Manhattan DA says his office to stop prosecuting prostitution
npr.org
npr.org
Is there reliable data either way about legalization increasing human trafficking?
FWIW, New Zealand legalised prostitution fully in 2003, and it seems to have had no negative effects. There was a major review 5 years after the law was passed (so 2008). Safety up, crime down, fewer sex workers on the streets, and at that time, no instances of human trafficking for the sex industry were able to be identified. (Come to that, I'm not sure any have been since either.)
Of course, individual laws exist in a larger framework of laws and culture, so it's not always clear that adopting a single law will have the same effects in other jurisdictions. Still, the NZ experience has been almost unremittingly positive.
Some sources (that I've only skimmed a bit -- and they don't uniformly agree):
https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/faq-will-legaliz...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/07/why-sex-work-should-be-d...
https://inquiringintothings.wordpress.com/2020/08/04/does-le...
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/decreasing-huma...
The fact that prostitution is illegal is part of what empowers bad people to victimize others: As soon as you have turned your first trick, you are guilty of a crime and cannot go to the police to turn them in without confessing to the crime you just committed.
That's exactly how child molesters also operate: By making the child feel complicit so they won't tell anyone.
Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim's rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, especially women and children, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking
What you are talking about is illegal immigration.
Some percentage of the girls are doing it willingly, but most are imported and essentially have no choice.
They try to add regulations to help, like only allowing girls themselves to rent spaces, but that tends to drive more underground.
In practice, the offering of social insurance is hardly used, and I would say you will have a hard time getting a receipt from a sex worker with displayed VAT (or the legal requirement to express VAT excemption if the sex worker is below the legal income threshold).
Anyways, trafficking is still a thing, and you as a customer can be arrested if you have reason to believe the sex worker is not willingly offering services but coerced or forced to do so.
No matter what you think about prostitution, as long as no coercion is involved, it is none of your business what other people do.
"If selling is legal and fucking is legal, selling fucking should be legal."
If you compare that to some things in the US:
Man Who Served 20 Years in Prison for Stealing 2 Shirts Freed https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/man-served-20-years-p...
Even if you consider this a reasonable punishment, the average costs to imprison a person in the US are about USD 30k per year and maybe you should reconsider your view.
Just because you wouldn’t want your daughter doing it is entirely different from saying everyone should be criminalized for participating in it.
The US may be different since it's social security system is very primitive. There, the choice would perhaps be between working as a prostitute and starving. Which, obviously, isn't a free choice.
"You will lose your unemployment benefit if you turn down an offer of "suitable" work without "good cause." Suitable work is work that fits your training, experience, skills, health, physical fitness, prior earnings, and is within 20 miles of your home"
Two other large states had similar requirements. I could not find any with a "you must take any available job" requirement. There's no way that could be even vaguely construed as requiring someone to take a sex work job if it's available.
Best to keep both of those things illegal to spare the dignity of my daughter. Better to lock people in jail if they attempt those things. Better to turn people who might actually enjoy farming into criminals.
So since the prosts can still be prosecuted, we still have many for the east, on the streets by all weather, working in awful condition for a low amount.
I live in HK now, where prostitution is fully legal (prosts won't be arrested as long as no pimp involved and one client at a time) and it's better, we don't see them in the streets and the fares are much much MUCH hire compared to France. They seem less drugged addict possibly.
It's anecdotal and there are so many differences between France and HK that I'm not sure what I'm comparing exactly :D But, more legal protection seems to provide for better conditions, not a surprise.
This is ambiguously worded. It could mean:
- Is anyone knowledgeable about European countries (all of which have made prostitution legal)?
- Is anyone knowledgeable about those European countries in which prostitution has been made legal?
It's surprisingly difficult to word this unambiguously, but from context I think the author means the latter.
Some progressive types keep talking about legalizing farming, but all I can think of is that it will increase the smuggling of humans to contribute to the farming workforce.
“To my friends: anything, to my enemies: the law”
Jury nullification is supposed to fill that need.
Yes.
> Jury nullification is supposed to fill that need.
No, its not. Prosecutorial discretion, jury nullifcation, and executive pardon/clemency are all part of what is supposed to fill overlapping needs.
There is far more crime that exists than we have resources to prosecute. So, if you're a prosecutor every decision to prosecute Crime A, is also an explicit decision not to prosecute Crime B-Z due to the limited resources.
Which means every prosecutor ever is always deciding which law to enforce and which law not to through the brutal economic realities of opportunity costs. So, saying: "We're going to change the relative priority of Crime A to Crime B in how we allocate resources" isn't that abnormal of a concept.
This is literally what the separation of powers is all about
If you're saying you'd like fewer laws and/or more money to those other institutions - then that makes sense.
"A spokesperson confirmed to NPR that it will not change the office's existing approach to arresting patrons of prostitution."
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/989588072/a-relic-and-burden-...
Similarly why do you presume a pimp must necessarily exist? The prostitutes I patron are simply grown self-employed autonomous workers. There is no coercion involved. They actually enjoy their work. Not everyone has the same hang ups about sex.
Selling drugs / buying sex are transactions at the expense of someone else’s body.
So how does porn fit into this picture ? Porn actors are selling their bodies, what's the difference between a person having sex in private for money, and someone doing the same while filmed ?
It's only the backward or prudish countries where prostitution is not legal.
Other counties of NYC:
Kings County (Brooklyn), Bronx County (The Bronx), Richmond County (Staten Island), and Queens County (Queens).
New York City is dividied into five boroughs, each of which is coterminous with is own county.
Boroughs are subdivivions of New York City City, counties are subdivisions of New York State.
Manhattan is the borough, New York County is the county.
However, I don't think any of the 5 counties that correspond to boroughs have their own governments. So there is no government at all for County of New York, but the Borough of Manhattan does have its own government, which is fine because the County and Borough are coterminous with each other (and both contained entirely within the City of New York).
I look forward to visiting the borough of Yerba Buena someday.
as did baltimore md and ann arbor(ish?) mich I think I had read.
whether or not you agree with the decision i feel like it should be done the proper way by changing the law not just up to a DAs whim.
what happened to all the people screaming about democratic norms in the past 4 years?
There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres...
Sex work = trafficking is, best case, a misplaced utopianism that makes things worse here and now, and often a far worse patronizing moralistic sexism.
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
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.
Most convicted of murder are not caught in the act, for example.
I find Eagle feathers pretty regularly in the area around where i live. A bunch of them nest across the street and there's another nest in the back of the yard in an old tree that's been used every year for years now. Some are old and nasty, most are pretty fresh though.
It seems like kidnapping would be a far easier to prosecute than prostitution.
Also how many kidnapped individuals are we finding in random prostitution stings?
The biggest hazards to a prostitute is legal repercussion and the secondary effects of that, like having no legal recourse after being abused. That's not "incidentally capturing some distinguishable conduct", the vast majority of dangers associated with this industry are artificially created by unjust laws directly driven by social taboo of a few.
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.
Ask the people of Austin how legalization of homelessness went.
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.
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".
(And increases legal occurrences too of course)
It seems to me you were assuming / guessing. Lots of things are counter intuitive though
What can make sense is that it would be illegal to buy sex (but ok to sell). Otherwise, if attacking the prostitutes, the legal system hurts the ones it was supposed to help
The prohibition of prostitution was never to protect prostitutes, who were viewed as the both immoral actors and temptors of others into immorality.
Its true that a modern rationalization of maintaining the prohibition of prostitution is that it is a tool to protect people from being victimized by being compelled or misled into becoming prostitutes, but that’s more of an attempt to sell the policy to people who would reject the original premise by people who are personally invested in that premise but recognize that others are not than anything else.
What was it about?
It was about punishing the
> immoral actors and temptors of others
(from the lawmakers point of view, at the time)
?
Where I am, it's different, in that the laws are meant to help those people (hence, legal to sell, but not to buy, around here)
> New Zealand legalised prostitution fully in 2003, and it seems to have had no negative effects. There was a major review 5 years after the law was passed (so 2008). Safety up, crime down, fewer sex workers on the streets, and at that time, no instances of human trafficking for the sex industry were able to be identified.
As I noted, data on human trafficking is very poor, but...best data we have seems to be that no, legalisation does NOT increase it measurably. In addition studies suggest it hasn't increased the number of prostitutes either (see, eg, https://www.otago.ac.nz/christchurch/otago018607.pdf).
It's easy to find claims of horrendous harms, but the NZ government, as part of it's official review in 2008, actively looked for and was unable to find any, and subsequent studies have consistently confirmed that.
NZ has had legalised prostitution for almost 20 years now, and the effects seem to be entirely positive.
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.
Also just restaurants probably tons of stuff will continue to be off the books anyways, heh.
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?
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.)
We would tax the purchase of sex work as an extra excise tax, just like for gas, alcohol, tobacco, and coca-cola. We want to encourage people not to spend all their money on these things, because over-indulgence could be detrimental. But you could go the other way and say these are paternalistic sin-taxes.
Because right now prostitution is _BOTH_ oppression by police and criminals _AND_ economic oppression (if we're considering low wages economic oppression).
She was for decriminalization, not legalization and regulation. (She was against legalization and regulation.)
She became a sex worked as part of the “sex work as liberation” movement.
I met her at a college reunion and asked her about how it worked out. She laughed and said: “I’m the only person I know who has never had a Facebook page. I can’t. That stuff follows you forever.”
Edit: She used her real name with most clients. This wasn’t a huge issue, because her name was identical to a popular porn star. Everyone assumed it was fake, and Googling it was impossible. Than the porn star quit, and eventually was forgotten. Her clients haven’t forgotten, sadly. Now googling her name brings up actual photos of her from a professional association belongs to.
In her view, if you valued the rights of the sex workers, decriminalization was the only thing that made sense.
She made a compelling argument, in part because she had first-hand experience with both sex work and politics. She had been some kind of political campaign worker, I think, and hated it but was good at it and when she was something like 27 years old, after nearly dying in some accident, she decided to live a little around that time some friend of her asked her to turn a trick in her place because she couldn't make the appointment for some reason.
She said the guy paid her with a smile on her face and it was the most money she had ever made for an hour of work. It was the best working experience she ever had, so she began doing that as her profession.
She always paid her taxes. She listed herself as an entertainer on her tax returns and she eventually married a lawyer and continued to do sex work. I believe she was arrested at least once and talked in the book about how traumatizing that was and how awful many police officers are to sex workers.
It's a great read and I highly recommend it.
Is that based on any research or evidence of any kind? I’m also inclined to invent some extremely absurd opinion on a subject I know nothing about in a field where I have never worked.
What's your argument for keeping prostitution illegal? And have you worked in the field?
> This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market,increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.40565...
https://harvardcrcl.org/to-protect-women-legalize-prostituti...
Note that most victims of sex trafficking are also illegal aliens. Thus legalized prostitution doesn't help them since they would also be deported. The main benefactors of legalized prostitution are the Johns who no longer have to suffer a social stigma from purchasing sex.
Then find a paper that claims that legalization decreases sex trafficking or shut up.
If you want to read about benefits of legalizing prostitution you're free to read it yourself, I'm not going to bother to extract excerpts for you. I've read some of your comments and you do come off as an intelligent fella but a bit on the arrogant side. Without any expectation I'm telling it does take some points off and unchecked may become a largerissue down the line. Enjoy your weekend
https://harvardcrcl.org/to-protect-women-legalize-prostituti...
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.
American Association of Meat Processors
Where did you get that from?
Whenever you read about human, sex trafficking it usually turns out to be utter BS like in the case with the football team owner who supposedly was seeing trafficked, sex slaves from China in a massage parlor where they were held keptive. Turned out later that there was no regular sex, the ones worker who slept there did so once because she didn't want to drive home and nobody was even from China.
If this is such a big problem where are all the articles about human sex trafficking rings actually getting busted?
This was just on hacker news today:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/t...
I take it you are not in law enforcement. Strangely, as a software developer working at home I don’t encounter much child slavery myself, so therefore it must not exist. Therefore I am not going to make the faulty and unfounded assertion that legalization will somehow eliminate unrelated crimes.
I think that was your point, but it can be taken either way.
You don’t have to agree with her take, but it’s worth engaging with it. She’s a brilliant, if deeply pessimistic, thinker.
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.
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?
> 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?
This describes a ton of jobs. Especially minimum wage jobs. Hot dog suit sign spinner would meet this definition.
Is that because other people look down on it? That's not what I would call intrinsically bad.
I've heard of people paying their way through college via prostitution, who say that it's much better than e.g. working as a waitress. Also, I'm sure it teaches social skills and bargaining.
> it's not safe
Many jobs aren't safe, such as coal mining. Usually the pay is at a premium to compensate.
> it involves the sale of a person's body which is dehumanizing
That is subjective. Want me to go look for prostitutes who have said in an interview or public blog that they find it empowering?
> it's bad for marriage and for people being in long-term relationships
In what way? If a man cheats on his wife by going to see a prostitute, that's obviously a problem for the marriage, though one could argue that the man being willing to do that in the first place was the problem. (If the only reason a husband doesn't cheat on his wife is because there isn't an available prostitute nearby, that marriage is obviously at the breaking point already.)
I would argue, furthermore, that there are probably a lot of men who get into relationships just to have sex, while the women are usually looking for more than that, which probably leads some of those men to misrepresent their intentions; and that if these men had a relatively cheap and safe alternative for getting sex, this might make the relationship market a lot more honest and healthy.
If I say no, so I still get unemployment?
If prostitution is a perfectly fine occupation, why not?
Legal forms of sex work (stripping, etc) have a special legal status that allows people to receive unemployment benefits while rejecting those positions.
The logic behind this is “sex work is bad and dehumanizing.”
How about working as a rabbi or a Mormon preacher? Or as someone who distributes leaflets for a Republican politician? There's probably a special status for those, too, right? "Against my fundamental beliefs". You could put it in that category too.
Acting would be another case. You have to wear costumes and perform the actions that a potentially creepy director wants you to! (And I've heard it's not that rare for this to actually be of the form "director wants an actress to wear a revealing costume and then makes sexual advances on her".)
> The logic behind this is “sex work is bad and dehumanizing.”
I believe that other people believe that.
Can you clearly define for me what sex work is and isn't?
Is exotic dancing? How about a scantily clad pop star? Live video pornhub "actress"? Movie star in a sex scene?
Cheerleader? Fashion model? Bikini model? Cabana boy? Shirtless ripped beach bartender? Bodybuilder?
Which is sex work, which isn't?
Are they all dehumanizing?
When sex, and the pursuit thereof, takes up more time in humans than any other known species (ref: Sex At Dawn) I think it would be more reasonable to claim that sex work is pretty much the most human profession a person can engage in.
Certainly, focusing on physical attributes and acts isn't everyone's preference, either for leisure or work - but claiming it is "bad and dehumanizing" is a stretch.
And no, the logic is not that it's bad and dehumanizing, the logic is that some people are truly opposed to doing it. Similarly, if I'm on unemployment, I do not have to, say, go drive a garbage truck just because I see someone hiring garbage truck drivers.
Two decades you could've been arrested, in gang violence among different gangs selling drugs, etc... because of "black market"...
If someone is already a prostitute by choice and not trafficked/etc they have a higher than normal chance of being murdered by serial killers... I think one third of serial killers have targeted prostitutes.
It may be bad, dehumanizing but so is just throwing them to the serial killers...at least making it legal allows for some sun to shine on the industry and for related services/industries to spring up like protection services to keep track of where they are and if they don't check in send out someone to check, etc...
It also makes the trafficking and dirtier/seedier sides of things easier to police because those are the only things to police now, and if someone is hiding something then they're probably not legit/legal.
Once it becomes legal, the supply goes up, prices go down and it won't "get you through college". Plus I don't see why our decisions on prostitution have to be driven by the economic policies that have increased college tuition 2-3x faster than the rate of inflation for 30 years.
Also you will have corporations form to market, manipulate and addict people to their "product". Do we really want to go there? Thailand and Amsterdam and Las Vegas are fine places (sorta) but they dont provide the joy one would hope from the "empowering" you think is so great.
Also I would think in an era of COVID awareness people should consider the public health reasons from STDs (but not just those) why sex work will overall lead to more sickness and death if we promulgate it via market mechanisms. Overall are sickness and death likely to increase or decrease?
I'm not sure where you are going with your argument (speculation? sources?) that a lot of men get married just to have sex. If they want purely the sexual pleasure there are plenty of ways to get that that are a lot easier and less consuming than getting married! (Porn, devices, etc) If they want companionship over time, you don't really get that through prostitution. (Escort/rent-a-dates are legal as are hiring assistants). If they want kids and to raise them prostitution won't help. If it's not just orgasms which men want and what men is the appearance of a woman being interested in them, smiling, acting sexy per webcam culture... but what the woman wants is money, I get that if we legalize prostitution we enable that illusion for the man and economic power for the woman but what is the great benefit of that? We undercut our efforts for women/daughters to get paid equally for their minds to create and instead push them into selling their bodies and abilities to deceive men as part of their job. OK we've created a market, but to what end?
Look, I get that people think the status quo on this should be reconsidered but it looks like more rich people wanting to use their money to get whatever they want without consideration of the people servicing them, hoping that some anecdotes of trickle down "success" hide the misery of the system they want to promulgate.
Sorry for the rant. Nothing personal.
Then I guess fewer people will decide to do it for economic reasons, and you'll be pleased with that? Seems ok.
> Plus I don't see why our decisions on prostitution have to be driven by the economic policies that have increased college tuition 2-3x faster than the rate of inflation for 30 years.
College was an example of something expensive that a lot of people want to pay for. (I do think college is becoming a less worthwhile proposition as time goes on, and didn't go myself.) Buying a car would be another example. My argument really doesn't depend on why people want to earn money, only that there exists a good reason.
> Also you will have corporations form to market, manipulate and addict people to their "product".
That, as a potential concern, applies to every product ever. Only in this case the sex drive is created by biology. And actually, the whole concept of "sex sells" means that they put sexy people all over the media already; and there are already sex-focused ads to try to get people to pay for porn and stuff; I don't think having ads for prostitution would make a difference here.
> STDs
Have you read about the precautions they take? I quote from a 2005 article about Nevada's Bunny Ranch: "According to law, condom use is mandatory for sex and oral sex as is periodic testing [looks like the period is "weekly"] for brothel employees. Since 1986, when mandatory HIV testing began, not a single brothel prostitute has tested positive." Also: "In the room, the men are inspected under a bright light to check for any visual evidence of sexually transmitted diseases." I think some street prostitutes but not all require condoms, and I really doubt that the majority of them get tested weekly. (The same can be said of people who go to nightclubs and hook up with a stranger for the night.) So it seems plausible that legalizing would lead to better safety.
> I'm not sure where you are going with your argument (speculation? sources?) that a lot of men get married just to have sex.
I said they get into relationships, not marriage. (There probably are some from very conservative backgrounds who believe in no sex before marriage [which also likely correlates with considering masturbation and/or porn to be a sin] who do end up marrying primarily for sex; but otherwise, yes, it's clearly a bad idea.)
> If they want ...
Lots of guys want lots of different things from a prostitute. Some want the pleasure of orgasm (and find it better than what they can get via masturbation). Some have never had sex and want to get some experience. Some want to have sex with a particular kind of woman. Some have an embarrassing fetish they want to explore. Some pay for her time and actually just cuddle with her. I'm sure there's a lot more.
> We undercut our efforts for women/daughters to get paid equally for their minds to create and instead push them into selling their bodies and abilities to deceive men
Who said anything about pushing them into prostitution? I just want the option to be there, for those who think it suits them. I am absolutely against pushing anyone into a career path they're uncomfortable with. (If economic necessity pushes them to choose a path, and this seems like a bad option but the least bad one, then, well, taking that option away would make things even worse.)
> it looks like more rich people wanting to use their money to get whatever they want without consideration of the people servicing them
The rich can already do that, either through their network if they have a decent one, or just by traveling to a place where it is legal. This would be more about making it more available and safe for the middle and lower classes.
Look. Fundamentally, my stance is that people have a right to do what they want with their bodies, which includes selling sexual services. Using the force of law to prevent them from doing that violates their rights. You would need a very strong argument ("this will cause terrible harm") to justify such a violation. But when I examine the consequences, they seem to me "probably positive overall".
On the personal angle, if it were legalized in my area, I'd consider trying it out (as a customer), but I'm paranoid enough about incurable STDs that even with their precautions I'd likely avoid it. (FYI, recreational drugs are another thing that I'm very much in favor of legalizing—for similar rights-based reasons—but have no intention to take advantage of myself.) And if I did it, I would certainly want someone who seemed enthusiastic and comfortable with the whole thing; if I got the impression that she really didn't like it but was putting up with it, that would make me rather uncomfortable with the situation.
I'm sorry, it's not at all clear that is true.
> it's not safe almost by definition
If it's illegal, sure. It absolutely could be done safely.
> it involves the sale of a person's body which is dehumanizing
This describes all wage labor.
> it's bad for marriage
One, not sure that's true. Two, who cares? Let the folks who want to get married get married, but those who don't, do their own thing.
I mean, imagine if you had to service other guys for your pay, no matter how ugly they were, no matter how little you liked them, and often with little power to stop them. I say with other guys to ensure that it isn't a pleasurable experience for most of you in the way it wouldn't be for women.
It's not something we as a culture want to have. You all need to have a bit of empathy, to be blunt; prostitution in general has never been something the majority of women liked, and it often was something forced on them.
Just because no one wants to do a job doesn't mean it should be illegal. There's a lot of jobs that I think shouldn't have to exist. But the reality is that they do have to exist, because people need to make a living.
I believe prostitution shouldn't be illegal for the same reasons that you believe it should be illegal. Empathy.
Are you talking about your specific garbage man? Because plenty of waste collectors like their jobs. This statement comes off as very elitist, though you probably didn't intend it that way.
The same could be said about any physical labor job. Arguably, the main reason safety is so difficult to enforce is that it is a black market practice with zero regulation.
> it's bad for marriage and for people being in long-term relationships.
Millions of people live their entire lives without marriage or even long term exclusive monogamous relationships. Most people who do sex work don't plan to do it for decades. There is no need to demand that people live their lives in a way condusive to marriage.
As for being bad for relationships, I find that somewhat dubious.
The criminal element being involved in prostitution is what makes it bad. Without that, it'd just be a profitable job for young women of certain types, and an outlet for incels who might otherwise end up mass shooters.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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
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...
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.
Please source your claims.
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.
You see this any time law enforcement stumbles upon a scary marketing word that helps them justify their activities to the public. The word's meaning slowly grows to encompass all sorts of things that the public would never have associated with it. Like how "Sex offense" now includes people caught urinating on the side of a building. And how you can get a "DUI" without driving and without being under the influence.
The DA is often an elected position and can’t easily be fired.
> The office will continue to prosecute other crimes related to prostitution, including patronizing sex workers, promoting prostitution and sex trafficking, and said that its policy would not stop it from bringing other charges that stem from prostitution-related arrests.
It makes even less sense to keep them in the shadows, afraid to work with cops, given they are such a vulnerable population.
Letting the hookers go about their business and arresting some fraction of their customers but not a large enough fraction to keep the customers from showing up at all (wouldn't want to deplete the metaphorical fishery) sounds an awful lot like a speed trap.
I wish I could not be cynical but there's just too much evil in law enforcement and the social services that deal with vices for me not to take this as a face value good thing. I'm sure they're happy to not be arresting hookers who've done nothing wrong. Beat cops don't like arresting people who've done nothing wrong. But I'd be lying if I didn't think there wasn't someone somewhere in the bureaucracy twirling their mustache while congratulating themselves on finding a way to both increase in revenue policing and satisfy the politically involved people who want progressive policy points.
Don't get me wrong, not arresting hookers is a good thing. But all my experience with the parts of government that deal with this sort of thing tells me this happened because the stars happened to align, not because someone with decision making power had an epiphany and decided that hookers shouldn't be arrested.
In this case there is dueling advocacy for the so called "swedish model" and full decrim, and by all accounts the lame duck DA is just trying to look good with the boring middle ground before his terms up.
Most other things, drug investigations, assault, etc are not earners.
The state doesn't make money on criminal law. It just doesn't.
No, you're either attempting a low-effort troll or you have a profound misunderstanding of history. Men have almost always been classified with elite status compared to women in most societies. The entirety of Western civilization is founded under religions that teach a Male God created Man (male, not collective humanity) in His image and that women were created to serve men and obey them, and that the weakness of women is the source of all of the world's evils, and the cultures and legal systems which emerged have often reflected and enforced that patriarchal bias.
For most of history, women were basically the property of their fathers, then traded for dowry to become the property of their husbands. They couldn't own property, they couldn't vote, they could be stoned to death for disobeying their husbands.
For most of history, both men and women in any society couldn't do any of the things you just described. The majority of people in any society, of both genders, have belonged to the lower classes. This is still true today, but you have far more rights as a lower class person today than you would have 200 years ago. You're viewing history solely from the perspective of the upper classes (which includes the middle class).
...great...really wonderful representation of our justice systems focus on arresting people for literally no reason
The Manhattan District Attorney Office's previous policy was to dismiss prostitution cases after the charged individual completed five counseling sessions with service providers. Going forward, it said its Human Trafficking Response Unit will file paperwork to decline formally to prosecute, and to inform the person arrested about purely voluntary services. The text of the new policy notes it does not preclude officials from bringing "other charges that may stem from a prostitution-related arrest."
Which sounds like they will still be doing the arresting of prostitutes, so I think you're actually right...
All the perverse money-printer incentives of running a traffic school combined with the socially stigmatized customers you get when running an ankle monitor service.
I'm sure the people that own the businesses offering those counseling services will be upstanding citizens of great moral character and the people referred to these businesses will have fair and honest business transactions with them (obvious sarcasm should be obvious).
You need to wake up seriously. it is not because you think it empowers women and should be legalized that there isn't a huge human trafficking issue to address even when legal (and in some countries it makes it worse). It is a myth and it is dangerous to communicate the lies that legalizing will solve everything when talking about human lives.
"State Department estimated that between 15,000 and 50,000 women and girls are trafficked each year into the United States." if for you it is a small number I dont know what to say...
Moreover, the real issue they are tackling in the article is that the DA is no longer arresting the prostitutes. Whether or not you think prostitution should be legal, hopefully we can all agree that punishing the prostitutes (the people who would be exploited!) for furthering exploitation is absurd.
It permits victims of sex trafficking to go to law enforcement without being arrested for prostitution by unsympathetic cops.
I listened to a podcast about some pig-farmer who killed like 49 prostitutes over 10 years back in the 80s-2000s in Vancouver, B.C. the police didn't know the prostitutes were missing because they don't want to be seen, they are hidden so they're easier to just kill and nobody notices... I guess.
It's not easy for me to understand why the legal system attacks the ones it's supposed to help, I mean, makes selling illegal, rather than making only buying illegal.
(In some/many? countries in Europe, it's ok to sell sex, but illegal to buy. So the prostitute can go to the police)
Sex trafficking can still be prosecuted. In general, though, prosecuting the victims of crimes doesn't make it any easier to prosecute those who victimized them.
"Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows."
Whether you hide your patronage from people who know you is a different matter. (The medical system is a good example in this respect: hospitals and other facilities are absolutely not hiding their presence from anyone—quite the opposite, really—but the fact that you visited Doctor Jones to treat your potentially embarrassing medical condition is considered very confidential information.)
Just because the law doesn't mandate confidentiality doesn't mean the customers won't expect it and reliably get it.
If they need a similar law for prostitution, they could pass one (I wouldn't be surprised if one already exists for a sufficiently broad category of "theraputic" services), but I doubt it would be necessary—at a brothel, only someone who verifies ages even needs to see a client's ID (and I suspect they could cover up the name); and as I said, it's strongly against the brothel's interest for there to even be rumors of non-confidentiality. I suspect a law would only move it from 99% privacy to 99.9% or something.