Author Archives: rosa

Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

At international level Melissa Farley a.o. have published the most relevant results with data from nine different countries (2004). According the study two-thirds of the examined 854 women in prostitution showed symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), which were comparable with them of healthcare-seeking veterans, women who fled to shelters, rape survivors and refugees who were exposed to state-sanctioned torture. The intensity of trauma-related symptoms depended on the intensity of the activity in prostitution. Women with multiple suitors reported harder physical symptoms. The longer the women were active in prostitution, the more likely they were infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Click here for the study “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” by Dr. Melissa Farley.

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Trauma Repetition and Revictimization Following Physical and Sexual Abuse

Dr. med. Wolfgang Wöller

The tendency of victims of physical or sexual childhood abuse to become revictimized in later life has well been documented empirically. Moreover, there is a high stability of violent and abusive relationships. The aim of this paper was to summarize perspectives from psychodynamic theory, attachment theory, and posttraumatic stress research to explain revictimization phenomena. The term repetition compulsion has little explanatory valuewithout additional theoretical assumptions.

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Tanja Rahms Speech at the International Abolitionist Congress, Paris 2014

After 3 years in prostitution, I almost jumped out a window – from the third floor. That was how prostitution made me feel, – that I had nothing to live for. I had been sexually violated so many times, that there was almost nothing left of me – neither inside, or outside. I was nothing. I was worth nothing. I felt completely useless. I was a machine for other people’s amusement, their sexual desires and their perverse exploitation.

I spent 9 years in therapy, to get where I am today. And even though I persist in telling about the violence experienced in prostitution I still live with the traumas and the re-traumatizing. But we, as survivors have to. We have to keep on telling about the violence, so no one will ever forget or be manipulated into thinking, that prostitution is even close to something you can define as sexwork.

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Trafficking, Prostitution and Inequality: A Public Lecture by Catharine MacKinnon

Catharine MacKinnon is an american lawyer, teacher and radical feminist activist. In her visiting lecture to University of Chicago Law School, Professor MacKinnon talks about consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women, her experiences in india, the swedish model and why legalizing prostitution is a failed experiment.

You can read her text here.