Diana Witchel: Time to change an unjust law

I don't think abortion is a good thing. I have yet to meet anyone who does. But I've never been able to see the point of making criminals out of women who find themselves in a situation where they are forced to resort to it. The laws on abortion changed because they had to. A healthy society can only ignore stupid and unjust law for so long.

The law on abortion, as it was when I was growing up, was stupid and unjust. The well-off could make discreet arrangements or go to Australia. So the lack of choice only really applied to the poor, the very young and the sexually abused.

I don't think prostitution is a good thing, but talk about stupid and unjust laws. In this particular human transaction, men, who almost entirely create the demand for the service in question, can do no wrong. The women who accept their money are criminals. This is clearly insane. And no one is even pretending the present law works.

So why the uproar - often from unexpected quarters - about decriminalising prostitution? One argument says that it's yet another liberal plot designed to bring down what is left of Western civilisation. The debate drove Rosemary McLeod, in the Sunday Star Times, into Old Testament mode.

She insists on calling a spade a spade and a prostitute a "harlot" and/or "whore". Referring to MP Tim Barnett and the Prostitutes Collective's Catherine Healy, McLeod thunders, "And so their supporters' position becomes that they don't want their own children to be whores, but they won't stand in the way of other people's children being so degraded".

In Britain, the normally fairly sisterhood-friendly Guardian columnist Julie Burchill put it more colourfully, "Imagine your own son or daughter (or mother, as most of them are) making a living out of being a human spittoon".

My favourite Burchill quote on the matter reveals outrage almost as fierce as McLeod's, "When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women". Yikes.

But it doesn't really wash. I don't want any of my children to grow up to be, um, a "sex worker". I also hope they don't grow up to be alcoholics or fundamentalist Christians. Or fundamentalist anything. I just don't require those who do to be clapped in prison.

This issue has long divided women. Prostitutes are either disempowered victims of the gender war or its superheroes. "The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror," declares Camille Paglia, "an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture."

It is these sorts of subjective responses and complexities that make matters of sexual morality so fiendishly difficult to put under state control. The fact is, consenting adults will do, and have always done, pretty much what they like in private, despite the best efforts of moralists and lawmakers.

So what to do? Veteran feminist Sandra Coney's Women's Health Action group is against Tim Barnett's bill as well. It favours the Swedish system, which criminalised the clients while decriminalising prostitutes. That solution smacks of the sort of feminism that sees women being empowered only by punishing men. Also, it's silly. It is like saying in a drug deal, the user is doing something morally wrong but the supplier is not.

Coney wrote, in a letter to this paper, "Let us hope our MPs are not swayed by ill-founded liberal notions that prostitution is just another form of work". So it's a hobby? Prostitution is work, but not as we know it. And that is reflected in the proposed legislation. They have even had to state, bizarrely, that a person cannot be denied a benefit if they refuse to take a job in the sex industry.

The oldest profession will never, as some people believe, be "normalised". Just because something is not illegal doesn't make it normal, as the behaviour of our politicians constantly demonstrates.

Making something not a crime also doesn't mean society approves of it. Appearing in a porn movie is not necessarily a crime but most of us don't want to do that either.

I can't really see many women listing "harlot" as their occupation on their passport and giving talks on careers day at school. Even if the law changes, prostitution will still be viewed by most people as a wretched way to earn a buck, no matter what Paglia and prostitute collectives say.

Still, change is scary. I can't help coming over a bit nimby about this one - not, I hope, in my back yard. Somehow the idea of the Resource Management Act sorting out conflicts over the location of brothels isn't entirely reassuring.

But reacting to a needed change in an unjust law with fear and revulsion will do nothing to improve our collective morality. You can't build a more ethical society on unjust laws.

What is disturbing about the disgust expressed by Burchill and McLeod is that it perpetuates the sort of contempt that leads men to feel justified in abusing and exploiting prostitutes. Or women they think act like prostitutes, or talk like prostitutes, or wear short skirts like prostitutes

A law change may encourage men to see prostitutes as real people with rights, as fellow citizens, rather than as a criminal subclass. Who knows, that sort of attitude shift might prove to be worse for business on the street than old, punitive laws.