I am not sure if it is really that clear cut. Germany has pretty liberal laws around prostitution and there are massive problems with human trafficking. Many women do not do the work out of their own volition.
Through my last job for over a decade I had access to thousands of sex workers, many in Germany. I will attest, on everything I own, not a single one was doing it against her will.
I do not doubt there are some being forced, but this idea that it’s a large percentage… I can not get behind. I’ve been on the inside and never saw anything remotely like it. And since I wasn’t a client I spoke openly with the girls and discussed things like this with them. Most were from Eastern Europe and we’re just stacking cash.
The Philippines I came across some questionable stuff, but that was due to extreme poverty. South and Central America were not quite as above board as Europe. Frankly, America is the worst, and that’s why Americans have these strange overly negative views of sex work. Our laws make it dangerous and thus dangerous people are attracted to it.
Clamping down on sex workers as described in the Reddit post makes human trafficking more likely, though, as victims of it can't trust the authorities will help them.
According to the data we have, that is not true. From Harvard Law School [1]:
> Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.
There's a lot more nuance to it if you read the article or the actual study. I am in general for legalizing sex work, but if we want to protect sex workers we can't pretend legalization is a panacea.
That paper relies on some pretty dodgy data to reach its conclusion. Basically the UN's subjective classification is used unquestionably as the measure of human trafficking data. Just to be clear, it's not using objective data or accounting for the mis-measurement problem between legal and illegal countries.
Based on the dataset the study uses to reach its conclusions the US, Japan, and Israel are considered "very high trafficking" countries. Whereas Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Moldova are classified "very low trafficking". Does anybody in their right mind honestly think human trafficking is less of a problem in Sudan than Japan?
With that kind of dataset, you can reach any kind of conclusion you want. Garbage in, garbage out.
This is out of date. Working conditions are also better in Germany, and could stand to keep improving.
EDIT: here are some recent improvements in Germany according to the wiki: The Criminal Code was amended in October 2016 to criminalise clients of trafficked or coerced prostitutes. This change was led by Social Democrat Eva Högl.
The Prostituiertenschutzgesetz (Prostitutes Protection Act) came into force in July 2017. Amongst the provision of the Act are registration of prostitutes, annual health checks and mandatory condom use. Brothel operators also need to register and prove their 'good conduct' before registration. The legislation also places restrictions on advertising. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Germany#Legal_...
As patrons stick with the well-regulated outlets, they won't fund the competing mob-controlled ones, and trafficking will slow. The conditions were just too easy to exploit at the outset.
Feel free to respond with a more recent study! I would be very happy to be proven wrong here.
Response to edit: I’m glad Germany is making progressive changes, but I’d like to see data (or at least firsthand anecdotes) that the amended laws are working as intended.
Legalization may not be a panacea. But the alternative is criminalization, and that is far far worse. Criminalizing prostitution guarantees a bad outcome for the affected prostitutes.
It’s not a binary issue. My point is that your argument can’t end at “criminalizing sex workers is bad!” That’s true, but there are many aspects to that, as well as adjacent issues like the ability to obtain health insurance. The Reddit post we’re discussing is a perfect example of how
myopic “legalization” can be insufficient to actually protect sex workers.
It is a binary issue. Legalisation of prostitutes and customers (and supporting businesses like brothels) is a necessary prerequisite to actually protect prostitutes. Otherwise there will always be at least one party in a situation where its best interest is to hide everything and cover up things.
Alcohol is legal but there are restrictions on selling, serving and possessing it. Speeding and murder are both illegal but the punishment and enforcement of them are vastly different. Sex work and human trafficking are complicated, intertwined issues with many moving pieces and it doesn’t help the discussion to oversimplify them like this.
I think it is very difficult to compare stats between countries where prostitution is legal and countries where it is not. The linked article is light on details whether this is accounted for or not.
I wouldn't want a neighbor operating a business that attract people, same as an hotel owner or guest. Criminalizing the owners is a step too far, I agree.
Filming arrests? they also film traffic offenders and other crimes, the names remain confidential until the trial though
Banks are worried to be involved in sex trafficking businesses, they don't have the tools to evaluate the legality of such a business so they simply ban all prostitutes. Similar rules apply BTW to large cash deposits or even unordinary sales of jewelry.
I couldn't find anything in Swedish prohibiting (explicitly or implicitly) being a spouse to a prostitute, unless of course if said spouse advertised her services which is illegal
TLDR; Sweden took it a bit too far maybe, but they also regulate alcohol sales so it makes sense.
Personally? I don't care too much, unless (and I haven't checked) someone can prove to me that legalizing prostitution can help reduce violence, rape etc in some way. I have the same opinion about legalizing some drugs- if the damages if significantly smaller then the benefit than why not?
To add to this, it's important to understand that there's the law, then there's the mythology surrounding the law. People rarely read the actual statues but rather rely on a sort of word of mouth heuristic transfer. Think adoption of GDPR, there's the actual text, then there's the cargo culting around cookie banners. Similarly patent trolls. The law is cut and dry but the internet of alight with stories about how someone in the wrong won buy having more money.
People routinely build models on what prosecutors will pursue and what kinds of violations will be successfully punished and these will frequently be orthogonal to the laws text. See any US discussion online about the ATF for instance.
If people believe of can be made to believe they will be prosecuted for doing something that isn't illegal then it's just as illegal as if it actually was.
Sex workers are not made criminally liable in Sweden. All the Reddit post is saying is that outside people will not want to be associated with their business - which makes sense if every sex worker might possibly be a trafficked sex slave and no one can feasibly tell the difference beyond reasonable doubt.
Again, that's the point - that not being criminally liable doesn't prevent the authorities from treating them like criminals and making their lives difficult.
Ah, but are the authorities treating them like criminals or possible sex slaves? The Reddit post doesn't give any evidence for the former over the latter.
#6 is simply a bank protecting itself, how would they differentiate a legal sex worker from a human trafficker? maybe in a country where some kind of prostitution is allowed they could show a certificate but not in Sweden.
#4 is simply a fulfilling what the law and the government meant, prostitution is illegal and the best way to catch the offenders is waiting for them outside of the business.
You can't have a bank account if you have too many unexplained, to the bank, companies or branches in "not so nice" places. Hell, as a newcomer to Sweden you can't have a bank account until you have a personal number even though it is not necessary or legal to refuse.
Police are not sitting outside anyone's house, they do detain sex buyers from time to time and the most sensible place to do that is outside of the business
Their clients are tho. So going to police endangers clients, so prostitute have to be reallu careful about it. Cause that sounds like sure way to loose clients.
Yes, I don't think the "Nordic model" is a good final answer. But I am not sure if there are more problems with human trafficking in Sweden than in Germany (of course geography plays a role, too).
What if legalizing prostitution has the secondary effect of greatly increasing the amount human trafficking, which the previous poster seems to be suggesting is the case in Germany? Wouldn’t making prostitution legal be the opposite of working on human trafficking then?
Address the actual crime, and not the result of a part of society.
Would you also like fast food and sugar-filled foods to be made illegal because they directly lead to millions of early deaths and cost large amounts of money to healthcare?
If the result of banning unhealthy fast food is the saving of millions lives and massive healthcare cost reduction then I would support it. I assume different, necessarily healthier, restaurants would fill the void, so they wouldn’t be missed.
I’m not sure why you would think otherwise. You’re talking to someone who clearly prioritizes personal agency less than overall well-being or positive outcome in certain cases.
Human trafficking is it's own problem, it's a constant. It would be rendered a moot point if laws were permissive enough to allow sex workers to organize in such a way that they could operate under high quality conditions, e.g. reputable brothels.
The foreign mob who traffics would then have to compete with institutions that have a reputation among the populace for good working conditions.
The issues surrounding drugs are similar. Narco states and mob control don't disappear overnight from legalization, but the increase in legitimate avenues takes over their market share over time.
Even in countries were laws are relatively more permissive, operations are relegated to the streets, and the Nordic Model has resulted in terrible working conditions.
Of course there's still a black market for marijuana. There's a black market for tobacco and liquor too. But it will be reduced to a specter of what it was.
> Human trafficking is it's own problem, it's a constant.
This isn't necessarily true though. Research has shown that increasing legalization for sex work leads to both more "reputable" sex work and more sex trafficking.
The research doesn't show that it "scales" with legalization, it shows that quasi-legalization results in more increases in traffic than full prohibition. That's not surprising.
If it’s not surprising why do you seem so confident that legalizing prostitution is the best idea? It sounds like in the less than ideal world we live in it’s likely to lead to more human trafficking, and more negative situations for women generally.
Because full legalization would allow for stronger regulation and protections that would disincentivize patronizing of trafficked prostitution.
We can plainly see the advantage with drugs, it's the same thing. At the outset, decriminalization of marijuana increases trafficking from the underworld in the short-run. Legalization eventually leads to a regulated market that circumvents illegal channels, and decimates their market share. This is beginning to be the case with marijuana.
There's no reason to believe it would be any different for sex work. Germany unveiled new regulations just a few years ago, stay tuned for new statistics this decade.
I am not sure if it is really that clear cut. Germany has pretty liberal laws around prostitution and there are massive problems with human trafficking. Many women do not do the work out of their own volition.