Israel's legislature files to adopt Nordic model

Got something to share with the reading public that isn't an action but should be read?

Moderators: delphyne, oneangrygirl, deedle, sam

Israel's legislature files to adopt Nordic model

Postby sam » Mon Dec 21, 2009 2:05 pm

Knesset bill filed to make hiring of prostitutes illegal
By REBECCA ANNA STOIL
http://www.jpost .com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261244344182&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Although the Israeli sex trade is said to generate billions of dollars of profit a year, with as many as a million visits to prostitutes each month, the Knesset may have found a way to discourage would-be "clients" of Israel's flourishing prostitution market. MK Orit Zuarets (Kadima), chairwoman of the Committee against the Trafficking of Women, filed a bill Sunday that would make the act of hiring a prostitute illegal in Israel.

"The significance of placing criminal responsibility on sex trade customers is that it regards prostitution as a forbidden phenomenon that is illegitimate and is rejected by society," explained Zuarets Sunday.

Zuarets has initiated a bill that would prohibit "consuming" sexual services and would allow courts to try sex trade consumers. The bill has won wide support, and is being co-sponsored by 25 MKs from across the political spectrum.

As an amendment to the penal code, Zuarets's legislation would place a possible sentence of up to six months in prison for a sex customer. Any customer found guilty for the first time would be offered the alternative of a community rehabilitation plan, whereas a repeat customer found guilty more than once will not have the option of participating in the community plan.

"This is a revolutionary proposal, which would define the customers of the sex trade as criminals and would require them to bear criminal responsibility for their actions," said Zuarets. "Legislation such as this one is part of a strategy of action against customers, who create the demand for the phenomenon and constitute the driving force behind the sex industry which generates billions of dollars each year."

"The only way to defend the women who deal in prostitution is not by those proposals that seek to institutionalize prostitution, because prostitution is not a profession, and is not the result of free will," Zuarets added. "The right way is to criminalize the consumers, spreading a safety net of social rights, a plan for rehabilitation and the establishment of shelters for women to aid them in escaping the cycle of prostitution."

The Committee for the Struggle Against Women Trafficking has already held a number of hearings, starting during the previous Knesset, regarding the criminalization of sex customers. Committee members discussed as the central model the so-called "Swedish System", after the Scandinavian country that in 1999 became the first state to illegalize sex consumers rather than the prostitutes themselves. That model, said committee staffers, was adopted for Zuarets's proposal.

Prostitution in Israel is currently legal, whereas the "accompanying" crimes, including pimping, running brothels, publishing sex advertisements and trading in women, are all criminal offenses. But legislators claimed that "the law was never sufficiently efficient in reducing these phenomena in any significant manner."

Legislators and anti-trafficking organizations were not alone in their support for Zuarets's bill. One of the preeminent rabbis of the national religious movement, Rabbi Yuval Sherlow, the head of the Petah Tikvah Hesder Yeshiva wrote an opinion supporting according to Jewish law the imprisonment of a man who has hired the services of a prostitute. MK Zevulun Orlev (Jewish Home) had requested Sherlow's opinion on the subject, and Sherlow wrote in support of the measure, but opposed placing sole responsibility on the customer.
"Your orgasm can no longer dictate my oppression"

Trisha Baptie
sam
chaotic good
 
Posts: 4391
Joined: Thu Dec 30, 2004 12:54 am

Re: Israel's legislature files to adopt Nordic model

Postby sam » Tue Dec 29, 2009 9:41 am

When the customer is a criminal
By Vered Lee
http://www.haaretz .com/hasen/spages/1138121.html

During my first visit to the bustling red-light district around Tel Aviv's Old Central Bus Station, the expensive SUV's couldn't be missed. The drivers behind the dark windows honked their horns to summon the prostitutes, blind to the black and blue marks on the women's bodies from shooting heroin, impervious to their suffering. An entire cross section of the Israeli population was represented by the "clients": migrant workers, soldiers, Arabs, elderly gentlemen in suits and high-techies in cars bearing the logos of their companies. In broad daylight, some went into the squalid massage parlors, while others took homeless minors, most of them addicts, into their company cars.

Some time later, when a brothel opened in my apartment building and customers sometimes came to the wrong floor, reality finally knocked on my door, in more ways than one. Again, I saw religious and secular people, men from the middle class and up, veterans and new immigrants, a veritable melting pot. Young men 25 to 35 arrived together, in pairs and groups, demonstrating that in Israel whoring is not a lonely activity but a social pastime, part of the culture. Like going to the movies or having a date at a pub.

Last week, MK Orit Zuaretz (Kadima) submitted a bill supported by 25 other lawmakers providing for six-month jail terms for people convicted of purchasing sexual services, with first-time offenders able to enter an educational rehab program instead of going to prison. The bill was formulated by attorney Naomi Levenkron, director of the College of Management's legal clinics. In the past, former Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On tried to have a similar bill enacted.

The measure is based on the understanding that prostitution is a crime, that prostitutes inhabit a living hell in which their "human dignity and freedom," to use the title of one of our Basic Laws, are trampled into dust. In Sweden, which was the first country to enact a similar law, in 1999, the number of women working as prostitutes shrank by two-thirds.

Criminalizing the consumption of commercialized sex seems such an obvious step that it's not clear why it has not long been part of our law. In other criminal areas such as gambling and drugs, the law has seen the purchasers as offenders from the start, even if not the main culprits. And gamblers and drug users harm themselves and their families first of all, while the purchasers of sex harm an often helpless stranger. Still, they have avoided prosecution, and it's the victims who are frequently arrested in brothel raids.

The double standards are nicely illustrated linguistically, with the pejoratives "prostitute" or "whore" used for the women, while the men are called "customers" or "clients." The new bill would put an end to this kind of sanitization of language; the purchasers would be tagged as criminals, not clients. The bodies of human beings, be they women, men or children, are not just another commodity; anyone who traffics in them in any way should be liable to punishment.

The Knesset inquiry committee that examined trafficking in women in 2004 estimated that each month about 1 million acts of prostitution take place in Israel. From the scores of interviews I have conducted with men and women who work in the sex industry, it emerged that many of these transactions are accompanied by violence, debasement, rape and other abuse. There is no price for these "extras," and there is no compensation for the psychological damage suffered by those condemned to work as prostitutes.

If there is any place the free market cannot be left to set prices, this is it. In March 2008, the price for certain sexual services around the Old Central Bus Station, set by supply and demand, fell to NIS 5. The time has come for the "customers" to pay the true price for their dehumanization of sex workers and to be marked as criminals in every sense of the word.
sam
chaotic good
 
Posts: 4391
Joined: Thu Dec 30, 2004 12:54 am

Re: Israel's legislature files to adopt Nordic model

Postby delphyne » Tue Dec 29, 2009 10:41 am

Another aspect to this which I saw over at the Captive Daughters blog:

ISRAEL - Young Palestinian women are being forced to into prostitution in brothels, escort services, and private apartments in Ramallah and Jerusalem, including areas inhabited by Jews, according to a report released Wednesday (12-9-09). The Palestinian organization SAWA (All Women Together Today and Tomorrow) published the paper, the first of its kind, urging Palestinian society to break its silence over its sex industry.

The report was compiled with support by UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, which allotted resources for research on the subject. SAWA conducted research and interviews for the study in the beginning of 2008, but for a variety of reasons has only now been published. The report, which is titled "Trafficking and Forced Prostitution of Palestinian Women and Girls: Forms of Modern Day Slavery," was released in conjunction with the "Global 16-day Campaign to Combat Violence Against Women."

The report claims that women are trafficked from different areas of the West Bank, in particular urban areas, as well as from the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. Women from Eastern Europe who are sold into the sex trade in Israel are also occasionally brought to the West Bank, where they work in designated apartments. There are a number of legally registered hotels and cleaning companies that offer "double services," which include sexual services for men...


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1133892.html
delphyne
antiporn star
 
Posts: 2930
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2005 10:59 am


Return to essays, articles, rants for public view

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 45 guests

cron