"When Will Women be Human?" : a Critical Discourse Analysis of the portrayal of prostitution in the World Conferences on Women

Sammanfattning: Prostitution is a disputed concept, not in the way that it is not defined, for it is, but not in the sense that would be to many viewed as ethical as well as moral values of the modern society. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Person and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Oth-ers to the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Wom-en, prostitution in itself is not defined and not established properly as an issue of old and still existing structures. The World Conference on Women and their following reports aim at establishing a platform of which women's rights are to be protected yet it seems to follow previous patterns of politics. The investigation aimed to analyze how the discrimination of prostitution is conveyed in the reports from these conferences and in that way try to analytically criticize the portrayed image of prostitution. As a mean to do this Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis is used, partly, to help underpin the hegemonic structures that are evident in the research to try and understand the discriminatory differentiation of forced and free prostitution. The results shows that a gap of prostitution itself is a question of discrimination of women's fundamental free-doms and a violation of their dignity. Further the analysis depicts that the gender and economical hegemonies structures the moral values and the politics of the concept of freedom and sex equality, that in its turn hinders any institutional change on the question of "free" prostitution.