Policies, “Mimi Silbert’s survey of 200 prostitutes in the San Francisco area indicates 70 percent of her sample were victimized by customers” who raped them or who went beyond the work contract. The majority of women have been victims of robbery, physical and verbal violence, and theft of service; “two–thirds of them claimed to have been beaten regularly by their pimps”. “Seventy-eight percent reported being victimized by perversion an average of seventeen times each”(Davis 320). Prostitutes can also be abused in similar ways by police officers and other officers of the court. In all these cases, prostitutes find it almost impossible to press their cases because of their vulnerability to prosecution and because of their lack of resources. If they do press their case, it is doubtful that they will be believed. For instance, it is often said a prostitute cannot be raped. Legalization would also allow officials to give up the farce of upholding anti-prostitution laws. According to a counsel person in New York, quoted in Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society, “ the actual situation in this city is that prostitution is accepted by everyone – police, judges, clerks, and lawyers. Arrest and prosecution are purely gestures that have to be made to keep up the faade of public morality”(Roberts 291). The first prostitute in the United States to speak publicly for rights of sex workers, Margo St James, states in A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, “By legalizing pornography and keeping prostitution illegal, the government legitimizes white men selling women’s sexuality while criminalizing women for selling sex on their own terms”(Pheterson 35). Except for a few counties in Nevada, prostitution is illegal in the United States. However, there is a growing movement across the country to bring to this old profession certain rights and privileges that...
