Is anyone knowledgeable about European countries where prostitution has become fully legal (clients won't be arrested)? Specifically the countries where pimping is illegal, but an individual sex worker and client transacting is legal.
Is there reliable data either way about legalization increasing human trafficking?
There's extremely poor data on human trafficking in general, and not even a lot of consensus on what it is. (The legal definition is often at odds with how the phrase is used in popular media.)
FWIW, New Zealand legalised prostitution fully in 2003, and it seems to have had no negative effects. There was a major review 5 years after the law was passed (so 2008). Safety up, crime down, fewer sex workers on the streets, and at that time, no instances of human trafficking for the sex industry were able to be identified. (Come to that, I'm not sure any have been since either.)
Of course, individual laws exist in a larger framework of laws and culture, so it's not always clear that adopting a single law will have the same effects in other jurisdictions. Still, the NZ experience has been almost unremittingly positive.
The fact that prostitution is illegal is part of what empowers bad people to victimize others: As soon as you have turned your first trick, you are guilty of a crime and cannot go to the police to turn them in without confessing to the crime you just committed.
That's exactly how child molesters also operate: By making the child feel complicit so they won't tell anyone.
Human trafficking doesn’t necessarily mean victimizing anyone, in my understanding - it can also mean someone being paid to smuggle someone else into a country voluntarily (in contravention of immigration laws). I would suspect this form of trafficking to increase if prostitution is legal and widespread.
That contradicts everything I have ever heard about the use of the term. From Wikipedia:
Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim's rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, especially women and children, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another.
Coercion is a fact of life. Claiming otherwise is naive. Legal prostitution means that your future daughter might have to choose between losing her unemployment benefits or taking a job selling sex.
Hm. Strange that this isn't the case now. Germany has not only unemployment benefits but also social welfare. If you unemployment runs out, you get a reasonable apartment paid, health insurance and about 400 Euro per month. No one if forced to work in a sex related field.
Even if you consider this a reasonable punishment, the average costs to imprison a person in the US are about USD 30k per year and maybe you should reconsider your view.
And who is to say that choosing that career path is any worse than choosing any other job to pay for life? It’s your own hang ups at work. Not everyone sees it as a negative.
Just because you wouldn’t want your daughter doing it is entirely different from saying everyone should be criminalized for participating in it.
Legalizing bussing of tables means that my daughter might have to choose between being starving and demeaning herself by cleaning up after other people. If farming is legalized she might have to pick cotton if desperate.
Best to keep both of those things illegal to spare the dignity of my daughter. Better to lock people in jail if they attempt those things. Better to turn people who might actually enjoy farming into criminals.
In many countries to be eligible for unemployment benefits you have to take any job available. Thus, it stands to reason that if prostitution was legal, such jobs would be available to people with unemployment benefits and they would be required to take them.
The US may be different since it's social security system is very primitive. There, the choice would perhaps be between working as a prostitute and starving. Which, obviously, isn't a free choice.
"any job available" is overstating it. I'd be shocked if that's how it works _anywhere_. It certainly isn't in the US. For example, here's the requirement from my particular state:
"You will lose your unemployment benefit if you turn down an offer of "suitable" work without "good cause." Suitable work is work that fits your training, experience, skills, health, physical fitness, prior earnings, and is within 20 miles of your home"
Two other large states had similar requirements. I could not find any with a "you must take any available job" requirement. There's no way that could be even vaguely construed as requiring someone to take a sex work job if it's available.
Yeah, that is exactly what it means. You cannot have the cake and eat it to. If selling sex is a normal job like waiting tables or coal mining (others' examples, not mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898169) then there is absolutely nothing stopping an unemployment office from compelling a benefactor to prostitution.
I can assure you that at least our welfare system here in NZ doesn't require you to take literally any job. We also have legalized prostitution for nearly 20 years with essentially no negative consequences.
If this were true, where are the people forced to accept jobs stripping because the unemployment office forced them into it? Further, what porn actors were forced by the same system?
In France clients can't be arrested but providers yes. Not sure your definition of "prostitution has become fully legal" means.
So since the prosts can still be prosecuted, we still have many for the east, on the streets by all weather, working in awful condition for a low amount.
I live in HK now, where prostitution is fully legal (prosts won't be arrested as long as no pimp involved and one client at a time) and it's better, we don't see them in the streets and the fares are much much MUCH hire compared to France. They seem less drugged addict possibly.
It's anecdotal and there are so many differences between France and HK that I'm not sure what I'm comparing exactly :D But, more legal protection seems to provide for better conditions, not a surprise.
Prostitution in Germany is fully legal - sex workers have access to health care and (should) pay taxes. The Saarland, a state bordering France, has the heighest brothel concentration in Germany, due to french visitors coming to use the services.
In practice, the offering of social insurance is hardly used, and I would say you will have a hard time getting a receipt from a sex worker with displayed VAT (or the legal requirement to express VAT excemption if the sex worker is below the legal income threshold).
Anyways, trafficking is still a thing, and you as a customer can be arrested if you have reason to believe the sex worker is not willingly offering services but coerced or forced to do so.
I'm trying to figure out if we should legalize farming. We know that farming was heavily associated with slavery, so it's logical that farming should illegal.
Some progressive types keep talking about legalizing farming, but all I can think of is that it will increase the smuggling of humans to contribute to the farming workforce.
I live in Amsterdam which has had legal prostitution for a while. What I know is they regurally talk about the problems it brings with trafficking. The policies are getting slightly more restrictive, not less.
Some percentage of the girls are doing it willingly, but most are imported and essentially have no choice.
They try to add regulations to help, like only allowing girls themselves to rent spaces, but that tends to drive more underground.
I think this is a totally reasonable concern, but I do want to present another side of it:
There is far more crime that exists than we have resources to prosecute. So, if you're a prosecutor every decision to prosecute Crime A, is also an explicit decision not to prosecute Crime B-Z due to the limited resources.
Which means every prosecutor ever is always deciding which law to enforce and which law not to through the brutal economic realities of opportunity costs. So, saying: "We're going to change the relative priority of Crime A to Crime B in how we allocate resources" isn't that abnormal of a concept.
This discretion is effectively granted to the executive since the governor and/or president could simply pardon everyone convicted of the crime after conviction. If the law might be unconstitutional there is also some discretion there, but it’s murkier. The legislative branch can write laws in ways that compel the executive to better execute those laws but there will always be practical limits (e.g. “We are prioritizing murder investigations so we can’t set up vice units without more funding.”). So if all laws are prioritized that way none are.
What you're describing is far more totalitarian than I think you understand. Corrupt selective enforcement is an evil, but prosecutorial discretion is a necessary component of a free society.
IF bandwidth was not an issue, then lots of things would be possible. ...but that is not a reasonably possible IF. We don't have infinite resources to hold jury trials for every time someone walks outside a crosswalk.
If discretion is applied to every single crime, it's got nothing to do with extenuating circumstances and everything to do with bad laws that shouldn't exist. For the state to make a law and then refuse to prosecute it is dangerous, because it could at any time turn around and start.
Wild to me that when it comes to drug offenses, the law is turning away from punishing the buyers and towards punishing sellers. But when it comes to the sex industry, it's steering the opposite direction.
I guess you blame the pusher and not the user because the user is the weaker party. In the sex trade, the pimp and the user are the strong parties and the sex worker is the weak party.
Interesting take, that's rare to see it that way, thanks for changing a bit my perspective. If choosing one party to arrest, I'd go with the client now.
Wow so much misinformation in that statement. I purchase drugs routinely. What a condescending attitude to state that my dealers have more power than I. I’m an adult who is fully capable of making my own decisions. There is zero power imbalance. No different than buying a candy bar.
Similarly why do you presume a pimp must necessarily exist? The prostitutes I patron are simply grown self-employed autonomous workers. There is no coercion involved. They actually enjoy their work. Not everyone has the same hang ups about sex.
>Selling drugs / buying sex are transactions at the expense of someone else’s body.
So how does porn fit into this picture ? Porn actors are selling their bodies, what's the difference between a person having sex in private for money, and someone doing the same while filmed ?
New York City is dividied into five boroughs, each of which is coterminous with is own county.
Boroughs are subdivivions of New York City City, counties are subdivisions of New York State.
Manhattan is the borough, New York County is the county.
However, I don't think any of the 5 counties that correspond to boroughs have their own governments. So there is no government at all for County of New York, but the Borough of Manhattan does have its own government, which is fine because the County and Borough are coterminous with each other (and both contained entirely within the City of New York).
It’s not much of a government. The DA of Manhattan is far more powerful than the borough president, who mostly doles out patronage jobs and pork projects.
so the DA can just pick and choose which laws to enforce? what’s the point of having a democracy then where we vote on laws? or judges and juries to determine cases?
whether or not you agree with the decision i feel like it should be done the proper way by changing the law not just up to a DAs whim.
what happened to all the people screaming about democratic norms in the past 4 years?
A genuinely interesting question. For most of human history, having children without a family around to invest in them was setting up for disaster - maybe some sort of cultural hangover from that? Birth control is still pretty recent.
The situation is too specific for it just to be authoritarian types trying to muscle in on people's lives. There might be something triggering here that is specific to how people think about sex.
> For most of human history, having children without a family around to invest in them was setting up for disaster
Do you have ample evidence to believe that is no longer the case?
I mean that's a pretty huge claim to just gloss over as a "cultural hangover". Because so far what limited studies were made indicate benefits to children from stable 2-parent households.
And even if that were the case, what does it have to do with prostitution?
I think the point isn't so much that having children without a family is no longer problematic as much as the fact that prostitutes no longer risk having unwanted children.
Apart from the breaking of various old taboos? Trafficking.
I'm sure there are plenty of prostitutes who deliberately chose that path, but an uncomfortably high number of prostitutes are victims of human trafficking.
Okay, unpopular opinion that is maybe outside the scope of this place time. What serious non-biased proof is there that "trafficking" is a real thing? Because I don't think it is. It seems to me to be a modern day witchcraft scare.
That is outside of police renaming prostitution busts as "human trafficking" crackdowns. If you think about the business mechanics of it for just a couple of minutes it makes no sense as an operation, regardless of the morality. The amount of risk and points of critical business failure you take on for probably minimal to negative financial gain is insane. Your main assets, your slave prostitutes, are your biggest and most volatile liability, and your source of income is your second biggest threat.
Your suspicions are likely correct. The entire human trafficking discussion is filled with statistics and data that come from nebulous and unverifiable sources. By creating sources out of thin air, law enforcement and its advocates are able to deflect criticism and defend the subjugation of sex workers. Try the book "Sex at the Margins" for a deeper anthropological look at the subject. https://www.lauraagustin.com/sex-at-the-margins-migration-la...
Reminds me of the War on Terror, where so little was actually about what a normal person would call terrorism. Most of it ended up being law enforcement overreach under the hard-to-criticize banner of fighting terrorism.
You see this any time law enforcement stumbles upon a scary marketing word that helps them justify their activities to the public. The word's meaning slowly grows to encompass all sorts of things that the public would never have associated with it. Like how "Sex offense" now includes people caught urinating on the side of a building. And how you can get a "DUI" without driving and without being under the influence.
Yep that's why farming should remain illegal. There's simply too great a chance that someone could be forced into that trade. Best to criminalize the behavior.
Is there any data to back that up? My necdotal observations from Denmark says it's the opposite; the ones who end up walking the streets are pretty much trafficking victims only.
A number of serial killers target prostitutes (actually the podcasts I listened to only mentioned ones in Vancouver, but I imagine elsewhere it's true too), police can't keep tabs on a "group" that wants to hide their actions.
Legitimizing the industry makes people who CHOOSE the livelihood safer, and for people who claim they want the government out of their lives and "personal freedoms" above all else, it's a no-brainer.
If it were legal women could use services and stuff to maybe track when they're going to a job and if they go missing - someone's alerted and the police come snooping...
It'd also free up a LOT of resources to focus on the still illegal prostitution and other sex crimes: forced slaves, underage, trafficking, etc... It'd also bring in tax revenue, etc. It'd probably raise their incomes too, maybe giving them what they need to afford a different career or finish school if that's something they want.
It also frees up prisons which the less people we have in prison the better, in fact I think prison shouldn't be for "punishment" so much as "protection" -- violent crimes should be locked up, but using marijuana or buying/selling consensual "experiences" shouldn't be...
If you literally can’t think of any reasons, it may be the case you’ve only been exposed to sex-positive feminism. It’s worth reading some of Dworkin’s work to get the other side of the story on sex work and pornography: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/andrea-dworkin-last-days-at-h.... Maybe start with “Right Wing Women” for a primer on how men hijacked the sexual revolution, before getting into the material that describes the brutality and dehumanization in the sex work industry.
You don’t have to agree with her take, but it’s worth engaging with it. She’s a brilliant, if deeply pessimistic, thinker.
I understand that's a big topic and I'd have to read the book to get into it, but I'm interested by the idea that "Men hijacked the sexual revolution" - what's the outline of that like?
I have over a decade in the technical operation of escort ad sites. Laws like FOSTA/SESTA make it far worse.
Very few sex workers are trafficked. Sites like backpage had a staff of many people who silently reviewed ads and reported trafficking tips. They were the #1 source of tips to the government. Backpage got shut due to a pissing contest between the owner and a AZ lawmaker IIRC.
Legalizing is humane.
The only trafficking I have witnessed is in California AAMPs. Gangs bring over women to work off “debt” and they move them to a new city every week or two to prevent them from making friends.
Turns out the organizations who tout prostitution as a problem because it's supposed sex trafficking are usually religiously motivated and just don't like prostitution that's why they don't call for changes to make prostitutes safer
As the article lays out, not ask trafficking is sex trafficking and this gets regularly conflated. Human trafficking is a serious problem. However, most cases are about people who end up somewhat involuntarily working in construction and agriculture. Big example are laborers in The middle East whose passports are taken away when they arrive and then work themselves to death on constructing soccer stadiums etc till their supposed debt is paid off.
Whenever you read about human, sex trafficking it usually turns out to be utter BS like in the case with the football team owner who supposedly was seeing trafficked, sex slaves from China in a massage parlor where they were held keptive. Turned out later that there was no regular sex, the ones worker who slept there did so once because she didn't want to drive home and nobody was even from China.
If this is such a big problem where are all the articles about human sex trafficking rings actually getting busted?
I take it you are not in law enforcement. Strangely, as a software developer working at home I don’t encounter much child slavery myself, so therefore it must not exist. Therefore I am not going to make the faulty and unfounded assertion that legalization will somehow eliminate unrelated crimes.
I'd say that human trafficking happens exactly because prostitution is illegal and pushed underground and that's where real cruel stuff happens. Prostitution should be heavily regulated and taxed, pimps are what needs to disappear from the whole equation. If that were to happen the underground shady prostitution would diminish greatly, not sure if it would disappear completely but customers would think twice about risking their health there since the regulated world would ensure healthier sex workers, up to date on STD tests and so on...
Dolores French, author of Working: My life as a prostitute, was a political activist (or worker of some sort) before she voluntarily became a sex worker in her late twenties. She continued to be a political activist but her cause was now sex workers rights.
She was for decriminalization, not legalization and regulation. (She was against legalization and regulation.)
Had a really good friend in college who was a feminist activist. Smart, straight A student, good upbringing, had graduate degrees.
She became a sex worked as part of the “sex work as liberation” movement.
I met her at a college reunion and asked her about how it worked out. She laughed and said: “I’m the only person I know who has never had a Facebook page. I can’t. That stuff follows you forever.”
Edit: She used her real name with most clients. This wasn’t a huge issue, because her name was identical to a popular porn star. Everyone assumed it was fake, and Googling it was impossible. Than the porn star quit, and eventually was forgotten. Her clients haven’t forgotten, sadly. Now googling her name brings up actual photos of her from a professional association belongs to.
Among the arguments for decriminalization of prostitution is that women should have the right to this path to make money. I don't know the argument against regulation, but I imagine it would still remove that path as an option for many. If you can't comply with regulation, then you're still doing something illegal. There's still people in power who are controlling your options.
It's been a lot of years since I read the book, but my vague recollection is that Dolores French argued that the problem currently is that abusive men -- pimps -- control the bodies and lives of most female sex workers, very much to the detriment of the women in question, and if you impose regulation, the state more or less takes over that role.
In her view, if you valued the rights of the sex workers, decriminalization was the only thing that made sense.
She made a compelling argument, in part because she had first-hand experience with both sex work and politics. She had been some kind of political campaign worker, I think, and hated it but was good at it and when she was something like 27 years old, after nearly dying in some accident, she decided to live a little around that time some friend of her asked her to turn a trick in her place because she couldn't make the appointment for some reason.
She said the guy paid her with a smile on her face and it was the most money she had ever made for an hour of work. It was the best working experience she ever had, so she began doing that as her profession.
She always paid her taxes. She listed herself as an entertainer on her tax returns and she eventually married a lawyer and continued to do sex work. I believe she was arrested at least once and talked in the book about how traumatizing that was and how awful many police officers are to sex workers.
Right, or you're an undocumented refugee and you can't gain access to services which handle money because you can't prove that you're not a money laundering terrorist. Meanwhile, it's the money laundering terrorists who will exploit these people as their only option to feed themselves. I hate that US laws started this wave of KYC requirements around the world. It's funny that you can actually get a prepaid debit card with many providers in the US without ID but you can't do anything with crypto exchanges.
> I'd say that human trafficking happens exactly because prostitution is illegal
Is that based on any research or evidence of any kind? I’m also inclined to invent some extremely absurd opinion on a subject I know nothing about in a field where I have never worked.
No, it's based on common sense. Do you not see that criminalizing prostitution did not and continues to not do anything positive for these sex workers? Do I need to have worked in this field to have an opinion? Really?
What's your argument for keeping prostitution illegal? And have you worked in the field?
Sorry, you can't use "common sense" as an argument for hotly contested claims. Here is a paper from 2012 that claims that legalized prostitution significantly increases human trafficking:
> This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market,increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.
This does not make much sense to me. Keeping prostitution illegal and criminalising it sends both the sexworkers and their clients onto the black market. There, sex workers have no rights. Sex workers can’t even complain when abused because they’d get punished a second time by authorities. I don’t really know how a study like that can can be conducted with a phenomenon that is hidden from the public view.
Ok, perhaps it doesn't make sense to you because you are not an expert in the subject? Your objection is akin to a criminologist claiming that some security feature in the Linux kernel doesn't make much sense to them.
You aren't an expert on the subject either. Not sure what your agenda is but I wish you had some common sense just for a few seconds. Prostitutes will continue their work legally or illegally, there were numerous unsuccessful attempts to stop them. There are n reasons why it's better if the whole sex industry leaves the underground shady world, from workers rights, less abuse, taxation, pensions, healthcare and so on. Let it sink in for a bit, it doesn't have to be written in a paper for you to attempt to make this mental exercise, does it?
No, I'm not an expert. Therefore I cite studies conducted by people who are experts. The available evidence indicates that legalized prostitution increases sex trafficking. Look at Germany and Netherlands. In both countries the number of victims of sex trafficking grew rapidly after they legalized prostitution. I.e evidence is against you. Stop being wrong.
Note that most victims of sex trafficking are also illegal aliens. Thus legalized prostitution doesn't help them since they would also be deported. The main benefactors of legalized prostitution are the Johns who no longer have to suffer a social stigma from purchasing sex.
You are not an expert but you are also lacking common sense and you’re stuck up on one paper. You can actually find a paper backing up quite a few opposing arguments and there are plenty of papers, if that’s the only type of thing you ingest, to claim that legalizing prostitution would bring a lot of benefits.
Common sense is an excuse to apply bias when you have nothing else to provide. Likewise the word obvious is fully interchangeable with the word oblivious without changing either the context or substance of a statement. Those are the polite and reasoned ways of calling this discourse ignorance or ethnocentricity.
You not making any sense. I’ll take it as arrogance this time. I don’t know you enough but I suspect you have some insecurities that you need to deal with
I invite you to mitigate your arrogance, your argument involves hijacking the narrative and waving a paper around. You don't make any other effort. By the way, it was not about sex trafficking as much as it was about legalizing prostitution. Yes, the former is a problem but it does not negate the current problems sex workers are facing. There are more prostitutes who ARE NOT trafficked, they are being abused and silenced by current legislation. Just because of a possible increase in sex trafficking we should not shut down a whole discourse in changing these people's situation. I invite you to swallow your pride and learn to be mindful about the conclusions you draw from these studies. They're not set into stone and are limited to their scope; the quality of the data and a possible hidden intent is also not automatically removed from consideration. Not at all am I saying studies are not valuable but they should not be taken as complete truth, they're just a view from a particular angle.
If you want to read about benefits of legalizing prostitution you're free to read it yourself, I'm not going to bother to extract excerpts for you. I've read some of your comments and you do come off as an intelligent fella but a bit on the arrogant side. Without any expectation I'm telling it does take some points off and unchecked may become a largerissue down the line. Enjoy your weekend
> Prostitution should be heavily regulated and taxed
I'm not sure why this always comes back up. Why would you want to stop violent oppression of prostitutes by police and criminals, and then replace it immediately with economic oppression?
You have it backwards: There should be tax credits for sex workers; for centuries they plainly have not been getting the protection under the law that tax money is expected to pay for.
There should be tax credits for sex workers; for centuries they plainly have not been getting the protection under the law that tax money is expected to pay for.
That’s a strange argument. What does a tax credit for a sex worker today do for a sex worker 150 years ago that paid taxes but didn’t get protection from the state?
Imagine the point I was making if I had said "a decade", and substitute that. Anything that's been happening for centuries has also been happing for decades, months, weeks, days, et c.
Sex workers working today are not receiving the same services and protection under the law that non-sex workers receive; our society had failed them and they deserve a refund. (So do their predecessors but that ship has sailed.)
If sex work is real work, then sex workers should pay taxes like real workers. But a credit is not going to happen, purely for political reasons.
We would tax the purchase of sex work as an extra excise tax, just like for gas, alcohol, tobacco, and coca-cola. We want to encourage people not to spend all their money on these things, because over-indulgence could be detrimental. But you could go the other way and say these are paternalistic sin-taxes.
> Why would you want to stop violent oppression of prostitutes by police and criminals, and then replace it immediately with economic oppression?
Because right now prostitution is _BOTH_ oppression by police and criminals _AND_ economic oppression (if we're considering low wages economic oppression).
Pretty sure that this is putting the cart before the horse. Sex workers has been legal in Australia for some time and I'd be interested (and surprised) to see if "human trafficking" to Australia is higher.
There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.
This is a thinner argument than I think people realize. That’s like saying “it’s already illegal to kill bald eagles, so it should be legal to sell bald eagle feathers.” Sometimes it’s very hard to prosecute some source wrongdoing after the product has entered the steam of commerce, so to speak. We routinely make things illegal at the point where it’s easiest to prosecute, even if doing so incidentally captures some distinguishable conduct.
If bald eagles were capable of willfully selling their own feathers you'd have a point and your analogy would be apt.
The biggest hazards to a prostitute is legal repercussion and the secondary effects of that, like having no legal recourse after being abused. That's not "incidentally capturing some distinguishable conduct", the vast majority of dangers associated with this industry are artificially created by unjust laws directly driven by social taboo of a few.
It does, as anyone forced into prostitution without consent could then seek standard legal remedies for things like kidnapping/battery/coercion/etc. So long as it remains illegal, that's basically impossible.
So by that logic legalizing child pornography and child prostitution would eliminate the harms associated with those. I am going to disagree with that, not only because its baseless, but also because its absurd.
Lol "adults transacting a mutually agreed exchange should not be prohibited by law" "oh so you want to rape little babies then?" Come on man get fucking real. You're being obviously disingenuous. I can tell by the word hoops you're jumping through that you know there's no logic to your argument, you're deliberately using words like "eliminate harms associated with those" to gloss over the fact that the harms are different and have different causes. You have no argument along this line, and you know it, and making arguments you know don't hold up is banal and lowly.
False equivalence. Unless you want nasty old feathers it's impossible to obtain them without killing the Eagle, but there is sex work without trafficking.
>it's impossible to obtain them without killing the Eagle
I find Eagle feathers pretty regularly in the area around where i live. A bunch of them nest across the street and there's another nest in the back of the yard in an old tree that's been used every year for years now. Some are old and nasty, most are pretty fresh though.
"We should ban hunting, because it's very hard to prosecute poaching after the product has entered the st[r]eam of commerce" wonder how well that would go over here in the US. And yet it's perfectly good logic when it agrees with the decisions you've already made.
Actually, it is legal precedent. Game wardens are the only law enforcement officers in the US that do not require search warrants because in their line of work everything is an exigency exception to the 4th amendment.
It should be legal to sell bald eagle feathers, as well as have any arbitrary sequence of bytes stored in a file on one's disk. I don't see why everyone in society should have to have their liberty arbitrarily restricted just because cops are terrible at their ostensible jobs.
It's not that enforcement is hard, it's that legal systems have decided that cops shouldn't have to be any good to do policing, and then they work backward from that. It's the wrong way around.
Attacking the leaf nodes of a societal problem lets it look like something is being done by police, when it is actually a huge injustice and a complete waste of time and resources.
You could spend billions to bust a million hookers and johns and never once make the tiniest dent in human trafficking.
If selling bald eagle feathers is legal, the incentive to kill one is bigger. Now unless you’re caught in the act of killing a bald eagle, there’s nothing they can do.
You're just kind of ignoring Rayiner's argument at this point. We already know that there are people who believe in principle that this stuff shouldn't be prosecuted at all. What's interesting is an argument that manages to engage with what Rayiner is saying; if you can't do that, you might as well just post at the top of the thread instead.
Human trafficking is different than kidnapping. The former is the forced distribution of persons for criminal acts while the later is the act of taking persons against their will.
You can't traffick humans without kidnapping them and holding them against their will. The whole point is we already have laws on the books to prevent that regardless of whether prostitution is legal or not.
In the case of people most jurisdictions want more severe laws in place than possession of stole goods against those people who are holding others against their will but did not kidnap them, as in they received the victims from others who may or may not have taken them by force.
This is not important. That sort of slavery is easy to deam legal without getting into what the forced work is.
Sex work = trafficking is, best case, a misplaced utopianism that makes things worse here and now, and often a far worse patronizing moralistic sexism.
2) It's much easier to protect the victims when they are strictly victims, and not participants in an illegal act. In the US, crackdowns on human trafficking overwhelmingly result in the women being arrested.
It's absolutely going to be the case that, at least sometimes, even with legal prostitution, someone is going to find a migrant who doesn't speak the local language well, steal their passport, and force them to engage in work, including sex work. (I mean, that already happens with crew on fishing vessels, kitchen staff in resteraunts, farm labourers...no reason sex work would be different right?)
What you want is for that story to end "...so then the victim went to the local police, who arrested the perpetrator, prosecuted them, gave the victim their passport back, and offered them a suite of support services".
What you don't want is "...but the victim was afraid they'd be arrested, so they didn't go to the cops" or "...but when the victim went to the cops, they were arrested and prosecuted; meanwhile the perpetrator was let go, because prosecuting trafficking is hard but prosecuting prostitution is easy, and the prosecutor wants to keep their stats up because they're running for the Senate next cycle".
> New Zealand legalised prostitution fully in 2003, and it seems to have had no negative effects. There was a major review 5 years after the law was passed (so 2008). Safety up, crime down, fewer sex workers on the streets, and at that time, no instances of human trafficking for the sex industry were able to be identified.
As I noted, data on human trafficking is very poor, but...best data we have seems to be that no, legalisation does NOT increase it measurably. In addition studies suggest it hasn't increased the number of prostitutes either (see, eg, https://www.otago.ac.nz/christchurch/otago018607.pdf).
It's easy to find claims of horrendous harms, but the NZ government, as part of it's official review in 2008, actively looked for and was unable to find any, and subsequent studies have consistently confirmed that.
NZ has had legalised prostitution for almost 20 years now, and the effects seem to be entirely positive.
Update: ok so this is about not prosecuting the prostitutes? That's a good thing to stop doing I think, and a dumb thing to ever have done I think.
What can make sense is that it would be illegal to buy sex (but ok to sell). Otherwise, if attacking the prostitutes, the legal system hurts the ones it was supposed to help
> What can make sense is that it would be illegal to buy sex (but ok to sell). Otherwise, if attacking the prostitutes, the legal system hurts the ones it was supposed to help
The prohibition of prostitution was never to protect prostitutes, who were viewed as the both immoral actors and temptors of others into immorality.
Its true that a modern rationalization of maintaining the prohibition of prostitution is that it is a tool to protect people from being victimized by being compelled or misled into becoming prostitutes, but that’s more of an attempt to sell the policy to people who would reject the original premise by people who are personally invested in that premise but recognize that others are not than anything else.
It's far from the academic consensus that this is more trafficking than there would otherwise be.
Legalization in more areas would also probably help, because an empty place (it's illegal in Vegas IIRC) going to have a harder tim serving sex tourism from the whole country.
I have seen several comments suggest legalization as an ultimate cure for many things, even unrelated. Almost every time these suggestions are unfounded assumptions not connected to any research or data. Is this a bizarre California thing?
Ask the people of Austin how legalization of homelessness went.
> Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees?
Things that are not typically legalized with prostitution still have a market which (absent successful constraints other than mere legalization of prostitution) will continue to be met by sex trafficking.
They shouldn't HAVE to, but an upscale college woman should be able to take a few jobs on the side if she wants in lieu of a full-time job.
Maybe someone is a sex-therapist who's wanting to experiment with actual sex in the context of doctor/patient/couples therapy well, they're getting paid so is that prostitution if she shows the wife different techniques or something?
Should the hypothetical homeless woman who's already suffering -- be put in jail -- giving her a felony so she's now even LESS employable?
Just locking up our "problems" doesn't fix anything. It didn't fix anything with drugs it won't with sex. It just creates black markets which are tax-free and have no legislation.
If you at least legalize it, require a business license, sales tax, and STD tests you kill some major problems in society like STD spread, you give the sex-worker more confidence to maybe move to a different career because now she's "legit" and not a "criminal".... etc...
In the specific case you mention making it illegal doesn’t remove the underlying economic imperative. It just punishes the women for being poor and needing the money.
More generally it takes away the liberty of other people (men or women) to do what they want with their own bodies to (not successfully) protect a particular group.
I mean nobody should have to sell sex to survive certainly, but if I was going to be homeless otherwise I personally would rather the option at least be legal if I were to choose to take it.
I can see no mechanism by which legalising sex work wouldn't force anyone to go into it, anymore than people might be forced to go into it by circumstances already. If you can think of one I'm willing to hear out this line of argument, but otherwise I think the fact that nobody should be forced to do it has nothing to do with the question as whether or not choosing to do it should be illegal
It's pretty clear that prostitution is bad. It's a bad career choice, it's not safe almost by definition, it involves the sale of a person's body which is dehumanizing, and it's bad for marriage and for people being in long-term relationships.
The questions are whether you think it's appropriate for the law to have an opinion about these things, whether you think the current law is effective, and whether you think the current law infringes on people's liberty too much.
It could conceivably be that legalizing prostitution is a good move. But, while I'd like to think otherwise, I don't think it's obvious that we can afford to stop enforcing laws that are essentially about guiding people to avoid bad choices.
Is that because other people look down on it? That's not what I would call intrinsically bad.
I've heard of people paying their way through college via prostitution, who say that it's much better than e.g. working as a waitress. Also, I'm sure it teaches social skills and bargaining.
> it's not safe
Many jobs aren't safe, such as coal mining. Usually the pay is at a premium to compensate.
> it involves the sale of a person's body which is dehumanizing
That is subjective. Want me to go look for prostitutes who have said in an interview or public blog that they find it empowering?
> it's bad for marriage and for people being in long-term relationships
In what way? If a man cheats on his wife by going to see a prostitute, that's obviously a problem for the marriage, though one could argue that the man being willing to do that in the first place was the problem. (If the only reason a husband doesn't cheat on his wife is because there isn't an available prostitute nearby, that marriage is obviously at the breaking point already.)
I would argue, furthermore, that there are probably a lot of men who get into relationships just to have sex, while the women are usually looking for more than that, which probably leads some of those men to misrepresent their intentions; and that if these men had a relatively cheap and safe alternative for getting sex, this might make the relationship market a lot more honest and healthy.
Ok, imagine I lost my job. I file for unemployment. As a condition of receiving unemployment, I have to accept any reasonable job offers. Shortly after going on employment, a man approaches me, offers me money to “go on dates.” Says he’ll give me a salary and “make it all legal.”
If I say no, so I still get unemployment?
If prostitution is a perfectly fine occupation, why not?
Legal forms of sex work (stripping, etc) have a special legal status that allows people to receive unemployment benefits while rejecting those positions.
The logic behind this is “sex work is bad and dehumanizing.”
Buying and selling and using marijuana in Colorado is pretty safe these days.
Two decades you could've been arrested, in gang violence among different gangs selling drugs, etc... because of "black market"...
If someone is already a prostitute by choice and not trafficked/etc they have a higher than normal chance of being murdered by serial killers... I think one third of serial killers have targeted prostitutes.
It may be bad, dehumanizing but so is just throwing them to the serial killers...at least making it legal allows for some sun to shine on the industry and for related services/industries to spring up like protection services to keep track of where they are and if they don't check in send out someone to check, etc...
It also makes the trafficking and dirtier/seedier sides of things easier to police because those are the only things to police now, and if someone is hiding something then they're probably not legit/legal.
And no, the logic is not that it's bad and dehumanizing, the logic is that some people are truly opposed to doing it. Similarly, if I'm on unemployment, I do not have to, say, go drive a garbage truck just because I see someone hiring garbage truck drivers.
In many countries you do have to accept job offers that you don't like in order to receive benefits or healthcare. If sex work is work, I don't see a reason to make a difference.
So, how about coal mining, or working as a cop in a heavily crime-ridden city, or other jobs that one might reasonably consider unacceptably dangerous? Is there a special legal status for those? If so, you could put prostitution into that category for starters (at least until legalization makes it safer). (If not, then I would consider this unemployment policy rather invasive.)
How about working as a rabbi or a Mormon preacher? Or as someone who distributes leaflets for a Republican politician? There's probably a special status for those, too, right? "Against my fundamental beliefs". You could put it in that category too.
Acting would be another case. You have to wear costumes and perform the actions that a potentially creepy director wants you to! (And I've heard it's not that rare for this to actually be of the form "director wants an actress to wear a revealing costume and then makes sexual advances on her".)
> The logic behind this is “sex work is bad and dehumanizing.”
When sex, and the pursuit thereof, takes up more time in humans than any other known species (ref: Sex At Dawn) I think it would be more reasonable to claim that sex work is pretty much the most human profession a person can engage in.
Certainly, focusing on physical attributes and acts isn't everyone's preference, either for leisure or work - but claiming it is "bad and dehumanizing" is a stretch.
I get it, but there are just so many holes in this line of thinking.
Once it becomes legal, the supply goes up, prices go down and it won't "get you through college". Plus I don't see why our decisions on prostitution have to be driven by the economic policies that have increased college tuition 2-3x faster than the rate of inflation for 30 years.
Also you will have corporations form to market, manipulate and addict people to their "product". Do we really want to go there? Thailand and Amsterdam and Las Vegas are fine places (sorta) but they dont provide the joy one would hope from the "empowering" you think is so great.
Also I would think in an era of COVID awareness people should consider the public health reasons from STDs (but not just those) why sex work will overall lead to more sickness and death if we promulgate it via market mechanisms. Overall are sickness and death likely to increase or decrease?
I'm not sure where you are going with your argument (speculation? sources?) that a lot of men get married just to have sex. If they want purely the sexual pleasure there are plenty of ways to get that that are a lot easier and less consuming than getting married! (Porn, devices, etc) If they want companionship over time, you don't really get that through prostitution. (Escort/rent-a-dates are legal as are hiring assistants). If they want kids and to raise them prostitution won't help. If it's not just orgasms which men want and what men is the appearance of a woman being interested in them, smiling, acting sexy per webcam culture... but what the woman wants is money, I get that if we legalize prostitution we enable that illusion for the man and economic power for the woman but what is the great benefit of that? We undercut our efforts for women/daughters to get paid equally for their minds to create and instead push them into selling their bodies and abilities to deceive men as part of their job. OK we've created a market, but to what end?
Look, I get that people think the status quo on this should be reconsidered but it looks like more rich people wanting to use their money to get whatever they want without consideration of the people servicing them, hoping that some anecdotes of trickle down "success" hide the misery of the system they want to promulgate.
> Once it becomes legal, the supply goes up, prices go down
Then I guess fewer people will decide to do it for economic reasons, and you'll be pleased with that? Seems ok.
> Plus I don't see why our decisions on prostitution have to be driven by the economic policies that have increased college tuition 2-3x faster than the rate of inflation for 30 years.
College was an example of something expensive that a lot of people want to pay for. (I do think college is becoming a less worthwhile proposition as time goes on, and didn't go myself.) Buying a car would be another example. My argument really doesn't depend on why people want to earn money, only that there exists a good reason.
> Also you will have corporations form to market, manipulate and addict people to their "product".
That, as a potential concern, applies to every product ever. Only in this case the sex drive is created by biology. And actually, the whole concept of "sex sells" means that they put sexy people all over the media already; and there are already sex-focused ads to try to get people to pay for porn and stuff; I don't think having ads for prostitution would make a difference here.
> STDs
Have you read about the precautions they take? I quote from a 2005 article about Nevada's Bunny Ranch: "According to law, condom use is mandatory for sex and oral sex as is periodic testing [looks like the period is "weekly"] for brothel employees. Since 1986, when mandatory HIV testing began, not a single brothel prostitute has tested positive." Also: "In the room, the men are inspected under a bright light to check for any visual evidence of sexually transmitted diseases." I think some street prostitutes but not all require condoms, and I really doubt that the majority of them get tested weekly. (The same can be said of people who go to nightclubs and hook up with a stranger for the night.) So it seems plausible that legalizing would lead to better safety.
> I'm not sure where you are going with your argument (speculation? sources?) that a lot of men get married just to have sex.
I said they get into relationships, not marriage. (There probably are some from very conservative backgrounds who believe in no sex before marriage [which also likely correlates with considering masturbation and/or porn to be a sin] who do end up marrying primarily for sex; but otherwise, yes, it's clearly a bad idea.)
> If they want ...
Lots of guys want lots of different things from a prostitute. Some want the pleasure of orgasm (and find it better than what they can get via masturbation). Some have never had sex and want to get some experience. Some want to have sex with a particular kind of woman. Some have an embarrassing fetish they want to explore. Some pay for her time and actually just cuddle with her. I'm sure there's a lot more.
> We undercut our efforts for women/daughters to get paid equally for their minds to create and instead push them into selling their bodies and abilities to deceive men
Who said anything about pushing them into prostitution? I just want the option to be there, for those who think it suits them. I am absolutely against pushing anyone into a career path they're uncomfortable with. (If economic necessity pushes them to choose a path, and this seems like a bad option but the least bad one, then, well, taking that option away would make things even worse.)
> it looks like more rich people wanting to use their money to get whatever they want without consideration of the people servicing them
The rich can already do that, either through their network if they have a decent one, or just by traveling to a place where it is legal. This would be more about making it more available and safe for the middle and lower classes.
Look. Fundamentally, my stance is that people have a right to do what they want with their bodies, which includes selling sexual services. Using the force of law to prevent them from doing that violates their rights. You would need a very strong argument ("this will cause terrible harm") to justify such a violation. But when I examine the consequences, they seem to me "probably positive overall".
On the personal angle, if it were legalized in my area, I'd consider trying it out (as a customer), but I'm paranoid enough about incurable STDs that even with their precautions I'd likely avoid it. (FYI, recreational drugs are another thing that I'm very much in favor of legalizing—for similar rights-based reasons—but have no intention to take advantage of myself.) And if I did it, I would certainly want someone who seemed enthusiastic and comfortable with the whole thing; if I got the impression that she really didn't like it but was putting up with it, that would make me rather uncomfortable with the situation.
> it's not safe almost by definition, it involves the sale of a person's body which is dehumanizing
The same could be said about any physical labor job. Arguably, the main reason safety is so difficult to enforce is that it is a black market practice with zero regulation.
> it's bad for marriage and for people being in long-term relationships.
Millions of people live their entire lives without marriage or even long term exclusive monogamous relationships. Most people who do sex work don't plan to do it for decades. There is no need to demand that people live their lives in a way condusive to marriage.
What would really solve this is if guys had to do it.
I mean, imagine if you had to service other guys for your pay, no matter how ugly they were, no matter how little you liked them, and often with little power to stop them. I say with other guys to ensure that it isn't a pleasurable experience for most of you in the way it wouldn't be for women.
It's not something we as a culture want to have. You all need to have a bit of empathy, to be blunt; prostitution in general has never been something the majority of women liked, and it often was something forced on them.
I'm pretty sure the garbage man doesn't want to go to work everyday too.
Just because no one wants to do a job doesn't mean it should be illegal. There's a lot of jobs that I think shouldn't have to exist. But the reality is that they do have to exist, because people need to make a living.
I believe prostitution shouldn't be illegal for the same reasons that you believe it should be illegal. Empathy.
I'm pretty sure the garbage man doesn't want to go to work everyday too.
Are you talking about your specific garbage man? Because plenty of waste collectors like their jobs. This statement comes off as very elitist, though you probably didn't intend it that way.
> It's a bad career choice, it's not safe almost by definition, it involves the sale of a person's body which is dehumanizing
Any form of manual labor is selling your body, all work done out of necessity is dehumanizing to a degree, lots of work is not safe and pay usually reflects that.
> and it's bad for marriage and for people being in long-term relationships.
The average rate of divorce is 50% in the US. 50% of all marriages. And you have to imagine that most of those divorced get remarried, so most people have been divorced! I don't see how legalizing an existing behavior that is widely engaged in would change it much either way. Try to imagine a scenario in which a couple stays married 30 years, but wouldn't have if it weren't illegal for one partner to pay for sex, does that sound like a likely scenario to you? One might argue that people would be less likely to marry out of desperation, or that equalizing sexual options across the board increases people's likelihood to treat their partners well. If anything you'd get a smaller number of marriages that more often last, and that's speculation, but it is the most reasonable speculation.
> The questions are whether you think it's appropriate for the law to have an opinion about these things, whether you think the current law is effective, and whether you think the current law infringes on people's liberty too much.
Yes, I believe this was the question you were responding to.
> I don't think it's obvious that we can afford to stop enforcing laws that are essentially about guiding people to avoid bad choices
Really? I think it is fairly obvious. The job of the law and the role of deterrent is to protect people from others, not to protect people from themselves. This is a pretty foundational point when talking about liberty and tyranny. It's why seat belts were not required in New Hampshire (the "live free or die" state) up until very recently. It is why we lobby to legalize everything that is illegal that we want legalized, that an individual has the right to do things that are potentially bad for themselves, that their own judgment is the one they best defer to.
Maybe masturbation and anal sex should be illegal as well? What do you think?
Working at McDonalds is dehumanizing too, and the pay is way worse.
As for being bad for relationships, I find that somewhat dubious.
The criminal element being involved in prostitution is what makes it bad. Without that, it'd just be a profitable job for young women of certain types, and an outlet for incels who might otherwise end up mass shooters.
This exists at every level - a cop can choose to pull you over for speeding or not, and if pulled over choose to give you a ticket or not. You can't get rid of the human element.
> The office will continue to prosecute other crimes related to prostitution, including patronizing sex workers, promoting prostitution and sex trafficking, and said that its policy would not stop it from bringing other charges that stem from prostitution-related arrests.
Maybe I'm too cynical but I bet they crunched the numbers and figured out that the prostitutes are generally poor people who can't pay big fines and the courts generally go easy on whereas the customers are generally a couple rungs up the ladder and get no slack from the courts because they can pay so they'll just refocus all the resources on prosecuting the customers which is where the money always was anyway.
I think you really should look at some actual stats if you think that poorer people aren’t extremely over-represented in court systems. There’s a reason that there are huge pushes to end cash bail and the like.
I don't have data on sex work specifically, but in general criminal fines don't come anywhere near paying for the law enforcement and prosecution apparatus required to get the conviction or plea.
If that were the case they wouldn't run speed traps.
Letting the hookers go about their business and arresting some fraction of their customers but not a large enough fraction to keep the customers from showing up at all (wouldn't want to deplete the metaphorical fishery) sounds an awful lot like a speed trap.
I wish I could not be cynical but there's just too much evil in law enforcement and the social services that deal with vices for me not to take this as a face value good thing. I'm sure they're happy to not be arresting hookers who've done nothing wrong. Beat cops don't like arresting people who've done nothing wrong. But I'd be lying if I didn't think there wasn't someone somewhere in the bureaucracy twirling their mustache while congratulating themselves on finding a way to both increase in revenue policing and satisfy the politically involved people who want progressive policy points.
Don't get me wrong, not arresting hookers is a good thing. But all my experience with the parts of government that deal with this sort of thing tells me this happened because the stars happened to align, not because someone with decision making power had an epiphany and decided that hookers shouldn't be arrested.
drug "investigations" actually, through civil asset forfeiture of "drug dealer" assets, are very lucrative. the police department in my hometown used to brag about how the city did not spend tax money on any of their vehicles, radios, and a bunch of other equipment.
A misdemeanor ticket can be issued and fully enforced in minutes. The discussion here is about felonies, which require courts, judges, juries, testimony, depositions, and evidence management. That stuff costs a lot of money and employs a bunch of people (some of whom are very well compensated!).
The state doesn't make money on criminal law. It just doesn't.
The speed traps is more a small town thing I think? NYPD is politically powerful in a rich place and just has a massive budget.
In this case there is dueling advocacy for the so called "swedish model" and full decrim, and by all accounts the lame duck DA is just trying to look good with the boring middle ground before his terms up.
I think it's more likely that punishing women is politically unpopular whereas punishing men is fine or desirable. Especially because women involved in prostitution may be especially vulnerable (poor, immigrant, drug addict, etc).
Punishing women, especially women in the sex trades or involved in sexual scandal, has never been unpopular in any society at any time in human history.
Punishing women is currently unpopular. For example, women get less punishment for the same crimes compared to men. I expect that punishing women has always been unpopular as women tend to be seen as needing protection or vulnerable and men tend to want to protect them.
You can say this about literally any group that wasn't classified with elite status, like royalty or clergy. Replace "women" with "men" in your post, and it's still just as true.
>Replace "women" with "men" in your post, and it's still just as true.
No, you're either attempting a low-effort troll or you have a profound misunderstanding of history. Men have almost always been classified with elite status compared to women in most societies. The entirety of Western civilization is founded under religions that teach a Male God created Man (male, not collective humanity) in His image and that women were created to serve men and obey them, and that the weakness of women is the source of all of the world's evils, and the cultures and legal systems which emerged have often reflected and enforced that patriarchal bias.
For most of history, women were basically the property of their fathers, then traded for dowry to become the property of their husbands. They couldn't own property, they couldn't vote, they could be stoned to death for disobeying their husbands.
>For most of history, women were basically the property of their fathers, then traded for dowry to become the property of their husbands. They couldn't own property, they couldn't vote, they could be stoned to death for disobeying their husbands.
For most of history, both men and women in any society couldn't do any of the things you just described. The majority of people in any society, of both genders, have belonged to the lower classes. This is still true today, but you have far more rights as a lower class person today than you would have 200 years ago. You're viewing history solely from the perspective of the upper classes (which includes the middle class).
I was going to say "No, the quoted portion says they'll arrest the johns, not the prostitutes." However, looking at the article, it says:
The Manhattan District Attorney Office's previous policy was to dismiss prostitution cases after the charged individual completed five counseling sessions with service providers. Going forward, it said its Human Trafficking Response Unit will file paperwork to decline formally to prosecute, and to inform the person arrested about purely voluntary services. The text of the new policy notes it does not preclude officials from bringing "other charges that may stem from a prostitution-related arrest."
Which sounds like they will still be doing the arresting of prostitutes, so I think you're actually right...
>The Manhattan District Attorney Office's previous policy was to dismiss prostitution cases after the charged individual completed five counseling sessions with service providers
All the perverse money-printer incentives of running a traffic school combined with the socially stigmatized customers you get when running an ankle monitor service.
I'm sure the people that own the businesses offering those counseling services will be upstanding citizens of great moral character and the people referred to these businesses will have fair and honest business transactions with them (obvious sarcasm should be obvious).
I cannot believe my eyes and the comments there.
The logic is "human traffic happens because prostitution is not legal" how is it different than far-right activists saying "police shooting people to death happens because people commit crimes".
You need to wake up seriously. it is not because you think it empowers women and should be legalized that there isn't a huge human trafficking issue to address even when legal (and in some countries it makes it worse). It is a myth and it is dangerous to communicate the lies that legalizing will solve everything when talking about human lives.
"State Department estimated that between 15,000 and 50,000 women and girls are trafficked each year into the United States." if for you it is a small number I dont know what to say...
idk if the argument is that legalizing prostitution decreases sex slavery or that it just doesn't increase it. You're 100% right that even if we legalize prostitution people will still be exploited. But if we criminalize prostitution people will still be exploited. And you're right that some countries allow prostitution in a way that makes exploitation easier or even legal. But that doesn't mean other countries can't do it a better way by allowing prostitution but heavily regulating it in order to protect the prostitutes.
Moreover, the real issue they are tackling in the article is that the DA is no longer arresting the prostitutes. Whether or not you think prostitution should be legal, hopefully we can all agree that punishing the prostitutes (the people who would be exploited!) for furthering exploitation is absurd.
The more legal prostitution gets, the more likely it is to occur in the "sunlight", where it's easier to notice and report problems like sex trafficking (without risking legal trouble yourself just for being in or patronizing the industry). In other words, no, probably the opposite.
"Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows."
Isn't that what you would expect when you initially legalize something that is illegal everywhere else? It gets worse before it gets better, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't follow the moral path and legalize it. You should be aware of that effect and prepare a response in advance, however.
I doubt that because there is a social stigma to prostitution that other minor vices don’t have. For example (hypothetical) if my wife found me using recreational drugs she would be pissed and force me into counseling, but if she found me with a prostitute it’s game over.
Well, the precise type of "sunlight" needed is that prostitutes and clients don't need to hide their business from the police, and can conduct their business in a publicly visible building, which the police can inspect at any time (to follow up on reports, or just go check that all the girls have valid-looking IDs, which can be followed up on if their suspicions are raised).
Whether you hide your patronage from people who know you is a different matter. (The medical system is a good example in this respect: hospitals and other facilities are absolutely not hiding their presence from anyone—quite the opposite, really—but the fact that you visited Doctor Jones to treat your potentially embarrassing medical condition is considered very confidential information.)
Medical privacy only exists because of HIPAA and doctor-client confidentiality. Neither of those would apply to the legalization of sex work. Your opinion is valid, but you chose a poor example for comparison.
Only, eh? Direct quote from the website of Nevada's Bunny Ranch: "Moreover, a Bunny Ranch encounter is entirely discreet, taking place in a private environment where the deepest, most intimate secrets of clientele remain confidential." It would very much hurt the Bunny Ranch's reputation if they reneged on that; it seems clear that confidentiality is something many of their customers value highly.
Just because the law doesn't mandate confidentiality doesn't mean the customers won't expect it and reliably get it.
My point was that "a service operates in the open" is compatible with "the customers of the service require confidentiality". Medical services are an example of that, an example in which people think that the need for confidentiality is so high that they made laws for it.
If they need a similar law for prostitution, they could pass one (I wouldn't be surprised if one already exists for a sufficiently broad category of "theraputic" services), but I doubt it would be necessary—at a brothel, only someone who verifies ages even needs to see a client's ID (and I suspect they could cover up the name); and as I said, it's strongly against the brothel's interest for there to even be rumors of non-confidentiality. I suspect a law would only move it from 99% privacy to 99.9% or something.
I do not doubt it - as there are plenty of people in the US without wives to force them and who would gladly hand out info to those on how to escape forced labor while seeking the services of volunteer labor - social stigma or not.
That depends on the drug. Cannabis (eaten or vaporized, not sure about smoked), psilocybin, and LSD are safer than sex with an untested partner, especially if they can be purchased in a regulated market.
How many people die each year from drug addiction or overdose versus sex? In U.S. 100K people a year die from alcohol. 90K+ from Overdosing. And 130K+ die from lung cancer. The only deadly non-treatable STD is HIV and that is a slow killer at best and quite rare (15.8K deaths per year by HIV positive). With a condom, risk is reduced 99%. Meanwhile, sex also increases the number of births, so by far sex is less deadly than drugs.
Exactly this, and if sex-workers can operate in the sunlight they can use services that maybe offer security in case they're doing outcall and go missing...
I listened to a podcast about some pig-farmer who killed like 49 prostitutes over 10 years back in the 80s-2000s in Vancouver, B.C. the police didn't know the prostitutes were missing because they don't want to be seen, they are hidden so they're easier to just kill and nobody notices... I guess.
It's not easy for me to understand why the legal system attacks the ones it's supposed to help, I mean, makes selling illegal, rather than making only buying illegal.
(In some/many? countries in Europe, it's ok to sell sex, but illegal to buy. So the prostitute can go to the police)
Could you help explain why you think that would be the case?
Sex trafficking can still be prosecuted. In general, though, prosecuting the victims of crimes doesn't make it any easier to prosecute those who victimized them.
It’s a step towards legalization, which will drive out the criminal trafficking element and lower the cost of doing business. It’s unclear whether that will lead to more or fewer people doing this kind of work, and what kinds of pressures to engage in legal in-person sex work might emerge.
Is there reliable data either way about legalization increasing human trafficking?