IT IS estimated that there are between 40 and 42 million prostituted people worldwide, 80 per cent of whom are women and girls. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for violence against women and girls, said in a recent report: “Prostitution reduces women and girls to mere commodities and perpetuates a system of discrimination and violence that hinders their ability to achieve true equality.”
Despite this, a 2024 YouGov poll indicated that 52 per cent of British people would like to see the sale and purchase of sex legalised. For those in favour, prostitution is regarded as work like any other and should, therefore, be subject to the same workplace regulations and protections as any other form of work. To those opposed to it, prostitution isn’t the oldest profession in the world: it is the oldest and most damaging form of oppression.
In a letter to the Scottish Parliament, the UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, wrote: “The ‘sex work is work’ narrative does not reflect the reality described by survivors or by frontline law enforcement. The reality is that exploitation is being normalised, particularly for younger women.”
This was before a vote in that Parliament on draft legislation that would have decriminalised and supported those engaged in prostitution, while imposing fines and prison sentences on people caught buying sex. The Prostitution (Offences and Support) Bill, introduced by Ash Regan MSP, was voted down at the beginning of February by 54 to 64, an outcome that, Ms Regan suggested, meant that “dogs have more protection than women and girls.”
The legislation, known as the “Unbuyable Bill”, would have introduced the Nordic Model to Scotland: an overhaul of prostitution law which decriminalises the selling of sex while making it illegal to buy it. It is a system that has been shown to reduce stigma for the women involved while also reducing opportunities for trafficking and exploitation.
HOW might the Church respond to this? One way is to hold to a responsible ethic of prostitution, which resists the obfuscatory language of “Sex work is work,” an assertion that evades the grim reality of a practice that is deeply harmful to women and girls. It must be an ethic rooted in theology and biblical teaching rather than one imposed by an increasingly sexually permissive culture.
The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 provides a good example: one that values women who are forced into prostitution, while it shames the men who pay for access to their bodies.
Tamar was widowed and childless, a woman with a marginalised and uncertain status, no longer a virgin, but not a wife or mother, either. She had also been abandoned by Judah, her father-in-law, who, by custom, ought to have protected her.
Tamar had no choice but to take on the task of another type of woman with uncertain status: that of a prostitute. In this guise, Judah, a buyer of women’s bodies, has sex with her, and she conceives a child. Tamar is able to use the seal of Judah’s identity which she has tricked him into giving her, to prove that he is the father of her child. His initial words of condemnation — “Bring her out and let her be burned” — become “She is more righteous than I,” when he is confronted with his own part in it.
While the narrative makes no overt moral claims about prostitution, the story of Tamar and Judah does provide an implicit criticism of the Israelite treatment of women who were forced by circumstance into it. She is righteous, favoured by God, given special matriarchal status, and a place in the genealogy of King David. Instead of being condemned by God for engaging in prostitution, she is honoured, whereas Judah, user of women, must face self-censure and shame. Tellingly, he “did not lie with her again”.
Similarly, Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho (Joshua 2 and 6), also appears in the same genealogy, after she saves the life of Israelite spies. Like many prostitutes, Rahab exists on the margins of society, in the literal border of the city walls, and yet it is she who has a profound understanding of the nature of who God truly is: “Yahweh your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below” (Joshua 2.11). Her story not only challenges Israel’s vision of outsiders: it also subverts the status of prostituted women, who are valued in the sight of God.
LIBERAL notions of choice and empowerment, skewing how we regard modern-day Rahabs and Tamars, present them not as victims of oppression, but as participants in an industry that is morally acceptable so long as women choose to do it.
Beginning in the 1970s and gaining pace in the late 1990s, a powerful pro-full-decriminalisation lobby that “Sex work is work” has vociferously opposed critics of prostitution as a system of oppression and exploitation. The term SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist) has been used to harass and shame anyone seeking to apply a feminist analysis to prostitution.
The sustained campaign to normalise prostitution by claiming that it is work like any other is seen by abolitionists not as an honest attempt to improve the sex industry, but as an attempt to improve its image to make prostitution socially acceptable. To control the language is to control the narrative.
The use of the term “sex work” is a rhetorical device, which helps to normalise prostitution, sanitising the harm that it does to the most vulnerable, and obliterating the reality of a practice that is incongruent with human dignity. On the other hand, to speak of the prostituted brings the perpetrators fully to the fore. As Gisèle Pelicot has famously said, it’s time for shame to change sides.
Jayne Manfredi is an Anglican deacon, writer, and radio broadcaster. offtherailsbyjayne.substack.com
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