Buying Sex Should Not Be Legal - The New York Times
Comments:
"Ms. Moran's description of the sex market is no different from any labor market susceptible to exploiting girls and young women, yet perfectly legal and accepted in society: the garment industry, the fashion industry, the nail salon industry, etc. All these industries too suffer from increased black market activity and human trafficking. Yet would it be the solution to criminalize all these industries?
Suppose we applied the "Nordic model" to the garment industry, where child labor and human trafficking are particularly notorious, in order to protect workers who make, say Nike sneakers, but we'd criminalize the "pimp" Nike and all "johns" who purchase Nike sneakers. Sure, consumption of sneakers would fall, the number of sweatshop sneaker factories would fall, the exploitation of factory workers would fall, and child labor and human trafficking would fall.
But under which model are workers more protected, earn better wages, work in better conditions, have greater pride in their work, when it is legal and visible with a panoply of regulatory protection or when it is illegal and underground?"
"For those of us who have worked in the legal system, we have seen first hand that prostitutes are not as they are portrayed by the media. And we also know that even in marriages, there is bargaining about sex and money and power. We cannot legislate morality."
"The surest way for government to abdicate control of any commodity is to prohibit it."
"The difference with your article is that Amnesty International has done its homework to develop a policy, and in that process interviewed a large number of sex workers to get their viewpoints too... To develop a policy which is based only on personal experience without the inclusion of others experience, as well as what is good for society at large, is to develop a flawed policy."
"My heart goes out to Rachel Moran for the harm she experienced as an underage prostitute. But she is not exactly an impartial observer in this debate and I don't mean because she is a former sex worker. I mean that she and her organization are getting paid to express these views... the Swedish approach -- criminalizing buyers -- that she espouses has not worked. It has not decreased the number of sex workers in Sweden or sex trafficking in that region; all it's done is make sex work more dangerous for the people who do it by choice. As I discovered in researching my book, Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, research shows that decriminalizing sex work -- in places like New Zealand and the Netherlands -- has made sex work much safer"
""I don't like chocolate so I'm going to make sure that nobody eats it because I KNOW BETTER". Recently I read some news in a British paper regarding the police freeing some Rumanian labor workers in the British country side, they were forced into picking fruit. In your eyes here's the solution: Let's ban fruit picking."