Catholic social teaching and the peripheries: the case for addressing prostitution

ABSTRACT Catholic social teaching (CST) has shown little interest in structural and social forces that impact negatively on the dignity and flourishing of women. Such inattention diminishes CST's credibility and neglects its liberative potential. This article examines an area of structural violence against women, the social reality of prostitution, to illuminate the imperative to expand normative CST to address specific experiences of women. Given the inadequacy of the Catechism's treatment of prostitution as an area of personal moral failing, a reading which fails to understand how cultural and legislative structures bear down on women's freedom and agency, a task for CST emerges. When CST principles are brought into dialogue with empirical attention to women's experience of prostitution, the tradition stands in solidarity with those who inhabit an existential and social periphery. The article argues that CST perspectives should nudge the Catholic Church towards proposing an abolitionist ethic in relation to prostitution.