Cass Avery: Unbearable laws on prostitution must be changed

There are eight brothels near where I live, and that doesn't mean I live on the mean streets - it just means that I know who my neighbours are.

Brothels are in a lot of places people don't expect to find them, and when you consider that prostitutes outnumber hairdressers in New Zealand they must all be working somewhere.

We have a very Victorian notion of prostitutes, like we have a very Victorian notion about almost anything sexual.

People imagine these women cunningly lingering on the dark and grimy street corners in the small hours of the night, rust on the steelwork of society, preying on men who might not otherwise be tempted to stray from their hearth and home. Oh really?

Demand and supply is what it is all about, and the only thing that separates the two is that the demand is legal but the supply is not. Bizarre.

To offer is to break the law but to ask for it isn't. To put the money down is legal but to pick it up is not.

Under the present law, being a prostitute isn't a crime, but it is a criminal offence to offer your services, be paid for your services and work for anyone who owns a premises where these services are offered or paid for. Tricky.

Because running brothels is illegal, lots of our prostitutes work the streets, and because a massage parlour can't by law employ anyone convicted of soliciting, or drug-taking, the women who are caught are forced to work the streets anyway.

The massage parlours don't make safe-sex advice available to their clients or staff in case that would give the impression that sex is being offered, even though the authorities know this to be the case and so few police are assigned to vice work they clearly aren't that interested in keeping tabs on the sex trade anyway.

At the end of the day the law seems more interested in appearing to condemn prostitution than actually getting rid of it. It is all about retaining a useful service in a kind of limbo between social tolerance and legal oblivion.

The discussion on legalising prostitution tends to centre around moral and ethical dilemmas about whether prostitution is work, whether the women who do it are damaged by it, and whether it is being condoned by being legalised.

But whether any of this is the case, the present situation is unbearable and it needs to be changed.

Obviously the situation as it stands now is a status quo based on a public fear to do anything that appears to condone prostitution, despite the fact that it leaves women unprotected and victimised by both men and the law and protects the people who pose most risk, the clients.

It is obviously not acceptable and better we move into a legal debate now than keep shutting this thing down.

The law change being debated through parliament at the moment would decriminalise prostitution, which means it would offer the same legal status to the sex workers as their clients already enjoy. Because brothels would become legal, sex workers would be able to move off the street and on to licensed premises.

It would give sex workers the right to refuse any services they didn't want to offer, address the problem of sexual heath and set an age limit of 18 for sex workers.

There is no doubt that these laws will drive those seeking to get around them further underground, but it is all underground at the moment anyway. The majority will be much better off.

And yes, if the Government is getting taxes from the sex workers in their newly legalised profession it will be earning money from prostitution, becoming a pimp, say the critics. Oh, come on.

Our Government takes taxes from companies which have committed atrocities overseas, it shakes hands with some rancid political leaders over the conference coffee tables, and we all sit back and let them make hypocrites of us by representation. So get over yourselves about tax from the sex industry.

I think people expect there to be an algal bloom of prostitutes across the country if the profession gets legalised - that law-abiding women everywhere will suddenly throw in their boring office jobs and opt instead for the sex industry.

This hasn't happened in other countries that have legalised prostitution. And why would it? It is not like it's the easy option.

Legalising prostitution isn't going to make it an attractive career option in large part because it won't make the clients any more appealing.

I see the faces of the guys who kerb crawl in my neighbourhood and I used to chat to the chauffeur of one of the regular clients of a private club nearby.

It's not Pretty Woman. The men and women in the sex industry need all the help they can get.