There is absolutely no empirical evidence for this - as it happens, a live social experiment is taking place in Europe. The trafficking networks in the East kicked into overdrive to supply the needs of the German and Belgian legal or gray brothels.
There is only one policy that works, demand minimization by outlawing payment for sex. This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking, while the "Legalize it" group of countries saw it explode. The data speaks for itself.
That "solution" may help with trafficking, but hasn't solved the issues of:
* right to pursue a living wage wity honest work
* right to pursue sexual health
Farming and manufacturing also have trafficking problems. Should it be illegal to pay for cars and food?
If not, what makes selling sex different?
No one should have the right to purchase any arbitrary person for sexual gratification. It should be my right to bodily autonomy, and I should be able to accept money for work that involves my body.
As a carpenter, I can accept money and in exchange, do work that is tough on my body and will have long-term physical effects. I should be able to also accept money in exchange for using my own body for to sexually gratify someone (I'm certainly allowed to do it free).
The right we should have is the right to decide how our body is used, not how we can use the body of someone else.
The (local government) departments that work with helping sex workers should be very glad to hear this since they have been quite overworked since covid. If the issue is largely solved they can move workers away from that and focus on other forms of trafficking.
But I do not believe the claim that Sweden has largely solved the issue of trafficking. Looking at the most recent published information from BRÅ (the government department for research and development within the judicial system), the amount of prostitution has increased significant and reached the highest ever peak last year (https://bra.se/download/18.146acb6517fd55784012735/165580083... page 30). The problem seem to have significant grown and is continuing growing.
Feel free to overlay statistics from Germany or Belgium if you want to provide evidence that their model is somehow worse. The complains I hear from Belgium is mostly about how the housing situation around the red street districts has become too expensive, and that people who lives there are tired of the tourism.
Now, customers can't admit to having been there at all, and so won't report their perception or what they were explicitly told by the sex worker.
This is ironic as your belief is based on the issue of trafficking being solved because you don't hear the reports or the stats dropped.
> The data speaks for itself.
Hysterical. It should be criminal that even sex work advocates in the US are attempting to recreate Sweden's model based on this flawed view. The unsaid reality is that people just aren't comfortable with how normal the consumers of sex work are, and don't want to find out that it isn't an antisocial "other".
Sex work is a labor rights issue. Sex trafficking is a labor rights issue just like labor trafficking is a labor rights issue. One that has nothing to do with punitive or criminal measures of the laborers or consumers, only the traffickers. Normalizing both the supply and the demand side in conjunction with increased avenues for labor assistance is the most holistic solution.
In many countries the work itself is legal, but you find such fun twists as:
"You have to operate using cash because banks won't work with you because its legal in Your City/State but not at a State/Federal/National level above that",
"You're not allowed to register as a business and subject to substantial tax penalties",
"Individuals are allowed to do it, but its illegal for a multiple people to organise and work together as a business",
"Your allowed to do it, but only inside your own property, as its illegal for rented commercial or residential property to knowingly provide you such a premises"
... Generally speaking its more common that you find its a case of "It's legal for you the human individual to get paid to have sex, but... not legal to X, Y, or Z" which is how for every step forward, people in this line of work continue to face persecution. Its also sadly one of the ways this the progress gets made, by wheeling and dealing in politics, so they get the legalising change done, but had to trade away any measures that protect worker rights, or changes to decriminalise working as a business together, or to operate a dedicated premises... there's usually one or more catches left over by all the compromise needed to get any movement on the core issue... and so people look at it and go "what's the problem, its legal isn't it?"... to which the response is "well yes... but..." ... And most people have already tuned out before they finish the word "but".
So in this particular case, what do you mean by "human trafficking?"
Legalisation of pimping isn't necessary.
The purpose of law is to tame commercial activities for protection of its commerce and prosperity. By legalizing something that is a net social harm, giving it guiderails so that it can lead to more stability and profit, you have incentivized that harm to reproduce maliciously. It is like offering subsidies to fossil fuels. No, it is like putting regulations on fossil fuels and giving them legitimacy.
Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.
We put regulation on fossil fuels as a practical matter of recognizing the reality in which we operate, and the harms that will come to real people if we outlawed it without a viable solution to the rest of the problems that would create.
> Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.
This sounds nice, but the practical implications are that already disadvantaged people are further abused and taken advantage of. No one should want that type of system.
Disadvantaged people should be not in the porn industry for some wealthy person's self fulfillment. We call that abuse. And the wealthy should be penalized.