What's the advantage to keeping that illegal?
Demand doesn't evaporate because you declare it to be illegal. The sellers will still need to accomodate their buyers who - not wanting to be arrested - will prefer buying in areas where enforcement is lax with all the increased risk that entails.
Very similar to decriminalizing possession of drugs, or buying of drugs, but not the selling of drugs... Buyers are frequently victims of addiction, and ruining their life with criminal charges doesn't help them break the cycle
The bill is not about trying to adjust the market, or to allow/accept prostitution, but to help victims of the trade.
If their goal is to protect victims then full legalization goes even further than this half-measure.
This statement has the same fallacy that the following statement does: "Keeping child labor illegal means children will choose to work in places where they feel less safe from the law. This will make young children who feel they have no choice but to work in a factory operate in a less safe environment."
The very fact that a certain choice is legal increases the economic incentives to pressure people into making that choice; in contrast, removing a choice by making it illegal incentivizes employers to offer alternate choices that are potentially less exploitative. When child labor is illegal, employers are incentivized to pay their workers a high enough wage to support the whole family without children having to work. When the option of child labor is taken off the table, workers end up in a better negotiating position.
The same is true of prostitution. When people can make money legally off of prostitution, they will be incentivized to go into the prostitution business and hire prostitutes. When they can't do that, they will be incentivized to go into a different line of work, and create employment opportunities for women that are less inherently exploitative.
>Inherently exploitative
Ah here we go. The real crux... moralism. It's exploitation at any price even if a fully capable adult makes the choice.
The parent comment is saying that if prostitution is legal but hiring prostitutes is not, then people will only hire prostitutes in areas where law enforcement is weak.
A comparable analogy would be that if laboring as a child is not criminally illegal (which it is not) but hiring children as laborers is illegal (which it is), then the people that hire child laborers will be doing so in areas where law enforcement is weak.
This seems to be both a pretty apt analogy, and also seems to be clearly true in the child labor case.
It's harder to combat rape when you have to meet client in a more secret place, and when you can't take a photo of client's id. So no, in fact actual sex workers hate nordic model since it pushes them towards more precarious position while declaring the opposite.
But the nordic model is better that the criminalization of sex workers imho.
By making the purchaser the criminal, you now have the additional problem of forcing sellers to take steps to assure their buyers safety, which would include keeping silent about the majority of what they do.
The solution is to decriminalise the transaction, not to decriminilise one party to the transaction.
It's the modern puritanism. They want to stop sales of sex.
"Because human trafficking" is their equivalent of "think of the children". Their stated reasons is not their reasons, its to shutdown discussion by shaming anyone who doesn't feel that selling of sex should be criminalised.
Usually prostitutes are women and buyers are men. So they legalized the part where there are more women. That's either because women have more sympathy from society or for ideological reasons. Fixing crime was way below those reasons on those politicians priorities.