The Pros And Cons Of Prostitution In China

As one of the oldest industries in the world, prostitution used to be legal in China (Jin, 2005). After China was liberated, the government strictly banned prostitution yet it is still rampant nowadays. Scholars consider it as a city disease. The city needs large sum of migrant workers to develop, however, they don’t have sufficient economic ability to bring their families to cities and satisfy their sexual demand. Therefore, they became the major customers of this industry (Liang, 2012). This problem has always been drawing public’s attention. In this essay, the pros and cons of legalizing prostitution will be listed, namely, making the industry easier to be supervised, protecting the rights and interests of sex workers as well as lead to

China strictly forbids prostitution as it may lead to the propagation of AIDS. According to the data from the Ministry of Health, sexual transmission has already become the major cause of sex workers getting AIDS. (Ministry of health, 2007). Even though huge effort have been taken by hospitals and social organizations to work on the safety education for prostitutes, it failed to reduce those numbers. Scholars believe that this mainly due to the government’s restriction. The prohibition prevent sex workers from undergoing a medical inspection and reaching for help. As illegal workers in China, no yearly medical inspection is promised. More importantly, the prohibition by government instills the concept of it is shameful to be a sex worker to the society. Since AIDS is usually related to an indecent sexual life in China, sex workers usually refused to accept medical treatment which makes the phenomenon even worse. However, in Netherland where prostitution is legalized, sex workers are encouraged to go for medical inspections 4 times a year. As a result, the percentage of AIDS carriers is 0.001% of Netherland’s population, lower than China where 0.058% of the population carry AIDS (The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). Some people against legalizing prostitution hold the opinion that the supervision of government will not be effective. Legalizing prostitution

China is a country where sex education is seriously insufficient, large scale of teenagers learn knowledge about sex from porn. In the long run, legalizing prostitution might promote sex education as it will no longer be a taboo to mention in public. However, in the short run, without adequate knowledge, large number of teenage boys might visit brothels out of curiosity, teenage girls may choose to work in brothels to earn pocket money. As long as families and education system don’t cooperate with each other to work on establishing teenagers’ correct attitude toward sex, legalizing prostitution will bring even worse consequences. Some people may argue that legalizing prostitution will reduce the percentage of juveniles been raped. According to a research, the pleasure of rape doesn’t come from sex at all, instead, it comes from violence (Wei, 2002).

To sum up, there are both pros and cons in the legalization of prostitution. It will make the industry easier to be supervised and protect sex workers’ rights, yet it will also lead to the early access to sexual behavior of juveniles. Arguments against these main points are: government’s supervision will not be effective, cause the collapse of social values and reduce the juveniles’ rape rate. These counter arguments are easy to refute. In my perspective, the pros of prostitution legalization