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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

My understanding: Decriminalization is more sweepingly favorable to freedom for sex workers. Legalization tends to involve a lot of regulations. It is sometimes no better for sex workers than criminalizing it.

Decriminalization seems to be about making as few laws as possible concerning the matter. Legalization involves writing a bunch of laws about what you can and cannot do.

Based on the opinions of sex worker and political activist Dolores French, I have long been for decriminalization. If a legal adult wishes to take money for sexual services, I don't see why anyone should care.

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You have this the wrong way round. Legalisation _does_ involve bringing something into the same set of regulations that applies to everything else, and that's a good thing. However, when we speak of "decriminalising" something, we usually mean removing criminal penalties for something that can still be against the law, and can still result in fines and other penalties. This means that the industry remains underground, which is usually worse for all involved. See the links I gave upthread for citations and the NZ context.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/differ...

Some clarification: under legalisation, sex work is controlled by the government and is legal only under certain state-specified conditions. Decriminalisation involves the removal of all prostitution-specific laws, although sex workers and sex work businesses must still operate within the laws of the land, as must any businesses.

Well, I can't speak for the New Statesman, but that's just not what decriminalisation means. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decriminalization

If a legal adult wishes to take money for their kidney, we certainly care.

You know, that totally makes sense to me. I would hate to see poor people parted out because selling pieces of their body seemed like a good idea at the time.

I don't see any relevance to sex work though.

It's an industry that's shown demonstrable, long term harm for short term benefits?

https://www.collegium.ethz.ch/fileadmin/autoren/pdf_papers/1... http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/FarleyVAW.pdf

Like the repetitive strain injury I got during the first dot com boom that I have never recovered from?

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