4 ms·

Banning the purchase of sex increases cases of rape: evidence from Sweden

47 points by cubefox 3y ago

cantSpellSober 3y ago
> However, it is not accompanied by a decrease in the number of pimps > Pimping is also closely related to coercive exploitation of prostitution and human trafficking This paper seems to hint at the conclusion "legal prostitution results in fewer rapes" but is "coercive exploitation of prostitution" meaningfully different? My understanding is that prostitution was most recently banned in Sweden because of the human trafficking problem in the first place, not moral grandstanding.
- alphabettsy 3y ago
  I realize this is not addressing your point, but it seems that law enforcement and politicians using the term “human trafficking” for everything from prostitution to coyotes helping illegal immigration has done a disservice.
  - dwighttk 3y ago
    What other term would you like for buying and selling people?
    - black_puppydog 3y ago
      I think the point was that "illegal immigration" is exactly not buying and selling of people, while the coercive/abusive prostitution trafficking pretty much is. And as such, the two things should not share a name. Renaming one or the other would be appropriate now.
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        But the entire issue is that because the immigration is illegal, there's no way to actually vet the circumstances of the people being transported.
      - dwighttk 3y ago
        I didn’t think people were including all illegal immigration in human trafficking, but only pointing out that where illegal immigration occurs there is also human trafficking. Illegal prostitution isn’t human trafficking, but they are closely related.
    - jonfromsf 3y ago
      police freely use "human trafficking" to refer to all prostitution. Which is absurd.
- TimPC 3y ago
  Several nations have legalized prostitution in ways where you can be a prostitute in business for yourself, but can't have someone above you taking a cut. This has the downside of preventing prostitutes from banding together to share rent for a space but it does a lot to limit pimping. Further improvements to the law could potentially allow for shared rental agreements of various types as long as there isn't someone getting a % cut and that would still effectively keep pimping illegal.
dwighttk 3y ago
>Taken together, the empirical evidence hints at the notion that the rise in rapes is not connected to the supply of prostitution but rather to changes in the demand for prostitution due to the ban. Wild that some end up raping instead of illegally visiting a prostitute.
yonixw 3y ago
The first graph [1] does not show correlation in trends ... But If someone have the full PDF, sure would like to read it [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378962808_Banning_the_purchase_of_sex_increases_cases_of_rape_evidence_from_Sweden https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378962808_Banning_t...
okeuro49 3y ago
Does the study account for the increase in rape through liberalised immigration policy over this time? > A total of 3 039 offenders were included in the analysis. A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8330751/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8330751/
- bhouston 3y ago
  > A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden. How can you have an immigrant who was born inside of Sweden? They are no longer an immigrant then.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > How can you have an immigrant who was born inside of Sweden? They are no longer an immigrant then. Not every country has jus soli/birthright citizenship. Sweden appears to be jus sanguinis/inherited citizenship only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nationality_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nationality_law > Swedish nationality law determines entitlement to Swedish citizenship. Citizenship of Sweden is based primarily on the principle of jus sanguinis. In other words, citizenship is conferred primarily by birth to a Swedish parent, irrespective of place of birth. > In general, children born in Sweden to foreign parents do not acquire Swedish citizenship at birth, although if they remain resident in Sweden they may become citizens later on.
    - laurentlb 3y ago
      If they were born in Sweden, they didn't migrate. There seems to be a confusion between immigrant and foreigner.
      - tivert 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
netsharc 3y ago
Also in Rhode Island: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5898187/prostitution-rhode-island-decriminalized https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5898187/prostitution-rhode-isl...
bhouston 3y ago
Did rape decrease as porn got more ubiquitous? I would think it is a similar correlation, no? Found an answer to my own question: "Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178909000445 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591...
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  I hope so, cause I'm 2nd-amendment on porn. I'm hoarding it for the end times.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    That’s great. I’m not; it isn’t even speech, and I reject the Lockean view of “freedom” anyway (which is actually license). Porn is incredibly destructive. Indeed, both pornography and prostitution are unethical, but of the two, prostitution is less bad. At least there’s another person involved, and the sex act is real, however defective. Less defective and destructive than glad handing yourself and laying waste to your mind that’s also difficult to recover from. Here we must distinguish between state permission and state sanction. The state can licitly permit certain evils if banning them leads to a worse situation, given the crooked state of humanity. Prostitution was traditionally one of these.
    - EnergyAmy 3y ago
      Prostitution and pornography are both far less destructive than other evils like religion. Let's start by banning those first.
mumblemumble 3y ago
Apparent earlier draft of the paper: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.pdf https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.p... I haven't paid to read the linked article, but the abstracts do differ significantly. Perhaps the work in the above link is presumably not representative of the final published version, which is about 20 pages shorter. That could just be formatting differences, though. About 60% of the pages in the earlier version are figures and tables, many of which get, but do not fill, a dedicated page. The author has presumably had ~5 years to keep working on it in the intervening time. That could either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on various factors including one's own opinion on how the scientific process should work. Personally, I'm always pretty a priori skeptical of this style of economic "natural experiment". I'm rather fond of economist Ronald Coase's observation that, "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess." And 5+ years is a long time to spend p-hacking one set of data. But it's hard to know what all is in a 30-page paper based on just a 150-word abstract. So I would encourage people to be very cautious about getting too caught up in dissecting and discussing this without taking some time to digest the whole thing first. Arguably Hacker News is just not the right venue in the first place because it's set up to reward opinions that people can assemble in a matter of minutes, and digesting and understanding the merits of a 30-page economics paper probably deserves more like a week's worth of time.
toxik 3y ago
The paper: "Prior to 1999, prostitution was not regulated in Sweden." Reality: "The earliest law to explicitly ban prostitution was in the Civil Code of 1734."
sandstrom 3y ago
I think the liberal immigration policy might play a role here. Sweden has taken a huge amount in the past 15 years, twenty percent of the population are immigrants. Obviously, most of them are not criminals. But on a group level, they are more likely to commit crimes. About 2x compared to Swedes, after adjusting for income, age and education (it's higher before adjusting, obviously). Digging deeper, there are large differences between groups. For example, the group men (compared to women) are much more likely to commit crimes. Another factor that stands out is geography. People from East Asia have similar crime-rates as Swedes, while people from Africa are 5-10x as likely to commit crimes (compared to Swedes). This holds for most categories, including violent crimes, sexual crimes and a bunch of other groups. Here is the landing page from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, a governmental agency: https://bra.se/publikationer/arkiv/publikationer/2021-08-25-misstankta-for-brott-bland-personer-med-inrikes-respektive-utrikes-bakgrund.html https://bra.se/publikationer/arkiv/publikationer/2021-08-25-... Here is the report with the data mentioned above: https://bra.se/download/18.1f8c9903175f8b2aa70f6df/1631107319978/2021_9_Misstankta_for_brott_bland_personer_med_inrikes_respektive_utrikes_bakgrund.pdf https://bra.se/download/18.1f8c9903175f8b2aa70f6df/163110731...
- cubefox 3y ago
  Yeah. It is important to point these things out, despite quite a few people wanting to suppress this information.

47 points by cubefox 3y ago

> However, it is not accompanied by a decrease in the number of pimps > Pimping is also closely related to coercive exploitation of prostitution and human trafficking This paper seems to hint at the conclusion "legal prostitution results in fewer rapes" but is "coercive exploitation of prostitution" meaningfully different? My understanding is that prostitution was most recently banned in Sweden because of the human trafficking problem in the first place, not moral grandstanding.

alphabettsy 3y ago
I realize this is not addressing your point, but it seems that law enforcement and politicians using the term “human trafficking” for everything from prostitution to coyotes helping illegal immigration has done a disservice.
- dwighttk 3y ago
  What other term would you like for buying and selling people?
  - black_puppydog 3y ago
    I think the point was that "illegal immigration" is exactly not buying and selling of people, while the coercive/abusive prostitution trafficking pretty much is. And as such, the two things should not share a name. Renaming one or the other would be appropriate now.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      But the entire issue is that because the immigration is illegal, there's no way to actually vet the circumstances of the people being transported.
    - dwighttk 3y ago
      I didn’t think people were including all illegal immigration in human trafficking, but only pointing out that where illegal immigration occurs there is also human trafficking. Illegal prostitution isn’t human trafficking, but they are closely related.
  - jonfromsf 3y ago
    police freely use "human trafficking" to refer to all prostitution. Which is absurd.
TimPC 3y ago
Several nations have legalized prostitution in ways where you can be a prostitute in business for yourself, but can't have someone above you taking a cut. This has the downside of preventing prostitutes from banding together to share rent for a space but it does a lot to limit pimping. Further improvements to the law could potentially allow for shared rental agreements of various types as long as there isn't someone getting a % cut and that would still effectively keep pimping illegal.

dwighttk 3y ago

>Taken together, the empirical evidence hints at the notion that the rise in rapes is not connected to the supply of prostitution but rather to changes in the demand for prostitution due to the ban. Wild that some end up raping instead of illegally visiting a prostitute.

yonixw 3y ago

The first graph [1] does not show correlation in trends ... But If someone have the full PDF, sure would like to read it [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378962808_Banning_the_purchase_of_sex_increases_cases_of_rape_evidence_from_Sweden https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378962808_Banning_t...

okeuro49 3y ago

Does the study account for the increase in rape through liberalised immigration policy over this time? > A total of 3 039 offenders were included in the analysis. A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8330751/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8330751/

bhouston 3y ago
> A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden. How can you have an immigrant who was born inside of Sweden? They are no longer an immigrant then.
- tivert 3y ago
  > How can you have an immigrant who was born inside of Sweden? They are no longer an immigrant then. Not every country has jus soli/birthright citizenship. Sweden appears to be jus sanguinis/inherited citizenship only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nationality_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nationality_law > Swedish nationality law determines entitlement to Swedish citizenship. Citizenship of Sweden is based primarily on the principle of jus sanguinis. In other words, citizenship is conferred primarily by birth to a Swedish parent, irrespective of place of birth. > In general, children born in Sweden to foreign parents do not acquire Swedish citizenship at birth, although if they remain resident in Sweden they may become citizens later on.
  - laurentlb 3y ago
    If they were born in Sweden, they didn't migrate. There seems to be a confusion between immigrant and foreigner.
    - tivert 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

netsharc 3y ago

Also in Rhode Island: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5898187/prostitution-rhode-island-decriminalized https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5898187/prostitution-rhode-isl...

bhouston 3y ago

Did rape decrease as porn got more ubiquitous? I would think it is a similar correlation, no? Found an answer to my own question: "Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178909000445 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
I hope so, cause I'm 2nd-amendment on porn. I'm hoarding it for the end times.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  That’s great. I’m not; it isn’t even speech, and I reject the Lockean view of “freedom” anyway (which is actually license). Porn is incredibly destructive. Indeed, both pornography and prostitution are unethical, but of the two, prostitution is less bad. At least there’s another person involved, and the sex act is real, however defective. Less defective and destructive than glad handing yourself and laying waste to your mind that’s also difficult to recover from. Here we must distinguish between state permission and state sanction. The state can licitly permit certain evils if banning them leads to a worse situation, given the crooked state of humanity. Prostitution was traditionally one of these.
  - EnergyAmy 3y ago
    Prostitution and pornography are both far less destructive than other evils like religion. Let's start by banning those first.

mumblemumble 3y ago

Apparent earlier draft of the paper: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.pdf https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.p... I haven't paid to read the linked article, but the abstracts do differ significantly. Perhaps the work in the above link is presumably not representative of the final published version, which is about 20 pages shorter. That could just be formatting differences, though. About 60% of the pages in the earlier version are figures and tables, many of which get, but do not fill, a dedicated page. The author has presumably had ~5 years to keep working on it in the intervening time. That could either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on various factors including one's own opinion on how the scientific process should work. Personally, I'm always pretty a priori skeptical of this style of economic "natural experiment". I'm rather fond of economist Ronald Coase's observation that, "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess." And 5+ years is a long time to spend p-hacking one set of data. But it's hard to know what all is in a 30-page paper based on just a 150-word abstract. So I would encourage people to be very cautious about getting too caught up in dissecting and discussing this without taking some time to digest the whole thing first. Arguably Hacker News is just not the right venue in the first place because it's set up to reward opinions that people can assemble in a matter of minutes, and digesting and understanding the merits of a 30-page economics paper probably deserves more like a week's worth of time.

toxik 3y ago

The paper: "Prior to 1999, prostitution was not regulated in Sweden." Reality: "The earliest law to explicitly ban prostitution was in the Civil Code of 1734."

sandstrom 3y ago

I think the liberal immigration policy might play a role here. Sweden has taken a huge amount in the past 15 years, twenty percent of the population are immigrants. Obviously, most of them are not criminals. But on a group level, they are more likely to commit crimes. About 2x compared to Swedes, after adjusting for income, age and education (it's higher before adjusting, obviously). Digging deeper, there are large differences between groups. For example, the group men (compared to women) are much more likely to commit crimes. Another factor that stands out is geography. People from East Asia have similar crime-rates as Swedes, while people from Africa are 5-10x as likely to commit crimes (compared to Swedes). This holds for most categories, including violent crimes, sexual crimes and a bunch of other groups. Here is the landing page from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, a governmental agency: https://bra.se/publikationer/arkiv/publikationer/2021-08-25-misstankta-for-brott-bland-personer-med-inrikes-respektive-utrikes-bakgrund.html https://bra.se/publikationer/arkiv/publikationer/2021-08-25-... Here is the report with the data mentioned above: https://bra.se/download/18.1f8c9903175f8b2aa70f6df/1631107319978/2021_9_Misstankta_for_brott_bland_personer_med_inrikes_respektive_utrikes_bakgrund.pdf https://bra.se/download/18.1f8c9903175f8b2aa70f6df/163110731...

cubefox 3y ago
Yeah. It is important to point these things out, despite quite a few people wanting to suppress this information.