"victimless crimes":

Public order, or victimless, crimes are those for use of illegal drugs and for engaging in sex work. They are victimless only if they are voluntarily engaged in by the person doing them, and if they do not indirectly harm others. The key words are "voluntary" and "indirect harm."

Questions and Sites to Spark Ideas

The Voluntary Nature of Public Order Crimes

• Addiction

  Drugs and alcohol are addictive. To what extent does usage remain voluntary once addiction has taken over?

  Visit The Stanton Peele Addiction Website.
  

  Peele reports on that site: " Zinberg and Jacobson suggest that the extent and diversity of a person's social relationships are crucial in determining whether the person will become a controlled or compulsive drug user." This would seem to suggest that a person with extensive and strong social relationships may continue use of the alcohol voluntarily, with control, while others without that network of social rellationships may lose control.

• Does this linking of addiction with strength and extent of social relationships remind you of other social and criminology theories?

  Consider the importance Durkheim ascribes to social relationships in anomic suicide. "So we reach the general conclusion: suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part. . . .When society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service and thus forbids them to dispose wilfully of themselves." Cited from "Egoistic Suicide," Emile Durkheim, in Farganis, James, ed., Readings in Social Theory, McGraw-Hill, 2000.

  Consider also "Gottfredson and Hirschi's "General Theory", [which] isolates a personality trait --low self-control--as the causal element in all criminal choice." (Pollock, Criminal Women, at p.205.) Self control, like not committing a crime, like not committing suicide, or staying in school, relates to the strength and extent of our social relationships. See containment theory (p. 268, Walter C. Reckless, "A New Theory of Delinquency and Crime," in Criminology Theory) and see Pollock, Criminal Women - pp. 176 and ff.)

The Victims of Victimless Crime

• Are there victims of public order crimes if we use a different perspective for analysis?

  Consider the crime in surrounding areas drawn by pornography and prostitution. Consider those who do not voluntarily enter the sex trade, but are forced into prostitution, including children here and in other countries who are sold into prostitution. Consider the victimization of women encouraged by pornography and prostitution. Consider the "demi-monde" of illegal and/or harmful social relationships that grow up around pornography, drugs, and the sex trade. Consider the change in neighborhoods wrought by the presence of this "demi-monde." Consider the victims who are robbed or harmed in order to support the needs of this "demi-monde." Consider the families and neighborhoods destroyed by connections, voluntary or no, with members of this shadowy world. (See The November Coalition.)

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• Is prostitution a victimless crime? Consider these two perspectives:

  In Rethinking Prostitution Barbara Sullivan argues that "existing feminist accounts of prostitution are inadequate. I argue that we need new types of theories which avoid universal and essentialist claims about prostitution, which pay attention to the effects of feminists adopting an anti-prostitution stance and which contest dominant cultural discourses about sexuality." As I understand her position, Barbara Sulllivan means that no overall statement on prostitution will cover the complexity of what sex work means to either the women who engage in such work, or others who do not. Nor can we declare as broad universal position that arguing against prostitution will ultimately benefit or harm women. When she says we need new theories that "pay attention to the effects of any position we adopt, and to the "dominant cultural discourses about sexuality," we could translate that into good faith listeniing to the validity claims of all who are affected by the work or by our stance on the work.

• How does the difference between legalization and decriminalization affect the prostitutes themselves?

  See the Prostitution Law Reform: Defining Terms for those terms.

  Note that legalization means institutional controls over the lives of those who engage in this work, where decriminalization means granting them control of the work they choose.

The History of Female Prostitution in Australia
Rethinking Prostitution
Report of San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution
Prostitution Law Reform: Defining Terms
Prostitution Statistics