who freely chooses to sell sexual services. For the other it is a young woman from a poor, underdeveloped country who has been threatened and cajoled into prostitution in the developed West by criminals. For a third prostitution is the outcome of a disorganized life that is marred by abuse and addiction. For yet another the face of prostitu tion is a young, vulnerable girl whose need for emotional support is sexually exploited by callous young men in her environment. The problem is that all of the images of prostitution are available ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’. They merge fact, moral belief, and calls for action, and their adherents hold on to them with sincere conviction. Yet, the choice of what image of prostitution prevails has large consequences for the nature and size of the issue that is the subject of public policy, as well as the type of instruments that are required for its solution. This insight about the role of numbers in policy explains two persistent features of the prostitution debate: the inflated estimate and the ubiquitous rhetorical trope of the “sad story”. In the first case we encounter unsub stantiated estimates, albeit delivered with great authority, about the number of (street) sex workers, Internet sex work, victims of trafficking, etcetera. The second feature is about the absence of numbers. Here, the argu ment is grounded in, often lurid, tales of a single sex worker or victim who, by implication and through the use of vague quantifiers, is supposed to represent a large population. The purpose in both cases is the same: to make a moral point and to incite the audience to action. Numbers have symbolic value in all public policy. What distinguishes morality politics, as we will discuss in chapter 4, is that numbers are primarily used for their sym bolic value, uncoupled from their factual, descriptive role, and with little reflection about the assumptions that determine the delineation of key categories.
Practical Obstacles. There are also practical obstacles in counting the number of sex workers. Prostitution is not a homogeneous phenomenon. It comprises different work types such as street, window, club, home and escort prostitution, each of which poses its own challenges to counting. Moreover prostitution forms a world that is closed to outsiders and, particularly in countries where it is not regulated and operates in the shadows. 22
Moreover, as we will explain below, the level of mobility in prostitution can be extremely high. As a result most data sources are problematic. Police records only register sex workers who have been involved in some kind of criminal activity, mostly violations of visa requirements or as victims of pimping. Tax records are rarely up dated, contain many expired files, while an unknown number of sex workers work outside the tax system or not accessible as in Austria.10 It is not surprising then that most countries do not have centralized data banks that keep track of basic statistics on prostitution. And even where such data registers exist they are often based on unreliable sources. In Austria since 2007 each year a “Review of Situation” (Lagebericht ) with regard to prostitution is produced by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, where relevant data of the so-called redlight-milieu are collected. The ‘Lagebericht’ is compiled from data that are requested each year from the departments of the Criminal Intel ligence Services in the Bundesländer by the department of Criminal Intelligence Service Austria of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. However, the police/criminal departments in the Bundesländer are not obliged to re port to the Ministry of the Interior, because prostitution lies in the responsibility of the provinces. Therefore, the data are not collected and compiled in the same way in each province. The “reviews of situation” seem to give a comprehensive picture at the very first glance. Indeed the data derive from various sources like police investigations, checks of work sites, police district investigators in the milieu, reports of patrols, reports on imprisonment. However, the data are in fact highly unreliable. The definition of sex facility differs per province11,
10 In the Netherlands from October 2008 till March 2010, about 5000 sex workers registered with the Tax Office. 11 According to the information of the Criminal Intelligence Service Austria there is no written definition about the types of facilities. It is said, that the designations are related to the licenses given, but the licensing procedure does not distinguish between brothels and nightclubs for exam ple, while it leaves out Turkish-Albanian cafés or “ Tischdamenlokale ”, where prostitution takes place on a large scale, altogether.
International Comparative Study of Prostitution Policy: Austria and the Netherlands