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Comment by Karsteski | Hacker News Reader

Yep, just a set of antiquated laws that punish people for using their bodies as they see fit. Worst part is that they do the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do, which is to keep citizens safe(ideally).

I'm glad people are slowly coming around to the idea that victimless crimes should not be a thing, whether prostitution or drug crimes. It saddens me that there were millions of lives ruined in the process, but that can be said for so many puritanical rules that all countries still have in place.

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>>antiquated laws

...Rejuvenated. These are new. There's a new common ground around puritanism. The philosophical underpinnings have changed. Women's rights are, ostensibly, protected while the client side is criminalalised. The reason for the laws is no longer "public morals," it's consent.

However, we arrive at more or less the same place. Increasingly, bishops and feminists find common ground on these issues...

Imo, even legalization isn't enough. We need normalisation. While prostition is marginalized and ostrecized, sex workers will be at the bottom of the pyramid.

Yup. 1999,to be precise.

Bravo. This is the natural product of a culture that paradoxically wants to be sex positive for women but also sex negative for men. The outcomes are surprisingly similar to what happens to a culture that's sex negative for women and sex positive for men.

I wonder how much day to day violence would be reduced if prostitution was normalized. How much violence is a result of internalized sexual frustration without an outlet.

I would hazard a guess that it wouldn't improve.

The kinds of people involved in violence are overwhelmingly poor, young males. This is not a group that cares about laws or cultural norms. They lack the money to pay for sex workers, they don't have cultural hangups about it. They lack the money, education, and human decency to maintain a girlfriend relationship.

Which is to say they're not bad people because they're sexually frustrated. They're sexually frustrated because they're bad people. Which can be a negative feedback cycle.

How about those at the margin? I'd guess most policy proposals don't seem productive when you condense a population down to a scalar "model" subject and ask if he would change his behavior in light of the new policy. That doesn't mean that population-level effects won't be observed.

I'm going to guess the effect would be marginal :)

If you want to address violence it would be better to focus on reducing poverty, on education, and on rehabilitation. A lot of violence is drug related, providing a legal market for buying and selling illegal drugs would kill that element crime. Prohibition of drugs seems to be playing out the same that prohibition of alcohol did. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.

Normalizing prostitution is not likely to move the needle for the reasons I mentioned.

I can’t reply to eloff directly but you are wrong, which is why we should base law on hard numbers and not „guesses“.

If prostitution has to be done at places with security guards it wouldn't be a big issue though, she just screams and the guy gets thrown out and possibly charged/arrested.

Screaming might not be enough...

For a security guard sitting in the corridor outside to hear you? Definitely it would.

That is a BS argument. Sexual frustration is the norm, rather than the exception, and if somebody commits a rape to act out sexual desires, then it is not because he didn't have access to prostitutes. I doubt there are a lot of people who frequent prostitutes as much as most couples have sex in a relationship...

However, honestly "voluntary" prostitution is also too expensive. Which is a big reason for the famed "management level" to exist. Through drugs, physical and psychological abuse they create a much cheaper supply, and only that way the demand can be met.

> if somebody commits a rape to act out sexual desires, then it is not because he didn't have access to prostitutes

I'd argue this is precisely the person who should not have access to prostitutes. Their existence, or our inability to adequately police them, is one of the stronger arguments against prostitution.

internalized sexual frustration without an outlet

Unless we’re talking about hi-class hi-paid workers here, which are far from common, this “outlet” has the same (or even lower) voltage than your hand-y discharger, if you get the analogy.

The more realistic result will be you and your kids living amidst endless brothels and their frustrated clients.

Plenty of violence is commited by men who have sexual partners. Also, violent men do commit violence againta their sexual partners.

In Sweden there are plenty of "yoni dearmouring" and similar sevices. I get that more women have a harder time orgasming than men usually have. Also more trauma amongst women than men.

But if you are a man with these kinds of problems you have nowhere to go.

An interesting way to test whether it is a victimless crime is to pay prostitutes $100,000 and to see how quickly they return to the profession. One possible theory is that prostitution is a victim of poverty.

Sure, but are you willing to apply the same test to every other job and outlaw the ones that fail?

Maybe not what GP was getting at, but I would like to structure society so that people don't have to spend big chunks of their lives doing menial jobs in order to afford their basic needs!

More automation. Menial jobs still need to get done.

Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there.

EDIT: This is not meant literally, I am not talking about toilette cleaning jobs at Facebook, I am talking about paying people for the time they spent working and maybe how physically taxing or unpleasant the work is. This is in contrast to paying people what you can get away with because of the available supply of workers or how much money you have to throw around because you can get it from your customers.

Then you would have millions of people applying for a few thousand jobs. How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries? Facebook does it by reducing the salary bit by bit until the number of people who wants to work there is roughly as many as they need.

I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more.

I'll note that lots of people want FB developer jobs, but they don't solve that problem by cutting salaries until the number of applicants is roughly equal to the number of jobs. It's a tell that you use one hiring heuristic for people in your social class and a different one for people seen as lesser. That's a great illustration of the overall problem that the original article is part of.

A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense.

>>> Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there.

>> I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more.

> A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense.

A lottery is about the fairest way to distribute a scarce resource imaginable. And it seems even less fair to declare that everyone whose job is to clean toilets should continue to get equally crappy wages, while there's massive inequality in income all over the place.

That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing. In the case of Facebook we would tax it to hell so everyone could share, not do a damn lottery so a few janitors can get rich. Of course that is if you are in the "distribute resources to the people camp", but I see no reason why a lottery would ever be the right thing to do here no matter what camp you are in, it isn't like the world would be better off if we had a lottery of who gets to inherit the billions of dollars the 0.0001% owns rather than distribute it.

So in short, the right thing to do is either leave facebook as is, or tax it so that neither its software engineers nor its janitors can earn much more than an average American.

> That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing.

Not every resource is divisible or practically divisible (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon).

You're kind of going all over the place to dispute everyone's points. If Facebook were to pay its toilet cleaners far above the market rate for that job, a fair way to solve the problem of "who gets these jobs" in the face of a glut of qualified applicants is by using a lottery.

You're right there's all kinds of other things that may be better to do, but we were talking about this specific artificial scenario.

As I said, I don't think you've tried very hard. I am not going to name all the possibilities one at a time.

If unfairness in jobs and compensation is what really motivates you, there are much bigger fish to fry than some totally imaginary jobs that will never exist.

Just pick the one you consider most qualified, there is no need to have the number of applicants match the number of jobs. But this is actually besides my point which is that even though menial jobs are often the harder, more unpleasant, or whatever jobs they are also often the worst payed for jobs because there is an oversupply of workers and this is used against them.

Economic theory might try to tell you that the low wages will incentivize people to seek better jobs which will reduce the supply of workers for menial jobs which will eventually get you a developer salary for cleaning toilettes, but as far as I can tell that is not what is actually happening.

My understanding of fair payment is not what you can get away with because of the supply and demand situation, it is that if you put eight hour of your life time into your work, then you deserve being paid for that time more or less no matter what you do.

Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay anyone at the company even close to what facebook pays its engineers, it doesn't make sense that a few privileged janitors gets facebook engineering salary when most of them gets a small fraction of that.

People who comes up with those arguments just haven't thought things through.

Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs.

For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.

The problem with that is if you don't let the supply and demand price be the price, you create other issues. Like what to do about the excess or undersupply of whatever you are looking at.

I'm not denying that the price can seem wrong. Who really thinks that sports stars ought to make 20x what a doctor makes?

The problem is in my opinion that the price fulfills too many tasks at once, it is a measure of work and resources required for the production of goods, it is used as measure of value or utility a consumer assigns to the goods, it is used to decide how goods of limited supply are distributed, and there may be more things upon careful inspection. The problem is that those aspects do not align in a good way all the time and that there are no or no strong enough forces to fix this.

Look at pay scales in the former Soviet Union. In demand workers were still paid more but the state guaranteed a job for everyone and poverty was quite low - and average difference between a well-to-do person and a working class person was not huge (though I guess the living arrangements back then could be considered "poverty" today). Labor / Other salaries are always a choice (although the USSR experienced lots of brain drain because of their choices, so maybe it doesn't work too well with open borders)

(even though there were many other problems, and eventually the planned economy bit and large foreign-denominated loans backed by plummeting oil made the whole thing collapse like a house of cards)

This sounds to me exactly like a nice-sounding in the short-term but ultimately unsustainable system to me. That some of the most anti-socialist places in the world are ex-territories of the soviet union doesn't give me much confidence in the soviet way there.

> How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries?

Pick the first person that applies who has seen a toilet before in their life and is physically able to clean one.

Costs. Facebook cannot replace a developer’s desk with auto-development station, but it definitely can do that to a toilet room. The only reason a toilet cleaner has a job is that they are cheap. If it was paid $300k/yr per floor, anyone at FB would automate floor mopping and sanitizer spraying in few weeks, if not rethink a toilet room completely.

(Which isn’t a bad idea given how much of ancient legacy shit we are still dragging in this area.)

Cut the salary of everyone by 5% and you can have one cleaner for every 20 developers. My point is simply that work should not be cheap, if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life, otherwise it is just a mild form of slavery.

if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life

I agree, humanely. But our entire competitive all-eating-optimizing nature works against this.

Raising min.wages would likely lead to the situation where they have no job at all, because if low-paid jobs were enforced as decently paid by law, companies would simply automate them. They didn’t do that yet, only because it’s cheap to use human labor. Taxi, delivery, cleaning, you name it.

If low skill job workers could get $$$$$$ jobs, they would. But they can’t, for various reasons. This is not fixable at the level we discussing.

https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increase...

I essentially agree with you but I think this not an argument against raising the minimum wage. They will not lose their jobs, they already do not have a job. Ignoring the facet of work as self-fulfillment or being part of society or whatever, the relevant part of a job for a worker is that it earns them a living wage, not that they do some work. In that sense someone with a job not earning them a living wage is already jobless.

And if we actually run out of jobs valued at least a living wage for some part of society - and I have no illusion that everyone can become a developer if they just tried hard enough - then this is a problem that needs addressing. Just pretending that there are still jobs because there is work that is valued less than a living wage but still more expensive then automation, is not a solution.

But I am not in a position to really judge objectively where we are, whether we are already out of jobs or whether some jobs are just underpaid because it is possible in the current market situation, or what mix of the former.

How do you prosecute poverty? Does poverty lose by default and you award the victim damages?

You can do the same cash experiment with most office workers and the effects might surprise you. You can say garbage management jobs, sweeping streets or even bureaucratic positions are the result of one's poverty.

Just leave the god damned people alone, its sad that in 21st century some folks still feel above the rest of us and try to push their moral views unto everybody else.

If you give someone who works fast food 100k are the going to go back to fast food? Not really a meaningful test as the vast majority of retail level jobs would fail it.

What if some people just like working in sex work?

Big if, some may enjoy it. Sky Rojo on Netflix might change your mind.

Some people don't enjoy work, period either. That doesn't mean that having a job should be illegal.

Prostitutes are paid a lot since the number of men who are interested in casual sex is a lot more than the number of women. Then the pay goes up so much that many women who aren't originally interested in casual sex also starts to engage in it, just because men value it so much. So one way to reduce the number of "victims" would be to put a max cap on how much you are allowed to pay prostitutes, that way women wouldn't do it as an easy way to earn money. Because paying women too much for sex hurts them apparently.

> Prostitutes are paid a lot

That's not a fair generalization. Most sex workers remain in poverty, and it's extremely risky work -- for all that men's rights activists like to talk about men having the most dangerous jobs, their statistics are drawn from a perspective that sex work isn't a "job" -- so the actual #1 most dangerous job, mostly done by women, is overlooked.

Even in places like Canada were the work is decriminilized and clients are criminalized, sex workers rarely go to the police after being attacked or raped because the common response is that the worker "asked for it." Sex workers are freelancers: they don't get insurance or other benefits, so they need to charge a higher rate up-front.

Rather than limit the amount that sex workers get paid, it would be better to legalize it and treat it like any other job. Forced labor (pimps and sex trafficking) is already illegal; those laws just need enforcement, which will be easier with the transparency of legal employment. Also, individual workers and brothels can get insurance, medical and otherwise, hire security, etc. to improve the safety of workers.

Let the free market sort out the price.

If they weren't paid a lot you wouldn't have a problem since these women would just go and work at McDonalds instead to earn their money.

And if they remain in poverty even when being paid a lot they either work very few hours or they spend it on luxury goods like clothes or trips.

Edit: Anyway, the argument isn't that prostitutes are victims because there is a lot of violence related to the profession. The argument is usually that it is inhumane to subject a woman to involuntary sex, so women accepting money to have sex they otherwise wouldn't is seen as a bad thing for the woman even under perfect conditions. That is the main argument why sex work should be illegal, everything else can be fixed but that can't ever be fixed no matter how much you improve surroundings. I don't agree with that view, but that is what you are up against.

Well, in fairness, the few prostitues I've seen downtown where I live all seem to be meth addicts or crackheads, not super employable. I would assume your high end super desirable escorts make far more money and are subject to far less danger

Sounds like the problem here is drug addiction and not prostitution.

>That's not a fair generalization.

You're nitpicking. You know they meant "a lot relative to the qualifications and difficulty of the job"

If something is illegal and people still do it to make a living you can be pretty much assured it's better than all the legal menial labor options.

> You're nitpicking. You know they meant "a lot relative to the qualifications and difficulty of the job"

No I'm not, and yes I know that, and I addressed it, but I'll spell it out some more.

Just about everybody is qualified to collect garbage, too. Garbage collection is physically risky and also disgusting and stigmatized. Like sex work, pay should compensate for those factors. Just because some people also voluntarily pick garbage in parks doesn't mean that garbage collection should be free.

The fact that sex work is illegal introduces additional risk to the workers, which, again, should increase its price. But, statistically, the highly paid sex workers are very uncommon. And that's not nitpicking; it's observing that OC is cherrypicking.

And anybody who thinks "sex is fun" and that comparing sex work to garbage collection is unfair has probably never done sex work nor had a serious conversation with somebody who has.

It is not nitpick. Prostitutes earn less then pretty much anyone on this forum. It does not pay as much as people assume.

And it has considerable risks, partially because they cant legally hire security.

> for all that men's rights activists like to talk about men having the most dangerous jobs, their statistics are drawn from a perspective that sex work isn't a "job" -- so the actual #1 most dangerous job, mostly done by women, is overlooked

By that token you'd also have to count "gangster" as a job, which is probably also pretty dangerous.

Furthermore, the entire notion that sex work is dangerous for women is exactly the reason it's widely prohibited in the first place.

If the issue is that it’s dangerous for women, then why do the lawmakers write laws that make sex work even more dangerous. It’s hypocritical nonsense pushed by religious groups.

I bet > 95% of all working people on earth would quite their current job if you gave them $100,000.

Is $100,000 supposed to be some kind of ‘set for life’ amount of money?

Nope

It's supposed to be a "solve immediate problems and buy time and/or education to find a better job" amount of money.

Not enough that you can retire but enough that you don't have to worry about making ends meet for long enough to pivot to something else.

It is enough to quit your job for many years, go study something, travel, or just take a break and try to pivot to a different kind of life.

It's enough buffer to make reasonable changes so as to get a more desirable profession if that is your goal, whether that's training for new skills, moving to a different location with better prospects, getting treatment for addictions, etc.

This works with almost every job.

I mean, if you gave a janitor $100,000 in cash would they come into scrub your toilet again tomorrow? Does that mean hiring a janitor is a crime with a victim?

Most everybody would behave differently if they had substantially more money. I know I wouldn't be working where I am if I didn't need a paycheck. But choosing a shittier job because it pays better is not victimization.

Yep, I am in the UK. Prostitution/brothels are nominally legal where I am (and have been for three decades) but they began cracking down recently. Religious groups allied with violence against women charities. This has been with mixed success because legalization was introduced to combat HIV, and the local govt is loathe to turn this back completely because it will cause chaos (lots of job losses, increase in pimping, human trafficking). But there is a new puritanism.

> Imo, even legalization isn't enough. We need normalisation.

Many of the FAANG companies are famous for their perks. One of those is having massage therapists at the office. By normalization, do you mean you would you be ok them also having sex workers (well paid with benefits) as well.

Just to be clear, I, and likely most people, would be against that, which shows that I don't think sex work is going to be completely normalized.

I think one could easily imagine that sex work could be given a similar treatment like legal Marijuana. Obviously there are differences in these (for lack of a more useful word) 'vices,' but "normalization" for marijuana in the US does not mean free weed edibles as part of your comp package. It means it's shunned/controlled/a sort of deal breaker in professional settings, but more and more understood to be a choice people can make with their free time outside of work as long as it's safe, legal, etc...

But you are talking about legalization, not normalization.

At many companies, it is pretty normal for there to be alcohol, even at work related events. I doubt, even if marijuana were made legal, that you would see marijuana at work related events.

There is a big difference between legalization and normalization.

One way you can think of normalization is with regards to its status in a professional setting. If you mentioned around the water cooler that you went to a nail salon and had a pedicure, no one would care. If you mentioned that you went to legal sex worker, you would have an HR complaint filed against you. One is normalized, the other is not.

I don't think sex in general will ever really be "normalized". It will always involve taboos of some sort.

By normalization I mean a social/cultural change, not necessarily a legal one... though the two are linked.

I mean a culture where being a sex worker is not something that most people hide or gasp at. Strippers are, in some places, semi-"normal." You can date an ex stripper, in some circles. Ex-prostitute is, generally, a no-go.

>>I, and likely most people, would be against that

Yes of course. That's what not being normalized currently means. Normalisation would be a change in these opinions. Homosexuality was also "most people against" very recently.

Also, I didn't say that I think this change is coming. Quite the opposite. The current trend is in the puritanical direction.

There is a strand of feminism that holds that women should have the right to work as sex workers, because women should have their own agency, yet at the same time men should at least be shamed – if not prosecuted – for recourse to sex workers. In this view, men’s use of sex workers is objectifying the female body, and on a societal scale that is not so straightforwardly a "victimless crime".

In the modern era, libertarianism quickly breaks down when certain demographics feel grievances.

And in all that mess everyone keeps forgetting that there are plenty of men and trans persons that sell sex.

> victimless crimes

I am not sure if it is really that clear cut. Germany has pretty liberal laws around prostitution and there are massive problems with human trafficking. Many women do not do the work out of their own volition.

Clamping down on sex workers as described in the Reddit post makes human trafficking more likely, though, as victims of it can't trust the authorities will help them.

Isn't that why laws should go after the seller and the purchaser not the product (especially in humans-are-the-product situations like this)?

The Reddit post in question pretty clearly describes the consequences of that approach; very substantial impacts on the sex worker.

if your manager and customer are criminals, whats are the odds youll be treated well?

Yes, I don't think the "Nordic model" is a good final answer. But I am not sure if there are more problems with human trafficking in Sweden than in Germany (of course geography plays a role, too).

(not an expert, just Swedish) it is not illegal to be prostitute in Sweden, you are not allowed to buy it.

So I guess there is no problem for a human trafficking victim to go to the police since they don't break any law themselves

Read the Reddit post we're discussing. It's made quite clear that that's wonderful in theory, but not so great in practice.

Sex workers are not made criminally liable in Sweden. All the Reddit post is saying is that outside people will not want to be associated with their business - which makes sense if every sex worker might possibly be a trafficked sex slave and no one can feasibly tell the difference beyond reasonable doubt.

Again, that's the point - that not being criminally liable doesn't prevent the authorities from treating them like criminals and making their lives difficult.

Ah, but are the authorities treating them like criminals or possible sex slaves? The Reddit post doesn't give any evidence for the former over the latter.

#4 and #6 in particular sound targeted at the sex worker more than an attempt at preventing pimping/slavery.

#6 is simply a bank protecting itself, how would they differentiate a legal sex worker from a human trafficker? maybe in a country where some kind of prostitution is allowed they could show a certificate but not in Sweden.

#4 is simply a fulfilling what the law and the government meant, prostitution is illegal and the best way to catch the offenders is waiting for them outside of the business.

Surely you can see how "sex workers can't have bank accounts" winds up being punitive, even if it's an indirect result of the laws?

Same for "what you do is legal, but we'll sit outside your house and arrest anyone going in-and-out".

You can't have a bank account if you have too many unexplained, to the bank, companies or branches in "not so nice" places. Hell, as a newcomer to Sweden you can't have a bank account until you have a personal number even though it is not necessary or legal to refuse.

Police are not sitting outside anyone's house, they do detain sex buyers from time to time and the most sensible place to do that is outside of the business

Their clients are tho. So going to police endangers clients, so prostitute have to be reallu careful about it. Cause that sounds like sure way to loose clients.

To add to this, it's important to understand that there's the law, then there's the mythology surrounding the law. People rarely read the actual statues but rather rely on a sort of word of mouth heuristic transfer. Think adoption of GDPR, there's the actual text, then there's the cargo culting around cookie banners. Similarly patent trolls. The law is cut and dry but the internet of alight with stories about how someone in the wrong won buy having more money.

People routinely build models on what prosecutors will pursue and what kinds of violations will be successfully punished and these will frequently be orthogonal to the laws text. See any US discussion online about the ATF for instance.

If people believe of can be made to believe they will be prosecuted for doing something that isn't illegal then it's just as illegal as if it actually was.

I have read it, I wouldn't comment otherwise

I wouldn't want a neighbor operating a business that attract people, same as an hotel owner or guest. Criminalizing the owners is a step too far, I agree.

Filming arrests? they also film traffic offenders and other crimes, the names remain confidential until the trial though

Banks are worried to be involved in sex trafficking businesses, they don't have the tools to evaluate the legality of such a business so they simply ban all prostitutes. Similar rules apply BTW to large cash deposits or even unordinary sales of jewelry.

I couldn't find anything in Swedish prohibiting (explicitly or implicitly) being a spouse to a prostitute, unless of course if said spouse advertised her services which is illegal

TLDR; Sweden took it a bit too far maybe, but they also regulate alcohol sales so it makes sense.

Personally? I don't care too much, unless (and I haven't checked) someone can prove to me that legalizing prostitution can help reduce violence, rape etc in some way. I have the same opinion about legalizing some drugs- if the damages if significantly smaller then the benefit than why not?

According to the data we have, that is not true. From Harvard Law School [1]:

> 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.

There's a lot more nuance to it if you read the article or the actual study. I am in general for legalizing sex work, but if we want to protect sex workers we can't pretend legalization is a panacea.

[1] https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...

This is out of date. Working conditions are also better in Germany, and could stand to keep improving.

EDIT: here are some recent improvements in Germany according to the wiki: The Criminal Code was amended in October 2016 to criminalise clients of trafficked or coerced prostitutes. This change was led by Social Democrat Eva Högl.

The Prostituiertenschutzgesetz (Prostitutes Protection Act) came into force in July 2017. Amongst the provision of the Act are registration of prostitutes, annual health checks and mandatory condom use. Brothel operators also need to register and prove their 'good conduct' before registration. The legislation also places restrictions on advertising. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Germany#Legal_...

As patrons stick with the well-regulated outlets, they won't fund the competing mob-controlled ones, and trafficking will slow. The conditions were just too easy to exploit at the outset.

Feel free to respond with a more recent study! I would be very happy to be proven wrong here.

Response to edit: I’m glad Germany is making progressive changes, but I’d like to see data (or at least firsthand anecdotes) that the amended laws are working as intended.

That's fair and I'll look later.

I think it is very difficult to compare stats between countries where prostitution is legal and countries where it is not. The linked article is light on details whether this is accounted for or not.

That paper relies on some pretty dodgy data to reach its conclusion. Basically the UN's subjective classification is used unquestionably as the measure of human trafficking data. Just to be clear, it's not using objective data or accounting for the mis-measurement problem between legal and illegal countries.

Based on the dataset the study uses to reach its conclusions the US, Japan, and Israel are considered "very high trafficking" countries. Whereas Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Moldova are classified "very low trafficking". Does anybody in their right mind honestly think human trafficking is less of a problem in Sudan than Japan?

With that kind of dataset, you can reach any kind of conclusion you want. Garbage in, garbage out.

Legalization may not be a panacea. But the alternative is criminalization, and that is far far worse. Criminalizing prostitution guarantees a bad outcome for the affected prostitutes.

It’s not a binary issue. My point is that your argument can’t end at “criminalizing sex workers is bad!” That’s true, but there are many aspects to that, as well as adjacent issues like the ability to obtain health insurance. The Reddit post we’re discussing is a perfect example of how myopic “legalization” can be insufficient to actually protect sex workers.

It is a binary issue. Legalisation of prostitutes and customers (and supporting businesses like brothels) is a necessary prerequisite to actually protect prostitutes. Otherwise there will always be at least one party in a situation where its best interest is to hide everything and cover up things.

Alcohol is legal but there are restrictions on selling, serving and possessing it. Speeding and murder are both illegal but the punishment and enforcement of them are vastly different. Sex work and human trafficking are complicated, intertwined issues with many moving pieces and it doesn’t help the discussion to oversimplify them like this.

Is there more human trafficking, or is the human trafficking more visible under the liberal laws?

Many? What percentage I wonder?

Through my last job for over a decade I had access to thousands of sex workers, many in Germany. I will attest, on everything I own, not a single one was doing it against her will.

I do not doubt there are some being forced, but this idea that it’s a large percentage… I can not get behind. I’ve been on the inside and never saw anything remotely like it. And since I wasn’t a client I spoke openly with the girls and discussed things like this with them. Most were from Eastern Europe and we’re just stacking cash.

The Philippines I came across some questionable stuff, but that was due to extreme poverty. South and Central America were not quite as above board as Europe. Frankly, America is the worst, and that’s why Americans have these strange overly negative views of sex work. Our laws make it dangerous and thus dangerous people are attracted to it.

Human trafficking is it's own problem, it's a constant. It would be rendered a moot point if laws were permissive enough to allow sex workers to organize in such a way that they could operate under high quality conditions, e.g. reputable brothels.

The foreign mob who traffics would then have to compete with institutions that have a reputation among the populace for good working conditions.

The issues surrounding drugs are similar. Narco states and mob control don't disappear overnight from legalization, but the increase in legitimate avenues takes over their market share over time.

Even in countries were laws are relatively more permissive, operations are relegated to the streets, and the Nordic Model has resulted in terrible working conditions.

>The foreign mob who traffics would then have to compete with institutions that have a reputation among the populace for good working conditions.

If the brothel organization or the .gov adds too much overhead cost there will be ample room for the criminals' overhead.

Weed is an example of this. The .gov couldn't resist taxing the crap out of it so there's still a black market.

Of course there's still a black market for marijuana. There's a black market for tobacco and liquor too. But it will be reduced to a specter of what it was.

> Human trafficking is it's own problem, it's a constant.

This isn't necessarily true though. Research has shown that increasing legalization for sex work leads to both more "reputable" sex work and more sex trafficking.

The research doesn't show that it "scales" with legalization, it shows that quasi-legalization results in more increases in traffic than full prohibition. That's not surprising.

If it’s not surprising why do you seem so confident that legalizing prostitution is the best idea? It sounds like in the less than ideal world we live in it’s likely to lead to more human trafficking, and more negative situations for women generally.

Because full legalization would allow for stronger regulation and protections that would disincentivize patronizing of trafficked prostitution.

We can plainly see the advantage with drugs, it's the same thing. At the outset, decriminalization of marijuana increases trafficking from the underworld in the short-run. Legalization eventually leads to a regulated market that circumvents illegal channels, and decimates their market share. This is beginning to be the case with marijuana.

There's no reason to believe it would be any different for sex work. Germany unveiled new regulations just a few years ago, stay tuned for new statistics this decade.

> problems with human trafficking

But that's different - kidnapping is not a victimless crime, and human trafficking is investigated and prosecuted entirely differently.

Human trafficking is an actual crime and should be worked on. Doesn't mean someone doing what they want with their own body should be criminalized.

What if legalizing prostitution has the secondary effect of greatly increasing the amount human trafficking, which the previous poster seems to be suggesting is the case in Germany? Wouldn’t making prostitution legal be the opposite of working on human trafficking then?

Address the actual crime, and not the result of a part of society.

Would you also like fast food and sugar-filled foods to be made illegal because they directly lead to millions of early deaths and cost large amounts of money to healthcare?

If the result of banning unhealthy fast food is the saving of millions lives and massive healthcare cost reduction then I would support it. I assume different, necessarily healthier, restaurants would fill the void, so they wouldn’t be missed.

I’m not sure why you would think otherwise. You’re talking to someone who clearly prioritizes personal agency less than overall well-being or positive outcome in certain cases.

There's an interesting theory that opposition to prostitution by other women is partially fueled by seeing seeing sex workers as "scabs", giving a resource away too easily in a way that devalues the artificial scarcity the others think it's "supposed" to have, taking away "negotiating power" in dating.

There is no absolute acceptance of "using their bodies as they see fit" or "my body my rules". It is just a made up rule no civil society accepts. Otherwise people can walk nakedly everywhere they want. There is simply not any constitutional right like that.

What is similar is that you can't do everything you want in your own house, like experimenting on bombs or making drugs, etc.

I am not totally against sex work. I am just pointing out the reasoning is flawed.

>there should still be regulations around the commercialization of a vice.

Why is getting laid a vice?

Or is it the "paying money to skip the BS" that's the vice?

It's a painfully frequent strawman/red herring, up there with "weed is just a plant", "all gun owners want to do is protect their families". I think it's useful to assume that not everyone who disagrees with you is malicious and/or insane, and hence their argument can't be condensed into something obviously false or indefensible.

See, the thing is, is that I do find it malicious if someone wants to tell me what to do with myself. I am very much in favour of personal autonomy above other people's morals or ethics that they feel the need to legislate onto everyone else, assuming no one is hurt in the process.

As much as I don't like that people eat/smoke/work themselves to death, I don't want a government having the ability to go and criminalize such things.

Yeah. I have the same philosophy. The thing is that, other than libertarians, nobody really agree with this philosophy. Especially the left, who loves the big government and hates libertarians to guts, sometimes suddenly pick a fundamentally libertarian position like this. This is just totally hypocrisy.

> just a set of antiquated laws

The law is from 1999 and prostitution was not illegal before it.

Nope. These particular laws are tailored to suppress coerced prostitution, which is rather the norm than the exception when prostitution is legal.

Unfortunately, when prostitution is legal it is impossible to tell coercion apart from consent. Sweden errs on the side of protecting the victims. It also means that "honest, voluntary" sex-workers have a much harder time while not technically committing a crime or being exploited.

But the laws are not designed to owe those prostitutes a living from sex-work, they are designed to be able to suppress exploitation, and it actually works.

>Nope. These particular laws are tailored to suppress coerced prostitution, which is rather the norm than the exception when prostitution is legal.

You'd really have to give good data to support this claim. Specifically, you'll have to prove that the majority of prostitution under a legal system is coerced.

And I'm adding an addendum here, a level of control equal to or lower than the standard job doesn't count. I.e. I'm not coerced in which I have to work to feed myself. That goes against what people generally define as coercion here.

You are underestimating how painful and denigrating sex work is for women, especially in the lower price segments, even without abuse, which is widespread.

To believe this is a voluntary choice of work, you need to assume these women have no other options. Which is ridiculous, as both Sweden and Germany have a social welfare system that values dignity. No, you don't have to hurt yourself just to get fed.

If a john visits a prostitute, and there is a chance that prostitute has been forced, at what level of chance does he become a rapist and at what level should he not be criminally liable? 90%? 50%? 1%? Point is: Neither the john nor the police can meaningfully tell the difference, and even a significant amount of forced sex labor is worse than prohibiting all prostitution.

All I'm asking you is to back up your claim that a majority of sex work in these regions is coercive.that's a huge claim to make that strongly undermines the typical counterargument that legalisation enables their protection.

It is also a claim that needs to be supported.

No, it does not need to be a majority of sex work that is coercive to decide that prostitution should be outlawed. What number of exploited sex slaves in your country do you tolerate? Again, the difference is almost impossible to tell, which makes prosecution and hard numbers so difficult. Legalisation just means that forced prostitution can hide in plain sight. A lower ratio would just mean better chances of hiding.

I doubt that anyone could amass the evidence that you would demand, because for some reason you want to believe that there is virtually no forced prostitution where there is legal prostitution. Here in Germany, social workers and charities who work in this areas, even police and prosecutors, know that this is anything but true. It is hard to actually prove trafficking beyond a reasonable doubt.

But when you regularly see young Romani prostitutes from eastern Europe, addicted to drugs, having been obviously physically and mentally abused, lacking teeth, etc and still saying they are doing this out of there own free will despite not living better than if they were living on social security. Especially if their pimp is standing behind them. Well. It doesn't add up, does it?

> victimless crimes

there should still be regulations around the commercialization of a vice.

sex billboards and youtube ads would definitely not be victimless.

so you are in favor of legalizing prostitution?

Why should prostitution be illegal?

Human trafficking. Prostitution is a lucrative racket for organized crime groups and unlike drug legalization, making it legal makes it _easier_ for organized crime to control it.

The legalization of prostitution in Austria resulted in a greater increase in illegal sex work:

“It indirectly supports the spreading of the illegal market in the sex industry,” the report concluded. “Organized crime has flourished and increased its influence in the sex industry.”

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/20...

Then crack down on human trafficking. Making something illegal that should not be illegal to solve a different issue should be one of the last options, not the first one.

Decisions should be made and laws passed based on real-world projected efficacy and data-driven feedback, not wishful thinking.

I haven't seen any data yet, what's the percentage of human trafficking prostitutes? how many prostitutes are forced to work and haven't chosen that? what's the violence rate toward prostitutes (even the linked reddit channel shows not insignificant number)?

I am aware that some women are fully aware of what they are doing, and won't regret it but how many don't?

How high would the rate have to be? Sure, if 99% of prostitution is forced prostitution I might be willing to say make it illegal but even then I am not really feeling good about it, I am still interfering with the free choice of the remaining 1%. But one might argue that life will never be totally fair and the 99% are so much better off that we can justify the collateral damage we do to the 1%. But I can not really say how high or low the fraction would have to be, are 10% to much, are 50% acceptable?

Is there free choice in modern democratic societies? Not at all, the state decide for you on abortion, marriage, car safety, gun usage and even what medications can get used (pseudoephedrine is not sold in Sweden!) so why not prostitution if (and only if) data shows that it's beneficial? As to what percentage the answer like everything else is whatever the winning party in the elections think

No society is perfect, but existing failures should not be the standard or justification for future changes. And there will probably never be universal consensus on everything because many policies are, at least to an certain extend, a matter of personal preference. Whether you want the state to be involved in something is often a matter of personal preference, do you prefer universal healthcare, do you prefer private health insurance, or are you willing to take the risk and have no health insurance at all? At least at first glance there is no single right answer to such questions and letting everyone decide is also not generally an option, for example if all healthy people get cheap private health insurance then universal healthcare does not work.

And your preferences are often a consequence of who you are, if you are healthy and wealthy and have a good job, then it is easy to prefer a state that does not want your money and lets you decide freely. If you are poor or have health issues or a high risk of being unemployed then you might reasonable prefer a stronger state. What you should be actually doing to decide your position in such matters is using the veil of ignorance, what policies would you want implemented if you were not yet born and you did not know whether you will be born into the richest family, or the poorest, or what sex or skin color you will have. So even in questions of personal preferences one can at least to some degree be more objective by considering different points of view.

So if the state decides for you that does not necessarily mean that the state acts arbitrarily, it might just optimize for different goals. And those might be arbitrary preferences by the people in power but there might also be sound reasoning behind and the resulting policy just does not align with your personal preferences. And sure, if there is some sound reasoning behind making prostitution illegal, then one should do this. But if the reasoning behind making prostitution illegal is to limit human trafficking then I do not see how you can have the resources to harass all the prostitutes but can not target human trafficking specifically and keep prostitution legal. But this might admittedly just be ignorance on my side.

good question, I have many answers but they are not good enough to justify a law. Since I am not a libertarian and I think that the state should have some control over their citizens I can understand why the state objects prostitution under the assumption that most (or many) sex works don't (or wouldn't) choose this lifestyle voluntarily. I also in favor of gun control, limiting SMS loans, limitations on drug usage (not sure to which level) etc.

Huge disclaimer- I don't have any numbers or data to support my feelings, the fact that there is a community with 170k members worldwide (probably not all of them sex workers) which have positive online attitude towards selling sex doesn't mean that this is their real life attitude. Mental problems or financial hardships can push people to justify things they might regret later.

But then address the underlying problems, offer better ways out of financial hardships than going into prostitution, require a psychological assessment before granting a work permit, ...

I can't argue bout that, and actually Sweden is not that bad at that

Since I am not a libertarian and I think that the state should have some control over their citizens I can understand why the state objects prostitution under the assumption that most (or many) sex works don't (or wouldn't) choose this lifestyle voluntarily.

It gets chosen because women have too few opportunities to make similar amounts of money any other way. Not giving women the right to sell sexual services condemns them to having no means to adequately support themselves. It doesn't protect them from anything at all.

Think about why this conversation is always about women selling sex. Why is that? Why are sex workers almost universally female or assumed to be while their clients are almost universally male?

That's the real issue here and it doesn't get fixed by criminalizing sex work.

actually Sweden has a decent job equality, I have seen women doing work that is considered men's work elsewhere- we are talking low level, unskilled work here not computer science

Then I imagine it doesn't pay as much as prostitution.

So it's not really a rebuttal to my point.

I don't know how much prostitutes earn in Sweden but low skilled employees earn a very decent salary that includes pension, the state covers health and education. You can actually have a decent life by being a McDonald's worker ( obviously there are exceptions)

Look, I don't understand why you are arguing in this way. This is not a rebuttal to my point.

Whatever else is going on in Sweden, prostitution exists there as well and criminalizing it is not stamping it out and is not a means to address the concern some people have that "Women who become prostitutes without being trafficked do so because they are desperately poor, so they still aren't truly there voluntarily."

I'm not saying that "Good paying jobs will stamp out prostitution." I have no goal of stamping out prostitution.

I'm saying that criminalizing prostitution gives desperately poor women no remedy for the poverty that forces some of them into prostitution. It just closes another door and makes their life harder, not better.

Just a healthy discussion, no arguing

The swedish answer is simple- because they don't see prostitution as legitimate, criminalization or not

That also doesn't address my point.

>I can understand why the state objects prostitution under the assumption that most (or many) sex works don't (or wouldn't) choose this lifestyle voluntarily.

I've never understood how sex work gets singled out from all the other forms of selling your body for money. I can't think of many(any?) working class jobs that aren't some form of selling your body for money. Typically for way less money then I would argue our bodies are worth.

true, but it's a range where prostitution is on the lower side. Do note that some of those professions are supervised to some degree, for example by health services, or requires some license

True, but I feel like that is an argument for the state to not object to prostitution. If the state wasn't onjecting, the industry or the state could then have some more oversight/licensing and be 'safer' for all. I put safer in quotes because I don't think "oversight" is always very effective or makes conditions safer, easy to look at Amazon wearhouse workers or cell phone assembly factories as pretty exereme cases of people selling their bodies for money and the supposed oversight not really doing much to lessen the exploitation/abuse.

> Since I am not a libertarian and I think that the state should have some control over their citizens I can understand why the state objects prostitution under the assumption that most (or many) sex works don't (or wouldn't) choose this lifestyle voluntarily.

So then shouldn't porn be illegal too?

It's already legal. Buying sex isn't, though. It's basically the inverse of some other countries' narcotics laws where it's illegal to sell but legal to buy.

No one should face legal penalties for consensually buying or selling sex.

for selling sex? definitely no.

for buying? maybe, but only if your country monitors and supervise prostitution in some way. As much as I don't like it a model where there are licensed brothels could work

Why do you "maybe" think the state should penalize individuals for consensually paying for sex? And isn't it an indefensible hypocrisy to allow sex to be sold but not to be bought? That situation is basically a state-mandated black market.

No, Society (well, Sweden in this case) is against prostitution and want to eliminate or at least minimize it. It's the same with drugs laws or illegal downloads- criminalization of this side or another is just tactics, in this case to hurt prostitutes less

The law in Sweden ensures a black market for sex work. Much like drug laws, sex work can never be eliminated in a free society. The primary consequences of the futile attempt to eliminate these things is to reduce freedom and seriously harm individuals.

So is theft, rape and tax evasion

Isn't the difference painfully obvious? All of those crimes have victims. Sex work is work, not crime.

I'm in favour of making as few things as possible illegal. Which means anything voluntary. Hence sex work, anything to do with drugs (children are obviously a different story), moving out to the woods and building some random shack to live, what have you.

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