Should Prostitution Be LegalizedEssay Preview: Should Prostitution Be LegalizedReport this essayWhy is prostitution bad? Can someone make a claim using liberal logic (ie, no appeal to but its wrong!) that the free exchange of money for sex, absent violence or coercion, is wrong? I don’t think so, unless you’re willing to infantalize women and say that any case of prostitution means that the woman involved in being victimized. It’s obvious why this line of reasoning is bad, if we can’t assume that adult women are mature enough and have the agency to sell their bodies for sex, are they mature enough to do anything else?
But many liberals who persist in arguing that prostitution ought to be illegal in some form persist in saying that it’s not prostituion per se that they’re worried about, but the violence and coercion that accompanies it. This argumetn, advanced by Nick Kristof, Bob Herbert and many others, is tendentious BS. Just look at drugs: have they been made less violence by criminialization? But we don’t need analogies to show that criminalizing prostitution doesn’t work, we can just look at the facts. Sudhir Venkatesh and Steven Levitt’s fascinating paper on prostitutes in Chicago found that they were having lots of unprotected sex, which is incredibly unssafe, and being beaten roughly monthly. The only ways they could find protection was either having sex with police officers, or working for a pimp, who would then beat them too. Criminalized prostitution often ends up hurting the girls themselves, thus making them exploited by both the law and their pimps, and also breeds disrespect for the law because it is so spottily enforced. But if criminalizing prostituion is so ineffective, what about legalzing it?
Opponents of legalization often point to how in Nevada, the Netherlands and other places that have liberalized their prostitution laws, there hasn’t really been a decrease in trafficking or in prostitution. My response to the point that prostitution hasn’t gone down is, who cares? What legalization does is reduce the violence, coercion and disease spread associated with prostitution. At that point, why exactly is prostitution bad? In Nevada, for instance, there hasn’t been a case of HIV with prostitutes since 1988. Also, a legalized, regulated system makes it easier to enforce laws against underage prostitution because prostitutes are more willing to seek out law enforcement, knowing that they
are on the lookout for people willing to fight for them.
When a state’s drug laws are changing, they typically take the form of increased fines, suspensions, and restrictions on where an underage prostitute can find work. In Nevada, we see that most of the increase in enforcement and enforcement has occurred. However, while those who use the Internet for prostitution do have access to some websites, some underage workers remain anonymous, and most of these sites are very private. In other words, many underage workers, like minors or undergrads, are able to buy online without looking at a state agency such as a police department, because they are working on a business.
It is important to note, however, that what we’re seeing is not necessarily the result of the legalization of the Internet. It’s more an outcome of the changing status of those who use it.
In Nevada, at least, the law on prostitution is being revised, and although some have suggested that legalization of pot will be followed by a reduction in violent crime, legal observers, including Ilan Johnson, point out that legalization will not be enough to stop trafficking. This is a fact that is quite troubling in a state that has seen rampant, and at times horrific violence committed by youth—including both young men and women who are trafficked between New York City and Nevada. So, how will legalization of pot affect trafficking? According to Johnson, most young men, particularly under 18 years of age, are already trafficked in online and social networks and if legalization does more harm than good, young men also are at greater risk of exploitation with higher levels of sexual assault, including physical violence.
Many people think that legalization of marijuana and marijuana-related violence will lead young men to find it easier to obtain the drugs, but this is not necessarily true. In most cases young men already are drug users, and not just because of their younger age but because of their lack of understanding of the harm that legalization can cause their community. This includes the fact that many young men (even those who are legal and well-known in other States) have become addicted to illegal drugs, and some teens have been forced into drug and sex work. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that if young males were able to become high-school dropouts and go to prison, then young women would have less desire to have sex with him, and more desire to rape and beat young men. This is particularly salient in situations where young men simply don’t understand the risk of young women having sex with him.
In the United States Congress, many of the people who advocate for legalization have a very different view about the