Originally published in The Nevada Independent
By Jackie Valley
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has released a video attacking — and calling for an end to — Nevada’s decades-old legal prostitution industry.
The two-minute video features women who say they were held hostage, sold for sex or trafficked as children in Nevada, where brothels are legal in select sparsely populated counties. It comes several months after a woman who says she was sex trafficked through a Nevada brothel filed a federal lawsuitseeking to overturn the state’s legalized sex industry.
The woman at the center of that lawsuit — Rebekah Charleston — opens the video with a blistering assessment of the situation: “I have a message for any woman listening: Nevada is not safe for women.”
The video goes on to describe Nevada’s history of legalized prostituion and, much like the federal lawsuit, alleges that it bolsters the illegal sex market.
“Inequality, poverty and abuse drives women into prostitution,” Charleston says in the video. “In order to abolish sex trafficking, we must eliminate the demand for prostitution. To put it candidly, we must stop any system that condones buying human beings for sex.”
