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Comment by only_as_i_fall | Hacker News Reader

I think the discourse around prostitution laws sometimes gets confused.

In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible.

I guess to be specific I think the police trying to expand anti-pimping laws to classify anyone who does business with a prostitute as a pimp are clearly detrimental to the well being of sex workers, but I don't think laws which discourage men from buying sex to begin with are necessarily more harmful than helpful.

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> In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted. This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible.

And that makes the police behavior in the OP make much more sense: the goal of legalized prostitution (and criminalizing all related activities) wasn't to make sex work legal, it was only to reduce the leverage traffickers have over the trafficked.

Right, but clearly in some cases (if this post is accurate) the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again.

It's a tough problem...

> the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers

The OP isn't describing sex workers being "terrorized," it's describing people not wanting to associate with them because of the legal peril of supporting prostitution.

> which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again.

I don't see any incentive for these women to go "underground" because they are in no legal peril themselves. The simple solution the ostracism is to stop being a prostitute and get a different job, which is probably what the law was intended to encourage.

> It's a tough problem...

The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation. The key seems to be a broad interpretation of what "profiting from prostitution" is, so landlords, hotels, boyfriends, etc. won't want to take the risk. That replaces the legal pressure to get prostitutes to stop with social pressure.

>I don't see any incentive for these women to go "underground" because they are in no legal peril themselves.

Sure no legal peril, but if a sex worker does come forward to the police about an abusive John or a pimp she risks being kicked out of her home, locked out of her bank account and having her family and friends harassed by police.

This creates a strong disincentive to get help from authorities, which seems like exactly the barrier legalization efforts aim to eliminate.

Tell me you're missing the point without telling me you're missing the point.

>The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation.

Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap.

I think you're missing the point. There appears to be no aboveboard legal prostitution in Sweden, nor is that what the law envisions. Rather all prostitution involves someone committing a crime (the John), and the law has chosen to not directly punish one party because that leads to undesirable outcomes in cases where that party wasn't willing participating.

There is no trap, if you don't break the law, and don't help other people break the law, then you aren't involved in the industry at all.

I'm not going to take a position on whether or not prostitution should be legal, but pretending that prostitution is currently completely legal when it always involves a crime doesn't seem like a good argument.

> Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap for women.

How does this create a trap, when a trafficked women can always run to the police and get everyone who tried to exploit them arrested, without being in any legal peril themselves?

that isn't how it works. any police interaction is fraught with legal peril.

nwsp has a report on harms involved with this model of prohibition

https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/4.%20Impacts%20of%...

occasionally there are news stories about particularly bad travesties of this kind of prohibition

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ireland-migr...

one thing to keep in mind is that many people cannot seek help from the police. people who are victims to forced labor are often in a complex legal situation created or exploited by the perpetrators. undocumented people, the most vulnerable victims of trafficking, risk being arrested and deported if they seek help. this may destroy lives, separate families, render people homeless, or deliver refugees back to their peril.

the only way to reduce this kind of exploitation is to legalize and proliferate good options that don't exploit people, and provide social support services to vulnerable people that do not involve law enforcement, so it becomes not easy or profitable to exploit people.

> one thing to keep in mind is that many people cannot seek help from the police. people who are victims to forced labor are often in a complex legal situation created or exploited by the perpetrators.

I mean, isn't that the exact problem that structuring prostitution laws in this way solves?

> undocumented people, the most vulnerable victims of trafficking, risk being arrested and deported if they seek help.

Illegal immigration is separate legal issue from prostitution, and issues caused by it won't get solved by normalizing prostitution.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between legalizing prostitution and normalizing it. It's quite clear this Swedish model does the former without doing the latter, in order to solve a specific legal dilemma. That's still going to irk those who really want the latter.

That's a good point, but if the government is going to do that they should be above board about it.

Presumably the law was sold to the public and legislators as applying to pimping under the everyday definition. Calling everything pimping is abusing the law, just like in the US where calling everything interstate commerce so that the Federal government can control it is abusing the law.

And if you passed law A, you shouldn't get to interpret it as law B and say that that's okay because law B is a tidy solution to a problem.

I don't think it's the case that prostitution is a social negative. Has anyone shown that?

I think your last paragraph relies on the concept that all sex workers are always victims and no one else (the buyers, coworkers etc) is ever a victim.

That really can't be true in practice. So we need a more nuanced approach.

We know that sex workers are frequent victims of violence rape and even murder as well as being at a much higher risk of catching stds or having unwanted pregnancies.

People argue about these specific numbers because frankly it's a hard population to get honest surveys of, but here's one I found.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9698636/

>As adults in prostitution, 82% had been physically assaulted; 83% had been threatened with a weapon; 68% had been raped while working as prostitutes;

...

>Eighty-eight percent of these respondents stated that they wanted to leave prostitution, and described what they needed in order to escape.

If those numbers are even close to reality I think it's hard to argue that the negatives of prostitution don't far outweigh any positives.

That said I think it's not at all obvious what the solution is here because clearly criminalizing prostitution is ineffective at eliminating prostitution.

Don't those stats only prove that criminalized prostitution is a negative? I expect you'd have a huge differential if you took similar stats from people selling weed in a place that strictly enforces a ban vs a place where it is legal and regulated. Probably not when it comes to rape, but violent/armed encounters are probably negligible for a legal weed shop, but common in an underground industry. Naturally, in the latter case, people would overwhelmingly want to get out, not because of the job itself, but the opportunists that crop up due to the lack of legal oversight.

Sure, but while there is evidence that less abuse and trafficking occurs where prostitution is legal (which is why I do generally support legalization) I think it's clear that it doesn't eliminate it.

I wasn't able to find any stats on violence in a country where it is both legal and normalized, but I did find this paper by a doctor of psychology about the trafficking and abuses that still occur under the German system.

https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol3/iss3/5/

I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but it seems like in many ways the legalization and normalization of prostitution has both failed to protect sex workers from violence and has normalized the trafficking and pimping of these women.

That article seems to be an anecdotal story from a single person. Sad, but hard to point at it as support for or against legalization without being able to show that similar cases are more common under one system than the other.

Sadly, people with mental health issues and difficult families being preyed upon by abusers is common, even here in the US.

> This doesn't mean that prostitution isn't still a negative and that we shouldn't try to eliminate it where possible.

Why?

Because it's extremely harmful to sex workers and many (perhaps a majority) of those who do it would prefer not to but lack the tools or support network to make a change.

What's the positive to society that justifies how frequently these women get robbed, assaulted, and raped?

"People routinely attack this group, QED we should ban this group" is odd logic. Lumber workers have the highest fatality rate of any profession in the US, at 1-in-1,000, should we also ban them? When queer people get attacked by homophobes, should we ban them from being queer?

Why is prostitution a different situation than those?

And how much of the violence against them is because they've been ostracized and routinely lack legal protections?

Is it really better for society that people who do prostitution to avoid starving to death... instead starve to death?

If you really believe people only do sex work because they lack the tools for something else, why not give them those tools instead of removing what little they already have? If your theory is correct, no one will decline these better tools; and anyone who does decline is reasonable evidence that your theory was wrong and sex work isn't actually intrinsically harmful.

Certainly, there are nations that legalize prostitution without falling in to anarchy and violence, and I don't just mean the Swedish model.

> In my view, the main reason for making prostitution legal is to allow victims of trafficking and sex crimes to seek justice against their abusers without themselves being prosecuted.

Yes that is precisely why it's not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, only to buy it. There is no need to allow the buying part, or pimping. The Reddit post is mostly bogus except for outlining the law in the first paragraph.

I mean come on, a landlord not allowing people to use his building as a private brothel isn't "a witchhunt".

Why do you think paying for sex is a negative that should be eliminated?

It's male chauvinism, abuse and oppression of women. As long as buying a woman just to exploit her body sexually is normalized we will never reach equality. The few happy sex workers that truly think they are not abused are not worth the enormous negative effects prostitution has on society.

Sounds like a lot of projection and presumption, combined with a complete dismissal of male sex work. I would argue that as long as people like you assume a woman con't control her own body without it being "exploited" or "oppressed", we will never reach equity.

I also believe in work safety laws that prohibit workers from operating machinery for 14 hours straight or climbing radio antenna without any kind of safety equipment. I fail to see how that's fine but laws about selling sex are somehow in violation of these worker's agency.

You really don't understand the difference between a safety regulation and a moral regulation? Or do you think sex work is intrinsically dangerous and prostitutes might fall to their death due to a lack of safety gear?

Prostitution is intrinsically dangerous and prostitutes are significantly more likely to die than any other workers. This isn't counting the incredibly high rates of physical violence and rape they face.

I have never once heard about this: what exactly are the intrinsic dangers of prostitution that make it so much less safe than being a lumberjack?

"I fail to see how that's fine but laws about selling sex are somehow in violation of these worker's agency."

You don't understand how limits on some types of work are different from a comprehensive prohibition on other types of work? I don't beleive you.

I don't see how banning prostitution isn't merely a limit on the kinds of sex work you can perform.

The distinction is arbitrary.

> It's male chauvinism, abuse and oppression of women

Do you think all sex workers identify as female?

> As long as buying a woman just to exploit her body sexually is normalized we will never reach equality

How is it any different from any other industry? What's the difference between paying someone to massage your scalp because it feels good and paying them to massage your genitalia because it feels good? For that matter, how is it any different to any job at all? Is a person being paid to restock shelves being hired for their holistic personhood? We're "exploiting" their body for their ability to lift items onto shelves. How are sexual skills any different from any other skill which we employee people for?

> The few happy sex workers that truly think they are not abused are not worth the enormous negative effects prostitution has on society.

Right, those sex workers are so dumb they don't even know of they're happy or not.

Not all sex workers are women but an overwhelming majority of them are and those that are women or trans are much more likely to face violence especially at the hands of men.

This is clearly a gender specific problem despite your desire to frame it otherwise.

As to your second point, we often hire underage people to do work such as restocking shelves. If sex work is truly the same as retail work would you also argue that hiring an underage prostitute is no different than when Walmart hires a 15 year old to push carts? If not, what's the difference?

We don't allow 15 year olds to sell alcohol, why would we allow them to sell sex? I'm sure one doesn't have to stretch far to find other examples of professions we don't generally let 15 year olds engage in - you don't seriously think a 15 year old cop with a gun is okay, do you? Or a 15 year old soldier on the front lines? Are you okay with a 15 year old doing your next heart surgery?

This is clearly a situation that society knows how to handle via a fairly wide variety of methods and control systems.

A 15 year old can't be a surgeon because they can't perform surgery. This is a false equivalence.

> As to your second point, we often hire underage people to do work such as restocking shelves. If sex work is truly the same as retail work would you also argue that hiring an underage prostitute is no different than when Walmart hires a 15 year old to push carts? If not, what's the difference?

I don't find this argument compelling. Are you saying that the only professions that are morally permissible are those that we would allow fifteen-year-olds to do? We don't allow them to bartend, drive trucks, nor be members of the US Senate, but I find it silly to think that fact makes those professions particularly immoral. 15 year olds aren't even allowed to work 40 hour weeks in most countries.

And, to answer your question, I think the answer is that the fifteen-year-old is not sexually nor emotionally mature enough to engage in prostitution. (Just like they are not mature enough to serve alcohol or drive, whereas they are likely emotionally mature enough to push carts.) They're below the legal age of consent by three years, for goodness' sake! Advocating for legalized and regulated prostitution is not equivalent to advocating for pedophilia, and I find the equivalence you've drawn troubling.

I'm not arguing that prostitution should be illegal because it is immoral (I don't even think it shouldbe illegal), I'm arguing that clearly sex is different than every other activity we engage in and its simply incorrect to pretend that having sex with someone is the same thing as scanning their groceries.

The market is men, the workers are not specifically women

Why do you view prostitution as a negative? The only argument I've heard against prostitution that's remotely convincing is that outlawing it reduces sex trafficking. But it sounds like you're acknowledging that outlawing sex work doesn't help trafficking victims and still think it's bad anyway.

Because it seems almost impossible to design a system where women aren't being abused as prostitutes. Prostitutes are routinely assaulted raped robbed and murdered even in places where prostitution is legal.

Also I think as a society we treat sex as different from other activities in a way that isn't really compatible with legal sex work.

For example, if some manager asks the intern to pick up their Dry cleaning as part of their job, some people might frown upon that but I don't think many people think the intern is being wronged or if they are that it isn't really a big deal.

On the other hand, if a manager asks his intern to have sex with him, I think most people agree that this should be illegal and that the manager in question is abusing his power, even if having sex with the manager was listed as a job requirement.

But if your job is only to have sex...suddenly it's ok again.

You can argue that we should treat sex as a normal activity like driving someone around or picking up groceries for them, but currently in society we treat sexual consent differently to prevent these power imbalances and pressured sex in the workplace, and I don't think that treatment is consistent with the sentiment of "sex work is just work"

Why do you think that prostitution has to mean that the prostitute's manager would be able to force them to have sex with him? Couldn't we have a form of prostitution where the prostitutes have sex with clients while still be protected from their bosses by normal workplace protections?

> to prevent these power imbalances and pressured sex in the workplace

The power imbalances and pressures are the same for picking up dry cleaning.

Sexual consent is treated differently because of how the laws shaped our views of prostitution. If prostitution, legally speaking, becomes a normal job like serving ice cream or sweeping the floor, then your sideline example naturally follows and is not some kind of exceptional case.

But is that a world you want to live in? Where your wife or girlfriend is sleeping with her boss to ensure she gets a favorable raise and that's just considered part of being a woman?

You are conflating sex work between a sex worker and their client, and sex between a boss and their employees. Most of your comments are conflating sex work, and sexual abuse. These are two different issues, and the data shows decriminalizing all parts of sex work, both buying and selling is the most effective way to make sex work a safer occupation.

If that’s the job she wants to do, it is certainly not my place to dictate her choices. It’s not the 1950s anymore.

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