> but more importantly not backed by any reputable scholarship that I'm aware of.
See what the other reply linked:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...
> The idea that otherwise well-behaving members of society would resort to rape without sex workers is, first, pretty fucked up
Well change the framing. Yes preventing the tradeoff in absolute term raises icky moral issues. But we don't live in a trolley problem world. Instead use the language of "harm reduction" i.e. marginal gains, and also drop the "otherwise well-behaving".
"otherwise well-behaving" is a bit fraught. I don't want to get into "there's tons of a bad people", because I don't want to prop of criminality as a immutable aspect of character. But explanation is not justification: just because some denial of something empirically pushes people towards crime, doesn't mean it is or isn't a justified excuse.
> then sacrificing our most vulnerable to them to ensure the safety of the rest of us is not a position I can support.
This is flat-out wrong. Sex work != trafficking. "Sacrificing" implies once a sex worker, always a sex worker, which is no law. The fact is in a world of shitty service jobs, alienating gig economy, etc., sex work often does pay better.
Vice prohibitions never work, so if one really wants sex work to go away, the only solution is to simply make other things and the social safety net pay better.