December 17, 2007 -
Today marks the fifth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.The Toronto Sun reports that an advocate for sex workers believes that pop culture influences, including the popular Grand Theft Auto series, help legitimize violence against prostitutes. Anastasia Kuzyk of the Sex Workers' Alliance of Toronto told the newspaper:
Sex work is a job, and violence isn't in the job description... There's a video game out there where you can run down prostitutes and kill them and beat them up and take their money. It feeds into the whole subculture of allowing the violence to continue. Violence against sex workers should not be normalized, but it is.
Kuzyk noted that between 1991 and 2004, 171 female sex workers were murdered in Canada. Street-level sex workers, she said, are 60 to 112 times more likely to be victims of fatal violence than the general population.
Comments
Re: Advocate Relates Grand Theft Auto to Violence Against
Be real: of course this game encourages violence! What we watch, read, play, and engage in all affects our minds most profoundly. It's like food or diet: anything we consume becomes the very stuff of our very cellular structure, just as anything we are entertained by also affects our composition, our mental landscape. In the same way that eating unhealthy foods leads to poor health, consuming unhealthy entertainment leads to a poor mental landscape. Duh! We live in a reality where consequence follows action, so don't pretend to be ignorant to your own power of imagination.
On the topic of prostitutes "deserving" to be violated because of their dress or appearance: this is a stupid and old argument, which only seeks to place the blame for violence on the victim. NO ONE ever deserves to be raped, murdered, or otherwise harmed, regardless of their style. The very idea that the victim could even remotely be responsible for the violence only shows how vastly dehumanized women have become in our culture!
Re: Advocate Relates Grand Theft Auto to Violence Against
The whole entire game is a sociopathic nightmare, working to desensitize the impact of violence and normalize the destruction of life. So stupid. The creators of games like this have their heads waaay up their asses. Even more disturbing is the popularity of this game with young men. We are raising a misogynistic, brutal, ignorant culture of violence, crime, and hatred when we give them games such as these to entertain their minds! Horrific.
Lets face it, most late teen and early 20s gamers probably aren't the most forward when it comes to women, whether having to get their interest legitimately, or having to pluck up the courage to go kerb crawling for it!!
So how can these people run prostitutes down in the street, as street soliciting is illegal in Canada.
What has it come to when people who take part in illegal activities complain about legal ones?
While paid sex might be undesirable for some, it is still an industry that makes money and instead of trying to kill them to stop the prostitution industry, why not just say no and say that you would not want to have their services???
killing someone because they don't have a moral life does NOT make it ok...just please everyone just use a bit of respect for those who might have a job that you might not like.
Freedom of Choice made for a great Pro-Abortion slogan, but the FACT is that Choice is a very broad term that should be considered for a great many issues, no matter what the gender or race or sexuality or whatever.
Many jobs are looked down on, and employees of such jobs are made fun of, disrespected, even treated with bigotry and hate.
What should be looked upon as an individual choosing a JOB, even one that many in society would place on the bottom rung of worthy jobs, rather than living off of other individuals or the government. Some of these jobs aren't glamorous. Some are down right demeaning to the individual, but they still choose those jobs. The fact is that individuals in the "adult business", no matter what the field, have made choices for themselves, whether others like it or not, and so long as they have the Freedom to Choose when to leave and not be forced to perform some act they do not wish to, they have a Right to do so without the verbal and mental abuse of the rest of society.
Pointing the finger of blame at fictional storylines for what happens in the real world is being ignorant, no matter how close you are to the situation, of what is going on in general society in the real world.
Nightwng2000
NW2K Software
Their job involves picking up strange men and taking them someplace where they won't be seen. Both parties have an interest in avoiding scrutiny.
It sucks, but it's got nothing to do with video games.
And course this has nothing to do with the fact that they are walking around the streets in the wee hours of the morning, are often alone during those hours, and are known to be carrying significant amounts of cash at any given time. No, it has everything to do with video games.
and also the fact that many of them are carrying (or looking for) illegal narcotics of some kind.
Yep. It's all the fault of them vidja games!
Is this guy seriously trying to claim that GTA 'legitimized' violence against Sex Workers (Which is a PC way to say HOOKER) SIX YEARS before the very first game was even made? (1997/1998 was when the original GTA was released, according to Wiki, which has a pretty good track record when it comes to actual public record facts.)
no one made an out-cry about being able to kill muggers in GTA 1.
I'm not really sure what the last 2 parts of your post have to do with the subject.
Let me rephrase that, I don't think most prostitutes are killed by someone because they don't like prostitution. I think they are killed because they are easy targets.
Its a snadbox game, it doesn't encourage anything, it lets you do what you want.
That said, violence against sex workers is deplorable, and shouldn't be tolerated in any form (in real life).
She goes to the cops - she goes to jail for being a hooker.
If you are going to make prostitution illegal, then fine, enforce the laws. And punish people who solicit them to the same or worse degree. But since most law enforcement agencies view prostitution as a soft crime, or recognize that prositutes are more likely to be a victim of a 'worse' crime, ie theft, murder, assault, they simply don't go after them. Legalized prostitution is better, so a legal sex worker has legal recompense to go after someone who commits a crime against her. But, it still legalization isn't going to solve the issue. Personally, I think prostitution laws should be repealed. This would allow them to prosecute, and allow for the dissolution of the drug-laden heirarchy that keeps many, many prostitutes in thrall.
Then cops can go after drugs, rapists, assaults, etc. instead of wasting time on a trade that has always, and will always exist.
~~All Knowledge is Worth Having~~
Why limit it to prostitutes though. Why don't we blame GTA for Dr. Harold Shipman becoming the world's most prolific murderer killing all those elderly people... or maybe the number 2 killer, Elizabeth Bathory... We could blame GTA for her, even though this phenomenon happened long before she turned up too!
----
Papa Midnight
Ah political correctness how I love you.......
not.... a playstation game...
... >_
岩「…I can see why Hasselbeck's worried about fake guns killing fake people. afterall, she's a fake journalist on a fake news channel」
E. Zachary Knight
Divine Knight Gaming
OK Game Devs
Random Tower
"I’m pretty sure Prostitution is not a job.. its a crime."
Depends on who you talk to and where.
We all know the answer as to whether GTA promotes violence against women..
But then, if you've never done it, you're at a disadvantage in Best Man Speeches.
I do believe that the person speaking is canadian where prostitution is legal, so its not a crime. So the statement is actually correct. Grant it though, many of the same problems with prostitution remain... It being legalized does help in that they are able to go to the police for help, but the questions are, are they willing to? is their much the police can do after the violence took place? And do the police care enough about them to take them seriously? if the answer to these are "no", especially the last one, then prostitutes got a lot more serious problems they need to deal with then some videogame.
Fangamer
I can get behind stopping violence against sex workers and I would even go so far as to say that in most games there's really no reason to have violence against sex workers in much the same way that in most movies there's no reason for the main character to beat a prostitute.
The thing is that in some media violence against anybody isn't exploitive. In some - hell, in many - cases it is but in some cases it's intrinsic to the media experience. In GTA III the connection is even slimmer - violence against prostitutes in GTA III is circumstantial. You can kill prostitutes and take their money because you can do the same to anybody in the game world. You could argue that it's exploitive because all of the violence in GTA is exploitive but it's not targeted at sex workers.
It's just frustrating that this woman is misinformed. And to those saying that sex workers are committing a crime I would like you to consider that the underground sex trade forces a huge number of young women into violent prostitution and they have almost no recourse. If you consider a 16 year old girl who's been lured out of her Eastern European village with dreams of making a modest living working at a restaurant in the US but is then beaten, raped and forced into prostitution a criminal rather then a victim then you have serious problems.
I would also like to point out that prostitution is quite probably the "world's oldest profession" - it has been with us since the beginning of recorded history and in many cultures, for a very long time, was considered quite respectable - even desirable. It is western Judeo/Christian values that have demonized it and made it immoral.
Well the article was from the Toronto Sun. I'd be referring to Canadian law.
No one in Thailand cares about violent video games.. so its fairly irrelevant who you talk to or where on this topic.
Isn't that what you're doing?
That said, none of these people deserves to be assaulted. I believe the speaker is saying that although it is a job risk - there tends to be some glamorization or at least acceptance of violence towards prostitutes. It could be that the mention of GTA was an example of this acceptance.
Judging from some of the comments above, I think she is right. This is a bit of a hot topic in Canada as there is an ongoing trial for a criminal who is accused of killing some 25 prostitutes and feeding them to his pigs. Pretty gruesome stuff. He has been handed 5 or 6 life sentences so far and the trial is continuing.
However, that case alone indicates that violence against sex workers [i]is[/i] a problem, even if video games are not to blame. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it would probably help if the government would stop treating them like criminals and/or ignoring them in the hopes that they'll go away. As I understand it, prostitutes are unlikely to report a lot of the violence done to them, and the police are unlikely to care, so... that creates a very bad situation that violent folks like Pickton are well aware of.
So.. any suggestions that'll never work?
I don't know. I won't pretend to be an expert on these things... but if I was in charge, I'd probably just look at other countries, see where prostitutes suffer the least violence, and try to copy whatever they're doing (assuming that human rights don't need to be violated in the process).