FEW years ago, the United Nations (UN) urged the countries in Asia including the Philippines to legalize prostitution. The reason behind such call was to combat the spread of HIV-Aids. It specifically recommends that nations should get rid of punitive laws against consensual sex trade to stem the HIV epidemic.
For them, prostitution should be recognized as an occupation so that it can be regulated to protect workers and customers. The existing penalties imposed in prostitution has just pushed people underground and away from the basic health services thereby exposing them to higher risk of acquiring HIV and spreading it.
On the onset, the UN recommendation seems to make a lot of sense. The number of HIV infected people and the rate of how it spreads has reached an alarming stage. Legalizing prostitution may seem to be necessary and beneficial at the same time and is therefore totally called for.
By legalizing sex trade, the prostitutes can be monitored, can be provided with safe working conditions, and can access the essential health care they need thereby reducing their risks. In like manner, the customers get protected as well.
Since it cannot be stopped, we might as well establish safety nets for them and in a way for us as well. It is after all the oldest profession in the world. So if we can’t beat them, then let’s join them; isn’t that just a happy ending for all of us?
Yet if we look closer to the issue at hand and consider our context of prostitution in our country then it would not take much thinking to say NO to such call. Why do I say so?
1. Prostitution violates women’s rights. Unlike in the other side of the world where prostitutes took the conscious choice of being in sex trade, majority of the prostitutes in the Philippines are only pushed to such trade due to poverty and lack of education. Most of them are underage and come from rural areas and hardly had any formal education at all. They are therefore just victims of the cruelty of the world. With this context, it can never be considered a profession. Legalizing it will just widen the door for human rights violation.
2. We are a nation who pride ourselves with a good conscience and dignity. Flesh trading denotes animalistic behavior and gutter-like form of living. It should have no room in a culture who respects women and who has high regard for chivalry. What I am trying to say is that although we may be a poor country but we are surely not a cheap nation. Let us not start to regard ourselves as one.
3. We value family over and above anything. We even break laws in the name of our family. Why then would we legalize a profession that has been known to cause family fall outs and break ups? Doing such would be upfront a danger to what we hold so dear; our family.
In a world undergoing rapid liberality and modernism, it would be easy to fall victim on the cause of pragmatism. Just because something is practical does not mean it is the best way to go. In its fight against HIV-AIDS, the United Nations has forgotten that we are more than just bodies that need to be healthy. We have a soul too. We are essentially embodied spirits.