identity, cultural
knowledge, attachments, and relationship to the earth.131
Indigenous analyses have integrated spiritual, cultural, political, and economic aware-
ness regarding these connections. ‘They treat Mother Earth like they treat women’, said
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 13

Lisa Brunner, White Earth Ojibwe Program Specialist for the National Indigenous
Women’s Resource Center,
They think they can own us, buy us, sell us, trade us, rent us, poison us, rape us, destroy us,
use us as entertainment and kill us. I’m happy to see that we are talking about the level of
violence that is occurring against Mother Earth because it equates to us. What happens to
her happens to us.132

Mi’kmaw grandmothers in 2021 resisted construction of a pipeline that would transport

liquefied gas across Canada to ports that would move it to Europe. They protested both
the environmental harms of the pipeline and also the ‘man-camps’ that have been con-
nected with increased violence against women. Because of the pipeline, the grandmothers
said, people would be ‘crying for their water and their lands and their mothers and their
sisters and their daughters’.133 Ongoing resistance to these multiple human rights viola-
tions is essential.

Notes
1. Prostitution is the sale of a sex act or the exchange of a sex act for food, shelter, drugs, cash,
or something of value. Trafficking is pimping or third-party control over another person.
Women are adult human females. Regarding the differences between sex and gender, see
Sara Dahlen, ‘De-sexing the Medical Record? An Examination of Sex Versus Gender Iden-
tity in the General Medical Council’s Trans Healthcare Ethical Advice’, The New Bioethics
26, no. 1 (2020): 38–52; Emma Hilton, Pam Thompson, Colin Wright, and David Curtis,
‘The Reality of Sex’, Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971–2021): 1–1; Angus Stevenson,
ed., Oxford dictionary of English (Oxford University Press, USA, 2010); Alice Sullivan,
‘Sex and the Census: Why Surveys Should Not Conflate Sex and Gender Identity’, Inter-
national Journal of Social Research Methodology 23, no. 5 (2020): 517–24. In this article,
we use the term ‘women in prostitution’ to include any adult in prostitution, simply
because the vast majority of people in prostitution are women.
2. Seiya Morita’s most recent book is Marxism, Feminism, Sex Work (Tokyo: Keio University
Press 2021).
3. Jon L. Anderson, ‘Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest’, New Yorker, November 11, 2019,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/blood-gold-in-the-brazilian-rain-forest;
Bnamericas, ‘Colombia Seeking to Spur Coltan Mining’, December 20, 2016, https://www.
bnamericas.com/en/news/mining/colombia-seeking-to-spur-coltan-mining/; Corbin Hiar,
‘Colombia Vows to Clean Up Coltan Mining’, International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, March 15, 2012, https://www.icij.org/investigations/coltan/colombia-vows-
clean-coltan-mining/; David Stuckler, Sarah Steele, Mark Lurie, and Sanjay Basu, ‘Introduc-
tion: “Dying for Gold”: The Effects of Mineral Mining on HIV, Tuberculosis, Silicosis, and
Occupational Diseases in Southern Africa’, International Journal of Health Services 43, no. 4
(2013): 639–49.
4. The Dakota Access Pipeline is controlled by Energy Transfer Partners, with minority inter-
ests held by oil corporations Phillips 66 and by affiliates of Enbridge and Marathon Pet-
roleum. This pipeline construction is resisted by the Standing Rock Sioux and many others.
5. Rick Ruddell, Dheeshana S. Jayasundara, Roni Mayzer, and T. Heitkamp, ‘Drilling Down:
An Examination of the Boom-Crime Relationship in Resource-Based Boom Counties’,
Actual Problems of Economics & Law (2017): 208.
6. First Peoples Worldwide, New Report Finds Increase of Violence Coincides with Oil Boom
(University of Colorado, March 14, 2019), https://www.colorado.edu/program/fpw/2019/
03/14/new-report-finds-increase-violence-coincides-oil-boom; Jessica Corbett, ‘Over 75
Indigenous Women Urge Biden to Stop Climate-Wrecking Pipelines and Respect Treaty
Rights’, Common Dreams, January 14, 2021, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/
14 M. FARLEY

01/14/over-75-indigenous-women-urge-biden-stop-climate-wrecking-pipelines-and-respect;
Brooks Johnson, ‘Is Sex Trafficking “Inevitable” along Enbridge Pipeline Route?’ Minneapo-
lis Star-Tribune, 2021, January 8, https://www.startribune.com/is-sex-trafficking-inevitable-
along-enbridge-pipeline-route/600008236/.
7. Olubayo Oluduro and Ebenezer Durojaye, ‘The Implications of Oil Pollution for the Enjoy-
ment of Sexual and Reproductive Rights of Women in Niger Delta Area of Nigeria’, The
International Journal of Human Rights 17, no. 7–8 (2013): 772–95.
8. RT Films, Congo My Precious: The Curse of the ‘Conflict Minerals’ in the Congo, 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTwzCy0-RTw.
9. Darca Morgan, personal communication, 2019.
10. Lisa M. Poupart, ‘The Familiar Face of Genocide: Internalized Oppression among American
Indians’, Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 86–100; Stella Pretty Sounding Flute, Honor the Grand-
mothers: Dakota and Lakota Women Tell their Stories, ed. Sarah Penman (Minnesota His-
torical Society Press, 2000), 47–76; Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American
Indian Genocide (Duke University Press, 2015); Andrea Smith, ‘Not an Indian Tradition:
The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples’, Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 70–85.
11. John Vidal, ‘Zambian Villagers Take Mining Giant Vedanta to Court in UK Over Toxic
Leaks’, The Guardian, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/aug/
01/vedanta-zambia-copper-mining-toxic-leaks.
12. Deborah Potts, ‘Urban Economies, Urban Livelihoods and Natural Resource-Based Econ-
omic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Constraints of a Liberalized World Economy’,
Local Economy 28, no. 2 (2013): 170–87.
13. Whitney Mulobelaj, ‘Prostitution “Easiest Way Out” for Zambia’s Farmers’, Reuters, Sep-
tember 7, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zambia-climatechange-prostitution-
idUSKCN11D0S4.
14. Author interview with anonymous prostituting woman in Lusaka, Zambia February 17,
1996.
15. Joeri Rogelj, Drew Shindell, Kejun Jiang, Solomone Fifita, Piers Forster, Veronika Ginzburg,
Collins Handa et al., ‘Mitigation Pathways Compatible with 1.5 C in the Context of Sustain-
able Development’, In Global warming of 1.5°C, (2018), 93–174. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC)Available at https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/.
16. Nina Lakhani,Who Killed Berta Caceres?: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s
Battle for the Planet (Verso, 2020).
17. Sara Hughes, ‘Flint, Michigan, and the Politics of Safe Drinking Water in the United States’,
Perspectives on Politics (2020): 1–14.
18. A. Swarup, I.E.M. Dankelman, K. Ahluwalia, and K. Hawrylysgym, ‘Weathering the Storm:
Adolescent Girls and Climate Change’, 2011, http://www.ungei.org/files/weatherTheStorm.
pdf; M. Williams, ‘Integrating a Gender Perspective in Climate Change, Development Policy
and the UNFCCC’, South Centre Climate Policy Brief 12 (2013): 1–8.
19. Catch News, ‘Women Forced into Sex Trade in Drought-Hit Andra Pradesh’, February 17,
2017, http://www.catchnews.com/social-sector/women-forced-into-sex-trade-in-drought-
hit-andra-pradesh-1464072481.html.
20. C. O’Brien, ‘An Analysis of Global Sex Trafficking’, Indiana Journal of Political Science 11
(2008): 719.
21. Margaux J. Hall and David C. Weiss, ‘Avoiding Adaptation Apartheid: Climate Change
Adaptation and Human Rights Law’, Yale Journal of International Law 37 (2012): 309.
22. Francesco Bassetti, ‘Environmental Migrants: Up to 1 Billion by 2050’, Foresight, 2019,
https://www.climateforesight.eu/migrations/environmental-migrants-up-to-1-billion-by-
2050/.
23. Simon Caney, ‘Human Rights, Climate Change, and Discounting’, Environmental Politics
17, no. 4 (2008): 536–55; Simon Caney, ‘Climate Change, Human Rights, and Moral
Thresholds’, Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (2010): 163–77; John H. Knox, ‘Climate
Change and Human Rights Law’, Virginia Journal of International Law 50 (2009–2010):
163–99; Svitlana Kravchenko, ‘Right to Carbon or Right to Life: Human Rights Approaches
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 15

to Climate Change’, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law 9 (2007): 513; Mary Robinson,
‘Climate Change Is an Issue of Human Rights’, The Independent 10 (2008).
24. United Nations Human Rights and Climate Change Working Group 2009–2016, http://
climaterights.org/our-work/un-human-rights-council/.
25. Ibid.
26. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, https://www.un.org/en/
universal-declaration-human-rights/.
27. Barry S. Levy and Jonathan A. Patz, ‘Climate Change, Human Rights, and Social Justice’,
Annals of Global Health 81, no. 3 (2015): 310–22.
28. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, Submission of United States to OHCHR
Report, Observations by the United States of America on the Relationship Between Climate
Change and Human Rights (United Nations, 2008), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/
Issues/ClimateChange/Submissions/USA.pdf.
29. Sumudu Atapattu, ‘The Right to a Healthy Life or the Right to Die Polluted?: The Emergence
of a Human Right to a Healthy Environment under International Law’, Tulane Environ-
mental Law Journal (2002): 65–126.
30. United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Declaration) (1972)
Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Preamble.
U.N. Doc. A/CONF.48/14.
31. Jonathan A. Patz, Howard Frumkin, Tracey Holloway, Daniel J. Vimont, and Andrew
Haines, ‘Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities for Global Health’, Journal of the
American Medical Association 312, no. 15 (2014): 1565–80.
32. Simon Caney, ‘Climate Change, Human Rights, and Moral Thresholds’,Climate Ethics:
Essential Readings (2010): 163–77.
33. Asbjørn Eide, ‘The Human Right to Adequate Food and Freedom from Hunger’, FAO
(1998). The Right to Food in Theory and Practice. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations (1998), 1–5. Eide discusses the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
34. Manisuli Ssenyonjo, ‘Reflections on State Obligations with Respect to Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights in International Human Rights Law’, The International Journal of Human
Rights 15, no. 6 (2011): 969–1012.
35. Jon Barnett, ‘Human Rights and Vulnerability to Climate Change’, Human Rights and
Climate Change (2010/2012): 257–71; Margaux J. Hall and David C. Weiss, ‘Avoiding Adap-
tation Apartheid: Climate Change Adaptation and Human Rights Law’, Yale Journal of
International Law 37 (2012): 309.
36. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, Fighting Climate
Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World 47–48, 2007/2008, http://hdr.undp.org/en/
medialHDR20072008ENCxyzomplete.pdf.
37. C. Tolan, ‘High Ground, High Prices, How Climate Change Is Speeding Gentrification in
Some of America’s Most Flooding-Vulnerable Cities’, CNN.com, March 3, 2021, https://
www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/03/us/climate-gentrification-cnnphotos-invs/.
38. Margaret J. Radin and Madhavi Sunder, ‘The Subject and Object of Commodification’, In
Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture. Vol. 52, eds.
Martha Ertman, and Joan C. Williams (NYU Press, 2005), 12.
39. Ine Vanwesenbeeck, Prostitutes’ Well-Being and Risk (VU University Press, 1994).
40. Yannis Ktistakis, ‘Protecting Migrants under the European Convention on Human Rights
and the European Social Charter’, In A Handbook for Legal Practitioners (2013), 47.
41. Ibid.
42. Chandra Kant Jha and Jeanne Madison, ‘Antecedent and Sequalae Issues of Nepalese
Women Trafficked into Prostitution’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 12, no. 1
(2011): 79–90; Meena Poudel, ‘Poverty, Prostitution and Women’, World Health 47, no. 6
(1994): 10–11; Jody Raphael, Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty, and Prostitution (North-
eastern University Press, 2015).
16 M. FARLEY

43. Narasimha D. Rao and Jihoon Min, ‘Decent Living Standards: Material Prerequisites for
Human Wellbeing’, Social Indicators Research 138, no. 1 (2018): 225–44.
44. Audrey R. Chapman, ‘A Violations Approach for Monitoring the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 18 (1996): 23.
45. Gena Steffens, ‘Changing Climate Forces Desperate Guatemalans to Migrate’, National Geo-
graphic (2018).
46. Jane McAdam, ‘The Enduring Relevance of the 1951 Refugee Convention’, International
Journal of Refugee Law (2017): 1–9. It should be noted that in 1951, most people did not
realise that climate change was a threat to survival.
47. J. Johnson, ‘Epic Failure of Humanity: Global Displaced Population Hits All-time High’,
Common Dreams, June 18, 2021, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/18/epic-
failure-humanity-global-displaced-population-hits-all-time-high.
48. International Refugee Assistance Project, U.S. Opportunities to Address Climate Displace-
ment, August 2021, https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Climate-
Report-August-2021-Final-4.pdf.
49. Melissa Farley, Ann Cotton, Jacqueline Lynne, Sybille Zumbeck, Frida Spiwak, Maria E.
Reyes, Dinorah Alvarez, and Ufuk Sezgin, ‘Prostitution and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder:
An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Journal of Trauma Practice 2,
no. ¾ (2003): 33–74.
50. Barkha Dutt, ‘As India Goes into Lockdown, Fear Spreads: “Poverty May Kill Us First”’,
Washington Post, March 26, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/
26/india-goes-into-lockdown-fear-spreads-poverty-may-kill-us-first/.
51. Dan Gentile, ‘SF Sex Workers Forced to Make Tough and Risky Choices During Pandemic’,
SF Gate, April 13, 2020, https://www.sfgate.com/offbeat/article/SF-sex-workers-weigh-in-
on-working-through-the-15177239.php.
52. Magdalene T. Larnyoh, ‘In Cameroun: Police Arrest Sex Workers Offering Services at Cor-
onavirus Isolation Centres’, Pulse/Ghana no. 1, (April 2020), https://www.pulse.com.gh/bi/
lifestyle/in-cameroun-police-arrest-sex-workers-offering-services-at-coronavirus-isolation/
shq9×8r; E.N. Ndi, ‘Cameroon Arrests Prostitutes Offering Sex at Virus Isolation Centers’,
Daily Nation, March 29, 2020. Cited in Melissa Farley, ‘Prostitution, the Sex Trade, and the
COVID-19 Pandemic’, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture 19, no. 1 (2020).
53. Einat Lavee and Orly Benjamin, ‘Between Social Rights and Human Rights: Israeli Mothers’
Right to Be Protected from Poverty and Prostitution’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies
48, no. 3 (2017): 315–26; Jane McAdam, ‘From the Nansen Initiative to the Platform on Dis-
aster Displacement: Shaping International Approaches to Climate Change, Disasters and
Displacement’, University of New South Wales Law Journal 39 (2016): 518.
54. Einat Lavee, ‘Exchanging Sex for Material Resources: Reinforcement of Gender and Oppres-
sive Survival Strategy’, In Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 56 (Pergamon, 2016),
83–91; Einat Lavee and Orly Benjamin, ‘Between Social Rights and Human Rights: Israeli
Mothers’ Right to Be Protected from Poverty and Prostitution’, Journal of Comparative
Family Studies 48, no. 3 (2017): 315–26. See also Brian Willis, Katherine Welch, and Saki
Onda, ‘Health of Female Sex Workers and their Children: A Call for Action’, The Lancet
Global Health 4, no. 7 (2016): e438–9.
55. For example, a Canadian prostitution tourist commented about women in Thai prostitu-
tion, ‘These girls gotta eat, don’t they? I’m putting bread on their plate. I’m making a con-
tribution. They’d starve to death unless they whored’. Christopher G. Moore, A Killing Smile
(White Lotus Press, 2004). Cited in Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson, Night Market: Sexual
Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (New York: Routledge, 1997), 168–9.
56. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York,
1985).
57. Julia O’Connell, Davidson, Prostitution, Power, and Freedom (University of Michigan Press,
1998), 5.
58. Elizabeth Fry Society, Streetwork Outreach with Adult Female Street Prostitutes (Toronto,
Unpublished Report, 1987); Melissa Farley, Ann Cotton, Jacqueline Lynne, Sybille
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 17

Zumbeck, Frida Spiwak, Maria E. Reyes, Dinorah Alvarez, and Ufuk Sezgin, ‘Prostitution
and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Dis-
order’, Journal of Trauma Practice 2, no. ¾ (2003): 33–74.
59. G.W. Jones, E. Sulistyaningsih, and T.H. Hull, ‘Prostitution in Indonesia’, In Lin Lean Lim,
ed., The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Inter-
national Labour Organization, 1998), 43.
60. Christa Wichterich,The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality (Zed Books,
2000), 63.
61. Melissa Farley, Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections
(San Francisco: Prostitution Research & Education, 2007), 34.
62. Melissa Farley, ‘Slavery and Prostitution: A Twenty-First-Century Abolitionist Perspective’,
In Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands (Santa Fe: School for
Advanced Research Press, 2015), 283.
63. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, USA, 2007).
64. Jeremy Seabrook,Travels in the Skin Trade: Tourism and the Sex Industry (Pluto Press,
2001).
65. Melissa Farley, Jan Macleod, Lynn Anderson, and Jacqueline M. Golding, ‘Attitudes and
Social Characteristics of Men Who Buy Sex in Scotland’, Psychological Trauma: Theory,
Research, Practice, and Policy 3, no. 4 (2011): 369.
66. Rachel Moran,Paid for: My Journey Through Prostitution (WW Norton & Company, 2015).
67. World Health Organization and United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights, Human Rights, Health, and Poverty Reduction Strategies. No. 5 (World
Health Organization, 2008).
68. Center for International Environmental Law and The Global Initiative for Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights, States’ Obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women, in the Context of Climate Change (2018),
https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HRTBs-synthesis-report-CEDAW.pdf;
World Health Organization, ‘United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights’, Human Rights, Health and Poverty Reduction Strategies (2008); Ramona Vijeyarasa,
‘CEDAW’s General Recommendation No. 35: A Quarter of a Century of Evolutionary
Approaches to Violence against Women’, Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 2 (2020): 153–
67; Cassandra Mudgway, ‘Sexual Exploitation by UN Peacekeepers: The ‘Survival Sex’
Gap in International Human Rights Law’, The International Journal of Human Rights 21,
no. 9 (2017): 1453–76.
69. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Eleventh Session. General
Recommendation No. 19: Violence against Women, (1992). https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/
Treaties/CEDAW/Shared%20Documents/1_Global/INT_CEDAW_GEC_3731_E.pdf.
70. Barbara Lee, Congresswoman (2015–2016) H.Con.Res.29 – Recognizing the disparate
impact of climate change on women and the efforts of women globally to address climate
change. 114th Congress. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-concurrent-
resolution/29.
71. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘General Recommen-
dation No. 37 on Gender-Related Dimensions of Disaster Risk Reduction in the Context
of Climate Change’, February 2018, https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CEDAW/Shared
%20Documents/1_Global/CEDAW_C_GC_37_8642_E.pdf.
72. Ibid.
73. Melissa Farley, Kenneth Franzblau, and M. Alexis Kennedy, ‘Online Prostitution and
Trafficking’, Albany Law Review 77 (2013): 1039.
74. Other definitions of slavery are similar. The International Criminal Court (ICC) defined
enslavement (which it considered a crime against humanity) as ‘the exercise of any or all
of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person [including] the exercise
of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children’
United Nations (1998) Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. http://legal.un.
org/icc/statute/99_corr/cstatute.htm. Section 1584 of the US Justice Department’s Code
18 M. FARLEY

‘prohibits compelling a person to work against his/her will by creating a “climate of fear”
through the use of force, the threat of force, or the threat of legal coercion which is
sufficient to compel service against a person’s will’. See Melissa Farley, ‘Slavery and Prosti-
tution: A Twenty-First-Century Abolitionist Perspective’, In Linking the Histories of Slavery:
North America and Its Borderlands (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press,
2015), 283. http://prostitutionresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Slavery-
Prostitution-Farley-2015.pdf. See also Article 4 of the European Convention of Human
Rights (2020) which prohibits slavery and forced labour: ‘1. No one shall be held in
slavery or servitude. 2. No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour’
Alhadi, Nadia. ‘Increasing Case Traffic: Expanding the International Criminal Court’s
Focus on Human Trafficking Cases.’ (2020) Michigan Journal of International Law 41,
541. See also discussion of UK’s Modern Slavery Act (2015) by Gary Craig, ‘The UK’s
Modern Slavery Legislation: An Early Assessment of Progress’, Social Inclusion 5, no. 2
(2017): 16–27.
75. Rachel Harris and Katharine Gelber, ‘Defining “De Facto” Slavery in Australia: Ownership,
Consent and the Defence of Freedom’, International Criminal Law Review 11, no. 3 (2011):
561–78.
76. Jean Allain, ‘The Nineteenth Century Law of the Sea and the British Abolition of the Slave
Trade’, The British Year Book of International Law 78, no. 1 (2008): 342. Also reproduced in
Jean Allain, The Law and Slavery: Prohibiting Human Exploitation (Brill, 2015).
77. Ibid.
78. Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Prostitution and Civil Rights’, Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
1 (1993): 13.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Coercion is defined in the Florida law as restraint of speech or communication with others,
exploitation of a condition of developmental disability, cognitive limitation, affective dis-
order, or substance dependence; exploitation of prior victimisation by sexual abuse; exploi-
tation during the making of pornography; and exploitation of the human needs for food,
shelter, safety, or affection. Florida Statutes. (2006). FLA. STAT. § 796.09(k)–(o) Prostitu-
tion. Coercion; civil cause of action; evidence; defenses; attorney’s fees. See Margaret
A. Baldwin, ‘Strategies of Connection: Prostitution and Feminist Politics’, Michigan
Journal of Gender & Law 1 (1993): 65.
82. Cecilie Høigård and Liv Finstad,Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love (Penn State
Press, 1992); Claude Jaget, ed., Prostitutes, Our Life (Falling Wall Press, 1980).
83. Fraser Committee, ‘Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution’, Pornography and
Prostitution in Canada. Ottawa, Approvisionnement et Services (1985).
84. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (1948), https://www.un.org/en/
universal-declaration-human-rights/
85. This is a result of their not being seen as fully human by the men who buy them for sexual
use, as well as by their supposed protectors. California police in the 1990’s stamped prosti-
tuted women’s rape reports with ‘NHI,’ which stood for ‘No Human Involved’ Linda
A. Fairstein, Sexual Violence: Our War against Rape (New York: William Morrow and
Company, 1993). And in 2011, a detective investigating serial murders of women in pros-
titution in New York commented that it was a ‘consolation’ to the public that the murdered
victims were ‘only prostitutes’ Robert Kolker, ‘The Gilgo Beach Murders Were a Cold Case:
Then a New Police Chief Arrived’, New York Times, September 25, 2020, https://www.
nytimes.com/2020/09/25/nyregion/long-island-serial-killer-gilgo-beach.html?searchResult
Position=1.
86. Fraser Committee, ‘Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution’, Pornography and
Prostitution in Canada. Ottawa, Approvisionnement et Services, 1985.
87. Leonard Cler-Cunningham and Christine Christenson, ‘Studying Violence to Stop It: Cana-
dian Research on Violence Against Women in Vancouver’s Street Level Sex Trade’, Research
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 19

for Sex Work 4 (2001): 25–6, https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/research-for-sex-

work-4-english.pdf.
88. John J. Potterat, Devon D. Brewer, Stephen Q. Muth, Richard B. Rothenberg, Donald
E. Woodhouse, John B. Muth, Heather K. Stites, and Stuart Brody, ‘Mortality in a Long-
Term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women’, American Journal of Epidemiology 159, no. 8
(2004): 778–85.
89. Devon D. Brewer, Jonathan A. Dudek, John J. Potterat, Stephen Q. Muth, John M. Roberts
Jr, and Donald E. Woodhouse, ‘Extent, Trends, and Perpetrators of Prostitution-Related
Homicide in the United States’, Journal of Forensic Sciences 51, no. 5 (2006): 1101–8.
90. John J. Potterat, Devon D. Brewer, Stephen Q. Muth, Richard B. Rothenberg, Donald
E. Woodhouse, John B. Muth, Heather K. Stites, and Stuart Brody, ‘Mortality in a Long-
Term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women’, American Journal of Epidemiology 159, no. 8
(2004): 778–85.
91. C. Gabrielle Salfati, Alison R. James, and Lynn Ferguson, ‘Prostitute Homicides: A Descrip-
tive Study’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 23, no. 4 (2008): 505–43.
92. Erik Avanier, ‘Coronavirus Threat Isn’t Stopping Sex Trafficking in Jacksonville’, News4Jax,
April 8, 2020, https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2020/04/08/coronavirus-threat-isnt-
stopping-sex-trafficking-in-jacksonville/.
93. Diana Leone, ‘One in 100 Children in Sex Trade, Study Says’, Honolulu Star-Bulletins, (Sep-
tember 10, 2001), A1, http://starbulletin.com/2001/09/10/news/story1.html.
94. Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot, Rosalind A. Sydie, and Catherine Krull, ‘Images of Prostitution:
The Prostitute and Print Media’, Women & Criminal Justice 10, no. 4 (2000): 47–72; Steven
P. Kurtz, Hilary L. Surratt, James A. Inciardi, and Marion C. Kiley, ‘Sex Work and “Date”
Violence’, Violence against Women 10, no. 4 (2004): 357–85.
95. Kathleen N. Deering, Avni Amin, Jean Shoveller, Ariel Nesbitt, Claudia Garcia-Moreno,
Putu Duff, Elena Argento, and Kate Shannon, ‘A Systematic Review of the Correlates of Vio-
lence Against Sex Workers’, American Journal of Public Health 104, no. 5 (2014): e42–54.
96. Stephanie Church, Marion Henderson, Marina Barnard, and Graham Hart, ‘Violence by
Clients Towards Female Prostitutes in Different Work Settings: Questionnaire Survey’,
British Medical Journal 322, no. 7285 (2001): 524–5.
97. Mimi H. Silbert and Ayala M. Pines, ‘Entrance into Prostitution’, Youth & Society 13, no. 4
(1982): 471–500.
98. Ruth Parriott,Health Experiences of Twin Cities Women Used in Prostitution. Unpublished
paper commissioned by Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt
(WHISPER), Minneapolis (1994).
99. Melissa Farley, Ann Cotton, Jacqueline Lynne, Sybille Zumbeck, Frida Spiwak, Maria
E. Reyes, Dinorah Alvarez, and Ufuk Sezgin, ‘Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine
Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Journal of
Trauma Practice 2, no. 3–4 (2003): 33–74.
100. Melissa Farley, Jacqueline Lynne, and Ann J. Cotton, ‘Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence
and the Colonization of First Nations women’,Transcultural Psychiatry 42, no. 2 (2005):
242–71.
101. Human Rights Watch, ‘No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons’, 2001.
102. United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993), https://
www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.21_declaration%20
elimination%20vaw.pdf.
103. Ronagh JA. McQuigg, ‘What Potential Does the Council of Europe Convention on Violence
against Women Hold as Regards Domestic Violence?’, The International Journal of Human
Rights 16, no. 7 (2012): 947–62.
104. Anna Zobnina, Expert Group Meeting Notes regarding UN Special Rapporteur on Violence
against Women’s Report on Rape as a Grave and Systematic Human Rights Violation and
Gender-Based Violence against Women, May 20, 2020.
105. US Mission to International Organizations in Geneva, Report of the Special Rapporteur on
the Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and
20 M. FARLEY

Mental Health (A/HRC/35/21) Social Protection and Human Rights, 2017, https://geneva.
usmission.gov/2017/06/23/explanation-of-position-on-resolution-l-18/.
106. Cecilie Høigård and Liv Finstad, Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love (Penn State
Press, 1992).
107. Melissa Farley, Ann Cotton, Jacqueline Lynne, Sybille Zumbeck, Frida Spiwak, Maria
E. Reyes, Dinorah Alvarez, and Ufuk Sezgin, ‘Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine
Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Journal of
Trauma Practice 2, no. 3–4 (2003): 33–74.
108. 84%, reported by Anita Kemp, Edna I. Rawlings, and Bonnie L. Green, ‘Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Battered Women: A Shelter Sample’, Journal of Traumatic
Stress 4, no. 1 (1991): 137–48; 45%, reported by Beth M. Houskamp and David W. Foy,
‘The Assessment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Battered Women’, Journal of Interper-
sonal Violence 6, no. 3 (1991): 367–75.
109. 70%, reported by Ian T. Bownes, E.C. O’Gorman, and A. Sayers, ‘Assault Characteristics and
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Rape Victims’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 83, no. 1
(1991): 27–30.
110. 51%, reported by Rosalind Ramsay, Caroline Gorst-Unsworth, and Stuart Turner, ‘Psychia-
tric Morbidity in Survivors of Organised State Violence Including Torture’, The British
Journal of Psychiatry 162, no. 1 (1993): 55–9.
111. Kathleen Barry,The Prostitution of Sexuality: The Global Exploitation of Women (New York
University Press, 1995); Andrea Dworkin, ‘Prostitution and Male Supremacy’, Michigan
Journal of Gender & Law (1993),1; Evelina Giobbe, ‘An Analysis of Individual, Institutional,
and Cultural Pimping’, Michigan Journal of Gender & Law (1993), 33. Cecilie Høigård and
Liv Finstad, Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love (Penn State Press, 1992).
112. Melissa Farley, ‘Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know
in Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly’, Yale Journal of
Law & Feminism 18 (2006): 109. Enforced nudity in prostitution is not only humiliating,
it marks its victims with shame, dehumanisation, and vulnerability to rape. See Kristian Wil-
liams, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press, 2006).
Rape is used in torture and in prostitution as the primary method of control, and it has
been designated a crime against humanity. Human Rights Watch, ‘No Escape: Male Rape
in US Prisons’, (2001). The intimate, aggressive domination of rape drives home the
massive inequality between the dominator and the subordinated. Describing the destruction
of his dignity and personhood, a man told Human Rights Watch that prison rape was a
process of ‘being made into a person of no self-worth, re-made into whatever the person
or the gang doing the raping wants you to be’ from Human Rights Watch, ‘No Escape:
Male Rape in US Prisons’, (2001).
113. United Nations, Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treat-
ment or Punishment (1985), https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%
201465/volume-1465-I-24841-English.pdf.
114. Steve Lopez, ‘The “Repugnant, Vile Truth” about Sex Trafficking in L.A. County’, Los
Angeles Times, August 31, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-0901-lopez-
prostitution20130901,0,4024210.column51.
115. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), https://www.un.org/en/
universal-declaration-human-rights/.
116. Svitlana Kravchenko, ‘Right to Carbon or Right to Life: Human Rights Approaches to
Climate Change’, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law 9 (2007): 513.
117. Postmodern philosophy has confused people and camouflaged the harms of prostitution by
mystifying the sex trade via a ‘politics of abdication and disengagement’ in which for
example, incest and rape become ‘epistemelogical quandaries.’ Catharine A. MacKinnon,
‘Points Against Postmodernism’, Chicago-Kent Law Review 75 (1999): 687. Under postmo-
dernism, racism, sexism, and lethal poverty become representations of reality, rather than
reality itself. To postmodernists, facts are unreliable: the oppressive social forces that
harm women in prostitution – racism and sexism and poverty – are considered
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 21

‘unknowable’ (Celine P. Shimizu, ‘Queens of Anal, Double, Triple, and the Gang Bang: Pro-
ducing Asian/American Feminism in Pornography’, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 18
(2006): 235) even though the peer-reviewed research cited here extensively documents
those harms. The assumption that material reality is mentally constructed and that
nothing is real means that the actual harms of prostitution cease to exist except in a
woman’s mind. Postmodernists assume that women who have been prostituted or
trafficked are narrating just one more version of reality. In postmodern reality, pimps’
and pornographers’ lies (prostitution is sexy and fun for everyone; prostitutes get rich
and meet nice men) are just as valid as survivors’ lived experiences of sexual exploitation
and abuse, and as valid as peer-reviewed research documenting that abuse. This presumed
equivalence of validity reflects a postmodern ‘sexual politics of meaninglessness’ that has
profoundly impacted women’s lives because it makes men’s violence against women invis-
ible (Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution [Spinifex Press, 2008]). A postmodern philoso-
phical view of the world ultimately brings forth a nihilistic destruction of meaning and a
valorisation of fragmentation that obscures an evidence-based understanding of the
human rights violations of prostitution.
118. Katie Jennings, Dino Grandoni, and Susanne Rust, ‘How Exxon Went from Leader to
Skeptic on Climate Change Research’, Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2015, http://
graphics.latimes.com/exxon-research/; Susanne Rust, ‘Report Details How ExxonMobil
and Fossil Fuel Firms Sowed Seeds of Doubt on Climate Change’, Los Angeles Times,
October 21, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-21/oil-companies-
exxon-climate-change-denial-report; see also #EXXONKNEW Available at https://
exxonknew.org/.
119. Jody Raphael, ‘Decriminalization of Prostitution: The Soros Effect’, Dignity: A Journal on
Sexual Exploitation and Violence 3, no. 1 (2018): 1.
120. Chris Hedges, ‘Amnesty International: Protecting the “Human Rights” of Johns, Pimps and
Human Traffickers’, Vox Populi, August 17, 2015. https://voxpopulisphere.com/2015/08/24/
8811/.
121. Wulf Rössler, Ulrich Koch, Christian Lauber, A-K. Hass, M. Altwegg, Vladeta Ajdacic-
Gross, and K. Landolt, ‘The Mental Health of Female Sex Workers’, Acta Psychiatrica Scan-
dinavica 122, no. 2 (2010): 143–52.
122. United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Aspects of the Victims
of Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Commission on Human Rights.
UN Doc. E/CN.4/2006/62), February 20, 2006, p. 9.
123. Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher, and Eric Neumayer, ‘Does Legalized Prostitution Increase
Human Trafficking?’, World Development 41 (2013): 67–82.
124. Niklas Jakobsson and Andreas Kotsadam, ‘The Law and Economics of International Sex
Slavery: Prostitution Laws and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation’, European Journal of
Law and Economics 35, no. 1 (2013): 87–107; Samuel Lee and Petra Persson, Human
Trafficking and Regulating Prostitution. No. 996. IFN Working Paper (2013); Egzone
Osmanaj, ‘The Impact of Legalized Prostitution on Human Trafficking’, Academic
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3, no. 2 (2014): 103.
125. Moira Heiges, ‘From the Inside Out: Reforming State and Local Prostitution Enforcement to
Combat Sex Trafficking in the United States and Abroad’, Minnesota Law Review 94 (2009):
428.
126. Drew Dellinger, ‘Dr. King’s Interconnected World’, New York Times Opinion, December 22,
2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/opinion/martin-luther-king-christmas.html.
127. Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 1995,
https://www.un.org/en/events/pastevents/pdfs/Beijing_Declaration_and_Platform_for_
Action.pdf.
128. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Moving the World Towards Sustainable Development.Peace with No
Borders: Religions and Cultures in Dialogue (Community Sant’ Egidio Madrid, September
15, 2019), https://www.jeffsachs.org/recorded-lectures/t54fd28l9try3ay8lpg9t4n7t7de2a.
22 M. FARLEY

129. Farhana Sultana, ‘Climate Change, COVID-19, and the Co-production of Injustices: A Fem-
inist Reading of Overlapping Crises’, Social & Cultural Geography 22, no. 4 (2021): 447–60.
130. Peggy Reeves Sanday, ‘The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study’,
Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 5–27.
131. Gül Aktürk and Martha Lerski, ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit to Climate-Dis-
placed and Host Communities’, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2021): 1–11.
132. Christine Graef, ‘Bakken Region Tribes Fight Back Against Human Trafficking’, Mint Press
News, November 21, 2014, https://www.mintpressnews.com/bakken-region-tribes-fight-
back-human-trafficking/199156/.
133. Angel Moore, ‘Mi’kmaw Grandmothers Oppose ‘Man-Camp’ that Goes with Massive LNG
Project’, APTN National News, 2021, https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/mikmaw-
grandmothers-oppose-man-camp-that-goes-with-massive-lng-project/
134. Emily F. Rothman, ‘Should US Physicians Support the Decriminalization of Commercial
Sex?’, AMA Journal of Ethics 19, no. 1 (2017): 110–21.
135. Rachel Moran and Melissa Farley, ‘Consent, Coercion, and Culpability: Is Prostitution Stig-
matized Work or an Exploitive and Violent Practice Rooted in Sex, Race, and Class Inequal-
ity?’, Archives of Sexual Behavior 48, no. 7 (2019): 1947–53.
136. David Charter, ‘Half of Amsterdam’s Red-Light Windows Close’, The Times (2008): 22.
137. Expatica.com Why Dutch Street Walkers Are Getting the Boot (2003, December 9).
138. Annelies L. Daalder, Prostitution in the Netherlands since the Lifting of the Brothel Ban
(Boom Juridische uitgevers, 2007), 67.
139. M. Paulus, ‘Out of Control: On Liberties and Criminal Developments in the Redlight Dis-
tricts of the Federal Republic of Germany’, (2014); B. Kavemann, H. Rabe, and C. Fischer,
The Act Regulating the Legal Situation of Prostitutes—Implementation, Impact, Current
Developments (Berlin, 2007); Der Spiegel, ‘Unprotected: How Legalizing Prostitution Has
Failed’, Der Spiegel 26 (2013).
140. German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. (2007).
141. Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher, and Eric Neumayer, ‘Does Legalized Prostitution Increase
Human Trafficking?’, World Development 41 (2013): 67–82.
142. New Zealand, Report of the Prostitution Law Review Committee on the Operation of the Pros-
titution Reform Act 2003 (Ministry of Justice, 2008), 121.
143. Ibid., 57.
144. Ibid., 46.
145. Michael L. Rekart, ‘Sex-Work Harm Reduction’, The Lancet 366, no. 9503 (2005): 2123–34.
146. Heidi Larson and J. Narain, Beyond 2000: Responding to HIV/AIDS in the New Millennium
(New Delhi: World Health Organization, Regional Office for South-East Asia, 2001); Emily
F. Rothman, ‘Should US Physicians Support the Decriminalization of Commercial Sex?’,
AMA Journal of Ethics 19, no. 1 (2017): 110–21.
147. Helen Ward and Sophie Day, ‘What Happens to Women Who Sell Sex? Report of a Unique
Occupational Cohort’, Sexually Transmitted Infections 82, no. 5 (2006): 413–17. Wulf
Rössler, Ulrich Koch, Christian Lauber, A-K. Hass, M. Altwegg, Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross,
and K. Landolt, ‘The Mental Health of Female Sex Workers’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
122, no. 2 (2010): 143–52; Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (Spinifex Press, 2008).
148. J.G. Silverman, M.R. Decker, J. Gupta, A. Maheshwari, B.M. Willis, and A. Raj, ‘HIV Preva-
lence and Predictors of Infection in Sex-Trafficked Nepalese Girls and Women’, JAMA 298,
no. 5 (2007): 536–42.
149. J. Banks, ‘Comment: City Shoulders Load of Making Law Work’, New Zealand Herald, Sep-
tember 15, 2003.
150. New Zealand, Report of the Prostitution Law Review Committee on the Operation of the Pros-
titution Reform Act 2003 (Ministry of Justice, 2008).
151. Douglas Fox, a founder of the International Union of Sex Workers, was arrested for living
off the earnings of prostitution in a police sting at the escort agency Christony Companions.
See Julie Bindel, ‘What You Call Pimps, We Call Managers’, Byline, July 21, 2015, https://
www.byline.com/column/7/article/188. Hiding beneath the banner of labour unions,
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 23

pimps appeal to the Left’s sympathies. However, groups such as the New Zealand Prostitutes
Collective, the International Union of Sex Workers (UK), Red Thread (the Netherlands),
Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (India), Stella (Canada), and Sex Worker Organiz-
ing Project (USA) – while aggressively promoting prostitution as work – do not resemble
what most of us think of as labour unions. They do not offer pensions, safety, shorter
hours, unemployment benefits, or exit services (which is what 90% of women in prostitution
say that they want). Instead, these groups promote a free market in human beings who are
used for sex. See also Julie Bindel, The Pimping of Prostitution (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017); Melissa Farley, ‘Very Inconvenient Truths: Sex Buyers, Sexual Coercion, and Prosti-
tution-Harm-Denial’, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture 15, no. 1 (2016);
Cecilie Hoigard, ‘The Presence of Pain in the Debate on Prostitution’, Women’s Front of
Norway (2015).
152. Maddy Coy, Helen Pringle, and Meagan Tyler, ‘The Swedish Sex Purchase Law: Evidence of
Its Impact’, Nordic Model Information Network (July 2016); Max Waltman, ‘Prohibiting Sex
Purchasing and Ending Trafficking: The Swedish Prostitution Law’, Michigan Journal of
International Law 33 (2011): 133.

Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Drisha Fernandes, Darca Morgan, Seiya Morita, and Anna Zobnina,
without whose suggestions and criticisms this paper would not have been completed. She also
appreciates the criticism and suggestions of reviewers at International Journal of Human Rights.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Melissa Farley is a research and clinical psychologist who has authored many articles and 2 books
on the topic of prostitution, pimping/trafficking, and pornography. She is the executive director of
Prostitution Research & Education, a nonprofit research institute that conducts original research
on the sex trade and provides a library of information for survivors, advocates, policymakers, and
the public. Access to the free library is at www.prostitutionresearch.com.

Appendix A. The consequences of legalising or decriminalising

prostitution

Contrary to expectations, the decriminalisation or legalisation of prostitution in the Netherlands,

Germany, and New Zealand did not make prostitution safer.134 In countries with legal prostitu-
tion, 80% of the women in prostitution are coerced or trafficked.135 After legalisation in Amster-
dam, organised crime spiralled out of control and women in prostitution were no safer than when
prostitution was illegal.136 Explaining that legal prostitution did not reduce crime as the Dutch had
hoped it would, Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen explained that it was ‘impossible to create a safe and
controllable zone for women that was not open to abuse by organised crime’.137 A 2007 Dutch
government report on legal prostitution found that pimps were still a … ‘common phenomenon.
… the fact that the number of prostitutes with pimps has not decreased is a cause for concern’.138
Ninety-five percent of the women in German legal prostitution were controlled by pimps who
were members of organised crime groups.139 Concluding that ‘prostitution should not be con-
sidered to be a reasonable means for securing one’s living’, a German government report found
24 M. FARLEY

that the 2002 Prostitution Act that legalised prostitution had not made improvements to the pro-
tection of women in prostitution, had not reduced crime, and had not offered women any means
of escaping prostitution.140 Increased trafficking has been linked to legalisation of prostitution in
150 countries.141
Five years after prostitution was decriminalised in New Zealand, a government Report on its
law found that violence and sexual abuse continued as before.142 After decriminalisation, ‘the
majority of sex workers felt that the law could do little about violence that occurred’ and that it
was an inevitable element of the sex trade.143 More than a third of women interviewed post-decri-
minalisation reported that they had been coerced.144 The highest rate of coercion by sex buyers in
NZ was reported by pimp-controlled or ‘managed’ sex workers. As in Germany and the Nether-
lands, the social stigma of prostitution persisted even after decriminalisation in New Zealand.
The medical harm reduction approach has influenced legislative harm reduction which is legal
or decriminalised prostitution.145 Harm reduction programmes such as condom distribution or
peer support, are no-brainers; some harm reduction is better than none at all. But the impossible
solution is sought: how can we stop sexual exploitation, rape and related harms while someone is
still in prostitution? The answer is, we can’t. Prostitution is the business of sexual exploitation.
Prostituted women are at high risk for HIV because they are sexually exploited by many
men.146 Frequent rapes also increase the women’s STD and HIV risks.147 A 3–4% increased
risk of HIV for each month in a brothel was noted by Silverman and colleagues.148
When the only approach to prostitution is harm reduction, and when harm elimination is not
included as an option, then legal prostitution advocates pop down a rabbit hole where prostitution
is assumed to be unpleasant but inevitable. ‘Wouldn’t it be at least a little bit better if it were lega-
lised?’ they ask. ‘Wouldn’t there be less stigma, and wouldn’t prostitutes somehow be protected?’
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark stated that prostitution is ‘abhorrent’ but at the same
time supported a prostitution decriminalisation law as a way to reduce the harm of prostitution.149
Prostitution decriminalisation (a form of legal prostitution) in New Zealand did not decrease the
coercive control of pimps, did not decreased the stigma of prostitution, and did not result in
increased reporting of crimes to police.150 Proponents of legal prostitution focus on reducing pros-
titution’s social stigma. While toxic prejudice toward the prostituted certainly exists, it is proble-
matic to ignore prostitution’s other harms that include sexual harassment, sexual abuse, assaults
and rapes by sex buyers, and manipulation and control by pimps. When stigma is the only
harm addressed, it appears that the goal is to obscure the more severe harms and focus on the
less severe ones, so that prostitution can be promoted as a form of labour. Some sex work advo-
cates are themselves earning profits from others in the sex trade and fail to mention this fact. Some
who name themselves sex trade advocates are actually pimps.151
Decriminalised or legal prostitution not only decriminalises the prostituted individual (which is
advisable), it also decriminalizes pimps. On the other hand, a human rights or abolitionist/harm
elimination law on prostitution employs three elements that have proven remarkably effective
in decreasing harms: (a) provide exit services to those who seek them (b) decriminalise only
those who are paid-for in prostitution, and (c) arrest sex buyers and pimps. Abolitionist prostitu-
tion laws have been passed by eight countries: Sweden (1999), Iceland, (2008), Norway (2009),
Canada (2014), Northern Ireland (2015), France (2016), Republic of Ireland (2017), and Israel
(2018). The Swedish law has resulted in the lowest rate of trafficking in the EU.152 This abolitionist
legal approach makes sense once prostitution is understood as a human rights violation and as
structural violence.