Tapu Misa: Brothels' location a dilemma for schools

Club Red Door, which has opened up across the road from Henderson Intermediate. Photo / Steven McNicholl

On Morning Report last week, the chairman of Henderson Intermediate's board of trustees, Ron Crawford, struggled to explain why his school community didn't like the presence of a brothel across the road.

It wasn't that he was opposed to brothels per se - "No, absolutely not" - he said, a little too quickly, just "not in our front yard".

"I just question - was that the intent of the [Prostitution Reform Act]? To allow brothels just across the road from the school, a church and a kindergarten, where you have 500 young impressionable children on a daily basis?"

It was a fair enough question, but his interviewer wanted to get to the heart of his school's objections. The brothel was a legal business operating under the law; it wasn't interfering with the running of the school: "So what's your problem?"

Mr Crawford could only mutter about the "appropriateness" of having a brothel across the road from a school, and the community being "really concerned".

He alluded to "disruption" that he wasn't prepared to discuss, before deciding he'd had enough of the interview.

Would it have been so bad if Mr Crawford had said what I'm guessing he really meant: That the community he represents regards prostitution as morally objectionable and thinks it should be kept as far away as possible from their children, end of story?

Would it have hurt to have said that however much they might accept the need to protect prostitutes from the dangers of their work (which was the idea behind the 2003 act that made prostitution legal), they weren't ever likely to see prostitution as good or desirable or the moral equivalent of the local dairy (or any other commercial enterprise on their stretch of road)?

Perhaps Mr Crawford was aware that moral objections cut no ice, either with the media or the judiciary.

Justice Paul Heath confirmed that by overturning Auckland City's anti-brothel bylaws in 2006, finding the location of brothels shouldn't be based on moral grounds but on "the need to address policy considerations such as public nuisances, offensive behaviour in public places, public health, public safety and compatibility with existing character and use of surrounding land".

Mr Crawford's predicament puts me in mind of a story by the prominent Harvard professor and philosopher Michael Sandel in his book Justice: What's the right thing to do? (2009).

When he was a graduate student at Oxford in the 1970s, there had been much debate about whether to relax rules against male guests staying overnight in women's rooms at St Anne's College, one of the all-women colleges.

"Some older women on the faculty were traditionalists. They opposed allowing male guests, on conventional moral grounds; it was immoral, they thought, for unmarried young women to spend the night with men.

"But times had changed, and the traditionalists were embarrassed to give the real grounds for their objection. So they translated their arguments into utilitarian terms. 'If men stay overnight,' they argued, 'the costs to the college will increase.' How, you might wonder? 'Well, they'll want to take baths, and that will use more hot water.'

"Furthermore, they argued, 'we will have to replace the mattresses more often.'

"The reformers met the traditionalists' arguments by adopting the following compromise: Each woman could have a maximum of three overnight guests each week, provided each guest paid 50 pence a night to defray the costs to the college. The next day, the headline in the Guardian read, 'St Anne's Girls, Fifty Pence a Night'."

Which just goes to show how hard it has become to articulate a moral argument, much less gain any sympathy for it.

Immanuel Kant was against casual sex because it was degrading and objectifying to both partners and "not about respect for the humanity of one's partner".

Kant's moral philosophy held that one should treat everyone (including oneself) with respect. It was a violation of humanity to treat oneself "as an object, a mere means, an instrument of profit". He would have been on the side of Henderson Intermediate.

If moral arguments have been left out in the cold, Sandel's book, based on his popular Harvard class on moral reasoning and justice (www.JusticeHarvard.org), does much to turn that around.

Arguing against the prevailing liberal position that citizens should leave their moral and religious convictions out of political discourse, and that Government should be neutral on moral and religious matters, Sandel makes the case for a politics of the common good that no longer ignores moral beliefs.

The free market may be a morality-free zone, but people are not.

"It is by no means clear that government can or should be neutral on the pressing moral questions of the day. The civil rights laws legislated morality, and rightly so. Not only did they ban odious practices, like the segregation of lunch counters; they also aimed at changing moral sentiments."

We can't make sense of a range of moral and political obligations that we commonly recognise, even prize, Sandel writes, unless we think of ourselves "as encumbered selves, open to moral claims we have not willed".

"For many people, talk of virtue in politics brings to mind religious conservatives telling people how to live. But this is not the only way that conceptions of virtue and the common good can inform politics.

"The challenge is to imagine a politics that takes moral and spiritual questions seriously, but brings them to bear on broad economic and civic concerns, not only on sex and abortion."