LEARN A BOUT TH E TRA FFI CKING OF WOMEN AND GIRLS WORLDWIDE, AND FIND OUT WHAT CAN BE DONE TO END THIS WID ESPR EAD PROBLEM …
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SOROPTIMIST WHITE PAPER
Prostitution is Not a Choice
I think so much about what has happened to me. Why these men did what they did to me. Old, disgusting men. It was horrible. They knew I did not want to be there, but they paid their money. They used me. I was their property for the night. They destroyed me.
(14-year-old girl at Casa Hogar, a shelter in Costa Rica for children rescued from the country’s sex trade1)
OVERVIEW Prostitution has been called the world’s oldest “profession.” In reality, it is the world’s oldest “oppression” and continues to be one of the most overlooked human rights abuses of women on the planet today. 2 Prostitution of women is a particularly lethal form of violence against women, and a violation of a woman’s most basic human rights. While society attempts to normalize prostitution on a variety of levels (discussed later in this paper), prostituted women are subjected to violence and abuse at the hands of paying “clients.” For the vast majority of prostituted women, “prostitution is the experience of being hunted, dominated, harassed, assaulted and battered.” 3 It is “sexual terrorism against women at the hands of men and little is being done to stop the carnage.”4And in “no other so-called profession are so many women murdered each year.” 5 More than anything, prostitution is not a choice, as some claim. Survivors of prostitution have described it as “the choice made by those who have no choice.” 6 The global forces that “choose” women for prostitution include, among others, gender discrimination, race discrimination, poverty, abandonment,
