The police took prostitutes and whoremongers to street on Wednesday. In the presence of hundreds of onlookers, their names and places of birth were read out.
Each of them was punished by an administrative detention of 15 days. The police announced that their raids on prostitution in barbershops, beauty parlors and bathhouses would go on. However, the very parading of the prostitutes and the whoremongers through the streets was a source of humiliation. The police believed that it could serve as a punishment to these people and a deterrent to others.
This is the reason police in many quarters of Guangdong Province resort to this approach when cracking down on prostitution. The police are obliged to eliminate pornography. But they should perform their duties under the law.
Pornography and prostitution are prohibited in China. Participants in the prostitution transaction are usually penalized according to the Chinese system of administrative sanctions rather than the criminal code. Legal control of prostitution was based on provincial rulings and local police initiatives until the introduction of the "security administration punishment regulations" in The regulations makes it an offence to "sell sex" and to "have illicit relations with a prostitute.
Adding weight to these enhanced law enforcement controls was the Law on Protecting the Rights and Interests of Women, which defines prostitution as a social practice that abrogates the inherent rights of women to personhood. Offending or insulting the sex workers cannot remove prostitution out of this land.
