Prostitution is not a victimless crime. The perception that there are all these individual sex workers working for themselves is simply not the reality. The vast, vast majority are trafficking victims who receive no money or benefit from their forced work.
When legalized, organized crime becomes legit companies but the base level approach doesn't change and the women are still trapped.
Stop, theyre not ready to hear that their problem is capitalism and they only care about it when it intersects their puritanica Christian values based societal upbringing.
The vast, vast majority are trafficking victims who receive no money or benefit from their forced work.
Yes, that's the current situation when it's illegal. Why are you advocating for that to continue?
When legalized, organized crime becomes legit companies but the base level approach doesn't change and the women are still trapped.
If you mean they're trapped in a job because they've got bills to pay, that's almost every job. The guy flipping your burgers has bills too, he isn't any less trapped.
Yes, illegally trafficked workers can still exist in legal industries - eg, there's still sweatshops even though sewing and textiles are legal. But there's also more remedies. A trafficked worker in a sweatshop can actually seek help from the state without the threat of being thrown in jail themselves. If sewing were illegal, that avenue would be closed off.
You're not going to eliminate the industry. As long as there's a demand for textiles, there's money in supplying that demand, and someone is going to supply it by hook or by crook. The best you can hope for is to provide a maximal number of remedies and escapes for those exploited by the system.
Same goes for sex work, if not moreso. Sewing isn't considered the world's oldest trade/profession.
In most countries where it has been legalized trafficking becomes worse because the ability to be more open allows for more business. See Germany.
Trapped isn't "I have bills that this unpleasant work pays for". Trapped is "I came from a different country under false pretenses and now I'm literally being held prisoner and forced to service 8-10 men a day for no benefit to me at all." The lack of understanding in the general populace of the US that this is the reality of US prostitution is what if preventing this from being fixed.
If you want to eliminate prostitution you rescue and help the existing people trapped in that situation and at the same time you increase penalties for the Johns and publicly make tons of arrests. Where this had been done, prostitution had greatly diminished.
The difficulty is that it's so lucrative that it is hard to get enough uncorrupted officials to sign off on this approach.
Germany has legalized prostiution for 20 years now. It made sexwork legal for many prostitutes who benefit from healthcare and safe labour laws and such. But the mayority of sex workers are suffering from bad working conditions. Brothels where sex is promised for flat rates, prostitutes being vulnerable to abuse by customers or pimps. Human trafficing is very much a thing. Prostitutes Passports are withheld and they are forced to work. Germany is basically the brothel of europe since in most countries prostitution is heavily regulated. And the problems legalisation promises to fix are very much still there.
When legalized, organized crime becomes legit companies
is straight up idiocy. No, the entire point of trafficking prevailing is that those entities don't suddenly go "oh shit, now trafficking is illegal" - it always was criminal and legalizing prostitution is a measure of slowly undermining the systemic problems that cause the satellite criminal activity to eventually diminish.
It's far from everything, you need proper legislature, education, labor unions and more... but that's exactly what follows a proper attempt at curbing the massive issues surrounding illegal prostitution.
You sure as fuck aren't helping them by causing them to incriminate themselves in the event of anyone reporting criminal scheming, with the most basic attempts you still open up channels for monitoring illegal activity and individuals getting mixed up in something against their wills.
The upside of legalizing alone is absolutely massive and you have to be entirely ignorant of the dynamics involved to think it isn't a step in the right direction. You won't put the toothpaste back in the tube, and keeping it illegal just guarantees that the folks who need to notice women literally being shipped in containers having a much harder time and never really surfacing in the first place.
I had a shady friend confide in me that, when Washington State legalized weed, they were tapped to negotiate a truce between two of the largest growops. Apparently the owners hated each other for 20 years and wouldn't talk without a mediator. They would up merging but continued to be pushed out of the market. I don't know what happened after that, but I thought it was interesting that they didn't try to go legit.
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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23
This.
Prostitution is not a victimless crime. The perception that there are all these individual sex workers working for themselves is simply not the reality. The vast, vast majority are trafficking victims who receive no money or benefit from their forced work.
When legalized, organized crime becomes legit companies but the base level approach doesn't change and the women are still trapped.