Legalising sex work opens the door for loopholes relating to sex trafficking and exploitation

The argument

The objection raised here is not to the people who sell sex but to the breadth of the category that decriminalisation would cover, and to what the evidence shows happens to trafficking when the market is made legal. The definitional point comes first. The term 'sex worker', coined in the 1980s, includes pimps and pornographers as well as those who sell sex. A law that decriminalises sex work therefore does not only remove penalties from the person selling; it also legalises the activities of pimps, who are historically known to traffic and exploit prostitutes. The protection intended for the person selling sex is extended by the same legal change to those who organise and profit from the trade. Experience is said to bear this out. Where sex work has been legalised, as in New Zealand, the benefits have accrued more to brothel owners and buyers than to the prostitutes themselves. The pattern of who campaigns for what is offered as corroboration: full decriminalisation has been observed to be campaigned for mostly by pimps and by men who buy sex, while prostitutes are more likely to argue for partial decriminalisation — a narrower change that stops short of legalising the whole trade. The trafficking evidence completes the case. According to a study, countries with legalised prostitution had a higher trafficking inflow than countries that prohibit it. The mechanism given is that legalisation expands the market, and that this expansion effect outweighs the substitution effect by which legal sex workers are favoured over illegal ones. A larger legal market creates demand that the legal supply does not meet, and the shortfall is filled by trafficked women. On this reasoning, legalising sex work opens loopholes for trafficking and exploitation rather than closing them, and so sex work should not be decriminalised.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Legalizing prostitution does not mean there will be increased sex trafficking. A 2012 government-sponsored study for New South Wales, Australia, which decriminalized sex work in 1995, showed “no evidence of recent trafficking of female sex workers... in marked contrast to the 1990s when contacted women from Thailand were common in Sydney”. New Zealand legalized prostitution in 2003, and according to a 2008 study by the New Zealand Ministry of Justice, there has been “no incidence of trafficking.” Additionally, sex worker advocates say the law has made it easier for sex workers to report exploitation.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The definitional claim is false. 'Sex worker' was coined to refer to people who sell sexual services, and no decriminalisation proposal extends legal protection to coercion, trafficking or the exploitation of another person — those remain serious offences under every model, including New Zealand's. [Rejecting P2] New Zealand is a decriminalisation case, not a legalisation one, so it cannot be evidence against the very model it exemplifies. The counter-argument on record cites the Ministry of Justice's 2008 review, which reported no incidence of trafficking and found the law had made it easier for workers to report exploitation, and the New South Wales evaluation reaching a similar conclusion after decriminalisation in 1995. [Rejecting P3] The cross-national trafficking studies compare reported cases, and reporting is precisely what changes when the surrounding activity is lawful and workers can approach the authorities. A regime that makes trafficking more detectable will record more of it, which is why the authors of this literature treat their own inflow measures as unreliable. [Rejecting C] The claim about who campaigns for which model is asserted without a source and is contradicted by the position of sex worker-led organisations internationally, which have consistently sought full decriminalisation. The argument also runs legalisation and decriminalisation together throughout, and its objections — brothel owners profiting, market expansion, licensing loopholes — are objections to the licensed-brothel model that decriminalisation rejects.