A Christian legal rights group has issued a damning report highlighting the "shattered lives" suffered by millions of women exploited into prostitution, in reaction to International Women’s Day by the United Nations.
The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) published "Prostitution: The Liberalisation Lobby in Europe" in the same week that the U.N. marked the global women’s event on Saturday (March 8), this year calling for equal rights under the theme, "For ALL Women and Girls: Rights, Equality, Empowerment."
It follows a filmed interview by the ECLJ with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, as previously reported by Christian Daily International.
“We cannot ever pretend that we will achieve a society where there is equality between men and women if we normalize that men can buy women’s bodies or children,” Alsalem said in the interview.
In its new report, the ECLJ states that 6.7 million victims are prostituted worldwide, including 1.7 million children, whose lives are "shattered by exploitation, violence and trauma." France, Sweden, and Ireland are lauded by the legal rights group for banning the purchase of prostitution acts and helping victims escape.
In an article accompanying the report, headlined "Prostitution: A New Right for Women?" Priscille Kulczyk, a researcher for the ECLJ, said the sex industry is "becoming a huge industry," fueled by a flood of pornography on the internet and powerful progressive lobbies pushing to liberalize prostitution across Europe.
“On the occasion of International Women’s Day, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) is publishing a new report denouncing the actions of the lobby for the liberalization of prostitution in Europe,” Kulczyk wrote.
“If the powerful 'progressive' lobby is to be believed, the legalization of prostitution is the new horizon of human rights, the new right for women to conquer.”
Kulczyk argued that the presumed right by the liberalization lobby to prostitute a human body is on par with other social issues of concern in Christian ethics, such as abortion, transsexualism, surrogacy, and euthanasia, saying the purported "right" of prostitution "knows no limits" and lamenting the notion of women and girls offering themselves as "work like any other."
She opined that the pro-prostitution lobby relies on some nongovernmental organizations to push its aims. At both the Council of Europe and the U.N. itself, Kulczyk recalled the battle for prostituted victims as opponents of exploitation, such as the ECLJ, face surmounting pressure from the pro-lobby.
“Under the guise of the right to control one’s own body, the empowerment of women or the fight against discrimination against them, this lobby promotes the violation of women’s rights. Calling the activity of prostitution 'sex work' or contrasting forced prostitution with voluntary prostitution to make the latter acceptable is a delusion: it is always about the purchase of a person’s body.”
Kulczyk also deemed it "wrong" to say prostitutes consent to the violation of their bodies since the background framework for the selling and buying of sex acts is "largely exploited by traffickers and almost systematically coerced by violence, manipulation, poverty, or drugs."
“Behind the apparently laudable objective of defending the rights of people in prostitution, liberalizing this practice amounts to legalizing the exploitation of which they are victims and regulating the violence of prostitution,” she concluded, mindful of the aims of International Women’s Day.
“'True feminism' in the service of the rights of women and girls lies in the fight against the commodification of women’s bodies.”
