Human trafficking.
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.
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?
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.
American Association of Meat Processors
This was just on hacker news today:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/t...
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...
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.
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).
Also just restaurants probably tons of stuff will continue to be off the books anyways, heh.
I think that was your point, but it can be taken either way.
There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.
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.
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?
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'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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres...
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
Sex work = trafficking is, best case, a misplaced utopianism that makes things worse here and now, and often a far worse patronizing moralistic sexism.
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
> 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.
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)
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.