The government of Tasmania has claimed to prioritise women’s safety and dignity, yet the continued partial criminalisation of prostitution in that state delivers neither. The Women’s Action Alliance Tasmania (WAAT) has now formally written to the Deputy Premier and Attorney-General The Hon Guy Barnett MP, urging a comprehensive review of the Sex Industry Offences Act 2005 with the clear goal of abolition.
Prostitution is violence: international authorities agree
In May 2024, Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, released a landmark report describing prostitution as a “system of violence, exploitation and abuse”. This summary of the report concluded that prostitution “reduces women and girls to mere commodities and perpetuates a system of discrimination and violence that hinders our ability to achieve true equality.” The Special Rapporteur calls for states to enact abolitionist laws that decriminalise prostituted persons, criminalise buyers and third-party profiteers, and provide real exit pathways for women. No society can claim to uphold women’s rights while permitting the prostitution of women as a commercial norm.
Normalising abuse in public view
Despite these realities, routine advertisements for ‘escorts’ continue to appear in Tasmanian media, including The Mercury. Such ads, often offering ‘natural sexual services’, normalise the commercial use of women’s bodies and create a public culture in which male sexual entitlement to women’s bodies is seen as just another transaction. These advertisements feed the demand that puts women and girls at risk, and undermine all government efforts to present a commitment to ending male violence against females.
The consequences of demand: murder in Launceston
This is not abstract. In 2022, a German sex buyer was convicted and sentenced after choking a prostituted woman to death during a paid sex act in Launceston. In December 2022, German tourist Tobias Pick was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for causing the death of Jingai Zhang, a Chinese-born Australian woman, when he bought her for sex in Launceston. This case of violence against a prostituted woman — the direct result of a system that entitles men to buy sexual access — exemplifies the risks and harm inherent wherever prostitution is legalised or decriminalisted. Such violence is not anomalous: it is endemic and pervasive where men are permitted by law to buy sexual access.
Institutional child sexual abuse and the perpetuation of male sexual violence
Allowing prostitution in Tasmania is fundamentally incompatible with the government’s commitments to address male violence against women and girls. The link between prostitution and sexual exploitation — including child abuse — cannot be ignored.
Tasmania’s recent Commission of Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Settings marked a turning point for the state’s approach to sexual exploitation. The inquiry, established in 2021, heard testimony from survivors, families and advocates about decades of abuse and failures of oversight in schools, youth detention, health care and other institutions. The final report was handed down in September 2023 and tabled in Parliament, making 191 recommendations — all of which the government has now pledged to implement.
The inquiry’s findings were explicit: child sexual abuse cannot be tackled without confronting the societal drivers that entitle men to sexual access and commodify others, especially women and girls. The state’s action plan, Keeping Children Safe and Rebuilding Trust, responds to the recommendations with reforms slated to occur through to mid-2029, acknowledging that prevention must address how institutions, law and broader culture enable sexual exploitation.
WAAT reminds Mr Barnett in the leetter that there is a direct connection between the harms exposed by the Commission and the need to abolish prostitution in Tasmania. Any social or legal framework that normalises paid sexual access undermines efforts to protect children from predatory behaviour. Experts and advocates in child protection have long warned that tolerating prostitution makes it difficult to foster a culture of genuine respect, safety and dignity for every woman and girl, including children and teens. Real prevention must address both demand and the conditions that allow males to purchase sexual access to vulnerable people.
Abolition: the only evidence-based path forward
The UN’s leading human rights authorities have stated that prostitution is an egregious violation of our human rights and should be abolished, not made safer for commercial benefit. Countries such as Sweden, Canada, France, and Israel have demonstrated the effectiveness of abolitionist laws, and Scotland is currently considering similar reforms. And AAWAA and a feminist coalition have also joined the call, demanding the abolition of prostitution in Australia as well as a National Apology for all those exploited in this inherently destructive industry.
WAAT has called on the Tasmanian government to act: review the law, heed the evidence, and adopt a genuine abolitionist framework of decriminalising prostituted women, criminalising the buyers and profiteers, and ending commercial advertising that drives demand. Anything less constitutes a betrayal of women’s safety, dignity and sexed-based protections and rights.
