Prostitution as a Psychiatric Situation: Ethical Aspects

This paper presents the morally controversial phenomenon of prostitution. As the basis for contemplating the prostitution issue the most important is revealing and understanding its primitive ethical root. For understanding its "soul", its essence, also important is comprehending sexual, "elementary thoughts" of mankind, through the relationship between prostitution and religious, social, political and spiritual life, and its nature as a reflection of the sexual-ethical concepts in different epochs and nations. We emphasize the connection between prostitution and psychiatry. Placing a special focus on importance of personality for deciding to become a prostitute, and by pulling it through a moral prism we define prostitution as a new medical situation. In favor of that, we stress the importance of the presence, position and role of psychiatrists within an indispensable multidisciplinary team, which is complementary despite its heterogeneousness, synergistically and simultaneously dealing with psychological, physical and social health-problems of women engaged in prostitution. We propose peer education as a way of promoting healthy and safer behaviors among the subculture of prostitutes, where we see another important role of psychiatrists in selecting/recruiting, training and motivating peer educators among them.