In “Sex workers get help to give up their night jobs“, The Age discusses the challenges facing those in prostitution who want to quit the profession and move into a more mainstream acceptable position:
RITA could never explain the large gap on her resume when she applied for jobs. She’d say she was a stay-at-home mother. But she’d really spent her adult life working as a prostitute to support three children.
”You can’t really tell them what you were doing,” she said. ”Otherwise, if you do, you’re going to be judged.” As her children became teenagers, Rita worried they might discover her secret, perhaps see her working the streets of St Kilda.
The problem I have with this entire process is simple: why should this matter? This is the 21st century. If someone worked for a week, a month, or ten years as a prostitute, why should that impair their ability to then apply for other work?
“24601″ – it’s the recurring motif from Les Miserables – the prisoner number assigned to Jean Valjean. It haunts him his entire life. A significant part of the premise of his story is that his history as a criminal taints his entire life moving forward, despite having done his time.
Yet prostitutes typically aren’t even doing anything criminal – or it shouldn’t be seen as that. Sex is sex. If some people pay for it, who are we, in society, to judge either the person who pays or the person who provides the service?
In short, it’s incredibly saddening that this is even an issue. It shouldn’t be.
No related posts.
Prostitution has been legal in New Zealand since 2004-5 now, and contrary to the screams of the religious right, nothing fundamentally changed in society after its passing – apart from working conditions being made safer etc.
But I suspect the problem above would still apply for anyone leaving the industry: you’ve got centuries worth of moral puritanism to overcome there before someone wouldn’t be looked down on for having been a prostitute.
Even if an HR person didn’t personally have an issue with it, they would potentially self-censor on behalf of their client etc. And so the misery-go-round continues.
Jean Valjean violated his parole if I remember the story correctly and that was the cause of his concern for being discovered.
In the terms of how parole was defined then, yes. Quite likely.
But in modern terms, the issues faced by Jean Valjean are a parallel for anyone who has done his/her time, but continues to be judged harshly by society.