Zimbabwe Constitutional Court Outlaws Arrests of ‘Prostitutes’

It's our constitutional right to stand at street corners at night
Nine women filed an application challenging the constitution

THE Constitutional Court on Wednesday ruled against the routine arrests of women on allegations of soliciting for paid sex in the streets.

The court said as long as there were no men who would confirm being approached by the women for the service the arrests were unconstitutional.

Nine women filed an application challenging the constitutionality of Section 81 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act [Chapter 9:23], after they were arrested and charged with soliciting for the purposes of prostitution.

In their application, the women argued that the crime of soliciting requires allegations of an act and a person so acted upon rather than the mere fact of being found at a street corner or being a woman in the central business district at night.

The women, who argued that they were a vulnerable group, also said their right to personal liberty guaranteed in Section 49 of the Constitution and their right to equal protection and benefit of the law under Section 56 (1) of the Constitution had been violated.

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Source: New Zimbabwe

3 Responses to Zimbabwe Constitutional Court Outlaws Arrests of ‘Prostitutes’

  1. Daniel Blaney August 17, 2015 at 2:34 am

    A huge problem with legalizing prostitution is that it will have the effect of increasing demand for the service. The gap between supply and demand is unfortunately filled with many women who do not want to be in this line of work (i.e. being forced by prostitution rings – some very large and powerful, mafia involved). This is currently a big problem in the Netherlands (estimated that 70% of sex workers are not voluntarily in this line of business, 40% trafficked), where lots of trafficked women are forced under the threat of violence (and/or threat of violence of their family back home) to work as a prostitute, having to turn in all the profits to their pimp. This is mainly because these women do not know their rights and the fact that their pimps employ methods to make the girls think they’re friends with the policemen who patrol the red light districts and brothels. The sex workers usually do not help with incriminating their pimps, because of aforementioned reasons. I’m pro-legalisation, but we seriously need to think of a model which reduces this effect.

    In the Netherlands, regulation is tight, but the girls are told exactly how to get their business running – there’s nearly always someone behind the scenes; almost none of these girls are independent businesswomen (this is a romanticised thought) – the work isn’t as consensual as it is made out to be. People come up with the argument that illegal prostitution makes prostitution go underground, and it is harder to patrol it, which is true, but it also means that for a lot of men the step to visit a prostitute will be bigger, keeping demand lower. This is not a subject that should be decided upon lightly and requires a lot more research to find a proper way of ordering the market.

    Reply
  2. John Parker August 17, 2015 at 2:35 am

    This is actually a policy that has more implications than one might imagine. If you really want to make sex work legal you also need to destigmatize it. Women need to see it as a reasonable and socially acceptable activity otherwise it is always going to be a job taken out of desperation (or mental illness).

    You almost need a situation where your typical female office worker would be running a bit of a sex business on the weekends and everyone at her office is cool with that. And that is something that goes deep into social attitudes.

    Reply
  3. Kevin Kent August 17, 2015 at 2:36 am

    Can I add on to this? I work for a Cambodian counter-trafficking in persons organization. Cambodia is a country where there was a law against trafficking in persons prior to 2008, but it wasn’t until then that there was a serious law on the suppression of human trafficking. Since 2008 the number of brothels in the country has closed, and so it’s easy to see that there are less people physically locked in a room and being forced to have sex. At the same time, there is still an enormous population of bars, karaoke parlors, clubs, beer gardens, hotels, massage parlours, and homes where you can buy sexual services. If there’s a continuum from “Sex for the sake of enjoyment” at one end, and “Physical coercion” at the other, there’s a lot of people who have ended up somewhere in the middle in Cambodia. There’s a lot of women (and some men, and some transgender folk) who are engaged in sex-work because they have no other option, and are emotionally, financially, or religiously coerced to a smaller or greater degree.

    I think a decriminalization law would probably have the same effect, though I could be wrong. You would probably see less people who were clearly “pimped” in the worst sense of the word, but more people who were taken advantage of legally and within the rules. It would really interest me if someone would do an in-depth study on camgirls and see to what extent there is bullying, manipulation, and coercion towards that population. Someone get on that.

    and there’s also evidence that the ‘epidemic’ of sex trafficking isn’t as extreme as you may be led to believe.
    I tend to agree with this. Though there are certain communities or areas where sex-trafficking (or more often Commercial Sexual Exploitation) is rampantly happening around South-East Asia, there are other forms of trafficking that are much larger (fishing and construction, in particular, for men, Domestic work for women, bride trafficking to China, and sexual exploitation within communities to name a few) the “advertisement” for sex-trafficking seems to dominate the field.

    Reply

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