WASHINGTON, DC (May 16, 2024) – The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) said that a new law in Belgium provides legal cover for pimps and traffickers to continue to abuse prostituted women. The law provides a “labour contract” to prostituted persons that includes a provision to “enable their pimps to punish them with a government mediator if they refuse sex more than 10 times in a six-month period,” according to ThePublica.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, along with survivors and women’s groups, maintain that instead of providing legal cover, Belgium should penalize pimps/traffickers along with sex buyers. They say prostitution is inherently harmful and policies like Belgium’s that further trap women into this system of exploitation guarantee that current and future victims will have lifelong physical and psychological trauma – not the so-called ‘empowerment’ that proponents claim.
“The clause that a prostituted woman in Belgium will face government intervention should she exercise her bodily autonomy too often gives the lie to the idea that she has any real bodily autonomy at all. This is the latest in a sorry string of examples that span the globe, proving time and again that regulation of the prostitution system protects only those who sell women and the men who buy them,” said Rachel Moran, Director of International Policy and Advocacy, National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
To learn the truth about prostitution, visit: https://endsexualexploitation.org/issues/prostitution/.
About National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE)
Founded in 1962, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is the leading national non-partisan organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography. https://endsexualexploitation.org/
