An email from Samuel Lee:
…we take the liberty of sending you a link to the working paper:In the paper, we build on Edlund and Korn’s model of voluntary prostitution (JPE, 2002) to study the effect of prostitution laws. Our main results are as follows:
- Neither across-the-board legalization nor criminalization unambiguously reduces sex trafficking. The impact of either of these policies crucially depends on the incidence of voluntary prostitution, which in turn depends on other variables, such as the female-male income ratio.
- Even if across-the-board criminalization reduces sex trafficking, it comes at the expense of voluntary prostitutes, who prefer legalization. There is then an inherent conflict between safeguarding (the liberties of) voluntary prostitutes and preventing trafficking. (This conflict is borne out in recent public controversies about prostitution laws in Canada, France, and South Korea.)- Between different types of criminalization, criminalizing johns is preferable to criminalizing prostitutes. The former is more effective in combating sex trafficking than the latter. The latter is furthermore unjust towards trafficked prostitutes, who’d then be doubly victimized.Based on our analysis, we propose a different legal approach, which has so far not been tried by any country: criminalization of johns outside of a “safe harbor” for voluntary prostitution. To be more specific:- Licensed brothels and prostitutes (i.e., regulated brothels) combined with — and this is crucial — criminal penalties for johns who purchase sex outside of these brothels. This (i) discriminates between the two “modes of production” of commercial sex, voluntary sex work and trafficking, and (ii) funnels all demand to the desirable “mode.” Trivial as the idea may sound, this policy has the potential to achieve both objectives, safeguard voluntary sex work and prevent trafficking, and hence to reconcile the two sides of the debate.- There are implementation issues, but none that couldn’t be addressed. Point (i) requires effective background checks for the licensing procedures. It also requires monitoring of regulated brothels to ensure that only licensed prostitutes are employed there. Point (ii) requires undercover law enforcement (“fake illegal prostitutes”) to deter illegal purchases. And it requires severe penalties for illegal purchases — surveys suggest that the most effective one is public registries (shaming), which in this case is less of a moral statement about prostitution than about trafficking because buyers outside of the “safe harbor” would be aware that they very likely purchase sex from trafficking victims.- There are clearly costs of licensing and enforcing the laws against illegal purchases. It seems to us, however, that these costs might be lower than for alternative, less effective approaches — which include the costs of enforcing across-the-board criminalization of prostitution and/or law enforcement activities targeted directly at traffickers, who are notoriously hard to catch or convict.There are other questions regarding prostitution laws that we discuss in the paper, some of them call into question simple interpretations that are often made about empirical associations between domestic prostitution laws and the domestic incidence of trafficked prostitution. We hope that you find the paper interesting.
I found this wildly unconvincing but I nevertheless believe that MR readers deserve to know about it:
Scott A. Anderson (2002). Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy: Making Sense of the Prohibition of Prostitution. Ethics 112 (4):748-780.
If you propose to introduce this legislation, I believe it should be introduced by a Senator from Louisiana.
Since it involves a tax or a penalty for services purchased outside of the program,
It should be called
VitterCare.
I wonder if this model would be effective for drugs legalization (criminalize the buyers rather than the dealers).
I think we already criminalize buyers. The more apt fit is loansharking: we legalized car title and payday loans so desperate people don’t get kneecapped.
A follow-up study needs to be what happens to the players in the previously criminalized market. The repeal of Prohibition didn’t result in the Mafia setting up distilleries and vineyards.
Unless the Supreme Court of Canada agrees to hear the case, as of March 12, 2013, Canada will have no laws prohibiting prostitution behind closed doors. (The only law left standing after Bedford v. Canada in the Court of Appeal for Ontario is the communicating law, i.e. prohibiting soliciting on the street.)
Given that the federal government is going to have to come up with something to replace the former legal regime, I think this proposal is a perfectly adequate solution. I hope they think about it!
That said, what libertarians and economists often discount as a rationale is the “child” factor: “I want prostitution to be entirely illegal, as it sends a message to my teenage daughter that it is not acceptable.” Seriously, read the online user comments on any Globe & Mail article about the Bedford v. Canada trial and you’ll see that meme come up again and again. Same thing with drug laws – people think that it’s naive to make drugs legal for adults only, and want it to remain illegal in order to help parents keep drugs out of the hands of their teenage children. It takes a village, and all that.
It’s not entirely an invalid point. I think a lot of Internet Libertarians are single (and, anecdotally from here and Volokh Conspiracy, largely male), and have somewhat optimistic ideas about parents ability to control their children’s behaviour when the larger culture is pushing in a different direction. At the very least, if one wants libertarian ideas to gain traction, there has to be a better response to this concern than the knee-jerk “They’re your kids, you control them, they’re not my problem.”
Well, it’s not an invalid point GIVEN that you believe that prostitution is inherently immoral and you believe that it is a type of immorality the government should be free to criminalize. A lot of people arguing against this believe that one of those two statements is false. The other big reason is, like this paper and others show, that this point doesn’t have a lot of empirical support.
It’s not so simple. We restrict violence & nudity on daytime TV because of the child factor, but we don’t think those think that watching adult TV is inherently immoral.
So there is an inevitable question of balance. How much damage to the restrictions cause? How much difference does it actually make for the ability of parents to control their kids. etc.
We try to prevent many things for our kids that we don’t think of as immoral. Flunking out of school, for example.
Prostitution and drugs are sort of the same thing – whether or not you think they’re immoral, they’ll likely lead to a bad outcome for your kid. Although my guess is a rational parent ought to be more concerned about drugs than prostitution, I don’t really know the numbers. What is the probability a regular suburban kid is going to wind up in prostitution or develop a real drug problem? (I’m attempting to rule out pot here; I mean something likely to cause real problems. Personally, I’d be vastly more concerned finding a kid with oxycodone than marijuana.) I’d think a drug problem is a lot more likely, particularly with the relative ease of access to serious prescription painkillers. On that basis I’d expect parental concern for their own kids to drive their opinions on drugs, but maybe not on prostitution. If people were rational about this kind of thing…
Drugs and prostitution are somewhat linked – many women turn to prostitution to finance a drug habit. Others because they have child(ren) to support and can’t hold down a regular job and welfare is too stingy or difficult, or some combination of those factors.
The problem with licensing of brothels and prostitutes is that some women who are not pimped or trafficked will be unable or unwilling to obtain licenses, and will continue to work; as most of these will be at the streetwalker end of the market, this policy will not make a significant dent in one of the main social costs of prostitution.
Huh?
How would you establish empirically that prostitution is immoral and the government should be free to criminalize it?
Not that the paper, for all the nice equations, contains much in the way of empirical work.
I can see parents worrying about their daughter turning a few tricks for spending money far more than they worry about firing up the occasional joint if both were to be legalized. It doesn’t have to dominate your lifestyle in order to lead to bad outcomes.
Initially, I thought that the rebellion factor would counteract the legalization = legitimization factor. That is, teenagers are more likely to do something that they’re not allowed to do for apparently arbitrary reasons. But on further reflection, I don’t think that’s a valid argument in favor of legalizing prostitution. It makes rebellion through prostitution more likely: Since there wouldn’t be legal consequences to doing so, the primary consequence would be alienating your parents. Which is the point of rebelling in the first place.
The logical argument might be that if your daughter is the type to willingly have sex in a brothel, she’s also likely willing to be promiscuous elsewhere as well, and at least a brothel will be a physically safe environment. (Counter argument: stalkers. I’m fairly certain sex workers are more likely to be stalked than the general populace.) Are prostitutes in places where it’s legal more or less promiscuous than their non-professional peers outside of work? (There’s bound to be a bias towards promiscuity among people who self select into sex work, but I don’t see a lot of hope in explaining that to a father when talking about his daughter. Even if he accepts that reasoning, he has a valid counter argument that he wants to make it harder for her to follow through on those impulses which he feels are self destructive.) Of course, when you’re talking about unwanted behavior by someone’s daughter, the logical argument isn’t always the most effective argument.
Yeah, difficult issue. The best response I’m coming up with is “she’ll do it anyway, just with different people and for less profit.” I doubt that’s very convincing.
I think a possible way to curb the “I’m mad at my parents so I’m going to be a prostitute because there are no legal consequences” crowd is to keep public record of every girl who chooses to become certified, thereby creating a form of public shame. Maybe I read it wrong, or maybe I jumped a gap in my head, but any prostitute picked up working outside of a brothel should simply be offered an application for license or be charged upon refusal.
Did I miss what happens to denied applications?
Presumably the application would be permanently denied if the applicant, for example, has HIV, fails a drug test, or has a substantial criminal record. But that applicant still might want to work in the industry and may choose to defy the law. So you’re back to jailing the marginal people working in the industry because they’re putting others at risk. It would not surprise me if the minimal sort of restrictions that would go into a license would impact a significant fraction of workers, particularly at the low end.
If society is supposed to get any benefit from the license, it can’t just be a rubber stamp. Isn’t that sort of the point of a license? There would be no benefit from a simple registry, unless I’m missing something.
That’s something of a double standard.
Hopefully there will be public “john certifications” too, to ensure the client don’t have STDs or history of severe violence, for the safety of the prostitutes (I suppose they’d get a discount compared to non-certified johns). Oh, and to shame the young men who choose to engage in a perfectly legal system.
…why is nobody mentioning rent boys?!
I doubt that prostitutes would be more promiscuous (outside of work), because that would be “giving away the product”, rather than selling it for income.
A decade ago, I polled Canadians and 9/10 were unaware that prostitution was legal. Thus I reject your claim that the law sends a message. Of course, a well-publicized court case could send a message.
The norms point is definitely relevant, but it looks like the paper incorporates this (here’s a quote from page 26):
“Law affects behavior not only through enforcement but also through an expres- sive role: It can affect societal norms (e.g., Benabou and Tirole [2011]). For example, in our context legalizing prostitution may make both the purchase and sale of commercial sex socially more acceptable (Kotsadam and Jakobs- son, 2011). The simplest way of incorporating this aspect into the model is to assume that legalization (criminalization) increases (decreases) the intrinsic value that women derive from prostitution and men derive from buying sex. So, suppose a man’s utility from buying a unit of sex is e when prostitution is legal and e − gb otherwise. Similarly, a woman’s utility from selling a unit of sex is ps when prostitution is legal and ps −gs otherwise. The disutilities gb and gs can be interpreted as guilt or stigma. It is immediately apparent that in our model gb and gs have the same impact as expected criminal penalties. We can therefore apply the results from Section : Legalization increases overall pros- titution, but it need not increase trafficking—on the contrary, it can reduce it. Even the intuition is virtually the same. Stigma associated with prostitution deters voluntary prostitutes but not traffickers, who do not care about the stigma borne by their victims. Norms that reduce voluntary prostitution can therefore create more room for trafficking. Absent voluntary prostitution, stig- matizing johns decreases trafficking, while stigmatizing prostitutes does not. By the same token, in countries where norms against prostitution are strong, and hence voluntary prostitution is low, criminalization of johns is likely to deter trafficking.”
Similarly, a woman’s utility from selling a unit of sex is ps when prostitution is legal and ps −gs otherwise.
But this is false. The utility a woman gains from selling a unit of sex is mostly the cash value of the transaction, and where prostitution is illegal, the cash price is higher. Unless the author is claiming that the higher price for a unit of sex where prostitution is illegal exactly matches the risks to the prostitute (and john!) created purely by the illegality of the transaction. And since the authors claim It is immediately apparent that in our model gb and gs have the same impact as expected criminal penalties, they’re explicitly not claiming that.
I don’t think there is any disagreement.
The way I understand the passage is as follows: Suppose (i) the sale of sex is subject to criminal penalties and (ii) that the illegality raises the social stigma of working as a prostitute. Both (i) and (ii) make it less attractive work as a prostitute. So, either decreases voluntary supply and increases the cash price of sex (as you say). Higher prices in turn make trafficking more attractive. In sum, social norms against sex work, while (or by) reducing voluntary sex work, tend to increase trafficking. I read your comment above to be in accordance with this logic, unless I’m missing something…
The other problem with the part of the analysis is that it assumes that the illegality makes prostitution less desirable for men. Is the author unaware of the risk-taking urge in men, especially young men? There are very plausible conditions under which the illegality itself makes prostitution more desirable for males.
It’s true—the paper assumes that criminal penalties for johns make the purchase of sex LESS desirable. And the assumption is important. You make the opposite assumption, the result doesn’t hold up. Whether one or the other assumption is more realistic (or holds for the larger proportion of johns) is an empirical question. With respect to the proposal, it boils down to the following question:
Suppose the policy was implemented as proposed, such that johns could buy sex in a legal sector (without criminal penalties) or in an illegal sector (with criminal penalties if caught). Suppose half the suppliers are in the legal (good suppliers) and half in the illegal sector (bad suppliers). Suppose that without the separation, good and bad suppliers would split the market equally. After the separation,
- Would more johns go to the illegal sector than to the legal sector because they like the “kick”? That is, would the separation shift demand towards the bad suppliers?
- Or would fewer johns go to the illegal sector because they don’t want to risk jail and entry into a public sex offender registry? That is, would the separation shift demand towards good suppliers.
We can argue the plausibility of either assumption on the johns’ (average) preferences. But that usually doesn’t resolve the disagreement/question. It’s an (important) empirical issue.
The proposal sounds a like the situation in the 3 counties of Nevada that permit prostitution, but only in tightly regulated brothels, including STD testing of the sex workers. The results are not unambiguously positive, see for instance Alexa Albert’s book “Brothel: Mustang Ranch Its Women”.
The problem with criminalizing the sex workers is that it makes them unlikely to cooperate with the police, and thus cripple the already notoriously difficult job of building a case against a pimp that a prosecutor can successfully sustain. This difficulty is why vice squads seldom undertake the effort and focus instead on low hanging fruit like stings on prostitutes.
The way I understand it, the proposal explicitly opposes criminalizing sex workers. Instead, it argues it is crucial to severely punish sex buyers who purchase sex outside of the regulated brothels — which, as far as I know, is not part of the Nevada system.
This is partly in reply to Anthony up above (July 12, 12:49 pm).
If you look at the defendants in the Canadian prostitution case that I linked above (Beford v. Canada), they’re all very strong-willed, self-confident, assertive women. They’re also older (usually middle-aged or above). Most of the spokespeople for those organizations with names like “Association of Sex Workers” (they exist all over the place in North America) also seem like people who can handle sex work without spiralling down into drugs etc. Look at the pictures of Terri-Jean Bedford posing in her leather with riding crop in front of the courthouse. I feel like these people, who are attempting to drive the debate on this, are not really representative of the median sex worker
I’m not sure how to express the thought clearly, but in the real world, people are not ideal libertarian rational actors. One’s upbringing, surroundings, cultural/societal norms… these all have an effect on the choices people make. Especially when a person is 18 years old and the rational-thought part of their brain isn’t fully developed yet, and we say “you’re an adult now, you can make very important decisions for yourself”. Perhaps society also owes it to young people to try to steer their choices the right way. I’m not talking about suburban kids from nice homes becoming prostitutes – it’s people from troubled situations that are already into alcohol and other drugs, largely out of parental control.
Look at me, I sound like a hardcore social conservative. I’m not, really – I’m in favour of full legalization of marijuana (under a regulatory regime similar to alcohol) and some form of legal indoor prostitution. Anything has to be better than pushing women onto the streets where they get picked up and murdered and buried on a pig farm. But I understand where parents are coming from – I hope to be one myself – and I don’t think their concerns can be dismissed so easily. Even if they’re harder to form into clear sentences than the libertarian black-and-white rules for what a government should do.
Also in reply to Anthony up above (July 12, 12:49 pm).
I agree that there may be a subset of sex workers who will be “unable or unwilling to obtain licenses.” But to use that as an argument against the policy seems like a “red herring.” Your argument is that licensing may not work perfectly. But I don’t see how this makes the licensing policy WORSE than the alternative approaches that dominate the public debate (full legalization or full criminalization). Also, the point of criminalizing buyers of non-licensed sex is to depress demand in the non-licensed market. This makes it attractive for those otherwise unwilling (but able) to get a license.
My argument is that licensing will not make much dent in the end of the market which is most socially damaging – streetwalking. While some traffickers use brothels, many make their “girls” work the street, as do many pimps. The police already mostly concentrate on streetwalking; many busts of illegal brothels (massage parlors, etc) have something to do with drug trafficking through the brothel, or other issues. Under the licensing scheme, the police won’t be shifting many resources away from policing brothels, because they already don’t devote many resources to them.
What’s the mechanism for social damage that you’re concerned with?
I think many people disregard the risk to the worker, as the worker chooses to take on that risk, but are concerned about things like the workers acting as disease vectors or participating in more serious crimes like robbery or drug distribution. This might be different from the point you’re making, but I’m not sure.
There is the concern about streetwalkers in particular participating in other crime, but the presence of streetwalkers makes a neighborhood more dangerous for women who aren’t prostitutes, as men’s judgements of who is a prostitute aren’t 100% accurate, and thus women in the neighborhood in general will be subject to significantly more unwanted advances, as the social norms against overly coarse or crude propositioning (including physical contact) will not really exist in a neighborhood where there are streetwalkers. Essentially, by tolerating streetwalkers, a neighborhood becomes one where sexual harassment of random women is *encouraged*. This cannot be socially optimal.
Zoning seems like a simpler way of addressing this.
@Anthony: “My argument is that licensing will not make much dent in the end of the market which is most socially damaging – streetwalking. While some traffickers use brothels, many make their “girls” work the street, as do many pimps.”
With the proposal, picking up a girl in the street would put the john at risk of arrest and severe penalties, including incarceration and/or public shaming (getting your name on a public list of prostitution regulation offenders, accessible to his wife, colleagues, children, you name it). This drastically reduces the appeal of precisely the market that you describe as the most socially damaging, streetwalking.
That said, if johns cannot go anywhere else to procure sex, an illegal market would likely survive despite the penalties on johns, in the streets or under even more deplorable conditions. Some women who might have chosen to sell sex in a legal market now exit. So for traffickers, there is demand to fill.
But now suppose that there exists a place where johns can go to buy sex without risking arrest, public shaming, or incarceration. This makes the illegal market, including streetwalking, a highly unattractive option to johns (just how unattractive depends on the severity of the punishments for buying sex in the illegal market).
When this legal place can absorb the demand that otherwise would sustain an illegal (streetwalking) sector, traffickers’ profitability falls, so the sector shrinks.
“But now suppose that there exists a place where johns can go to buy sex without risking arrest, public shaming, or incarceration.”
This is only marginally different from the existing situation. The risks of seeing a prostitute in an existing indoor establishment aren’t zero, but they’re close in most places, and significantly closer to zero than the risks of picking up a streetwalker. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it seems that most busts of indoor prostitution, at least in the Bay Area, are related to illegal drug trafficking. Local police *do* however go after streetwalking, both by trying to arrest customers after the transaction has been started, and by using decoys. Making indoor prostitution legal as proposed would probably not drop the price, as the expected price drop from legalization would be offset by the costs of licensing. Since, despite the significantly higher risks, streetwalking continues to meet a demand, I wouldn’t expect to see much change.
They’re also older (usually middle-aged or above)…Look at the pictures of Terri-Jean Bedford posing in her leather with riding crop in front of the courthouse. I feel like these people, who are attempting to drive the debate on this, are not really representative of the median sex worker
Those women are extremely unattractive. Their customers would likewise be much older, much uglier and/or comparatively much poorer. I think you are exactly right. They are not the median of sex workers but aging outliers trying to maintain market value thru government cartelization.
Egad. If that were all Toronto could muster in the way of prostitutes there would be zero high finance visiting that city.
LOL! This gets even funnier.
Some pics of Bedford and Scott:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2009/10/06/canada-prostitution-decriminalize685.html
Lebovitch is a sow:
http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Sex_workers_question_police_DNA_collection-8345.aspx
So at least part of my point is that you should worry more about your daughters getting into drugs, because aside from the direct ill effects of drugs, it’s also one of the more likely paths into prostitution. I’ve also heard that the “sugar-daddy” phenomenon will sometimes shade into prostitution, where instead of particular nice gifts, the man will give the woman cash for her to spend as she wishes. Teaching your daughters to live within their means and to earn their own money will help them to avoid that sort of temptation.
Another advantage to the proposed system is that you potentially have a built in population of people who can be hired to enforce the law, as a substitute for undercover agents – the legal prostitutes could be hired to fill this role. They are motivated to help combat violations of the law, and could work with police to trap people who are illegally hiring unlicensed prostitutes.
Interesting point.
I guess I don’t know the demographics of who uses prostitutes, but it seems likely that, even given legal alternatives, a large portion of the demand for sex-for-pay will remain on the black market side, if only for privacy (secrecy) reasons.
Elliot Spitzer isn’t going to visit a legal brothel, right?
+MattJ, legal sex workers value their protection of clients’ privacy as a reputational asset. It is likely that only a tiny fraction of the demand side would choose the black market, namely those willing to add criminal penalties to the shame of exposure and exploit the trafficked.
@MattJ: I agree with Swedenborg. True, many clients value secrecy very highly. But your concern presumes that in legal brothels purchases are “public,” whereas they are “secret” on the black market. Actually, the proposed policy aims to achieve the exact opposite. The proposal is to have public registries (shaming) for johns who get caught on the black market, whereas “in legal brothels the anonymity of johns should be safeguarded (unless, of course, the prostitute is abused); this reduces the relative appeal of illegal sex.” (See, e.g., page 36 of the paper, the first paragraph under “How to punish johns who buy illegal sex.”)
Having made use of a prostitute or hundred in my time and I’m going to agree with MattJ’s statement. It’s not just about privacy but quality and pricing also. As with any regulated licensed profession you often end up with overpriced poor service (hence the prevalence of illegal/unlicensed barbers, haircutters, interior designers, day workers, etc etc) and anybody that made of use of both illegal and legal whorehouses know this. The only time you are seeing this work, from a John’s perspective, are places like Thailand or India where effectively you have a legalized unregulated sex trade and women/men/dogs/etc can compete on price, quality, discretion, and health (yes I have seen some that proudly advertise their routine std checks (maybe forged, maybe not), I’m sure you will see even more competition soon with the OTC HIV test). You can also find this to a lesser degree in various legalized escort markets (England and Hong Kong great examples here) but it’s still limited usually by regulatory factors (primarily bans on advertising and zoning).
@Peter: True, there is not necessarily a level playing field between legal and illegal brothels. The latter may have their own appeal for various reasons — some more benign than others: e.g., trafficking is one possible reason why unregulated markets for sex have lower prices — after all, trafficking is supply. This is why it’s so essential for the proposed policy to push demand into the legal sector by criminalizing the purchase in illegal brothels; to make the illegal sector less attractive for buyers, and thereby push demand and — via prices — legitimate supply into the legal sector. None of the places you mentioned have buyer criminalization.
I’m fairly certain that Elliot Spitzer’s paid women all knew exactly who they were dealing with. As I understand it, rule #1 for prostitutes who want to not be beaten, raped, robbed, and/or arrested is, “know exactly who your clients are”, and the low-end prostitutes who who cannot manage this do in fact wind up beaten, robbed, raped, and arrested on a fairly regular basis.
So, the real question is, given that Elliot Spitzer is going to be paying for sex from a woman who will then be in a position to go public with “Elliot Spitzer paid me for sex!”, which gives him better odds?
A prostitute who is by definition a criminal, and who will likely someday be in a jail cell wondering how best to negotiate a lighter sentence?
Or, a legal prostitute at a legal brothel with a legally enforceable privacy policy?
Every legislature has many more men than women and many of these men have used prostitutes. Legal penalties for the men who purchase the services of prostitutes? Not gonna happen.
I don’t know, it happened in Sweden.
[insert Roissy-esque comment about how Swedish men—possibly all Scandinavian men—are feminized beta herbs]
if the blouse fits…
It also happened in Iceland, Norway, and South Korea. It’s about to happen in Finland, and perhaps France.
On the debate in France from this week’s Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/21558612
Tyler, I think you just articulated an argument for licencing! It’s like… in some situations it… might be useful…
I’m going to have to stand up for ugly, unattractive men with zero personality. Are they supposed to be celibate because some parent is worried about the future of their wayward daughter? Isn’t this also a feminist issue; “Keep your laws off of my body!” If sex trafficking, however that’s defined, is the problem, go after the traffickers. Whores know that their job is dangerous, that’s part of the reason for the price. There’s lots of jobs with an element of risk, should they all be phased out? Let’s start with the cops. Speaking of which, who’s a lower form of humanity, a prostitute or a cop pretending to be one?
The idea with the proposal seems to be precisely to go after the traffickers by, in essence, destroying their profitability (by killing their market). Men who wish to procure sex can do so legally, in a place where the prostitutes have not been trafficked.
Going after traffickers in other ways sounds great. But isn’t that what many countries say that they are trying to do? Yet, trafficking is rampant. This seems to suggest that, whatever they are doing, it isn’t enough to solve the problem. The may be that going after traffickers requires coordination across countries, so *one* country cracking down on trafficking doesn’t help much unless other countries do so as well.
In any case: Responsible clients of prostitutes, as well as non-trafficked sex workers who advocate legalization, should welcome a way to transact in sex without supporting sex traffickers.
Whether these ideas are helpful is contingent on how big a problem trafficking actually is. Are the draconian measures proposed killing 99% of the industry to stop the 1% that’s really bad, or 99.999% to stop the 0.001% that’s really bad? Quite a while ago on MR there was a thread discussing how high quality data is hard to get for this question.
I presume that by “bad” you mean “trafficked prostitutes” and by “non-bad” you mean “non-trafficked prostitutes”? Assuming that the “non-bad” prostitutes would get licenses, the proposal would neither kill the 99% to stop the 1% nor kill the 99.999% to stop the 0.001%. It would just stop the 1% or the 0.001% and allow all others to work. In fact, by stopping the 1% (or the 0.001%), it would actually improve market prices for the 99% (or the 99.999%).
Alternatively, if you assume that some of the “non-bad” prostitutes would not qualify for licenses either, then — depending on the licensing requirements (say, apart from being non-trafficked, pass an HIV-test) — you wonder whether they should be allowed to work in this industry in the first place. Sure, the person who tests HIV-positive and does not get a license may try to work on the streets. But the proposal does not criminalize illegal sellers but illegal buyers (if anything, such marginalized sellers should receive assistance). Moreover, if HIV-positive sellers were to pool in the illegal sector, that would make the illegal sector even less attractive to prospective johns.
I said “really bad.” I tried to avoid making a moral judgement on regular prostitution that I figured would be controversial. If you’re kidnapped and kept chained in a cell, I think that’s unambiguously bad. But I don’t know how common that is.
It seems like you’d want some sort of regulation that hit trafficking hard, but had minimal impact on the business of regular workers, who presumably make up the vast majority of workers. To the extent that licensing impacts the regular workers (and I think insofar as it preferentially impacts the lower-end of the business it will), that should count against it. Not that I think it totally negates the concept, it’s just that the chilling effect on the regular business is a negative, and I think some people view it as a positive, which is wrong or at least requires a lot more argument.
If you wanted licensing to provide some sort of quality assurance for customers, you could offer certifications that require medical testing.
People without this certification could still practice, but would presumably charge less. And would attract customers who want this combination of features.
This would be much less intrusive.
I agree that there might be a chilling effect on the regular business, though one could think of ways to reduce that. I also agree that if trafficking is actually very rare, the policy’s impact will be rather small. On the upside, if the measures do reduce a substantial amount of trafficking, they also have a positive effect on the voluntary sex workers, through prices.
What share of prostitution is trafficked is clearly an empirical question. A prediction in the paper is that female-male income gaps should be an important factor. In practice, estimates are hard to come by. Havoc.com is an interesting website that tries to collect articles and information about all types of black market activities. One of the markets covered is human trafficking:
http://www.havocscope.com/human-trafficking/
To give one example, it links to a recent article reporting that between 2007 and 2012 the Polaris Project has received 45,000 hotline calls in the US about sex trafficking and another 2012 article reporting that about 4,000 minors are trafficked into NYC each year. Here’s also an 2012 estimate on Canada from Havoc:
“There are an estimated 300,000 people who are victims of human trafficking in Canada. 150,000 people are trafficked into the country to work from foreign countries, while the remaining 150,000 people are trafficked domestically around the country. Pimps in Canada are reported to purchase people from human traffickers for $4,879 (5,000 Canadian Dollars). One single person can earn the pimp up to $273,000 (280,000 Canadian Dollars) a year. Human trafficking and prostitution in Canada is estimated to generate up to $400 Million a year.”
Anecdotes also suggest that the sex trafficking business is large enough to feed quite a few traffickers; for example, this BBC video claims that part of the income from trafficking Mexican girls into the NYC prostitution market sustains a small but wealthy village in Mexico:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18144333
All I can say is that none of this is proof, but perhaps cause for concern.
Previous critiques of the numbers thrown about have made me think that the actual number of trafficking victims is very close to zero.
Is it really plausible that one in a hundred Canadians is a victim of human trafficking? That would be what, one in five young women?
This is implausible, and makes me suspect that the more intrusive plans to ameliorate the trafficking problem are really about cutting down on the amount of regular prostitution going on. Which might be a good thing to do, but is clearly a much more controversial point.
I agree with you here: the numbers may very well be inflated. Which is why I wrote, “none of this is proof.” Nevertheless, my caution regarding the magnitude does not yet lead me to conclude that the actual number is very close to zero. Quite the opposite, I find this cause for concern—even if the numbers are somewhat smaller—if not disconcerting.
That said, the debate about what percentage of prostitutes is trafficked is very prominent in the debate (basically, your 99%-1% argument). And it’s one of the central reasons why the proposal in the paper looks the way it does. Compared to the other debated approaches—across-the-board criminalization or legalization–this proposal is much better suited to reach a compromise between parties that disagree about the prevalence of trafficking relative to voluntary sex work. In fact, that’s precisely the point. it is (a) designed to create a “safe harbor” for voluntary sex workers while (b) using criminalization of johns outside of that safe harbor to funnel demand away from traffickers. Clearly, this has more potential to appeal (than outright legalization or outright criminalization) to both sides of a debate about the precise share of voluntary sex work vs. trafficking.
Finally, we can play with the numbers a bit. 300,000 trafficked–that’s a stock, not a flow. It’s the number of people that at one point in time were trafficked in(to) Canada, not all of them necessarily “active” anymore. The number of women in Canada between the age of 15 and 45 is currently 6.9 million (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo10a-eng.htm). 300,000/6.9M—that makes roughly 1:23. Suppose the estimate is inflated by a factor of 3; meaning there are only 100,000 trafficking victims. That still makes 1:69. Or suppose that we believe that a more reasonable ratio is 1:200. That would still make for 34,500 victims (which would imply that we believe the 300,000 number to be inflated by roughly a factor of 10).
Also, it is interesting to compare to other crimes. Suppose the number of 4,000 minors trafficked into the NYC prostitution market per year is correct (NB: this counts minors only). NYC has about 8 million people. The 50 largest cities in the US have about 46 million people. Let’s ignore the rest of the country, and let’s be simplistic and extrapolate linearly. This would make for about 46/8*4,000=23,000 minors trafficked into these 50 cities per year (that have about little less than 1/6 of the US population). 23,000 is really not such a large number relative to the total population. But, by comparison, the number of homicides in the US in 2010 was 14,748 (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm).
Again, none of this proves or disproves anything. But it does raise concern.
Nothing in the proposal suggests to get rid of prostitution, so it would not require anyone “to be celibate.” Also, regarding another point of yours, it’s probably true that prices for sex are higher when the job is more dangerous for prostitutes. However, by no means does this imply that there is no gain in taking measures to make the job less dangerous; not even the prostitutes would mind if their work environment became safer – in fact, that’s what sex worker organizations (e.g., the ICRSE) are lobbying for.
“Based on our analysis, we propose a different legal approach, which has so far not been tried by any country: criminalization of johns outside of a “safe harbor” for voluntary prostitution.”
I think Germany may already be doing something like this. I can’t speak from experience, having never patronized a brothel, but Germany does license and regulate brothels. I do recall a story on the TV news a few years back about a politician getting arrested for trying to pick up a prostitute on the street, but in the wrong part of town, implying that it would have been permitted to pick her up in a different part of town – a “red light” district.
While it sounds similar, the regulation in Germany is actually quite different from the proposal.
Since 2002, prostitution is legal in Germany, but the legal sector is highly unregulated: Brothels can be operated as regular businesses and do NOT need a special brothel license. The law allows prostitutes to get regular work contracts but does NOT require licensing. Prostitution may, in general, take place not only in brothels but also in homes and in the street.
It is true that cities are still allowed to create “prostitution-free zones.” But the purpose of these zoning laws is to keep the cityscape “nice,” i.e., “protect” the “better” neighborhoods from prostitution—they do not, and are not designed to, curb trafficking. (Given the law regulation, traffickers can easily operate in the red-light districts.) Also, buyer penalties for violating zoning laws are very mild, and actual prosecution of buyers presumably rare.
In short, the current German approach has neither (i) the licensing/monitoring procedures for legal prostitution nor (ii) the severe criminalization of “illegal” johns that are key to the proposal in the paper. So, there might, or should, be a lot of trafficking in Germany. Indeed, the 2006 human trafficking study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (“Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns”) lists Germany as one of the top nine destination countries of sex trafficking. The situation hasn’t gotten better since then, which is why early this year the conservative party in Germany (CDU) has called for law changes that impose stricter regulation.
Comments on this entry are closed.