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Prostitution in the 21St Century France: Where Do We Go from Here?

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Prostitution in the 21St Century France: Where Do We Go from Here? Prostitution in the 21st century France: where do we go from here? by Lea Bernier-Coffineau In the night of August 16th to 17th, Vanesa Campos, 36 years old, was shot in the thorax at her workplace. A transgender prostitute from Peru, Vanesa was working, like the majority of her colleagues, in the Bois de Boulogne, a more than two thousand acres forest in the west of Paris known to be one of the main spots of parisian prostitution. The announcement of this violent murder immediately aroused the wrath of the organizations for the protection and defense of prostitutes' rights. Once more they denounced the alarming work conditions of prostitutes in France, and criticized the policies consistently pursued by the administrations since the middle of the 20th century, which have failed to ensure the safety and security of prostitutes. The STRASS (Syndicat des Travailleurs du Sexe or Sex Workers Union) used the occasion to express yet again its deep disagreement with the law of April 13th 2016 that penalized the purchase of all sexual acts. According to this organization, as well as to several others like Médecins du Monde or the Mouvement français pour le planning familial, punishing the client only results in increasing the clandestinity, precarity and insecurity of prostitutes. Indeed, these organizations were echoing a position which emerged during the debates around the 2016 law when Médecins du Monde, for example, was already concluding that “the negative effects of this law already impact their safety, their health and their living conditions in general.”1 Yet the law, which had the support of 1 GIAMETTA, Calogero, LE BAIL, Hélène, “Que pensent les travailleur(se)s du sexe de la loi prostitution ?” : Enquête sur l’impact de la loi du 13 avril 2016 contre le système prostitutionnel, the main feminist and abolitionist movements, was meant to “invert the criminal charge” by dropping the passive soliciting offense that had targeted prostitutes since the Loi pour la Sécurité Intérieure (Law for Internal Security) from 2003, and by granting them a victim status. If the perverse effect of this new law is unquestionably confirmed by the figures and testimonies collected within the community, one can be surprised by the STRASS arguments. The website of the organizations says: “We fight for the recognition of all forms of sex work, against prohibition”; “We demand that all sanctions against procurement be withdrawn from the criminal code”; “Punishing sex workers' clients […] is an unacceptable harm to our sexual freedom”2. This position, neither a regulationist nor an abolitionist, purely calling for the liberalization of the activity brings a new voice to the public debate. Backed by many LGBTQ rights (Inter-LGBT), people affected by HIV/AIDS (Act-up) and women rights (Collectif 8 Mars pour tou-te-s) organizations, this position is spreading and it is reaching more and more scholars and intellectuals. Françoise Gil, a sociologist specialized in sexual issues, has been taking a stand against “moral crusaders” and for the prostitutes' rights over their own bodies. Her article entitled “The prostitute, a social fiction”3 published in 2008 in the journal Sociétés offers a perfect illustration of the paradoxes that the debate on prostitution involves as well as on the limits of this debate. To shed light on the different positions involved in the issue of prostitution in the 21st century France, I will first review the emergence the liberationist ideal too often reduced to the highly broadcasted and controversial rants of its partisans. I will then focus on Françoise Gil's article in order to better identify the contradictions and inadequacies of Médecins du Monde, 2018. Read online : https://www.medecinsdumonde.org/sites/default/files/Rapport- prostitution-BD.PDF 2 STRASS website: http://strass-syndicat.org 3 GIL, Françoise, “La prostituée, une invention sociale ?”, Sociétés, 2008, n°99, pp. 21-32. Available at: https://www.cairn.info/revue-societes-2008-1-p-21.htm the arguments brought up by this current. Finally it will be necessary to take stock of the stakes of the fight and the factual data available as to get out of inertia. UNDERSTANDING LIBERATIONISM The sociopolitical context that led to the emergence of French liberationism has been fnourished for centuries with reflections and recommendations that tried to deal with the ancient phenomenon of prostitution. For most of its history, French society has adopted a prohibitionist policy that repressed the activity by all means. Using persecution, banishment, imprisonment and even deportation to the Americas, the successive monarchs, guided by the Catholic Church, considered the prostitute as a threat to the population. Because she's afflicted with venereal diseases, attracting honest men between her thighs, the prostitute is a scourge to eradicate. “The repression is active but apparently ineffective: not only the number of girls arrested and locked up does not decline during the [18th] century but it even tends to swell.”4 The entry into the 19th century marked a radical change of strategy. Because prostitution was now seen as inevitable, it would have to be regulated by law. At the dawn of the first empire, Napoleon tilts the sclae towards the tolerance of brothels that allow authorities to better monitor the activity and to protect the eyes of the world from debauchery5. Registries are created and kept up to date in big cities in order to count and track prostitutes, and medical visits are organized in the "public houses" for 4 MERICKSAY, A, “La prostitution à Paris: dans les marges d'un grand livre”, Histoire, économie et société, 1987, pp. 495-508. 5 CHIMIENTI, Milena, “Prostitution: une histoire sans fin ?”, Sociétés, 2008, n° 99, pp. 11-20. regular sanitary controls, enabled by the collaboration between the “mères maquerelles” (madams) and the “Brigade des moeurs” (mores squad). It is the advent of regulationism on behalf of preserving social order. Within a new functionalist approach, prostitution is now considered as a “necessary evil” that needs to be legislated. Thus, as German philosopher Georg Simmel puts it, it presents itself as an essential “release” that contributes to the balance of marital relations and to the preservation of the honor of married women. The French hygienist doctor Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, a fervent defender of the regulationist system, wrote with the delicacy he is known for: “prostitutes are as inevitable in an agglomeration of men as sewers, roads and filth dumps”6. The “French system”, imitated in Europe as in the colonies, thrived throughout the 19th century, and gave way to the golden age of “maisons closes” that would give Paris a sulfurous reputation (that is still alive today as evidenced by postcards). It was only after the Second World War that the country adopted a position called abolitionist, aiming at the disappearance of the “state institution” (“institution étatique”)7 of prostitution. Unlike prohibitionism, abolitionism considers prostitutes as victims rather than criminals. The 1946 Marthe Richard Law8 constitutes the official end of the regulationist era, shuting down brothels and making procurement as well as soliciting illegal. As a consequence, prostitution plunged back into the shadows, and the ambivalence of French modern policy against it would provide fertile ground for the birth of the liberationist current. Indeed, describing the prostitute as a victim while criminalizing their activity as soon as it is visible to the eyes of all seemed at the very least hypocritical. 6 PARENT-DUCHÂTELET, A-J-B, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, 1836. 7 CHIMIENTI, Milena, “Prostitution: une histoire sans fin ?”, Sociétés, 2008, n° 99, pp. 11-20. 8 Named after the female politician, former prostitute, who introduced the bill. Françoise Gil's speech, shared by the STRASS and other organizations, rejects all past or extant attempts to deal with the phenomenon and calls for a total decriminalization of what they see as a “profession” in its own right. According to this line of thought, any repressive law forces "sex workers" into hiding and insecurity. The activists of this feminist and libertarian movement, many of them prostitutes themselves, advocate for full and complete disposition of their bodies and refuse the status of helpless victims assigned to them by society. Furthermore facing a system that repeatedly imposes standards and limits on the woman body, prostitution appeared as the ultimate transgression and even as an elevation. It was Sophie Maksimowski, a young Canadian anthropologist, who brilliantly verbalized this point using a Foucaultian perspective: “It is important to recognize the ability of people, such as sex workers, to challenge discourses that constrain them, and to build discourses of their own.”9 Proponents of liberalization claim the right to choose to prostitute themselves and demand a professional status be created for them to obtain social protections equal to that of other citizens. Lastly, they denounce the French legislation contradictory double discourse which penalizes prostitution with the soliciting offense while demanding taxation of sex workers incomes10. Deliberately provocative and therefore widely publicized, many public interventions of STRASS and other public figures (like that of Ovidie, a former pornographic movies' actress and director), have contributed to include prostitutes' voices in the social debate. Their voices had already united in 2003 when the Loi pour la Sécurité Intérieure (Law for Internal Security) introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of Internal Security under 9 MAKSIMOWSKI, Sophie, “A Brief History of the Anthropology of Sexuality, and Theory in the Field of Women’s Sex Work”, Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology, 2012, vol. 20. Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/totem/vol20/iss1/9 10 French tax administration and jurisprudence consider the prostitution's incomes as non-commercial profits, in accordance with Article 92 of the Tax Code.
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