Stigma Of Prostitution

Prostitution describes sexual intercourse in exchange for remuneration. The legal status of prostitution varies in different countries, from punishable by death to complete legality. The great degree of social stigma associated with prostitution, of both buyers and sellers, has lead to terminology such as ‘commercial sex trade’, ‘commercial sex worker’ (CSW), female sex worker (FSW) or sex trade worker. Organizers of prostitution are typically known as pimps (if male) and madams (if female).
Most women do not choose prostitution; rather, they are forced into this type of work because of drug addiction, poverty, or lack of education. Women are driven to this profession by the acute poverty in their homes. Hundreds are disillusioned film aspirants
from middle class families and many married women become estranged from their husbands due to their ill treatment a cruelty. Whenever there is a drought there is migration of women and girls from villages to the city in search for employment and they are seduced by procurers and end up in brothels. These factors, in addition to their lives on the streets, expose sex workers to a number of health problems other than, or in addition to, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
To the theoretical even more than to the applied sociologist, prostitution sets a profound problem: Why is it that a practice so thoroughly disapproved, so widely outlawed in Western Civilization, can yet flourish so universally?..... Prostitution is a veritable institution, thriving even when its name is as low in public opinion as to be synonymous with “the social evil.” How, then, can we explain its vitality?