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Comment by backtoyoujim | Hacker News Reader

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Trafficking women for sex trade is essentially orthogonal to the degree of legality of a commercial sex trade; regardless of legality bad actors will seek to traffic sex workers for profit.

The experience in, say, Australia, is that bright lights cause cockroaches (sex trafficers) to scurry:

    A 2020 research on migration, sex work and trafficking showed that, due to the decriminalisation of sex work in some of its states and to a recent increase in work visa opportunities for sections of migrant sex workers, the numbers of human trafficking victims into the sex industry in Australia had dramatically decreased.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Australia

Criminalising activities doesn't magically make problems go away, it merely buries them and makes them easier to ignore.

    "Non-trafficked women in the sex industry have a real role to play in supporting trafficked women. Often they will be the only people trafficked women are in contact with who do not have a vested interest in maintaining their exploitation" (Maltzahn 2002a: 65). Yet all women in the sex industry suffer increased levels of rape and violence and are in need of support services. Research by the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria showed that respondents felt "out of touch with reality" and "different from other people, especially other women", with 64.2 per cent of women wanting to leave the industry (Noske and Deacon 1996: 11). According to Maltzahn, this means that, regardless of differing positions on prostitution, there is a need for greater outreach by services to women in the sex industry (Maltzahn 2002a).

https://aifs.gov.au/resources/practice-guides/trafficking-wo...

I could also force you to sell car parts by holding your parents at gunpoint. Yet here we are, with no mention of making selling car parts illegal. I wonder why? Coercion of service via threat of violence is already pretty illegal as far as I can tell.

Because sex, unlike car parts, is not a commodity that is bought and sold between rational economic actors. Sex is the most intimate of acts, the oldest and deepest animal instinct, and people will do things to satisfy their lust that they would never even consider in any other context. A marketplace for sex that doesn't abuse women cannot exist among homo sapiens; it's just not compatible with our nature. Many have tried, all have failed

Chimpanzees and Bonobos will trade sex for bananas. Sex is literally the first thing that was ever economically transacted.

I'd like to think human civilization could strive for a bar higher than chimpanzee.

I mean, a marketplace for anything that didn't at least discriminate against women hasn't existed longer than the last century or so. Appeals to nature always seem pretty flimsy to me, because everything is incompatible with nature, until one day it's not.

Sex was sold long before car parts.

Citation needed

Because plenty of people are willing and able to produce enough car parts to satisfy the demand at a price all parties agree too.

Sex work isn’t like selling car parts. To extend your analogy, the person selling the car part is the pimp and the car parts are women. The car parts don’t have feelings and their own desires, so you don’t have to force them to be sold.

What leads you to believe that there aren't enough women (and men!) who would be willing to sell sex if it were legal?

What's the federal interest rate? Minimum wage? Cost of living? Nothing drops panties like desperation!

this conflates sex trade and sex trafficking, a common thing to do but the trend actually is to listen to people that don't conflate that, so that they can treat the trafficking issue as the labor rights issue that it is. everyone wants harm reduction. criminalized prostitution under the veil of stopping trafficking does not do that. the opposite on the other hand allows labor organizations to continue to help workers with increased avenues for help.

"Sex trade that doesn't end up harming vulnerable women" does not exist, has never existed, and cannot exist. Many governments have tried, and failed, because it is entirely contrary to human nature. Sex is the most intimate of acts, our deepest and oldest animal instinct. It cannot be modeled as an economic commodity exchanged between rational market actors.

Exactly so.

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