The implicit assumptions that ones' choice to have sex with strangers for money is coerced, wrong, constitutes self harm, and must be protected against are telling a story that denies the people who make that choice the very same autonomy such a statement pretends to protect against.
I'd say that is incorrect and based on incomplete understanding. I'd say it's a choice, made, no matter how incomprehensible, for money. Like other choices people make, eg choosing such and such career path, or such and such relationship, sometimes there's peer pressure. And because it's connected with orchestration by criminal enterprises, tainted by that association. However, when you come down to it, people could sell themselves before criminals wanted a cut. It works to consider how you might come to make that choice, and whether your assumptions about prostitutes are filtered through the landscape of what you perceive as your own possible choices.
So before I pronounce prostitutes as victims to fit a narrative of exploitation I've chosen (seductive also for it suggests my moral superiority that I would never make such a choice! :), maybe I'll remember it doesn't work to victimize the people I'm talking about by pretending they had no autonomy. Isn't that, the very same hypocrisy I'm trying to accuse others of? Using a person for a purpose? And when that person may have done the choosing, and I in my argument may be doing the using, haven't I neatly reversed the roles all by myself, and undermined the very argument I was making?
Tl;Dr - when you're talking about people you want to paint as victims it works to consider them as autonomous,
choice making beings, to gain more accurate insight,
even tho it's seductive to pretend that somehow you've more autonomy than they.
Stl;Dr - fantasising that prostitutes have no autonomy is trying to use them for an intellectual "dry sex", without paying, for the sake of argument without their consent! Definitely only for scoundrels!! :)