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Still not sure why we don't legalize the whole thing. What are we trying to prevent or protect by having it be illegal?

by didibus 6y ago

austincheney 6y ago
Human trafficking.
- sneak 6y ago
  Kidnapping is already illegal. There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    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.
    - sneak 6y ago
      "forced distribution" is the same thing.
      - austincheney 6y ago
        It’s not the same. Kidnapping is an illegal act but not a form of slavery while human trafficking is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres...
        Ericson2314 6y ago
        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.
        austincheney 6y ago
        That is not what I said.
        toolz 6y ago
        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.
        austincheney 6y ago
        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.
        toolz 6y ago
        aggravated kidnapping in the US often gets 20 years in jail. median sentence for murder is 13 years. I can imagine you might think the sentence would be lighter but there's nothing preventing heavy sentencing for kidnapping. edit: holding a human captive even if you aren't the original captor is still kidnapping so that detail doesn't really change anything
  - jfoutz 6y ago
    Usually ambulances can speed, for example.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    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.
    - sneak 6y ago
      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.
      - dieortin 6y ago
        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.
        sneak 6y ago
        There are lots of ways of enforcing laws against people who are not caught in the act. Most convicted of murder are not caught in the act, for example.
        tptacek 6y ago
        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.
- xenihn 6y ago
  This brings up something I've never considered before. Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees?
  - mc32 6y ago
    Yes. Women get trafficked to the Netherlands and Germany and prostitution is legal. Nevada too.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      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.
      - austincheney 6y ago
        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.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 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.
  - Lazare 6y ago
    1) Yes, but less. 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".
- silly-silly 6y ago
  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.
  - strken 6y ago
    Trafficking anything bulky into Australia is harder because it doesn't have land borders, so it's not necessarily a good case study.
    - waterhouse 6y ago
      Then I guess it shows that legalizing prostitution in island nations is a good idea? I'll take that.
  - selfishgene 6y ago
    There is plenty of trafficking out there even in countries where it is legal. Germany is an excellent case in point. This was just on hacker news today: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/trouble-in-paradise-rise-and-fall-of-germany-brothel-king-jurgen-rudloff https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/t...
  - pyuser583 6y ago
    There is research that shows countries with legal prostitution have more trafficking. You can Google it if you want.
- tartoran 6y ago
  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...
  - sneak 6y ago
    > 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.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      It's very disingenuous to compare taxes to harassment from cops and organized crime alike. Also just restaurants probably tons of stuff will continue to be off the books anyways, heh.
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      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?
      - sneak 6y ago
        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.)
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  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.
  - zachrose 6y ago
    AAMP?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - cko 6y ago
      I think it's sex work parlance for Asian (American?) massage parlors
    - geocrasher 6y ago
      https://www.aamp.com/ https://www.aamp.com/ American Association of Meat Processors
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    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
    - austincheney 6y ago
      Like the UN? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres... Where did you get that from?
- hedora 6y ago
  Keeping prostitution illegal protects the human trafficking trade. I think that was your point, but it can be taken either way.
rayiner 6y ago
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-hot-slit-review 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.
- RugnirViking 6y ago
  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?
slibhb 6y ago
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.
- smabie 6y ago
  I don't think it's bad.
- AlphaSite 6y ago
  > sale of a person's body Arguably, working in a factory is equally a transaction where the company borrows your body for a fixed rate. So I’m not convinced that that holds. Nor do I agree that it’s bad for marriage or long term relationships necessarily, can you elaborate?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  Not who you're responding to, but > 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?
roenxi 6y ago
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.
- steve76 6y ago
  You work for 50 years. Buy your dream home for quiet retirement. A magnet of human toxicity moves in next door, turning your last few years into one wild night of Stephen Paddock. Growing produce in your garden is nice. Growing produce wholesale is a freak show. If you are to bring the freak show to the very core of the human, at least get something out of it. Organ harvesting, for instance. Or, better yet, forced conscription in penal brigades. Old man Hammurabi said all you have to do to be lawful is limit the violence, not create it. Sending a subject to the trenches to covet his wife is a Biblical mortal sin. But sending the town fool and his disease spreading slice, well then, it's the gallows for you if you don't.
- antisthenes 6y ago
  > 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?
  - kenneth 6y ago
    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.
tenebrisalietum 6y ago
Women should not have to sell sex to survive. For example, is it right for homeless women to do this in order to no longer be homeless?
- bitwize 6y ago
  Better that a woman be homeless than that she practice sexual immorality, amirite?
- jeeeb 6y ago
  This seems like a very weak moral argument. 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.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  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...
- dragonsngoblins 6y ago
  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
gremlinsinc 6y ago
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...
fogihujy 6y ago
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.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Legalization reduces trafficking.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    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.
  - sib301 6y ago
    Look up the Harvard study which found the opposite to be true. Please source your claims.
- Thuggery 6y ago
  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.
  - koofdoof 6y ago
    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-labour-markets-rescue-industry https://www.lauraagustin.com/sex-at-the-margins-migration-la...

Still not sure why we don't legalize the whole thing. What are we trying to prevent or protect by having it be illegal?

austincheney 6y ago

Human trafficking.

sneak 6y ago
Kidnapping is already illegal. There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.
- austincheney 6y ago
  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.
  - sneak 6y ago
    "forced distribution" is the same thing.
    - austincheney 6y ago
      It’s not the same. Kidnapping is an illegal act but not a form of slavery while human trafficking is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres...
      - Ericson2314 6y ago
        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.
        austincheney 6y ago
        That is not what I said.
      - toolz 6y ago
        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.
        austincheney 6y ago
        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.
        toolz 6y ago
        aggravated kidnapping in the US often gets 20 years in jail. median sentence for murder is 13 years. I can imagine you might think the sentence would be lighter but there's nothing preventing heavy sentencing for kidnapping. edit: holding a human captive even if you aren't the original captor is still kidnapping so that detail doesn't really change anything
- jfoutz 6y ago
  Usually ambulances can speed, for example.
- rayiner 6y ago
  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.
  - sneak 6y ago
    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.
    - dieortin 6y ago
      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.
      - sneak 6y ago
        There are lots of ways of enforcing laws against people who are not caught in the act. Most convicted of murder are not caught in the act, for example.
        tptacek 6y ago
        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.
xenihn 6y ago
This brings up something I've never considered before. Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees?
- mc32 6y ago
  Yes. Women get trafficked to the Netherlands and Germany and prostitution is legal. Nevada too.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    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.
    - austincheney 6y ago
      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.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 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.
- Lazare 6y ago
  1) Yes, but less. 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".
silly-silly 6y ago
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.
- strken 6y ago
  Trafficking anything bulky into Australia is harder because it doesn't have land borders, so it's not necessarily a good case study.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    Then I guess it shows that legalizing prostitution in island nations is a good idea? I'll take that.
- selfishgene 6y ago
  There is plenty of trafficking out there even in countries where it is legal. Germany is an excellent case in point. This was just on hacker news today: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/trouble-in-paradise-rise-and-fall-of-germany-brothel-king-jurgen-rudloff https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/t...
- pyuser583 6y ago
  There is research that shows countries with legal prostitution have more trafficking. You can Google it if you want.
tartoran 6y ago
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...
- sneak 6y ago
  > 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.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    It's very disingenuous to compare taxes to harassment from cops and organized crime alike. Also just restaurants probably tons of stuff will continue to be off the books anyways, heh.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    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?
    - sneak 6y ago
      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.)
dkdk8283 6y ago
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.
- zachrose 6y ago
  AAMP?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cko 6y ago
    I think it's sex work parlance for Asian (American?) massage parlors
  - geocrasher 6y ago
    https://www.aamp.com/ https://www.aamp.com/ American Association of Meat Processors
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  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
  - austincheney 6y ago
    Like the UN? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres... Where did you get that from?
hedora 6y ago
Keeping prostitution illegal protects the human trafficking trade. I think that was your point, but it can be taken either way.

rayiner 6y ago

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-hot-slit-review 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.

RugnirViking 6y ago
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?

slibhb 6y ago

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.

smabie 6y ago
I don't think it's bad.
AlphaSite 6y ago
> sale of a person's body Arguably, working in a factory is equally a transaction where the company borrows your body for a fixed rate. So I’m not convinced that that holds. Nor do I agree that it’s bad for marriage or long term relationships necessarily, can you elaborate?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
betwixthewires 6y ago
Not who you're responding to, but > 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?

roenxi 6y ago

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.

steve76 6y ago
You work for 50 years. Buy your dream home for quiet retirement. A magnet of human toxicity moves in next door, turning your last few years into one wild night of Stephen Paddock. Growing produce in your garden is nice. Growing produce wholesale is a freak show. If you are to bring the freak show to the very core of the human, at least get something out of it. Organ harvesting, for instance. Or, better yet, forced conscription in penal brigades. Old man Hammurabi said all you have to do to be lawful is limit the violence, not create it. Sending a subject to the trenches to covet his wife is a Biblical mortal sin. But sending the town fool and his disease spreading slice, well then, it's the gallows for you if you don't.
antisthenes 6y ago
> 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?
- kenneth 6y ago
  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.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago

Women should not have to sell sex to survive. For example, is it right for homeless women to do this in order to no longer be homeless?

bitwize 6y ago
Better that a woman be homeless than that she practice sexual immorality, amirite?
jeeeb 6y ago
This seems like a very weak moral argument. 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.
gremlinsinc 6y ago
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...
dragonsngoblins 6y ago
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

gremlinsinc 6y ago

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...

fogihujy 6y ago

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.

koheripbal 6y ago
Legalization reduces trafficking.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  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.
- sib301 6y ago
  Look up the Harvard study which found the opposite to be true. Please source your claims.
Thuggery 6y ago
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.
- koofdoof 6y ago
  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-labour-markets-rescue-industry https://www.lauraagustin.com/sex-at-the-margins-migration-la...