What should the legal status of prostitution be?

Government oversight of prostitution would improve all outcomes

Question: What should the legal status of prostitution be?
Position‹3 of 4›: Prostitution should be legalised
Argument: Government oversight of prostitution would improve all outcomes

The legalisation of prostitution ensures Governments can regulate prostitution to reduce social ills.

The argument

Legalisation is defended here as a means of bringing an existing activity within reach of the state. The approach is taken in order to preserve the rights of sex workers while trying to decrease certain negative effects of prostitution, and it works by replacing prohibition with a set of legal parameters within which the activity may take place. The first consequence concerns rights. Sex workers operating legally can be provided with services unavailable to anyone whose work is itself an offence: unionisation, which allows them to set terms collectively rather than individually, and police protection, which allows them to report violence against them without the report incriminating them. Both depend on the worker not being punished for the work, which is what staying within the designated legal parameters as dictated by the government secures. The second concerns harms that prohibition leaves unaddressed. Because the activity is visible to the state rather than hidden from it, the government can regulate and oversee prostitution: conditions can be inspected, requirements imposed and health measures applied. This is the route by which the spread of sexually transmitted infections can be reduced, and by which associated crime can be brought down, since an activity conducted openly under rules does not depend on the informal and unaccountable arrangements that illegality forces it into. The two effects reinforce one another. Workers who can call on the police are harder to exploit, and an industry that is overseen is one in which harms can be identified and acted on rather than only suspected. Both follow from the same change, which is that the activity ceases to be something the state can only punish and becomes something it can supervise, keeping sex workers safer. Because government oversight of prostitution would improve all these outcomes, prostitution should be legalised.

Context

The practice of legalisation can encompass all manner of laws to regulate prostitution, such as permitted locations and advertising laws. This means that each government can individually decide the parameters within which they will allow prostitution.

Premises

[P1]Legalising prostitution lets the government regulate and oversee it rather than driving it underground. [P2] Oversight can preserve sex workers' rights through services like unionisation and police protection. [P3] It can also reduce negative effects such as crime and the spread of sexually transmitted infections by setting legal parameters sex workers stay within. [C] Therefore, prostitution should be legalised because government oversight would improve all outcomes.

Counter-arguments

By overseeing its legalisation, the state is sanctioning prostitution and profiting off of it. This prioritises the consumer over the prostitute’s health and safety. A It is also not a given that the state will be able to dictate policies that will protect sex workers, listen to sex workers when producing policies, or indeed have sex worker’s best interests at heart. Sex workers may have to continue working under criminal conditions if they are unable to meet state requirements.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The state does not necessarily know how best to protect sex workers.