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WillowOne's Positions

Prostitution

My Positions

  1. I believe that prostitution should be legal, with appropriate regulation and protections.
  2. The sale of sex between consenting adults is a transaction that harms no third party, and the state has no more business prohibiting it than it has prohibiting any other service.
  3. The proper object of the criminal law is coercion, trafficking, and the exploitation of minors, all of which are easier to detect and prosecute when the industry operates in the open.

Notes

  1. Criminalisation has not eliminated, or noticeably reduced, the prevalence of prostitution anywhere it has been tried. It is called the oldest profession for a reason.
  2. Its illegality facilitates criminal enterprise and exploitation. Where the trade is illegal, the people who run it are, by selection, criminals, and the people who work in it cannot go to the police.
  3. Sex workers operating outside legal protection are more vulnerable to unsafe and abusive working conditions, to violence from clients, and to extortion by police. They cannot work together for safety without committing the further offence of running a brothel.
  4. Without regulation, serious issues such as sex trafficking, the exploitation of minors, and the absence of health and consumer protections are more difficult to detect and address. A legal industry can be inspected; an illegal one cannot.
  5. Legalisation would enable the dissemination of accurate public health information and improve health and safety standards within the industry.
  6. Models. There are broadly four legal approaches:
  • Full criminalisation (most of the US): criminalises both buying and selling. Produces all the harms above.
  • The Nordic model (Sweden since 1999, Norway, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland): criminalises buying but not selling, on the theory that this reduces demand. The evidence that it reduces demand is weak, and sex workers' organisations report that it drives the trade underground, makes clients less willing to be screened, and leaves workers less safe.
  • Legalisation (Germany, the Netherlands, Nevada): the trade is legal but subject to licensing, zoning, and registration. This reduces harm but tends to create a two-tier system in which those who cannot or will not register remain illegal and unprotected.
  • Decriminalisation (New Zealand since the Prostitution Reform Act 2003; New South Wales): the trade is treated as ordinary work, subject to ordinary employment, health, and safety law, with specific offences retained for coercion and the involvement of minors. This is the model supported by the WHO, Amnesty International, UNAIDS, and most sex worker organisations, and the New Zealand government's own review found that it had improved workers' safety and their willingness to report violence without increasing the size of the industry.
    My position is closest to decriminalisation, with the regulatory emphasis on protecting workers rather than on licensing them.
    7. The objection that prostitution is inherently degrading, or that no one would freely choose it, is a claim about other people's choices that those people generally reject. Where it is true, the remedy is to improve the alternatives, not to criminalise the one that was chosen.

Personal Context

  • I have never solicited or engaged the services of a prostitute.
  • I do not think I would ever engage the services of a prostitute.
  • Through my Photography I have worked with models who would be classified as sex workers.

Also see