Australian and Danish Governments Providing Prostitutes for the Disabled

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LifeSiteNews.com
Friday September 30, 2005

HOBART, September 30, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) � According to an apparently unembarrassed official of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Australian state of Tasmania, guidelines have been established that allow care givers to organise visits for disabled clients to Hobart�s local brothels.

The terms "hooker or "street walker" have long been taboo as being insensitive.  Now "prostitute," is no longer acceptable either and the properly affirming phrase "sex trade worker," is used to describe the world�s oldest profession.  This new nomenclature is especially important now that publicly funded social workers can � and do � arrange for their intellectually disabled charges to make visits to the ladies in order to exercise their sexual "rights."

Disability Services state manager Michael Plaister said to The Mercury newspaper, "What we've got is a longstanding policy based around the principles of human rights that people with disabilities have the same rights as anyone else in the community and are entitled to be assisted to exercise those rights."

Disability Services' guidelines include a section developed in 2001, titled "Access to a Sex Worker."  It states, "Sex workers should be seen as one of a number of options to consider when supporting people with disabilities to make decisions about their sexual needs."  The report in The Mercury says that though the men usually pay for the services themselves, guidelines exist for social service funds to be made available should they be strapped for cash.

A spokesman for Advocacy Tasmania, a non-profit organisation that provides legal services to elderly and disabled people, said that people with disabilities had a right to express their sexuality and to have a sex life.

The "right" to fornication has its own internal logic and social workers in Denmark as well as Australia have followed it industriously to its conclusion in the care of disabled clients.

In Denmark, the government has arranged a more regimented system in which the social services pays for "sex workers" to service disabled men twice a month.  The Danish guidelines state, "It could be of great importance that the carer speaks to the prostitute together with the person in their care, to help them express their wishes."

The contradiction between governments fighting the exploitation and trafficking of women and paying for those women to service men under public care has not escaped everyone.  Danish Social-Democrat spokesman Kristen Brosboel said: "We spend a large proportion of our taxes rescuing women from prostitution.  But at the same time we officially encourage carers to help contact with prostitutes."

As in Australia, however, official arguments in Denmark against the practice will clash with the obvious problem that prostitution is not illegal in either country.  As is common in many "enlightened" western nations, only living off the profits of prostitution is illegal, not the practice itself.

The problem rests upon a contradictory notion that there is such a thing as a "right" to sexual relations outside marriage.  This idea, that will appear bizarre to many, is now common in governments and civil service circles around the world and is harmfully effecting a wide range of legislation.

In Canada, the growing acceptance of prostitution by government is only a small part of a general coarsening of social interaction.  This week, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler used the idea of a "right" to fornication as the argument to defeat a bill to raise the age of sexual consent by children from 14 � one of the lowest in the world � to 16.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Canadian Parliament Votes Against Raising Age of Consent for Sex from 14 to 16
www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/sep/05092906.html

Stripper Visa Scandal Exposes Canada's Complicity in Human Trafficking
www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/nov/04113009.html

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