This is a pretty nuanced discussion of this issue.
By Ronald Weitzer, Global Policy
This is part of a forthcoming Global Policy e-book on modern slavery. Contributions from leading experts highlighting practical and theoretical issues surrounding the persistence of slavery, human trafficking and forced labour are being serialised here over the coming months.
Ronald Weitzer examines the evidence on legalizing prostitution from two sources: large, multi-national correlational studies and in-depth case studies. He argues the latter provide a far superior evidential base on which to formulate public policies.
Some anti-trafficking activists and organizations claim that legalizing prostitution adversely affects the well-being of sex workers, including their vulnerability to trafficking. Others claim the contrary, which is consistent with the conventional understanding that bad actors and organized crime thrive under conditions where a commodity or service has been criminalized, not legalized. Are these claims evidence-based? Does legalization affect the well-being of sex workers or impact the level of human trafficking into a country and, if so, what are these effects? When elected officials debate changes to prostitution laws, what kinds of data should inform their deliberations? This essay examines the evidence from two sources: large, multi-national correlational studies and in-depth case studies. I will argue that the latter provide a far superior evidential base on which to formulate public policies.
Two studies by economists have attracted favorable attention from anti-prostitution activists and policymakers in several countries. The studies have been invoked as definitive evidence when the issue of legalization is being considered by legislatures or in the media, as recently as 2021 when Oregon, New York, Vermont, and Louisiana were considering bills to legalize prostitution. Anti-legalization forces cite the studies as definitive evidence supporting their position.
Using information on 161 countries from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) or a subset of European countries in the same source, Cho, Dreher, and Neumayer and by Jakobsson and Kotsadam published two papers in 2013. The studies rely on UNODC figures despite the fact that UNODC had cautioned against doing so because “the report does not provide information regarding actual numbers of victims” and because of unstandardized definitions, sources, and reporting across countries, with some conflating trafficking, smuggling, and irregular migration. The authors of the two studies concede that it is “difficult, perhaps impossible, to find hard evidence” of a relationship between trafficking and any other phenomenon and that “the underlying data may be of bad quality” and are “limited and unsatisfactory in many ways.” Yet they nevertheless treat the UNODC report as a serviceable data source and conclude that nations that have legalized prostitution have higher rates of human trafficking than countries where prostitution is criminalized.
