Full decriminalization and legalization of prostitution have been tried before, and they both lead to increased sex trafficking.
In a comparison of 150 countries that have legalized prostitution and those that did not found that legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution marketplace, which increased the human trafficking inflows.[1] Further, in Nevada, legalized prostitution has led to an increase in the illegal sex trade within the state, which is 63% higher than the next highest state of New York and double that of California.[2]
Rhode Island clearly demonstrates that fully decriminalized prostitution will not yield a different result than legal prostitution. In Rhode Island, prostitution was not illegal or regulated by law if it was performed indoors, from 1980 to 2009.[3] The lack of laws controlling the indoor prostitution in Rhode Island created a “sex buyer’s paradise” in which pimps, traffickers, and sex buyers impeded arrest. Full decriminalization created a loophole for traffickers and organized crime to avoid detection because police did not have probable cause to investigate cases of prostitution in order to then uncover sex trafficking.
In addition, the marketplace for prostitution is the context in which all of sex trafficking occurs. The marketplace encompasses strip clubs, illicit massage parlors, online platforms, hotels, and street corners where people are sold for sex. Sex buyers use sex trafficked and other women in prostitution interchangeably. There is not a distinctive demand for sexually trafficked persons per se, but a demand for a prostituted person.
Further, the pimps and sex traffickers are equivalent as they both recruit, harbor, transport, provide, and obtain people by force, fraud, and coercion in order to exploit for commercial sex. Therefore, any person who is controlled by a pimp is a victim of sex trafficking. Decriminalization or legalization of prostitution would redefine pimp to “manager”, but would not change the ways in which the pimps force and coerce people in order to exploit them for commercial sex.
[1] Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher, and Eric Neumayer, “Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?” World Development 41 (2013): 67‒82, doi: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.05.023.
[2] Creighton University, The Human Trafficking Initiative, Nevada’s Online Commercial Sex Market (2018), scribd.com/document/379531366/Nevada-sex-trafficking-study (accessed March 31, 2019).
[3] Melanie Shapiro and Donna M. Hughes, “Decriminalized Prostitution: Impunity for Violence andExploitation,” Wake Forest Law Review, (2017): works.bepress.com/donna_hughes/94 (accessed March 31, 2019).