Driving home on Saturday night, you find yourself in a shitty neighborhood. The light turns red, stranding you at a desolate intersection. Reflexively you roll up the window, double check the locks. Outside, a woman your age, dressed in a skintight pleather miniskirt, a Lycra tube top and fuck-me high heels, makes eye contact with you before moving on to the next car. As the green light gives you permission to leave, you notice the SUV behind you rolling down a darkly tinted window. He turns into a dark alley and she follows behind on foot.

This is the most common image of American prostitution, even though streetwalkers account for less than 30 percent of the prostitutes working in our country. Escort agencies, massage parlors, freelance workers and a few legalized brothels account for the vast majority. Thousands of people accept money for sex acts everyday, but because prostitution is illegal in 49 states, the details of prostitutes’ personal and professional lives are largely a mystery.

The National Task Force on Prostitution estimates that over 1 million U.S. citizens have worked as prostitutes. Single mothers, sexual healers, starving artists, students putting themselves through college and widows easily outnumber the stereotypical desperate junkies and crack whores. Also contrary to popular opinion, many prostitutes take pride in their work and feel sexually and financially empowered as they provide what they know to be a necessary role in society. In Nevada alone, where regulated legal brothels can exist in counties not exceeding 400,000 residents, the Nevada Brothel Association estimates 365,000 legal sex acts are paid for each year. As of 1998, these state-licensed brothels netted $50 million dollars annually. Considering that this money was generated by a few hundred licensed prostitutes, imagine how staggering the national annual net income would be!

But because a prostitute’s job is often illegal and usually stigmatized, these people are ignored, and so are their basic needs. Workers rarely come out to non-co-workers or customers unless they have to—when they are arrested by police or seeking assistance from a social worker or sex worker advocacy group. Even Heidi Fleiss, perhaps America’s most famous modern prostitute, only published her autobiography after serving her jail time. Because prostitutes are both legally and socially gagged, intellectuals and activists are left to write on their behalf.

Many of these people choose to ignore the prostitutes themselves, though, eager instead to tackle the larger philosophical issue of prostitution and its place in our society. Feminists often argue that this patriarchal institution is a product of poverty and male domination, while international human-rights activists go so far as to define prostitution as a form of slavery. President Bush recently announced in his National Security Presidential Directive that prostitution and related activities are “inherently harmful and dehumanizing.” The directive is purportedly designed to “advance the fight against (human) trafficking” in the United States and around the world.

As with all prostitution policies designed by intellectuals and governments, the new Presidential Directive has very real and devastating impacts on the prostitutes themselves. I had the opportunity recently to meet the first person charged with “human trafficking” under the new directive while attending a panel discussion at the third Sex Workers Film and Video Festival in San Francisco, which was organized by longtime prostitute, artist and sex-worker-rights activist, Carol Leigh, aka Scarlet Harlot. The alleged “slave trader” is a well-spoken hippy in her early 40s who has worked as a prostitute for nearly 20 years. She explained how she had inadvertently participated in a trafficking “sting” operation when she put a new girl in town in touch with “safe” (nonviolent) clients. Now she faces three federal felony counts and decades of jail time.

Because prostitutes operate outside the law, they operate outside the safety net that societal law provides most citizens. Prostitutes who report rapes or beatings on the job can expect nothing to come of it, except, perhaps, harassment and jail time for the prostitutes. There are many documented cases in which charges were dropped against a rapist solely due to the fact that his victim was a prostitute. Apparently, President Bush, along with many human-rights crusaders, believes that prostitution is inherently dehumanizing, but instead of targeting the international black-market slave trade of women and children—the real victims—his directive targets and punishes consensual adult prostitutes.

Debra M. Hughes, a college professor and recent contributor to the National Review, takes this prostitutes-are-victims assertion one step further. She writes that if organizations that purportedly “help” women in the sex industry are “not willing to fully engage in the report and rescue of victims of trafficking and sexual slavery,” they become the exploiter as they necessarily befriend pimps and brothel owners who will allow them access to the prostitutes. She charges that “harm-reduction” groups, which seek to improve the quality of life for prostitutes in our country, are inadvertently participating in their unknowing enslavement. Similarly, the suffragettes championed prostitution-abolition movements in the early 20th century, and it is feminists who continue to further anti-trafficking laws such as the directive by President Bush.

There is a need to divide prostitutes into two groups: the women and children who are true victims of poverty and sexual slavery and the adults who are knowingly, willingly and consensually participating in prostitution. In 1996, the San Francisco Task Force for Prostitution, comprised of government and community leaders as well as prostitutes, concluded, “Not only are current responses (to prostitution) ineffective, they marginalize and victimize prostitutes, making it more difficult for those who want to get out of the industry and more difficult for those who remain to claim their civil and human rights.”

One such basic human right is access to quality health care in the United States. The spread of disease is often the number-one concrete reason cited for why prostitution must remain criminalized. In the 1980s especially, as HIV and AIDS began gaining national attention, prostitutes were being closely scrutinized for their contribution to the spread of STDs—as a group of people who sleep with multiple partners a day, many of whom they do not know.

It is no surprise, then, that in parts of Africa, up to 60 percent of prostitutes are HIV-positive. In parts of India and Thailand, the numbers are up to an estimated 30 percent. Yet, in Canada, China, Austria, Australia and Germany, the incidence of HIV in female prostitutes is actually lower than the corresponding numbers for non-prostitute women, according to Making Sex Work Safe, a handbook which includes research from the World Health Organization and Global Programme on AIDS. As one sticker being sold by COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), the United States’ first sex-workers labor union, points out, “Prostitutes Use Condoms, Do You?”

There has never been a single worker who tested positive for HIV during her work at the legal Nevada brothels. Licensed prostitutes agree to monthly STD tests and undergo thorough safe-sex education. The zero-infection rate urged Dr. Alexa Albert to research the safe-sex practices of these professionals in an effort to learn tips that might help slow the spread of HIV and AIDS in non-prostitute women nationwide.

But nonprofit organizations that strive to make sure prostitutes who work illegally have access to safe sex tools and health care are often vilified for condoning prostitution. As Cheryl Overs and Paulo Longo, co-authors of Making Sex Work Safe, write, “Different core beliefs about sex work lead to different ways of approaching health promotion for sex workers. It is effectively impossible to take a neutral position.”

As a result of the new Presidential Directive, USAIDS, an organization responsible for providing funding to countless health organizations in the United States, now asserts that any organization providing health care to prostitutes advocates prostitution and will consequently cease to receive funding. Therefore, prostitutes will no longer have access to free HIV testing, condoms and latex gloves through these organizations. This viewpoint not only seems moralistic but is also a threat to the common good. How can a government, whose job it is to protect the safety of the public, be willfully contributing to the spread of disease among its citizens? Unless, of course, prostitutes are not considered citizens.

Even within the community of health-care advocates, many times prostitutes’ personal rights are not being considered. For example, an accepted practice among international legal brothels is the “100 percent Condom-Use Policy,” which requires mandatory weekly or monthly disease testing and random inspection of brothels by military and police to ensure that the prostitutes are using condoms with their clients. But this policy does not guarantee that the prostitute—who in this case is not committing an illegal act, and should therefore be guaranteed the rights of any other citizen – will receive a citizen’s rights. Under the 100 percent CUP policy, prostitutes around the world are often subjected to inferior health care at unsanitary clinics and are routinely terrorized during the military and police sting operations. Even in countries where prostitution is legalized, or at least not actively prosecuted, it is far from legitimized.

The average big American city spends $7.6 million of taxpayers’ money annually to prosecute prostitutes. Yet, despite a large-scale increase in streetwalker arrests through the 1990s, prostitution is still rampant in our country. While some of us have the luxury to debate ethics, the women, men and transgenders who are out illegally peddling their bodies know that they cannot call 911 for help and be taken seriously; that they soon will no longer get help from health organizations; and that at any time they could be thrown in jail, held on misdemeanor or felony charges and stripped of custody of their children. What does it say about our society that human-rights groups are overlooking the basic rights of a large segment of society in an effort to tackle an abstract moral demon?