Speaker:  Dr Max Waltman

Topic:       Legal Prostitution: A Crime Against Humanity?

                 Abstract: Despite extensive social science research documenting the coercion and damage attendant and endemic to the sex industry and decades of legal debate on approaches to this problem, no effective legal challenges have resulted. Countries following the Swedish (now “Nordic/Equality") prostitution model law, which penalizes buyers and third parties while supporting prostituted persons to escape, have decreased prostitution's incidence, while countries in which prostitution is legalized have seen trafficking and other violative abuses metastasize. Empirical evidence shows that legal prostitution exponentially increases “widespread" and “systematic attacks" against prostituted persons, including “rape, enforced prostitution, human trafficking, sexual slavery," and other atrocities enumerated under international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).  Close case readings focusing on the ICC support the theory that legal prostitution be recognized as a crime against humanity.

Date:        21 August 2024

Time:       13:00 – 14:15

Venue:     Room 648, Arts and Social Sciences Building

Contact:          Pauliane Davidse, 808 2414, pauliane@sun.ac.za

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