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1 Mich. J. Gender & L. 13 (1993)
Prostitution and Civil Rights

handle is hein.journals/mjgl1 and id is 19 raw text is: PROSTITUTION AND CIVIL RIGHTStt Catharine A. (MracKinnon * The gap between the promise of civil rights and the real lives of prosti- tutes is an abyss which swallows up prostituted women.' To speak of prostitution and civil rights in one breath moves the two into one world, at once exposing and narrowing the distance between them. Women in prostitution are denied every imaginable civil right in every imaginable and unimaginable way,2 such that it makes sense to understand prostitution as consisting in the denial of women's humanity, no matter how humanity is defined. It is denied both through the social definition and condition of prostitutes and through the meaning of some civil rights. The legal right to be free from torture and cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment is recognized by most nations and is internationally guaranteed. In prostitution, women are tortured through repeated rape and in all the more conventionally recognized ways. Women are prostituted precisely in order to be degraded and subjected to cruel and brutal treatment without human limits; it is the opportunity to do this that is exchanged when women are bought and sold for sex. The fact that most legal prohibitions on torture apply only to official torture, t © Catharine A. MacKinnon 1993. 1 This speech was given at the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law Symposium entitled Prostitution: From Academia to Activism, held on October 31, 1992, at the University of Michigan Law School. Comments by Dorchen Leidholdt and Margaret Baldwin were especially helpful in its revision. The assistance of the ever- resourceful University of Michigan Law Library and Rita Rendell are gratefully acknowledged. * Catharine A. MacKinnon is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual'harassment as sex discrimination and, with Andrea Dworkin, conceived and fielded ordinances recognizing pornogra- phy as a violation of women's civil rights. She is currently representing women and children survivors of genocidal rape and prostitution in Croatia and Bosnia- Herzegovina. I. This discussion focuses on prostituted women and girls as the paradigm case, remembering that boys and sometimes men are also prostituted. 2. This discussion builds upon prior presentations at the conference in which the conditions of women in prostitution were documented. See generally Evelina Giobbe, Juvenile Prostitution: Profile of Recruitment, in CHILD TRAuMA I: ISSUES AND RESEARCH 117 (Ann W. Burgess ed., 1992); Evelina Giobbe, Prostitution: Buying the Right to Rape, RAPE AND SExuAL AssAuLT III: A REsEARCH HANDBOOK 143 (Ann W. Burgess ed., 1991); and citations throughout this article.

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