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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

> Making prostitution illegal is what drives a huge part of that human trafficking.

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.

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Sweden's "Nordic Model" is absolutely not backed my empirical evidence either. One crucial flaw discovered was that it has simply cut off one primary reporting mechanism for discovering trafficking: the customers!

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.

AFAIK the group that allegedly gets protected by the Swedish system - the Swedish sex-workers - are overwhelmingly against that system.

Many of the strongest advocates for this system are former sex workers, who have recognised the abuse they were subjected to during that time and seek to protect others from the same.

No doubt, the sex workers that are not trafficked and exploited see it as bad for business because they are forced to compete harder for a smaller market.

Protecting the business interests of prostitutes is a lower priority than minimizing abusive sex trafficking.

> "This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking"

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.

"Demand minimizaton" ia a fancy term for "restricting human rights"

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?

The idea that there exists a human right to purchase sex, i.e, to take advantage of your economic position in order to make use of other people's bodies for personal gratification, and that that's something promoting health, is a probably a soft form of sociopathy.

"Human right" may be a bit extreme, but what about the myriad other ways we "take advantage of [our] economic position to make use of other people's bodies"? Am I a sociopath if I get a massage? A manicure? Hire movers to take my couch down the stairs?

If not, what makes selling sex different?

I think you read the comment the wrong way.

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.

If someone wants to have sex with you, for any reason other than you defrauding them or threatening to violate their rights, and someone else uses the threat of violence to prevent them from having sex with you, that violates both of your human rights, according to any definition of human rights grounded in bodily autonomy and free association.

Sweden has all the wrong solutions to society's problems which they export world wide as the "Swedish Model".

They got COVID right

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