PARIS: French sex workers have lodged a constitutional challenge to a 2016law making it illegal to pay for sex, reopening a debate on whether womenshould be free to sell their bodies.
On Tuesday, around 30 sex workers backed by nine associations, including amedical NGO, went to the Constitutional Council to argue the law infringedtheir sexual and commercial freedom and made them more vulnerable to attack.
The law, which punishes people caught paying for sex with fines of up to1,500 euros ($1,800) for first-time offenders and 3,750 euros for repeatoffenders, took years to make its way through parliament after fiercedebate.
Inspired by Sweden, it makes it a crime to buy sex but not to sell it,shifting the criminal responsibility to clients.
Hailed by many feminist groups at the time as an advance for women’srights, the law was assailed by sex workers as an infringement of“constitutional rights to personal autonomy and sexual freedom, respect ofprivacy, freedom of contract and freedom to do business.”
The sex workers also argued that by criminalising their clients the law haseroded their earnings, forcing them to take ever greater risks to earn aliving.
These include agreeing to engage in unprotected sex or to have sex inisolated environments where they are more vulnerable to attack.
In August a Peruvian transgender sex worker, Vanesa Campos, was killed inthe forested Bois de Boulogne park west of Paris. She was shot dead whiletrying to stop a group of men robbing a client.
“It’s the client who dictates his conditions and we have no choice becausewe have fewer clients than before but still as many bills at the end of themonth,” one sex worker, who gave her name as Anais, told AFP afterTuesday’s hearing.
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Many rights groups argue women do not engage in prostitution freely but areforced to do so by hardship or other circumstances.
They accuse clients of exploiting their vulnerability. Issuing a robustdefence Wednesday of the law, France’s High Council for Equality BetweenMen and Women argued prostitution was “the opposite of sexual liberation”and “oppresses all women” by enshrining the notion of male domination.
The council pointed to a poll showing that 78 percent of French supportedthe ban as proof of widespread support. “We don’t want a society where itis possible to buy someone else’s dignity,” a lawyer for the abolitionistcamp, Cedric Uzan-Sarano, argued before the Constitutional Council.
But a lawyer for the sex workers’ camp, Patrice Spinosi, countered that bymaking it a crime to buy sex but not to sell it the state had created a“schizophrenic” situation and “infantilised prostitutes.”
“Who are you to forbid me from doing what I want with my body?” he asked.
The Constitutional Council will publish its decision on whether the law iscompatible with France’s basic charter on February 1. – APP/AFP
