Page 98 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

FEMINIST PROSTITUTION DEBATES 85
Netherlands, which decriminalise prostitution practices occurring within the context of
licensed commercial premises.
In opposition to ‘anti-abolitionist’ strategies of this kind, the feminist antiprostitution
lobby is currently pushing organisations within the UN to acknowledge that prostitution is
an issue that relates to matters of inequality, exploitation and violence, and, as such, its very
existence constitutes a violation of human rights. To realise this goal, the Coalition
Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) has drafted a new Convention Against Sexual
Exploitation with the support of UNESCO. This Convention maintains that it is a
fundamental human right to be free from sexual exploitation in all its forms and contends
that the 1949 Convention should be expanded in order to make prostitution and trafficking
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violations of human rights. Briefly, the draft Convention argues for the introduction of
positive programmes in work, education and other economic and supportive structures,
so as to diminish the economic necessity for women to engage in prostitution, and includes
a clause designed to penalise the male customers of prostitution, while simultaneously
demanding the removal of all punitive provisions for women-in-prostitution. In Sweden,
abolitionist arguments of this kind have resulted in the implementation of a new
prostitution policy, one that criminalises the act of buying but not the act of selling sex
(Gould 2001: 437–56).
While the arguments mounted by both sides are rhetorically persuasive, they are also
flawed in a number of crucial respects. The understanding of prostitution as violence
against women and the understanding of prostitution as an unremarkable configuration of
‘private sexuality’ similarly function to homogenise prostitution practices by eliding the
experiential diversity of sellers and buyers of sex. Moreover, even though the tactical
reconfiguration of prostitution as work has given the prostitution transaction an
imprimatur of acceptability, it remains the case that the concept of ‘sex work’ is fraught with
problems, not the least of which is the question of what is meant by the terms ‘sex’ and
‘work’ and hence the very rendition of prostitution as sex work (Prestage and Perkins
1994: 6–21).
Nevertheless, the broad parameters of these debates look set to influence the shape of
Chinese legal responses to prostitution for the foreseeable future. I have therefore
highlighted the disputatious nature of feminist responses to prostitution in order to situate
the following question: ‘How well do the respective platforms of the feminist anti-
prostitution and pro-sex-work lobby travel to China?’

Debating the Chinese response to prostitution
As noted previously, the Chinese government is currently being pressured by certain
international human rights organisations to abandon its policy of banning prostitution. In a
recent report on the PRC’s implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), various NGOs criticise China’s
governmental authorities for failing, among other things, to tackle the domestic and intra-
country trafficking in women for the purposes of ‘forced’ prostitution and for refusing to
recognise ‘voluntary’ prostitution as a legitimate form of work (Human Rights in China
et al. 1998). At the same time, the NGO report somewhat erroneously castigates law and