San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution
Final Report 1996

International Policies and Practices-Notes



1 This law discusses surrogate motherhood as a prostitution service. 'If a man's wife has borne him no children, but a prostitute has borne him children, he shall provide for that prostitute wine, oil and clothing and the children which the prostitute has borne him shall be his heirs but as long as the wife lives, the prostitute shall not abide in the house with the wife.' Whores in History, page 8

2 Ibid., page 9.

3 Ibid., page 15 . Wives were confined to domestic activities and not permitted to socialize outside. In this structure, women who were not model wives were not able to support themselves except through prostitution, so a large prostitution economy developed.

4 Ibid., page 17

5 According to Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution in Victorian Society, (Cambridge University Press, 1980) many women who did not have sexually transmitted diseases when they were arrested got them from the unsterile, newly invented speculums used to examine them .

6 Working and The Law: Worker's Handbook, published by SWOP, Sex Workers Outreach Project, New South Wales.

7 As a result, the majority of prostitutes can not work in legally specified ways, so that most of prostitution is criminalized. (See Appendix A.) For example, in most legalized systems of prostitution only 10-20% of prostitutes comply with regulation. 'Registration, Mandatory Testing and Health Certificates: The Record' by Priscilla Alexander 1994.

8 COYOTE, Margo St. James.

9 For example, in a 1991-2 survey of 55 street prostitutes in Portland, Oregon, 55% said they were the victims of sexual torture. Council For Prostitution Alternatives, Portland Oregon.

10 For example, a woman from the Philippines reported being offered a job in a hotel in Europe by a high government official at home. She was not a prostitute at the time, and no mention was made of sex. After much indecision, she decided to go. When she arrived, she found that the job was in fact prostitution, and that she had no choice in the matter.

11 Laws against 'traffic' in women, which are supposed to prevent the forced movement of women and girls across national or state boundaries for the purposes of prostitution are, instead, used to keep voluntary prostitutes from traveling. The White Slave Traffic Act, introduced in 1910 (also known as the Mann Act) was the first glaring example of racist results of the misdirected attempts to deal with sexual slavery. The first prominent person charged was Jack Johnson, the First Black Heavyweight champion, who had an affair with, and eventually married, a white prostitute. He was charged under the act, and convicted of transporting her across a state line.(Carl Sifakis, Encyclopedia of American Crime Facts on File, Inc. NY, 1982)

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