Backpage helped keep me safe during one of the scariest times of my life
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Until it is made legal (not happening in the US), there is no argument that should work in favor of making it easier.
There are reasons prostitution is illegal. There are reasons to make it as difficult as possible for someone to find a prostitute. There are enough stories of people who tear apart their lives and families because it was too easy to find a prostitute (implication is that they wouldn't have used a prostitute if they couldn't find one easily and quickly).
It's sad that she suffers from bi-polar, but this is not a utilitarian society. Backpage helping her doesn't justify the fact that it directly led to a proliferation of illegal activity.
Equating the law with a perfect moral code - i.e. it is always wrong to break the law and always good to obey it - is a flawed way of understanding human society.
The argument "I'm going to do it anyways, so you might as well make it safe and convenient for me" doesn't sound very persuasive to me, especially if we generalize this principle.
It's not so far fetched to imagine a married family man acting on an impulse to hire a prostitute. It's a situation where if one wasn't so easily available, he wouldn't have done it.
Not such a stretch of the imagination to imagine this person getting found out by family. Bam! Instant harm to multiple innocent people.
But once you receive the answer to your real question, the reason why prostitution is criminal, while yoga pants are not should be self evident.
Correct, that's why murder is criminalized, and not the reason why prostitution is criminalized.
They applied filters to ads which made it harder for law enforcement to search for and find trafficed women; those filters were instant and permanent and so evidence was destroyed.
Backpage themselves claimed (in many of the lawsuits brought against them) that they were unable to take any action on ads for children who were being solf for sex because of the Communications Decency Act.
And people seem a bit confused by the offer: street work is obviously terribly risky. But small ad sex work is still very dangerous. The vast majority of people who sell sex do so to feed an addiction, or because they're being coercively controlled. This is not a willing exchange of a good for money.
That may be true for the vast majority of sex work in general. But I think it's pretty unlikely to be true for the vast majority of sex work advertised online, particularly in places like this. This is an empirical question, of course, but the sexworkers subreddit is some decent evidence in this camp.
The same reason people need to do any kind of work; because we are living in a society where he economic system requires most people to sell labor of whatever kind they can that is valued by others in the marketplace in order to survive.
EDIT: And for some people, given that requirement, sex work is the option where the undesirability of doing the work combined with the pay for doing it leaves it the rational choice. In some cases, it's also the least socially objectionable option practically open.