Burning Tamar

Burning Tamar

By Reed Metcalf

A

new plan to regulate the sex trade in Zürich has been causing quite the buzz in Switzerland and her surroundings. The city—famous and infamous for its risqué social reforms—has opened a compound in which prostitutes can practice their trade in safety.

What?

That’s right: the Zürich citizenship voted on a referendum to build an industrial complex in a suburban setting for 2.5 million taxpayer francs ($2.7 million) where prostitutes would solicit and deliver their services in safety.

This may seem absolutely shocking to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, but there is a great deal of backstory to look at. Zürich once had a massive drug problem—as in people openly injected heroin in parks and on street corners while drug dealers

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operated with impunity—but cleaned it up with some startling reforms that included needle exchanges, injection clinics, and government-dispensed drugs. Even more startling is that the reforms worked to an extent.

Now Zürich is trying a similar method with its prostitution issue.

The trade has been legal in the Swiss capital since 1942, and prostitution in general is legal in most central and western European countries. Many places have it highly regulated on paper (but often not in practice) and stipulations that narrowly delineate between legal prostitution and rape, coercive sex, or other violent crimes.

The dominant view in Europe is that the prostitute has turned to prostitution out of economic desperation; only a minute number of individuals choose this lifestyle willingly. Most cannot otherwise support themselves and their families.

And so many women in Europe put themselves in massive danger to feed their children—children, mind you, that they have often had prior to turning to prostitution. These mothers and wives go to work daily with the understanding that they face a high probability of being robbed, raped, or abducted at work; it is an occupational hazard. But they seemingly have no choice.

And so Switzerland has introduced die Verrichtungsboxen—sex boxes.

This is in the same vein as the drug reforms: make prostitution safe, reduce the violent crimes suffered by those forced into this lifestyle. The complex has strict rules: one man per car, no driving off-site, services must be performed in one of the drive-in carports.

The ports are like small, open-ended garages with modifications. Each has a bright light so the security guards can see what is happening, an alarm on the passenger-side door, and a wall so narrow on the driver’s side that the client

for sex or that the city has become the new pimp by charging prostitutes for daily licenses to practice. The project has become a joke in a very dark way.

In defense, however, Herzig says, “We want to reduce violence and improve living conditions for sex workers. For us, it’s not funny. I don’t think violence is funny. And the cause for prostitution usually is poverty, and I don’t think poverty is funny either. So what we are doing here is serious.”

When I first read the coverage of the issue from the BBC,1 I was startled; it’s just such a foreign concept to Americans, where certain counties in Nevada are the only places prostitution is legal in the States. The more I read and delved into the issue, however, the sadder I became. The sex-box development is definitely an improvement for the destitute forced to turn to the trade, but something about it still resounded discordant in my ear. The biblical filter with which I interpret the world knew this was not satisfac-

These mothers and wives go to work daily with the understanding that they face a high probability of being robbed, raped, or abducted at work; it is an occupational hazard. could not get out to pursue a fleeing sex-worker. There is also a counseling center on site with showers, a coffee room, and sleeping quarters. Zürich hopes the complex will help prevent robberies and completely stop the abductions and subsequent beatings and rapes that plague the city’s sex-workers.

Criticism has flooded in against the project. Michael Herzig of Zürich social services says the complex has been accused of making Zürich a theme park

tory as a solution, but I struggled to articulate why. Deeper delving eventually gave me the words I needed.

The hearts of the project’s leaders are admirable, but it seems that their motives are the only ones uncompromised. The sex-box complex is merely the culmination of a whole series of injustices that are deeply woven into the society’s fabric. They are all but indistinguishable at first glance, but a closer look helps reveal the problems that are greater than even prostitution.

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The BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports the observations of a woman who runs a drop-in clinic for prostitutes: taxpayer support “had more to do with their annoyance at seeing prostitutes on their streets than it did with keeping women safe.”

The sex-box is not as much a safehouse as it is a set of blinders. There is a problem in Zürich, but the citizens

known pejoratively as Gypsies, have been historically disenfranchised in many capacities in Europe. Migrants from India and Persia looking for a new start, the Roma were kicked and driven about the European continent for centuries without a true homeland.

At times they were tolerated, and at others they were slaughtered. They suffered many of the same injustices and fates as the Jews, including the

The sex-box development is definitely an improvement for the destitute forced to turn to the trade, but something about it still resounded discordant in my ear. The biblical filter with which I interpret the world knew this was not satisfactory as a solution. don’t want to see it. They would rather quarantine it, pay a small bit of tax for upkeep every year, and forget that there are women who are stuck selling their bodies and their dignity so they can feed their children.

But here is the plot twist. Why is there not a greater movement to alleviate the poverty that forced these individuals into this lifestyle in the first place? In a country that boasts a perfect literacy rate, a gross national income per capita of $76,380 (for comparison, the U.S.’s from the same year was $48,450),2 and an unemployment rate in Zürich of 3.2%,3 can they not find the means to keep women from this practice if they truly are concerned for their safety or well-being?

All indicators suggest that they do not want to, because the vast majority of Zürich’s prostitutes are Gypsies.

It boils down to an issue of racism or exclusionism. The Roma peoples,

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death camps of Nazi Germany in World War II. They have never gained the same sort of deliberate push towards equality, however, from the rest of the Western World in the wake of that horrific crime. The Roma are still despised and marginalized in many countries today.

And so it is in Zürich. The issue is not so much that the prostitutes are prostitutes; it is that they are Roma.

They are not wanted, they are not hired, and they are eventually forced to provide for themselves in degrading ways that put them at risk to be robbed, raped, and killed by members of the very culture that pushed them to this state. Some in Zürich want to protect them, but it appears that most just don’t want to see them or think about them. They put the Roma in a cage so that they can be disenfranchised away from the citizens’ sight that might make them remorseful for the effects of their racism.

My initial reaction to the situation has been anger. Let me clarify. I am not angry at the sex-box concept. The minds behind the complex truly want to alleviate the plight of these women who find themselves stuck in a life-threatening and dignity-destroying trade. I am certainly not angry with the prostitutes. To point the finger at a woman trying to feed, clothe, and educate her children after she has been denied the right to work is not acceptable. I cannot help but remember Tamar, a Gentile ancestor of David and Jesus, who turned to prostitution when the family she had married into (Israel) severed their connections with her. She was a widow, and to be sent away from the family of her husband was close to a death sentence. She had no property and no value as a bride.

She would be lucky if her own father took her back. She was disenfranchised completely. So she dressed as a prostitute with a face-covering and sat along the road. Her own father-in-law, Judah, solicits her and pays her with his signet ring, cord, and staff. When

Tamar and the twin boys she bears, accepting the marginalized back into the family of Israel, God’s chosen people. The judgment on Tamar’s acts as a prostitute issues from Judah’s own mouth: “She is more in the right than I.” 5

she becomes pregnant, the town is outraged and they inform Judah. His response?

tion that has led to this dehumanizing situation, that lights the pyre of execution. Judah saw what he had done to Tamar and repented. Zürich refuses to see what it has done to the Roma and the other marginalized. Humanity is denied. The blaze is stoked. The building of the sex-boxes removes the marginalized and the guilt associated with them from sight and allows their suffering to continue as the voters who approved the complex sleep with unbothered consciences.

Tamar pressed her right as a human being, the right to live, by turning to her last resort. Her prostitution forced her father-in-law to see her humanity and his culpability in all but destroying her. Even without the glaring double-standard where the prostitute is punished but not her client, the horror of the story is evident when the one who pushed her to this state is the very one who decides to burn Tamar for her desperate actions. Praise God for Tamar’s deliverance in Canaan, but it seems that this deliverance might be denied her in Zürich.

No, I am not angry with Tamar. I am not angry at the sex-box concept. I am instead angry at the deeply ingrained, centuries-old hatred and discrimina-

The sex-box is not as much a safe-house as it is a set of blinders.

There is a problem in Zürich, but the citizens don’t want to see it.

“Let her be burned.”4

But then the signet ring and other identity markers come forth. Tamar says, “It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.” Judah realizes that he was the one who not only impregnated Tamar but forced her to fend for herself in the most desperate of ways. He repents and cares for

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Tamar is burned, and Judah will visit another prostitute on his next business trip.

My next reaction is shame and horror, for my hands are dirty as well.

This is the natural destination of unchecked sin. All of us have the same temptation as the expert of the law in Luke 10, the temptation to ask, “Who is my neighbor?”

“Who can I get out of loving? Aren’t there any people I don’t have to love?”

When we do not love the other, when we make excuses because of gender, skin color, language, country of origin, age, economic standing, religion, or any other reason to not love them, we slowly build up a rhetoric that allows us to strip them of all things human. We deny them life; perhaps we allow them to continue breathing, but we deny them the life of dignity and safety that we have come to expect and demand for ourselves.

I sincerely doubt that most people would be complicit with putting other human beings in a cage to earn their food via sexual favors, but this is what has happened because of unchecked prejudice, because of human unwillingness to look at another people group and say, “You deserve the chance to live.” It has happened in every culture in every time, and a look at what has transpired in Zürich must make us look to our own prejudices. Those in Zürich who would do what is right, would try to protect these women who

constantly must venture into harm’s way, end up with the impossibility of curing a cancer with gauze bandages.

They are doing what they can for the sex-workers, but it is not ultimately changing the society that led them to and is keeping them in the sex-trade.

Recognizing the Imago Dei, the Image of God in which every human on the planet has been created, is the only thing that we can do to stop or reverse such situations in Zürich, in Los Angeles, in London, in Delhi, in Chicago, in Johannesburg. We have to own this problem, each person and each community: every prejudice we harbor, whether against a religious garment like a turban, a symbol like the flag of Mexico, or an accent we instantly recognize as foreign, we must understand that prejudice to be the beginning of disenfranchisement, of segregation, of Apartheid, of a sex-box, of an execution pyre. To overlook our own personal discriminations is to plant the seeds of wicked crops. We must instead view every person through the eyes of God, allow God to shape and redeem our perceptions of those different from us, and love as the God of All loves: perfectly and indiscriminately. May we love instead of shun, and deal with our true sins instead of only treating their symptoms.

Reed Metcalf (MDiv, ‘13) is the Editor of the SEMI. He and his wife Monica love hiking and wish they had a dog, but they don’t have room for both a dog bed and all their books. Reed likes to spend his free time looking like he actually knows what he’s doing.

1. The BBC Article “Zurich introduces ‘drive-in’ sex” by Imogen Foulkes (26 Aug 2013; http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-europe-23839358) is foundational for my own information on the sex-box topic.

2. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Switzerland,” accessed September 22, 2013, http://www.britannica. com/EBchecked/topic/577225/Switzerland.

3. “Arbeitslose” (Web publication). Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich (Department of the Mayor). July 2012. Retrieved 26 September 2013.

4. Genesis 38:24, NRSV 5. Genesis 38:26, NRSV. Genesis 38 is the source for the entire Tamar-Judah cycle.

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