Prostitution results in egregious violations of human rights and multiple forms of violence against women and girls, who they are often dehumanized and perceived as persons without human rights. Prostitution violates the right of women and girls to dignity and often constitutes torture, inhuman and degrading treatment. Physical forms of violence – mainly by sex act buyers – include sexual abuse, rape and gang rape, severe beatings, including for the victim’s refusal, lack of enthusiasm or dissociation. Kidnapping, abduction and enforced disappearance are also common. Women and girls are mutilated or burned, including with cigarettes. They have foreign objects inserted into their bodies, urinated, defecated and ejaculated upon, and can be forced to have unprotected sex. In pornography, acts of gagging, brutal penetration of the vagina by one or several men are particularly common.
As a result, they are often left with lasting physical disabilities. Prostitution also leads to femicide, serial killings and death threats.
Victims are also subjected to physical abuse, sadism and masochism by sexual act buyers. The more brutal and violent the sex act (such as being forced to endure sex acts with animals), the more users feel that they have received their “money’s worth”. Pregnant women are not spared. Prostituted women and girls are often kept in slavery or slavery-like conditions, where women and girls are sexually enslaved or taken by armed groups as “wives”. Prostituted women and girls are regularly subjected to verbal abuse offline and online, shaming and blackmail. Victims or their families may be threatened, or subjected to unwanted contact or attempted contact, including online. Accusations of prostitution are also levied against female politicians and human rights defenders as a form of persecution.
Economic violence and marginalization includes receiving little or no payment, being exploited for long hours, extorsion, refusal of sexual act buyers to pay, robbery by pimps, other third-party exploiters and sexual act buyers, forced payment of “interest” to pimps, fines by the police, lifelong debt bondage and bribes to key players in the prostitution system. Others include payment to pimps for rent, work or basic services. Migrant women are often in debt bondage even before entering prostitution owing to the expenses and broker fees incurred for their journey, which is then used to coerce them to sell sexual acts. Many pay taxes through their pimps, which furthers control and decreases their chances to exit.
Exploitative practices within the prostitution system often impede victims’ access to education, health care and other essential services, and deny them access to their most basic rights, such as to food, water, sanitation, clothes, health services and medical care. Many women and girls continue to be trapped in destitution and see their situation worsen, even after they exit prostitution.
Victims also lose their right to privacy, freedom of movement and their right to family.
They are often socially isolated and cannot move freely, as pimps withhold identity documents, constantly surveil them, and take decisions regarding their time, the “service” and the “remuneration” to be provided. The control exercised by pimps frequently obstructs victims’ right to privacy and their right to family. They are also often subjected to arbitrary and prolonged detention, irregular migratory status, expulsion and deportation.
Prostitution often results in serious psychological violence, such as memory loss, depression, insomnia, eating disorders, substance abuse, identification with the aggressor, dissociation and suicidality, which often lead to suicide. Frontline organizations explain that the consequences of prostitution for mental health are similar to those of victims of torture.
According to a study conducted in nine countries, 68 per cent met the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder. Victims suffer from hypervigilance, anxiety, changed intimacy and sexual pleasure, lack of confidence, and suicidal ideation. Prostitution also results in other serious health-related consequences, such as declining life expectancy, exposure to sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, and difficulties in access to treatment. Prostituted women and girls can be coerced into abortions or sterilization and may suffer from forced pregnancy. They may also suffer from pelvic floor degradation, urinary tract infection, bladder inflammation, fecal incontinence, infertility, cervical cancer, oral illnesses, or sleep
disorders.
The aforementioned forms of violence and their consequences are compounded by the lack of legal protections for victims, the inability of many to perceive themselves as victims, the prosecution of women and girls in prostitution, lack of disaggregated data on impacts of prostitution, lack of exit programmes, face language barriers, social stigma against them or their families, corruption and complicity of law enforcement and other State institutions, as well as State and non-State sanctioned discrimination. Attitudes such as racism, xenophobia, sexism, racism, particularly against women of colour, lesbophobia and transphobia aggravate violence against victims. It is also influenced by the very low prosecution and conviction of sexual act buyers. Many victims also fear the retaliation and “punitive measures” of the pimp or criminal organizations.
Violence against women is prolific in pornography. An analysis of popular pornography videos completed in 2010 uncovered that 88.2 per cent of scenes contained acts of physical assault (e.g., gagging, choking or strangulation); 48.7 per cent contained acts of degrading verbal name-calling (i.e., bitch). Women in pornography often recounted being exposed to rectal and throat gonorrhoea; tearing of the throat, vagina and anus; and chlamydia of the eye. Prostituted women and girls are subjected to non-consensual image-based sexual abuse and cyberflashing. The same applies to pornography generated by artificial intelligence. According to one analysis, more than 96 per cent of pornography generated by artificial intelligence was produced without the consent of the individual featured. In 2022 alone, there were over 100,000 computer generated non-consensual images of women online. Victims of pornography generated by artificial intelligence, adolescents, especially girls, can suffer isolation, school bullying and harassment. They are therefore often retraumatized.
Many women lose custody of their children as they are labelled bad mothers. Children of women in prostitution also suffer from violence, even while they are in their mothers’ womb. Many children are conceived as a result of a violent act of prostitution. A study on children of prostituted women found delays in neurodevelopment, unschooling, suspected maltreatment, abuse or neglect, family dysfunction, partial or total absence of a father figure, housing and caregiver instability, and anxious, avoidant or ambivalent attachment. Other findings included attention deficit and hyperactivity, language and learning disorders, developmental disharmony, depressive disorders, suicidal ideation and self-injurious behaviour, hyperoxia, insomnia, cognition of guilt and worthlessness, and irritability.
They are also often stolen, drugged or sold in trafficking networks regularly, used for sexual
abuse or rape, and often are killed too.
From:
Prostitution and violence against women and girls
Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls,
its causes and consequences, Reem Alsalem* (Human Rights Council – United Nations)
