On the Illegality of Sex Work and the Impact on Victimization, Health, and Human Trafficking: Is Criminalization a Cure or Disease?

ABSTRACT

Despite the apparent ubiquity of prostitution over time and place, and legality of most other modern forms of sex work (e.g., erotic dancing, cam girls, entrepreneurial pornography), prostitution remains criminalized around most of the globe. In recent years there has been a push to reevaluate this stance, with new debates arising over the positive and negative implications of criminalizing prostitution, with particular attention paid to victimization, public health, and human trafficking. Still, most of these arguments are emotive, political, or normative in nature, and rarely are empirical evaluations of the impact of criminalized prostitution included in this narrative. This essay aims to address this issue by presenting the scientific findings on the impact of criminalized prostitution with respect to violence/victimization, public health, and risk of sex trafficking. We find that overall, criminalization has iatrogenic effects on victimization and public health (such as spread of STDs, use of condoms, etc.) in the literature, but the impact on sex trafficking is more mixed. We therefore call for more research and funding to be dedicated to the issue, with focus on developing and evaluating policies that specifically aim to maximize benefits from decriminalizing prostitution across domains, while also protecting our most vulnerable.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex trafficking
• prostitution
• sex work
• decriminalization
• legalization
• prevention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Prostitution is defined by the criminal code as a form of sex work. Therefore the terms “prostitute/prostitution” and “sex worker/sex work” are used interchangeably, unless stated otherwise.

2. California’s Proposition K was reported to include provisions that eliminated law enforcement operations and investigations targeting prostitution, and by extension, sex trafficking, and eliminated services and programs such as the First Offender Prostitution Program, which aimed to reduce prostitution and sex trafficking by encouraging those arrested for prostitution to transition out of the sex work industry (San Francisco Examiner, 2008).

3. Rhode Island inadvertently decriminalized indoor prostitution from 2003 to 2009 when a key provision in a state statute was deleted during the drafting of a bill.