6 ms·

On mobile so I'll having trouble finding a source, but studies have unfortunately found that countries with legalized prostitution generally have higher traffic

On mobile so I'll having trouble finding a source, but studies have unfortunately found that countries with legalized prostitution generally have higher trafficking rates.

rifung 8y ago
Here you go: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/ https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-... "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." I find this interesting.. I wonder why people would still go to an illegal worker over a legal one. Is it that the consumers don't know they're illegal or they have some other advantage like cheaper price or a different experience?
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  > Is it that the consumers don't know they're illegal Apparently it's a hard problem to solve. Prostitution is legal in Germany, but still far from "accepted" as regular work. There are attempts at having the workers register themselves plus regular check ups (which they're not too keen on, because when the political landscape changes, being part of some database isn't a good thing. Plus, being in a database might expose their line of work that they normally don't point a spotlight on in their regular life), at requiring their customers to report suspect cases (but not all customers are interested in having their pastime exposed like that, and also how are they supposed to detect these?). Every attempt at a solution (without guarantee of success) creates new problems because it's a volatile environment all around. Illegal workers being immigrants, they are unfamiliar with the law, at risk of deportation (so the protections legal workers theoretically have don't apply to them in whole), and they're also not very keen on their families learning how they made the money that was sent back every month (no, it wasn't by waiting tables). Also, with mafia-like structures trafficking them, blowing the whistle might reduce life expectation for them and their families back home. There's little room for them to help themselves once in the situation.
  - capobvious 8y ago
    The regular checkup part at least is solvable. The only way to help victims of trafficking is to offer them help and some sort of amnesty.
- roenxi 8y ago
  That study might be the best available, but it isn't very convincing - they are analysing a large number of countries and it doesn't look like they gathered the data first hand. Are all the statistics using a consistent definition of human trafficking? I have no faith that data between different countries is comparable on this issue, especially when it was apparently gathered from other sources. That is the sort of approach that gets Sweden called a 'rape capital' [0]. It is an extreme claim that legalising something causes crime rates to increase. They advance a plausible idea for the mechanism, but it seems reasonable that they are picking up ghosts in the data rather than a real effect. Correlation and causation issues might also be at play somewhere, and the scope of the study is just too big to pick it up. If there is a secondary source on one country that talks about a before-and-after observed change that might be interesting. Basically, I'm not dismissing it out of hand, but it seems pretty reasonable that legalising drugs/prostitution/whatever automatically reduces crime and this study doesn't meet a reasonable bar of evidence. Maybe if it were combined with a good single-country study that highlighted the mechanism a bit more - but the uncertainties in the case study are enormous. The numbers cited in the report for Germany, for example, could be optimistically (optimistic to the point I feel disingenuous, but I don't think I'm saying anything statistically outrageous) spun to say that it is human trafficking may have declined from 19,740 (1996) to 12,350 (2003) with the legalising of prostitution +. [0] https://www.thelocal.se/20170221/why-sweden-is-not-the-rape-capital-of-the-world https://www.thelocal.se/20170221/why-sweden-is-not-the-rape-... + Footnote 38 notes that Germany changed their definition of human trafficking victims between 1996 an 2003 to include more people, although they don't think this accounted for the majority of the increase.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >It is an extreme claim that legalising something causes crime rates to increase. Not least because any increase also has to make up for all the crime that went away overnight when $thing became legal.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > "Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited." But: (1) Can inflows really be measured comparably between legalized and non-legalized regimes? and (2) Are inflows actually the figure of merit or a proxy? (3) If inflows are a proxy for the figure of merit, is the relationship between that proxy and the actual figure of merit consistent between legalized and non-legalized regimes? Its worth noting that key utilitarian arguments made for legalization (there are also more direct deontological arguments) include that legalization makes it easier for people subjected to abuses within sex work (including, but not limited to, trafficking) to identify themselves and/or be identified, and for them to escape from those abusive situations. If that is true, one would expect: (1) Any mechanism for detecting trafficking levels (including inflows) to return a result higher relative to the actual level, ceteris paribus, in a legalized regime than a criminalized one, and (2) Actual inflow levels in a legalized regime to be higher in proportion to impact levels (number of people subjected to trafficking at any point in time, number of person/years per year spent subjected to trafficking, lifetime average number of days spent subjected to trafficking, etc.) because shorter time to escape would require higher inflow levels [0] for any given impact level (or, equivalent, produce lower impact levels for any given inflow level.) And this doesn't even address that the research uses a source that relies on local reports of human trafficking rather than consistent collection on common standards, and that legalizing regimes (and particular democratic legalizing regimes, which saw the greatest likelihood of increases) might simply tend also to use broader definitions of human trafficking in the first place, or expend more effort to either detect it or to distinguish it from non-trafficking prostitution. [0] Well, where "inflow" is imports + people newly subjected to trafficking locally; the paper seems to consider only imports, which would ceteris paribus have the same relation, but there could be compounding effects from differences in local trafficking (OTOH, if legalization made it harder to traffic locals--because those who would be at risk would be more able to turn to legal sex work themselves--then that would further increase the ratio between import inflows and domestic impact levels.
- thomasz 8y ago
  > I find this interesting.. I wonder why people would still go to an illegal worker over a legal one. Is it that the consumers don't know they're illegal or they have some other advantage like cheaper price or a different experience? Slaves are cheaper and less likely to refuse to perform certain services.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I wonder why people would still go to an illegal worker over a legal one. There is no reason to assume the client knows who is legal and who isn't. I can well imagine that it's less dangerous to traffic someone where prostitution is legal because the activity per se isn't going to get you arrested. I saw some article about stolen high value tech being booming business because, unlike illegal drugs, simply possessing the tech per se was not illegal. They would have to prove it was obtained illegally to charge you with anything.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  I don't want to trivialize a complicated subject, but... Prostitution and street-walking are two different things, and it would be possible for prostitution to be legal whilst keeping street-walking illegal. I suppose it could be argued then a single person could operate from their home, but groups would have to work from licensed premises. Seems like that would have an advantage.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  You're assuming direct causality. Think of the practically limitless number of major confounding variables here that are practically impossible to control for in a reasonable way. At the most fundamental think of the distinction between nations that legalize prostitution versus those that do not. There tends to be a very different system of ethos between these nations and this is going to trickle down to every single aspect of society. So for instance I think it's extremely likely that you can show that legalizing certain drugs (such as marijuana) can be shown to 'cause' increases in sex trafficking. Of course it almost certainly does not but I'm making the educated assumption that nations that have legalized prostitution are going to have legalized drugs of various sorts more liberally than nations that still have criminalized prostitution. And so, lo and behold, we can show a correlation between legalizing drugs and sex trafficking if we assume that paper is correct that a link exists between sex trafficking and legalized prostitution. Though indeed even the link itself should be called into question. For instance could the cause not be that legalization enables greater scrutiny over workers and thus the legalization itself helps to increase the detection efficiency of unlawful trafficking? Differences in what you're measuring mean nothing unless you are measuring things in the exact same way, with the exact same 'resolution'. Again you can try to control for things like this, but the controls are subject to just as many problems. --- Maybe the most important issue here is that this is an issue that is incredibly difficult to do right even when you are 100% impartial and objective analysis is your one and only purpose. In reality people are biased, and a negative result means you basically just wasted however many months researching this topic. And this is a topic where you could, even without malice or intent, show anything to be true if you wanted by just seeking out slightly different data, or controlling for confounding issues in slightly different ways.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  Wasn't one of the suggested causes of this that legalizing prostitution made it possible for the trafficked women in question to report their trafficking without being arrested? (And to still have a living afterwards) When your metric is "crimes discovered" or "crimes reported", you have to make sure improvements come from reduction in crime, not detection rates...
capobvious 8y ago
So deal with the trafficking which is already illegal.
coldtea 8y ago
That's because they have labor laws that are easy on exploiting immigration in general.

On mobile so I'll having trouble finding a source, but studies have unfortunately found that countries with legalized prostitution generally have higher trafficking rates.

rifung 8y ago

Here you go: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/ https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-... "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." I find this interesting.. I wonder why people would still go to an illegal worker over a legal one. Is it that the consumers don't know they're illegal or they have some other advantage like cheaper price or a different experience?

pgeorgi 8y ago
> Is it that the consumers don't know they're illegal Apparently it's a hard problem to solve. Prostitution is legal in Germany, but still far from "accepted" as regular work. There are attempts at having the workers register themselves plus regular check ups (which they're not too keen on, because when the political landscape changes, being part of some database isn't a good thing. Plus, being in a database might expose their line of work that they normally don't point a spotlight on in their regular life), at requiring their customers to report suspect cases (but not all customers are interested in having their pastime exposed like that, and also how are they supposed to detect these?). Every attempt at a solution (without guarantee of success) creates new problems because it's a volatile environment all around. Illegal workers being immigrants, they are unfamiliar with the law, at risk of deportation (so the protections legal workers theoretically have don't apply to them in whole), and they're also not very keen on their families learning how they made the money that was sent back every month (no, it wasn't by waiting tables). Also, with mafia-like structures trafficking them, blowing the whistle might reduce life expectation for them and their families back home. There's little room for them to help themselves once in the situation.
- capobvious 8y ago
  The regular checkup part at least is solvable. The only way to help victims of trafficking is to offer them help and some sort of amnesty.
roenxi 8y ago
That study might be the best available, but it isn't very convincing - they are analysing a large number of countries and it doesn't look like they gathered the data first hand. Are all the statistics using a consistent definition of human trafficking? I have no faith that data between different countries is comparable on this issue, especially when it was apparently gathered from other sources. That is the sort of approach that gets Sweden called a 'rape capital' [0]. It is an extreme claim that legalising something causes crime rates to increase. They advance a plausible idea for the mechanism, but it seems reasonable that they are picking up ghosts in the data rather than a real effect. Correlation and causation issues might also be at play somewhere, and the scope of the study is just too big to pick it up. If there is a secondary source on one country that talks about a before-and-after observed change that might be interesting. Basically, I'm not dismissing it out of hand, but it seems pretty reasonable that legalising drugs/prostitution/whatever automatically reduces crime and this study doesn't meet a reasonable bar of evidence. Maybe if it were combined with a good single-country study that highlighted the mechanism a bit more - but the uncertainties in the case study are enormous. The numbers cited in the report for Germany, for example, could be optimistically (optimistic to the point I feel disingenuous, but I don't think I'm saying anything statistically outrageous) spun to say that it is human trafficking may have declined from 19,740 (1996) to 12,350 (2003) with the legalising of prostitution +. [0] https://www.thelocal.se/20170221/why-sweden-is-not-the-rape-capital-of-the-world https://www.thelocal.se/20170221/why-sweden-is-not-the-rape-... + Footnote 38 notes that Germany changed their definition of human trafficking victims between 1996 an 2003 to include more people, although they don't think this accounted for the majority of the increase.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >It is an extreme claim that legalising something causes crime rates to increase. Not least because any increase also has to make up for all the crime that went away overnight when $thing became legal.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> "Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited." But: (1) Can inflows really be measured comparably between legalized and non-legalized regimes? and (2) Are inflows actually the figure of merit or a proxy? (3) If inflows are a proxy for the figure of merit, is the relationship between that proxy and the actual figure of merit consistent between legalized and non-legalized regimes? Its worth noting that key utilitarian arguments made for legalization (there are also more direct deontological arguments) include that legalization makes it easier for people subjected to abuses within sex work (including, but not limited to, trafficking) to identify themselves and/or be identified, and for them to escape from those abusive situations. If that is true, one would expect: (1) Any mechanism for detecting trafficking levels (including inflows) to return a result higher relative to the actual level, ceteris paribus, in a legalized regime than a criminalized one, and (2) Actual inflow levels in a legalized regime to be higher in proportion to impact levels (number of people subjected to trafficking at any point in time, number of person/years per year spent subjected to trafficking, lifetime average number of days spent subjected to trafficking, etc.) because shorter time to escape would require higher inflow levels [0] for any given impact level (or, equivalent, produce lower impact levels for any given inflow level.) And this doesn't even address that the research uses a source that relies on local reports of human trafficking rather than consistent collection on common standards, and that legalizing regimes (and particular democratic legalizing regimes, which saw the greatest likelihood of increases) might simply tend also to use broader definitions of human trafficking in the first place, or expend more effort to either detect it or to distinguish it from non-trafficking prostitution. [0] Well, where "inflow" is imports + people newly subjected to trafficking locally; the paper seems to consider only imports, which would ceteris paribus have the same relation, but there could be compounding effects from differences in local trafficking (OTOH, if legalization made it harder to traffic locals--because those who would be at risk would be more able to turn to legal sex work themselves--then that would further increase the ratio between import inflows and domestic impact levels.
thomasz 8y ago
> I find this interesting.. I wonder why people would still go to an illegal worker over a legal one. Is it that the consumers don't know they're illegal or they have some other advantage like cheaper price or a different experience? Slaves are cheaper and less likely to refuse to perform certain services.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I wonder why people would still go to an illegal worker over a legal one. There is no reason to assume the client knows who is legal and who isn't. I can well imagine that it's less dangerous to traffic someone where prostitution is legal because the activity per se isn't going to get you arrested. I saw some article about stolen high value tech being booming business because, unlike illegal drugs, simply possessing the tech per se was not illegal. They would have to prove it was obtained illegally to charge you with anything.
jimnotgym 8y ago
I don't want to trivialize a complicated subject, but... Prostitution and street-walking are two different things, and it would be possible for prostitution to be legal whilst keeping street-walking illegal. I suppose it could be argued then a single person could operate from their home, but groups would have to work from licensed premises. Seems like that would have an advantage.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You're assuming direct causality. Think of the practically limitless number of major confounding variables here that are practically impossible to control for in a reasonable way. At the most fundamental think of the distinction between nations that legalize prostitution versus those that do not. There tends to be a very different system of ethos between these nations and this is going to trickle down to every single aspect of society. So for instance I think it's extremely likely that you can show that legalizing certain drugs (such as marijuana) can be shown to 'cause' increases in sex trafficking. Of course it almost certainly does not but I'm making the educated assumption that nations that have legalized prostitution are going to have legalized drugs of various sorts more liberally than nations that still have criminalized prostitution. And so, lo and behold, we can show a correlation between legalizing drugs and sex trafficking if we assume that paper is correct that a link exists between sex trafficking and legalized prostitution. Though indeed even the link itself should be called into question. For instance could the cause not be that legalization enables greater scrutiny over workers and thus the legalization itself helps to increase the detection efficiency of unlawful trafficking? Differences in what you're measuring mean nothing unless you are measuring things in the exact same way, with the exact same 'resolution'. Again you can try to control for things like this, but the controls are subject to just as many problems. --- Maybe the most important issue here is that this is an issue that is incredibly difficult to do right even when you are 100% impartial and objective analysis is your one and only purpose. In reality people are biased, and a negative result means you basically just wasted however many months researching this topic. And this is a topic where you could, even without malice or intent, show anything to be true if you wanted by just seeking out slightly different data, or controlling for confounding issues in slightly different ways.
DuskStar 8y ago
Wasn't one of the suggested causes of this that legalizing prostitution made it possible for the trafficked women in question to report their trafficking without being arrested? (And to still have a living afterwards) When your metric is "crimes discovered" or "crimes reported", you have to make sure improvements come from reduction in crime, not detection rates...

capobvious 8y ago

So deal with the trafficking which is already illegal.

coldtea 8y ago

That's because they have labor laws that are easy on exploiting immigration in general.