Academics specializing in gender studies agreed yesterday that prostitution should be decriminalized, but differed on other aspects of the sex industry.
Hwang Shu-ling (黃淑玲), an associate professor at the National Defense Medical Center's Department of Humanities, and Liu Yu-shiu (劉毓秀), a professor at National Taiwan University's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, joined several women's groups in a meeting at the Ministry of the Interior yesterday.
"We propose that the sex industry should be reduced in size to prevent more women from entering it. This is because very few women are able to leave the industry in one piece after they make their money and want out," Liu said.
"It has been found that prostitution harms these workers' ability to deal with reality, and they have a high incidence of suicide and self-mutilation, not to mention addiction to drugs," she said.
"But, at the same time, we want prostitution to be decriminalized, with the clients being fined instead so they can be taught to take responsibility for the problems they cause, such as [providing demand for] human smuggling. It should not be taxpayers who have to cough up for these problems," she said.
Liu also said that pimps and madams and others who profit from the exploitation of prostitutes should be fined.
Liu said that the groups' main aim was to promote a society in which sexual relationships were equal and not of a commercial nature.
The groups at the meeting, including the Garden of Hope Foundation and the End Child Prostitution Association in Taiwan, asked the ministry to explain its position on the sex industry.
Department of Social Affairs Director Chiu Ju-na (邱汝娜) said that a Chinese-language report in January which claimed the department was working to promote decriminalization of the sex industry in its entirety was not correct.
She said the ministry was only looking into prostitution.
"Legalization of the sex industry requires further public debate, but mindful of human rights concerns, the ministry has asked the National Police Administration to study the feasibility of decriminalization of prostitution," Chiu said.
But the groups who met with Chiu did not represent all women's groups opinions on the matter.
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She said they adopted a middle-class, moralizing stand which infringed against the prostitutes they purported to represent.
"Article 80 of the Social Order Maintenance Law (社會秩序維護法) requires punishment for all prostitution, yet often it's only the lower-class prostitutes that end up getting caught by police," Ho said.
She said that high-class escorts usually knew how to dress elegantly, show good taste and avoid police.
"It's good that the other groups want prostitution to be decriminalized, but, in the past, they have hindered the abolition of Article 80 by saying they wanted a program to regulate the sex industry. It was a deliberate ploy to the delay the process of abolishing the article," she said.
Ho said that by focusing only on exploitation in the sex industry, the other groups were ignoring exploitation in other industries.
"They do not realize that there is a desperate need for people to do this line of work, and this line of work is no more worrying than others," Ho said.
"Lower-class women need breathing space," she said.
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