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The Backpage Defendants Never Stood a Chance

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23 pointsaragonite14 comments

Other than child prostitution, is there ever a reason to fight sex work instead of investing in social programs or just giving some basic income to vulnerable people?

> just giving some basic income to vulnerable people?

Why single out prostitution here?

Would you care to elaborate?

dsign was staying on topic by suggesting their solution in the context of prostitution, but the dsign worded the solution in a way that could apply to people other than just sex workers.

Social programs and basic income target residents; prostitutes are famously migratory. A prostitute currently working in California often starts out as a vulnerable girl in Missouri or Colombia or Korea or anywhere else other than California, and thus out of scope for any social program that California's voters could possibly be expected to fund.

It incentivizes sex trafficking. There is already plenty of evidence of increased human trafficking in areas where prostitution is legalized. These prostitutes start out as kids who the traffickers see as sources of revenue due to the existence of prostitution.

But why would legalization of prostitution increase sex trafficking, which is already a crime? With legalization, sex workers have more rights and a higher ability to go independent, or to go to the police when they suffer abuse.

I suspect that the amount of sex trafficking is actually determined by the amount of nearby vulnerable men/women with low economic prospects. It's a red herring to look at any correlation with legalization and consider that as causation.

Legalization increases demand for prostitutes, which incentivizes sex trafficking, and consequently increases sex trafficking. It's a very straightforward line of consequences compared to what you are trying to say.

1. Is it really so straightforward? And if so, do the chosen means fulfill the purpose of reducing sex trafficking without causing a comparable amount of harm to prostitutes? Did the DOJ's raid and shutdown of Backpage reduce sex trafficking to a degree that outweighed the harm to sex workers and to hosters of sites similar to Backpage?

2. Legalization of online pornography increases demand for porn, which incentivizes sex trafficking, and consequently increases sex trafficking.

3. As long as prostitution is criminalized, prostitutes can't seek police intervention when when police sexually assault prostitutes [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in...

Sex trafficking creates prostitutes, so it outweighs much of the other considerations.

> Legalization of online pornography increases demand for porn, which incentivizes sex trafficking, and consequently increases sex trafficking.

Correct. Prostitution being a much more private enterprise incentivizes sex trafficking to a much larger degree.

> Sex trafficking creates prostitutes, so it outweighs much of the other considerations.

1. Consider this analogy: Nightclubs create (opportunities for) date rapes, so nightclubs should be banned. That's my good faith example. My bad faith example is: Sex-motivated kidnappings create hidden sex slaves, so anyone who wants to have sex in private must let police know about it.

2. Is your argument something like "if sex trafficking then prostitutes therefore if no prostitutes then no sex trafficking"? The prostitutes "created" from sex trafficking are the victims, and arresting them would further victimize them. A substitute method could be to legalize prostitution and to require that people report the identities of prostitutes to the police without arresting the reported prostitutes. Even this hypothetical I came up with is not one I actually want, because a law which forces people to give up someone's privacy based on the latter's occupation is terrible. But I think my hypothetical demonstrates that criminalizing prostitution is wholly unnecessary.

> Sex trafficking creates prostitutes, so it outweighs much of the other considerations.

3. Consider the War on Drugs in the US. The real analogy is: Drug trafficking creates drug addicts, so those drugs should be criminalized. Which is well and good, until you get to the follow-up question, what do you do with the people who used the criminalized drugs? Throw the drug addicts into prison and rehabilitate them. Except, the authority to imprison drug addicts was not conditioned on forcing the state to ensure that there was enough money for rehabilitation programs (i.e. what should've happened was "if there are not enough resources to rehabilitate the drug addict, the government can't put the drug addict in prison"). Instead, the US continues to throw drug addicts into prison without obeying prison capacities [1] and without making sure that there is enough money set toward good faith rehabilitation attempts. So the drug addicts don't get healthy by the time their 10-year sentences finish, and an average person who has gone multiple years without stable income has a hard time staying healthy, productive, and sane. The end alone doesn't always justify the means, because many means can cause more harm than they reduce.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#Prison_overcrowdi...

It still doesn't remove the problem that legalization leads to increased demand which leads to increased sex trafficking. Even in legal settings, you will have black markets etc., except the markets will be much bigger. Making it illegal solves for that problem. That's just the reality of it.

Musing for a moment. What if they legalized and taxed it to fund social programs? Would the supply of sex workers decline enough to move the price to the point that a lot of market participants (Johns) would meaningful reduce their demand? (If so that sounds like a ton of harm reduction IMO)

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