Somehow people continue to call prostitution a “victimless crime.” You have thousands of girls that are sold worldwide into prostitution to feed the reckless, immoral desires of others. Even those that “choose” the life as a prostitute in America rarely choose to live that life. Take the now high-profile, high-dollar escort called Kriten.
Tell me how the young lady described in this story is not a victim:
She left a broken home on the Jersey Shore at 17 and came to New York City to work the nightclubs as a rhythm and blues singer. Now, at 22, she is the unwitting, and as yet unseen, star of the seamy drama that is the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.
She left “a broken family” at age 17, having been abused, according to the MySpace page, and has used drugs and “been broke and homeless.”
“Learned what it was like to have everything and lose it, again and again,” she writes. “Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone.
“But I made it,” she continues. “I’m still here and I love who I am. If I never went through the hard times, I would not be able to appreciate the good ones. Cliché, yes, but I know it’s true.”
“But she also is a 22-year-old, not a 32-year-old or a 42-year-old, and she obviously got involved in something much larger than her.”
Kristen is the victim of a culture that objectifies woman as merely sexual objects and one that views prostitution as simply an “adult choice.”
Over at National Review Online’s Media Blog, Kevin D. Wiliamson makes some excellent points when it comes to many on the left and their reaction to prostitution:
…I wonder, though: If individual rights justify legalizing prostitution, why don’t they justify working for presently illegal wages, or ignoring laws that oblige members of certain professions to join unions, or that oblige businesses to do business with those unions?…
Why is the Left libertarian on sex but authoritarian on practically everything else?
…Can we really say that anybody is exercising a “right” to do any kind of business when that business can only be done in accordance with narrow regulatory mandates? Why should you have a “right” to be a prostitute but not a “right” to work for $7 an hour at a video shop in Bovina, N.Y.?
That thought, while spot-on, is purely academic. For Kristen there was no “right” to be a prostitute. She went that route after being abandoned by virtually every male in her life and being unable to get attention doing what she loved – music.
At times like these, I don’t rejoice over the moral failings of someone from the other party. I’m saddened over the hurt caused to the families of those involved (also victims) and for people like Kristen who suffer objectification and humiliation all the while never being granted victimhood or a way out.