Most people hearing that the High Court in Cape Town is being asked to decriminalise prostitution, file it away somewhere distant in their minds. A street corner in a part of town they don’t drive through. A debate for lawyers and activists. Something that happens to other people, somewhere else.

That instinct is understandable. It is also wrong.

Cause for Justice (CFJ) has filed extensive court papers in defence of the criminal ban on prostitution, including four expert witness statements. They are not arm-chair commentators. They are people who have spent their working lives either close to this – in brothels, on streets, in counselling rooms – or in  public health data.

Read together, their evidence makes one point with unusual force: the harms of prostitution are not limited to two people engaging in sexual acts for reward.

One of the central claims for decriminalisation is that prostitution is merely a private activity/transaction between two or more consenting adults. Marie-Anne te Brake‘s evidence is a direct answer to that claim and effectively defeats it.

She is a counselling coach specialising in trauma related to sexual betrayal, certified in the APSATS Multidimensional Partners Trauma Model, with nearly three decades in sexuality and relational counselling behind her practice. Much of her work is with the wives/partners of men who engage in sexual acts for payment.

These women do not arrive in her counselling rooms with ordinary relationship problems. They arrive with trauma – anxiety, hypervigilance, dissociation, intrusive thoughts, the loss of any sense of safety. In one case she describes, the discovery of her husband’s conduct left a client requiring inpatient psychiatric treatment. In another, the client only learned the truth after being advised to be tested for venereal disease (STD/STI).

This part most people never consider: Wives are exposed to disease without their knowledge and without their consent. 

Ms. Te Brake also describes a pattern she encounters repeatedly: Early exposure to pornography, escalating in frequency and intensity, diminishing satisfaction with intimacy with their life partner and, often enough that it cannot be dismissed as exceptional, progression to paid sexual activity with third parties. Demand, on her evidence, is frequently not a considered consumer choice at all. It is driven by compulsivity.

And then there are the children in those homes. They are affected by it all. They live inside the instability, the secrecy, the emotional absence and the conflict. Ms. Te Brake calls them what they are: Secondary victims of conduct in which they had no say and gave no consent.

Her conclusion is that decriminalising prostitution would lower the practical, legal and psychological barriers to sexual acts for reward and hand ‘buyers’ a ready justification for it. She expects the harm to families to increase, not decrease.

Madri Bruwer has spent more than three decades with Straatwerk, leading outreach to women in prostitution across greater Cape Town. She has personally walked alongside roughly 150 women attempting to exit prostitution. Her teams reach around 80 women every week. She knows of at least six women in prostitution who were murdered, most of whom she knew personally.

She has also visited about a hundred homes where children are being raised by relatives because their mothers cannot parent through prostitution and addiction. She has met a young woman diagnosed with a serious dissociative disorder, prostituting alongside her own mother. The harm is generational. It does not stop with one woman.

She also describes what happens to the neighbourhoods around prostitution hotspots. Noise, fights, discarded condoms, intimidation of residents and criminal activity: Gangs move in to control ‘the trade’ and bring the rest of their ‘business’ with them. Her assessment is blunt – crime and prostitution are inseparable, and they affect the whole community.

There is a further point in her evidence that speaks directly to ordinary families. Through Straatwerk’s schools’ campaign, she and her teams have taught over a hundred thousand children about dignity and protection from exploitation. Part of that message is simply that prostitution is against the law, and that no one is destined for it.

Decriminalisation would put the law in direct contradiction with that message, at exactly the moment a vulnerable young person is deciding whether to “give it a try”.

The women she works with say the same thing in their own words. One, identified as S.T., puts it plainly: prostitution makes you crazy, because you have to switch off your brain to get into cars with strangers who could kill you. Another, A.A., describes needing drugs simply to cope – a necessary, unhealthy way to disconnect just to survive the day.

No change in the law removes the need to switch off your brain.

Professor Reitze Rodseth is a medical doctor and healthcare academic with a doctorate, a master’s in health research methodology from McMaster University in Canada, 140 plus peer-reviewed papers and expertise in systematic reviews.

He tested one specific claim: Whether public health has changed so much since 2002 that prostitution no longer carries the same public health risks. (* 2002 is the year that the Constitutional Court issued a judgment in State v Jordan, upholding the criminal ban on prostitution, on the basis that a ban is in line with the South African Constitution.)

What the evidence actually shows:

• Condom use has barely moved. In 2002, 27.3% of sexually active South Africans aged 15 and over used a condom at last intercourse. In 2022, it was 31.8%. More than two in three still did not. Availability improved. Behaviour did not follow.
• Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) protects against HIV, and nothing else. Gauteng’s health department recorded male urethritis (inflammation of the urethra) rising from 12% in 2020 to 15% in 2023, and its own MEC attributed this to higher PrEP uptake leading to more unprotected sex.
• Other STDs are flat or worsening. South Africa’s National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and STIs confirms no significant decline in chlamydia and gonorrhoea in almost thirty years, despite enormous investment, with adult prevalence among the highest in the world. 
• Legality does not fix the mental health toll. A recent German study found high levels of mental health disorders among women in prostitution in a country where it has been legal for years.

Prof Rodseth’s conclusion is that the public health risks presented by prostitution remain substantially what they were in 2002 and that decriminalisation is unlikely to improve the severe mental health problems the women in prostitution suffer.

This is a national health picture. Everyone lives inside it. It affects everyone.

Emma van der Walt founded Brave to Love, which rescues and rehabilitates women and children out of prostitution and trafficking. Her work has taken her into brothels, street-based prostitution zones and informal settlements, alongside the police, the NPA (National Prosecuting Authority) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Her evidence contains one of the single most important practical points in the entire case.

Prostitution offences are how trafficking victims get found.

Trafficking is extremely difficult to prove at first contact. Women are traumatised, frightened, or coached to say they are there by choice. It takes time. Prostitution-related offences are what currently allow police to enter a brothel, question buyers, and separate a woman from whoever controls her for long enough that reality/the truth can surface.

Remove those offences, and you do not remove the exploitation. You remove the ability to find it.

With prostitution legalised, traffickers will simply present women as independent workers. Illegal brothels will operate behind that facade. 

Emma has been inside brothels where a serial rapist moved between premises, and where owners suppressed reporting, because they feared exposure would be bad for business.

She has encountered girls as young as eleven being prostituted. Minors are hidden among adults and instructed to lie about their age. In a system already struggling to detect exploited children, normalising the so-called “trade” would make them harder to find, not easier.

Her summary of two decades of direct and indirect involvement in this work: prostitution is captivity disguised as choice.

If we don’t help shape the law, the law will shape us.