To browse Academia. Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above. Skip to main content. You're using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. Mojca Pajnik. SI WWW. On the other hand, trafficking in human beings is equated with the sexual exploitation and victimization of women, while other types of forced labor are excluded from debates. During the s, the s, and particularly the s, civil society movements and feminist theory re-opened the debate on prostitution af- ter several decades of respite following the Second World War, reinforc- ing the view that prostitution was sexual violence against women, similar to rape, pornography and other types of sexual exploitation.
Yet it is not only colonialism that defines sexual violence, but also capitalism, class divisions, racism, nationalisms and heterosexual norms. However, abolitionist perspectives do not take into account these aspects.
The movements for self-organization of prostitutes that began to emerge during the early s, not only in the US and Western Europe, but also in Latin America and Asia, radicalized the argument against ab- olitionism. In legal categories, when decriminalization of prostitution is debated as abolition, it has a different meaning; it denotes the abolition of the provisions in penal laws that treat prostitution as an offense.
For more on this see Chapter Two. The definition of prostitution as violence or sex work, and of prosti- tutes as victims or sex workers, continues to be the principal point of de- parture in considerations of prostitution. Similarly polarized are polem- ics on human trafficking. Those supporting the abolition of prostitution define trafficking in human beings as violence and argue for the policies of victim protection and criminalization of perpetrators.
Today, sex work is associated with the sex indus- try, which, according to some authors,6 also includes striptease, erotic dance, sex hot lines and even pornography.
