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I think the discourse around prostitution laws sometimes gets confused. In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of traffi

I think the discourse around prostitution laws sometimes gets confused. In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible. I guess to be specific I think the police trying to expand anti-pimping laws to classify anyone who does business with a prostitute as a pimp are clearly detrimental to the well being of sex workers, but I don't think laws which discourage men from buying sex to begin with are necessarily more harmful than helpful.

tablespoon 5y ago
> In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible. And that makes the police behavior in the OP make much more sense: the goal of legalized prostitution (and criminalizing all related activities) wasn't to make sex work legal, it was only to reduce the leverage traffickers have over the trafficked.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Right, but clearly in some cases (if this post is accurate) the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again. It's a tough problem...
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers The OP isn't describing sex workers being "terrorized," it's describing people not wanting to associate with them because of the legal peril of supporting prostitution. > which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again. I don't see any incentive for these women to go "underground" because they are in no legal peril themselves. The simple solution the ostracism is to stop being a prostitute and get a different job, which is probably what the law was intended to encourage. > It's a tough problem... The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation. The key seems to be a broad interpretation of what "profiting from prostitution" is, so landlords, hotels, boyfriends, etc. won't want to take the risk. That replaces the legal pressure to get prostitutes to stop with social pressure.
    - ruined 5y ago
      Tell me you're missing the point without telling me you're missing the point. >The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation. Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap for women. How does this create a trap, when a trafficked women can always run to the police and get everyone who tried to exploit them arrested, without being in any legal peril themselves?
        ruined 5y ago
        that isn't how it works. any police interaction is fraught with legal peril. nwsp has a report on harms involved with this model of prohibition https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/4.%20Impacts%20of%20Other%20Legislation%20and%20Policy%20-%20The%20Danger%20of%20Seeing%20the%20Swedish%20Model%20in%20a%20Vacuum%2C%20Swedish%20Model%20Advocacy%20Toolkit%2C%20NSWP%20-%20December%202014.pdf https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/4.%20Impacts%20of%... occasionally there are news stories about particularly bad travesties of this kind of prohibition https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ireland-migrant-sex-workers-jailed-prison-newbridge-police-romania-naas-a8962291.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ireland-migr... one thing to keep in mind is that many people cannot seek help from the police. people who are victims to forced labor are often in a complex legal situation created or exploited by the perpetrators. undocumented people, the most vulnerable victims of trafficking, risk being arrested and deported if they seek help. this may destroy lives, separate families, render people homeless, or deliver refugees back to their peril. the only way to reduce this kind of exploitation is to legalize and proliferate good options that don't exploit people, and provide social support services to vulnerable people that do not involve law enforcement, so it becomes not easy or profitable to exploit people.
standardUser 5y ago
Why do you think paying for sex is a negative that should be eliminated?
- Kiro 5y ago
  It's male chauvinism, abuse and oppression of women. As long as buying a woman just to exploit her body sexually is normalized we will never reach equality. The few happy sex workers that truly think they are not abused are not worth the enormous negative effects prostitution has on society.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Sounds like a lot of projection and presumption, combined with a complete dismissal of male sex work. I would argue that as long as people like you assume a woman con't control her own body without it being "exploited" or "oppressed", we will never reach equity.
    - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      I also believe in work safety laws that prohibit workers from operating machinery for 14 hours straight or climbing radio antenna without any kind of safety equipment. I fail to see how that's fine but laws about selling sex are somehow in violation of these worker's agency.
      - standardUser 5y ago
        "I fail to see how that's fine but laws about selling sex are somehow in violation of these worker's agency." You don't understand how limits on some types of work are different from a comprehensive prohibition on other types of work? I don't beleive you.
        only_as_i_fall 5y ago
        I don't see how banning prostitution isn't merely a limit on the kinds of sex work you can perform. The distinction is arbitrary.
GolDDranks 5y ago
> This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible. Why?
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Because it's extremely harmful to sex workers and many (perhaps a majority) of those who do it would prefer not to but lack the tools or support network to make a change. What's the positive to society that justifies how frequently these women get robbed, assaulted, and raped?
  - handoflixue 5y ago
    "People routinely attack this group, QED we should ban this group" is odd logic. Lumber workers have the highest fatality rate of any profession in the US, at 1-in-1,000, should we also ban them? When queer people get attacked by homophobes, should we ban them from being queer? Why is prostitution a different situation than those? And how much of the violence against them is because they've been ostracized and routinely lack legal protections? Is it really better for society that people who do prostitution to avoid starving to death... instead starve to death? If you really believe people only do sex work because they lack the tools for something else, why not give them those tools instead of removing what little they already have? If your theory is correct, no one will decline these better tools; and anyone who does decline is reasonable evidence that your theory was wrong and sex work isn't actually intrinsically harmful. Certainly, there are nations that legalize prostitution without falling in to anarchy and violence, and I don't just mean the Swedish model.
kar5pt 5y ago
Why do you view prostitution as a negative? The only argument I've heard against prostitution that's remotely convincing is that outlawing it reduces sex trafficking. But it sounds like you're acknowledging that outlawing sex work doesn't help trafficking victims and still think it's bad anyway.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Because it seems almost impossible to design a system where women aren't being abused as prostitutes. Prostitutes are routinely assaulted raped robbed and murdered even in places where prostitution is legal. Also I think as a society we treat sex as different from other activities in a way that isn't really compatible with legal sex work. For example, if some manager asks the intern to pick up their Dry cleaning as part of their job, some people might frown upon that but I don't think many people think the intern is being wronged or if they are that it isn't really a big deal. On the other hand, if a manager asks his intern to have sex with him, I think most people agree that this should be illegal and that the manager in question is abusing his power, even if having sex with the manager was listed as a job requirement. But if your job is only to have sex...suddenly it's ok again. You can argue that we should treat sex as a normal activity like driving someone around or picking up groceries for them, but currently in society we treat sexual consent differently to prevent these power imbalances and pressured sex in the workplace, and I don't think that treatment is consistent with the sentiment of "sex work is just work"
  - randomdata 5y ago
    > to prevent these power imbalances and pressured sex in the workplace The power imbalances and pressures are the same for picking up dry cleaning. Sexual consent is treated differently because of how the laws shaped our views of prostitution. If prostitution, legally speaking, becomes a normal job like serving ice cream or sweeping the floor, then your sideline example naturally follows and is not some kind of exceptional case.
    - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
LatteLazy 5y ago
I don't think it's the case that prostitution is a social negative. Has anyone shown that? I think your last paragraph relies on the concept that all sex workers are always victims and no one else (the buyers, coworkers etc) is ever a victim. That really can't be true in practice. So we need a more nuanced approach.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  We know that sex workers are frequent victims of violence rape and even murder as well as being at a much higher risk of catching stds or having unwanted pregnancies. People argue about these specific numbers because frankly it's a hard population to get honest surveys of, but here's one I found. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9698636/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9698636/ >As adults in prostitution, 82% had been physically assaulted; 83% had been threatened with a weapon; 68% had been raped while working as prostitutes; ... >Eighty-eight percent of these respondents stated that they wanted to leave prostitution, and described what they needed in order to escape. If those numbers are even close to reality I think it's hard to argue that the negatives of prostitution don't far outweigh any positives. That said I think it's not at all obvious what the solution is here because clearly criminalizing prostitution is ineffective at eliminating prostitution.
  - bryondowd 5y ago
    Don't those stats only prove that criminalized prostitution is a negative? I expect you'd have a huge differential if you took similar stats from people selling weed in a place that strictly enforces a ban vs a place where it is legal and regulated. Probably not when it comes to rape, but violent/armed encounters are probably negligible for a legal weed shop, but common in an underground industry. Naturally, in the latter case, people would overwhelmingly want to get out, not because of the job itself, but the opportunists that crop up due to the lack of legal oversight.
    - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      Sure, but while there is evidence that less abuse and trafficking occurs where prostitution is legal (which is why I do generally support legalization) I think it's clear that it doesn't eliminate it. I wasn't able to find any stats on violence in a country where it is both legal and normalized, but I did find this paper by a doctor of psychology about the trafficking and abuses that still occur under the German system. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol3/iss3/5/ https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol3/iss3/5/ I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but it seems like in many ways the legalization and normalization of prostitution has both failed to protect sex workers from violence and has normalized the trafficking and pimping of these women.
Grustaf 5y ago
> In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. Yes that is precisely why it's not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, only to buy it. There is no need to allow the buying part, or pimping. The Reddit post is mostly bogus except for outlining the law in the first paragraph. I mean come on, a landlord not allowing people to use his building as a private brothel isn't "a witchhunt".

tablespoon 5y ago

> In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible. And that makes the police behavior in the OP make much more sense: the goal of legalized prostitution (and criminalizing all related activities) wasn't to make sex work legal, it was only to reduce the leverage traffickers have over the trafficked.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Right, but clearly in some cases (if this post is accurate) the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again. It's a tough problem...
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers The OP isn't describing sex workers being "terrorized," it's describing people not wanting to associate with them because of the legal peril of supporting prostitution. > which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again. I don't see any incentive for these women to go "underground" because they are in no legal peril themselves. The simple solution the ostracism is to stop being a prostitute and get a different job, which is probably what the law was intended to encourage. > It's a tough problem... The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation. The key seems to be a broad interpretation of what "profiting from prostitution" is, so landlords, hotels, boyfriends, etc. won't want to take the risk. That replaces the legal pressure to get prostitutes to stop with social pressure.
  - ruined 5y ago
    Tell me you're missing the point without telling me you're missing the point. >The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation. Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap for women. How does this create a trap, when a trafficked women can always run to the police and get everyone who tried to exploit them arrested, without being in any legal peril themselves?
      - ruined 5y ago
        that isn't how it works. any police interaction is fraught with legal peril. nwsp has a report on harms involved with this model of prohibition https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/4.%20Impacts%20of%20Other%20Legislation%20and%20Policy%20-%20The%20Danger%20of%20Seeing%20the%20Swedish%20Model%20in%20a%20Vacuum%2C%20Swedish%20Model%20Advocacy%20Toolkit%2C%20NSWP%20-%20December%202014.pdf https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/4.%20Impacts%20of%... occasionally there are news stories about particularly bad travesties of this kind of prohibition https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ireland-migrant-sex-workers-jailed-prison-newbridge-police-romania-naas-a8962291.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ireland-migr... one thing to keep in mind is that many people cannot seek help from the police. people who are victims to forced labor are often in a complex legal situation created or exploited by the perpetrators. undocumented people, the most vulnerable victims of trafficking, risk being arrested and deported if they seek help. this may destroy lives, separate families, render people homeless, or deliver refugees back to their peril. the only way to reduce this kind of exploitation is to legalize and proliferate good options that don't exploit people, and provide social support services to vulnerable people that do not involve law enforcement, so it becomes not easy or profitable to exploit people.

standardUser 5y ago

Why do you think paying for sex is a negative that should be eliminated?

Kiro 5y ago
It's male chauvinism, abuse and oppression of women. As long as buying a woman just to exploit her body sexually is normalized we will never reach equality. The few happy sex workers that truly think they are not abused are not worth the enormous negative effects prostitution has on society.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Sounds like a lot of projection and presumption, combined with a complete dismissal of male sex work. I would argue that as long as people like you assume a woman con't control her own body without it being "exploited" or "oppressed", we will never reach equity.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    I also believe in work safety laws that prohibit workers from operating machinery for 14 hours straight or climbing radio antenna without any kind of safety equipment. I fail to see how that's fine but laws about selling sex are somehow in violation of these worker's agency.
    - standardUser 5y ago
      "I fail to see how that's fine but laws about selling sex are somehow in violation of these worker's agency." You don't understand how limits on some types of work are different from a comprehensive prohibition on other types of work? I don't beleive you.
      - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
        I don't see how banning prostitution isn't merely a limit on the kinds of sex work you can perform. The distinction is arbitrary.

GolDDranks 5y ago

> This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible. Why?

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Because it's extremely harmful to sex workers and many (perhaps a majority) of those who do it would prefer not to but lack the tools or support network to make a change. What's the positive to society that justifies how frequently these women get robbed, assaulted, and raped?
- handoflixue 5y ago
  "People routinely attack this group, QED we should ban this group" is odd logic. Lumber workers have the highest fatality rate of any profession in the US, at 1-in-1,000, should we also ban them? When queer people get attacked by homophobes, should we ban them from being queer? Why is prostitution a different situation than those? And how much of the violence against them is because they've been ostracized and routinely lack legal protections? Is it really better for society that people who do prostitution to avoid starving to death... instead starve to death? If you really believe people only do sex work because they lack the tools for something else, why not give them those tools instead of removing what little they already have? If your theory is correct, no one will decline these better tools; and anyone who does decline is reasonable evidence that your theory was wrong and sex work isn't actually intrinsically harmful. Certainly, there are nations that legalize prostitution without falling in to anarchy and violence, and I don't just mean the Swedish model.

kar5pt 5y ago

Why do you view prostitution as a negative? The only argument I've heard against prostitution that's remotely convincing is that outlawing it reduces sex trafficking. But it sounds like you're acknowledging that outlawing sex work doesn't help trafficking victims and still think it's bad anyway.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Because it seems almost impossible to design a system where women aren't being abused as prostitutes. Prostitutes are routinely assaulted raped robbed and murdered even in places where prostitution is legal. Also I think as a society we treat sex as different from other activities in a way that isn't really compatible with legal sex work. For example, if some manager asks the intern to pick up their Dry cleaning as part of their job, some people might frown upon that but I don't think many people think the intern is being wronged or if they are that it isn't really a big deal. On the other hand, if a manager asks his intern to have sex with him, I think most people agree that this should be illegal and that the manager in question is abusing his power, even if having sex with the manager was listed as a job requirement. But if your job is only to have sex...suddenly it's ok again. You can argue that we should treat sex as a normal activity like driving someone around or picking up groceries for them, but currently in society we treat sexual consent differently to prevent these power imbalances and pressured sex in the workplace, and I don't think that treatment is consistent with the sentiment of "sex work is just work"
- randomdata 5y ago
  > to prevent these power imbalances and pressured sex in the workplace The power imbalances and pressures are the same for picking up dry cleaning. Sexual consent is treated differently because of how the laws shaped our views of prostitution. If prostitution, legally speaking, becomes a normal job like serving ice cream or sweeping the floor, then your sideline example naturally follows and is not some kind of exceptional case.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago

LatteLazy 5y ago

I don't think it's the case that prostitution is a social negative. Has anyone shown that? I think your last paragraph relies on the concept that all sex workers are always victims and no one else (the buyers, coworkers etc) is ever a victim. That really can't be true in practice. So we need a more nuanced approach.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
We know that sex workers are frequent victims of violence rape and even murder as well as being at a much higher risk of catching stds or having unwanted pregnancies. People argue about these specific numbers because frankly it's a hard population to get honest surveys of, but here's one I found. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9698636/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9698636/ >As adults in prostitution, 82% had been physically assaulted; 83% had been threatened with a weapon; 68% had been raped while working as prostitutes; ... >Eighty-eight percent of these respondents stated that they wanted to leave prostitution, and described what they needed in order to escape. If those numbers are even close to reality I think it's hard to argue that the negatives of prostitution don't far outweigh any positives. That said I think it's not at all obvious what the solution is here because clearly criminalizing prostitution is ineffective at eliminating prostitution.
- bryondowd 5y ago
  Don't those stats only prove that criminalized prostitution is a negative? I expect you'd have a huge differential if you took similar stats from people selling weed in a place that strictly enforces a ban vs a place where it is legal and regulated. Probably not when it comes to rape, but violent/armed encounters are probably negligible for a legal weed shop, but common in an underground industry. Naturally, in the latter case, people would overwhelmingly want to get out, not because of the job itself, but the opportunists that crop up due to the lack of legal oversight.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    Sure, but while there is evidence that less abuse and trafficking occurs where prostitution is legal (which is why I do generally support legalization) I think it's clear that it doesn't eliminate it. I wasn't able to find any stats on violence in a country where it is both legal and normalized, but I did find this paper by a doctor of psychology about the trafficking and abuses that still occur under the German system. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol3/iss3/5/ https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol3/iss3/5/ I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but it seems like in many ways the legalization and normalization of prostitution has both failed to protect sex workers from violence and has normalized the trafficking and pimping of these women.

Grustaf 5y ago

> In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. Yes that is precisely why it's not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, only to buy it. There is no need to allow the buying part, or pimping. The Reddit post is mostly bogus except for outlining the law in the first paragraph. I mean come on, a landlord not allowing people to use his building as a private brothel isn't "a witchhunt".