1AC

1AC—Violence
Criminalizing prostitution forces the lifestyle underground—this normalizes
violence against them because they have no recourse to the law
CARRASQUILLO 14 J.D. Candidate 2014, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center; B.A. 2011 in Philosophy, City
University of New York, Queens College [Tesla Carrasquillo, Understanding Prostitution and the Need for Reform, Touro Law Review,
2014, 30 Touro L. Rev. 697] *numbers = words
B. Criminalizing Prostitution Does Not Work
The benefits that were intended to stem from the criminalization of prostitution have not been achieved, and several harms have
resulted from its remaining illegality. Criminalizing prostitution has "never significantly reduced the
incidence of prostitution." n113 In fact, statistics overwhelmingly demonstrate that prostitutes
are constant re-offenders. n114 Arrests and fines do not effectively act as deterrents; prostitutes are
soon selling sex in order to pay off their fines. n115 Prostitution is costly, both to citizens and prostitutes. n116 Due to
the fear of reporting crime, prostitutes' lives are at risk, and their ability to report crime is stifled. n117
Criminalization is also an attack on a woman's sexual autonomy and does nothing to prevent
the spread of STDs. n118
According to Legal Aid attorney Kate Mogulescu, "the NYPD makes an average of 2,700 arrests each year for
prostitution and loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution citywide." n119 Many prostitutes face jail time if convicted
in the state of New York, especially given the fact that many prostitutes are often repeat offenders. n120 It costs taxpayers $
167,731 to house an inmate each year in a city jail. n121 That amounts to $ 460 a day, per inmate, not including the cost of the New
York Police Department's manpower, the cost to the courts, or lawyer's fees. Decriminalizing prostitution would free resources that
could be allocated to more pressing criminal matters. Despite the fact that street prostitution accounts for a small minority of all
prostitution, 90% of prostitutes arrested are streetwalkers. n122 Forty-percent of streetwalkers are women of
color, yet 55% of prostitutes arrested are minorities. n123 These results show [*709] that a
disproportionate number of
poor minority women are harassed and arrested for prostitution. n124 Furthermore, jail time as a result
of a conviction is not the only punishment that affects these women. A conviction can negatively affect a woman's
opportunity to obtain housing, education, and most importantly, the ability to get a job. n125
Saddled with the stigma of a criminal record, even prostitutes who truly want to leave that lifestyle are left with few available
options, forcing them to continue prostituting. n126
One of the major flaws in criminalizing prostitution is that it jeopardizes women's lives.
Prostitutes face a " risk of premature death that is forty times the national average ."
n127 Studies of San Francisco street prostitutes showed that [seventy percent] 70% of
the prostitutes in the study were raped an average of thirty-one times by their customers and
[sixty five percent] 65% of the women stated they were beaten by customers an average
of 4.3 times. n128 In a similar study in Oregon, "78% of the prostitutes were raped, 48%
by pimps an average of sixteen times per year, 78% by johns an average of thirty-three times per year." n129 Perhaps
the most frightening statistic is from the Justice Department, which estimates that
one-third of the more than [Four Thousand] 4,000 women killed by serial murderers
in 1982 were prostitutes. n130 This statistic shows that prostitution is dangerous work, but it is made
more dangerous because "criminalizing prostitution leaves victims of violence with
few avenues for recourse due to fear of police action and general lack of legal protection." n131 Because
prostitutes are "routine victims of police violence and arrests, sex workers fear reporting the violations of their rights." n132
This reinforces the power that pimps have over their prostitutes, thus, making leaving
this lifestyle extraordinarily difficult. n133 When a prostitute needs money for bail, she
turns to her [*710] pimp, leaving her forever in his debt. n134 Prostitutes are not only afraid to report crimes against
themselves, but also to report crimes that are linked to prostitution in general. n135 For example, if a prostitute were a
witness to a crime, she would be reluctant to report it because of the fear that her status as a prostitute would get her arrested.
n136 Crimes associated with prostitution often exist because prostitution is illegal. n137
This is supported by the fact that areas where prostitution is legal have lower rates of crimes connected with prostitution.
n138
"The frequency of violence against prostitutes is only exacerbated by oppressive
cultural norms and biased media representations of prostitutes." n139 Criminalization
of prostitution makes violence against prostitutes "either socially invisible or

conceptualized as "just life .' " n140 When prosecution occurs against those who attack prostitutes, prostitutes
are rarely seen as being completely innocent. n141 They are blamed for being assaulted, battered,
raped, and are thought to have assumed the risks of their lifestyles. n142 Prostitutes are "at best
invisible and at worst considered deserving of abuse." n143 The criminalization of prostitution, thus, further marginalizes
prostitutes from society. n144 The consequence is a society that justifies the violence that prostitutes endure. n145
Another harm resulting from the criminalization of prostitution is its infringement on women's sexual
autonomy. n146 Women lose the choice to get paid for having consensual sex. A woman may have sex for
free, but once she receives something of value for her services, the act becomes
illegal. This attack on women's sexual autonomy is similar to the past attacks on women's
sexual and reproductive [*711] freedom. n147 Criminalizing prostitution is just another way to
have control over a woman's body, in the same way that criminalizing contraceptives and abortion had done.
n148 A woman should have the right to enter into a contract regarding the use of her body. Such contracts are already legal,
even in similar situations. For example, surrogacy involves a contract between a woman and a potential couple who cannot, or
choose not to, have a child traditionally. n149 In most cases, a couple is unable to conceive or carry a baby to term and seek a
surrogate to complete the task for them. n150 Women who elect to become surrogates are very well compensated. n151 The
argument that no woman ever "wants" to be a prostitute has been made in respect to surrogacy. n152 Radical feminists have
argued that the:
surrogacy arrangement is not one in which a woman can enter into by her own free will because in both prostitution and
surrogate motherhood, the state has created the social, economic and political situation in which the sale of some sexual or
reproductive capacity is necessary to a woman's survival. n153
Therefore, surrogacy, like prostitution, "equates women with sex and nothing more." n154 Yet,
surrogacy is legal and prostitution is not. If a woman can enter into a contract and be
compensated for carrying a baby for nine months, enduring the physical and emotional tolls of labor, and
risking having to abort the baby if there are complications, then so should a woman who spends fifteen
minutes having sex with stranger.
Many activities that were once deemed immoral, like the use of contraceptives or abortions, have gained
social acceptance and are no longer banned in most places. For instance, gambling, alcohol
consumption, and even sodomy were banned at one point, but are now tolerated by society. n155
Given the harms that criminalization can [*712] be considered the cause of, the need
for prostitution reform is great. The next section will describe and analyze three alternatives to the
criminalization of prostitution that may be more effective in reducing crime, preventing the spread of disease, and keeping
women safe.

Illegality of prostitution is a foundation of all laws that justify violence against

women—domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and rape are excusable when a
person acts like a prostitute. Removing legal prohibitions on sex work has
spillover effects.
BALOS & FELLOWS 99—*Clinical Professor of Law, University of Minnesota
**Everett Fraser Professor of Law, University of Minnesota [Beverly Balos & Mary
Louise Fellows, A Matter of Prostitution: Becoming Respectable, 74 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1220, 1291-
1292]

This section argues that domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and rape constitute a continuum of violence against women, and that
as sumptions about prostitution underlie societal attitudes about these acts of violence. Recognizing how prostitution relates to
traditional categories of violence against women and that it is a part of the con tinuum, we assert that reforming the laws of
domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and rape has the potential to transfigure prostitution. n30
[*1230] Traditionally, crimes of violence against women are disaggregated into separate acts of
violence, with specific, defining features. In con trast, the notion of a continuum of violence reflects women's lived
experiences: Violence is pervasive in all the places where they live their lives - in their homes, their
workplaces, and in public spaces. The
continuum also makes clear the relationship between the law's
assessment of women's rights to legal redress and societal and legal attitudes about
prostitution. Feminists frequently criticize the manner in which the legal establishment and
society scrutinize the conduct and motivations of a woman who is subjected to domestic
abuse, har assment, or rape more than they scrutinize the perpetrator when de termining
whether the nature and severity of the harm the woman has suffered warrants legal intervention. n31
In situations of domestic abuse, a woman is typically asked whether she provoked the violence and why she remained in the
relationship. n32 In cases of sexual harass ment in the workplace, the questions pertain to whether the woman welcomed the
conduct and why she remained in that employment. n33 In rape, the critical inquiry is whether the woman consented. This entails
subsidiary questions about why she was where she was, wear ing what she was wearing, and behaving the way she was behaving.
n34 [*1231] When a woman engages in prostitution, however, no questions need be asked. Both
society and the law simply presume that the woman provoked, welcomed, and consented to
the conduct, given what she was wearing, where she went, and the fact that she received
money. n35 Where the circumstances involve prostitution, the failure to ask these questions does not mean that the woman is
not the focus of the in quiry. It just means that the inquiry is framed by assumptions made about a woman
in prostitution.
These assumptions, which result in women who are engaged in prostitution having little or no
protection under the law, n36 establish a paradigm for a certain type of conduct. It is against this
paradigm that society and the law measure whether, when violence against women occurs , it is
appropriate for civil or criminal law to intervene. The real purpose of questions like "Why
didn't she leave her partner?"; "Why didn't she leave that job?"; "Why was she with that man?", is to ascer tain
whether the woman obtained a benefit, especially an economic one. The unstated assumption
is that if a woman enjoyed a benefit, she "assumed the risk" and therefore bears responsibility for the vio
lence, leaving the alleged perpetrator less accountable for his behav ior. Here, prostitution serves as the paradigm
for what constitutes an undeserving claim of harm. What we had comfortably assumed to be an inquiry into the
elements of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, or rape turns out to be an inquiry into how closely a woman's behavior resembles
prostitution. n37
[*1232] For example, in Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, n38 the landmark United States Supreme Court case that
recognized "hostile environment" sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination under Title VII, the Court held that testimony
about the complainant's sexu ally provocative speech or dress was not per se inadmissible to estab lish the element of
unwelcomeness to the sexual advances. n39 The Court found that "such evidence is obviously relevant." n40 In so doing, the Court
constructed its inquiry into the element of unwelcomeness as an inquiry into how closely the complainant's dress and behavior
resembled the stereotypical dress and behavior of a woman in prosti tution. The Court thus telegraphed
an unavoidable
outcome: If in deed you dress and behave like a woman engaged in prostitution, then the
sexual advances will be deemed welcome and the claim of sexual harassment will fail.
The California Supreme Court in People v. Berry n41 reversed the murder conviction of the
defendant who had strangled his wife. The opinion dwells on the victim's behavior in what the court described as "a
tormenting two weeks in which Rachel alternately taunted defen dant... and at the same time sexually excited defendant." n42
There was uncontroverted evidence that prior to the defendant's murder of his wife by strangulation, he had choked her twice, at
least once to the point of unconsciousness. n43 The facts set out by the court also indicate that during this time the defendant's wife
was in the process of leaving the defendant and had informed the defendant that she wanted a di vorce. n44 Nevertheless, the
court found that the victim's "long course [*1233] of provocatory conduct" entitled the
defendant to a jury instruction on voluntary manslaughter. n45 Here the court focused on the
victim's behavior , not the defendant's. It emphasized her relationship with an other man and that she had, in the court's
view, used that relationship to "taunt" the defendant. n46 This focus permitted the court to base the degree of the husband's
culpability on the moral/good or immoral/bad behavior of the wife. Bycharacterizing the wife's conduct as
sexually provocative, the court depicted her as immoral/bad and therefore less worthy of
protection. n47 The stereotype behind this construction is that of the prostitute who, by her very nature, engages in sexually
provoca tive behavior. The court's reasoning is clear: A woman who engages in sexually provocative conduct
behaves like a prostitute and is less worthy of the law's protection. Further, the actions that she provokes
by her behavior are, at least in part, deserved.
In addition to prostitution's influence on the legal and social tra dition of focusing on the behavior of women
and its paradigmatic role as the standard by which the seriousness of charges of domestic
abuse, sexual harassment, and rape is evaluated, it is bound to these other forms of violence
in yet a third way. Women report acts of violence that are embedded in the images of prostitution, which are often rein
forced through pornography. Survivors of domestic abuse report that their batterers use the epithets
of "whore" and "slut" when beating their victims. n48 They also report being forced to look at
pornography [*1234] and sometimes being forced to replicate the acts portrayed. n49 Survi vors also report that attackers use
similar epithets during rapes and sometimes throw money at them afterwards. n50
State v. Norman, n51 a 1989 North Carolina Supreme Court case, demonstrates how sometimes domestic abuse can take the form
of prostitution. In an unsuccessful appeal of her conviction for voluntary manslaughter of her husband, Judy Norman argued that she
was enti tled to have the jury consider whether the killing was done in self- defense. n52 She presented evidence to show that she fit
the profile of a [*1235] battered spouse to support her self-defense claim, which included tes timony that the deceased frequently
assaulted her, struck her with var ious objects, and put out cigarettes on her body. n53 There was also testimony that her husband
did not work and forced her to make money by prosti tution, and that he made humor of that fact to family and friends. He would
beat her if she resisted going out to prostitute herself or if he was unsatisfied with the amounts of money she made. He rou tinely
called the defendant "dog," "bitch," and "whore," and on a few occasions made her eat pet food out of the pets' bowls and bark like
a dog. n54
As in domestic violence and rape cases, sexualharassers fre quently equate their victims to women in
prostitution. It is not un common to find that the conduct alleged to constitute workplace sexual harassment involves
references to prostitution through porno graphic images. n55 In Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, n56 for exam ple, the male
shipyard workers targeted Lois Robinson by choosing pornographic images that included women who resembled her. n57 Like the
batterers, the harassers in the shipyard sent the message that Robinson deserved no respect because she was the woman in the por
nography - "a whore." n58
In recognizing that the neat, legal categories of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, rape, and
prostitution do not accurately reflect [*1236] how women experience acts of violence, we do
not intend to obscure the fact that each category of violence presents issues particular to it.
Our purpose, instead, is to expose that the prostitution paradigm , its images and its threats, plays a role
that is common in all categories of violence along the continuum. In turn, the continuum reveals
both the pervasiveness of violence and the pervasiveness of prostitution as a paradigm in
women's lives. Because different categories of violence interrelate with and support each other, legal reforms and
changing societal views of one form of violence affect the law's treatment and society's
understanding of the other forms of violence. For this rea son, legal reforms that expand protection
from violence in the areas of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and rape have the potential to blur the
boundaries between each of these forms of violence and prostitution. n59 In response, law reformers have
developed strategies that seek to reinforce traditional distinctions or to construct new ones. Notwithstanding those strategies,
however, law
reform efforts also have the capacity to transform our legal and societal
understanding of prostitution.

Prioritize our impact—understanding security through gender identity is key to

prevent serial policy failure and address local insecurities such as famine,
disease, environmental degradation, and war
Hoogensen and Rottem 4—*Gunhild Hoogensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Tromsø, Norway. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science specializing in IR and Comparative Politics from the University of
Alberta. **Svein Vigeland Rottem is a Doctoral Student in IR at the University of Tromsø and a Researcher for the Human Security
Project [“Gender Identity and the Subject of Security,” Security Dialogue 2004 35: 155, SAGE Journals]
Conclusion
Understanding security through gender identity forces us to re-evaluate traditional security
politics, where security and securitization are traditionally understood as the top of the state
hierarchy, where securitization is the exclusive domain of extraordinary measures as defined
by perceived threats toward the state and where securitization is a negative process that
demands emergency action ‘outside the bounds of normal political procedure’ (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998: 24).
Securitization understood thus means failure: failure to address the issue within ‘normal
bounds’ (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998: 29). Securitization is a threat–defence sequence that we are
told we must avoid. But what this also means is that we must accept the deprioritization of
security issues that do not meet these narrow standards . Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde (1998: 25–26) state that
they ‘do not want to start by arbitrarily assigning degrees of importance to referent objects and sectors, for instance, defining state
as more important than environment or military as more securitylike than identity’. Instead, they
claim that priority, and
therefore the securitizing act, can be established on the basis of the impact the issue has on a
wider pattern of relations (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998: 26). However, to do this, one must decide upon
the criteria to be used to determine such impact. We have shown that gender as identity can not
only provide the criteria to determine impact , but also allows for a broader understanding of
security overall.
A reorientation of the security dynamic that removes the hierarchy and prioritization of some
securities over others – acknowledging securities laterally, democratically, and in mutually influential and dynamic ways –
moves the concept of security away from the patriarchal and hierarchical structure in which
the prevailing security discourse is encased. Thus, it is possible, and beneficial, to recognize
security emanating from democratic roots – not in a hierarchical sense but as a multiplicity of securities flowing
concurrently. We can then start to recognize ways in which these securities are linked to one
another, rather than isolating them from one another and prioritizing them individually. Such
linkages can then inform policy , balancing the complementarity of the securities while
recognizing ways in which they possibly conflict.
This means that we recognize the interconnections between local violence such as domestic
violence and global violence such as war, and we recognize that ignoring the former prevents
us from fully understanding the causes of the latter. Recognizing the nature and causes of
these different levels of violence allows us to work with, and cooperate on, these securities
before they develop into the sort of atrocities that are often the primary focus of the human
security agenda. A broadened understanding of security can work towards prevention . The
security dynamic is always in flux, and security is not a ‘condition’ to be repaired and done with ( ‘band
aid’ solutions ). It takes a great deal of awareness and vigilance to be secure, as well as
recognition of the impacts of economic, health, environmental, community and personal
security. A broader definition of security, trickling up and out to policymakers and community
action, allows for deeper and more effective exploration of the insecurities articulated by
diverse identities – including through gender – regarding famine , disease , the sex trade ,
environmental degradation , oppression and, among many other things, war .
What we learn from Wæver et al. is that identity is important . The greatest evidence that the definition
of security must be widened is the debate about security itself. The debate illustrates the
extent to which security is understood in so many different but important and relevant ways,
including traditional as well as non-traditional approaches. The failure of the debate so far lies in assuming that
each avenue presented is the avenue to security. When we take a moment to step back from
our attacks and parries, we can see that we are plainly demonstrating the complexity of
security. In fact, there is a great deal of agreement and positive movement among the scholars
who argue in favour of some sort of expansion of security. That they come to the debate from
different perspectives is only a benefit – it illustrates just how necessary it is to understand
security in a broader sense. What these debates clearly show is that state security cannot be equated with
the security of the people. Through identity, individuals, communities, ‘the people’ have a
legitimate avenue to achieve security on their own terms, ‘trickling up’ to the policymakers .
 Plan
The United States should remove criminal penalties on and apply employment
laws to prostitution in the United States.
 1AC—Solvency
The plan’s version of minimalist legalization is necessary to ensure prostitution
worker rights—all “prostitution bad” arguments are skewed by bad research
practices that assume criminalized and Swedish regimes.
Ronald WEITZER, Professor of Sociology at George Washington University, 13 [“Prostitution as a Legal Institution,” December
4, 2013, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/12/04/ronald-weitzer/prostitution-legal-institution]
Unfortunately, the
vast majority of research on prostitution internationally has focused on systems
where all or most of the preconditions for prostitution are illegal. Thus, what we think we
“know” about prostitution may be colored by research confined to how it manifests under
criminalization, rather than where it is legal. Imagine researching only countries where abortion is criminalized and
occurs in unsafe and shady circumstances – then generalizing those skewed findings to “abortion.” This is the situation for
prostitution: many of the assumptions and public policies regarding it are based on either folk wisdom or ignorance of the full
panoply of policy regimes.
McNeill is right about several things. Starting with her central point, there
is absolutely no reason why sexual
commerce cannot be viewed and treated like other kinds of work . What makes it different
from other work is the stigma attached to it and a set of stereotypical assumptions about the
participants and the working conditions. But research shows that such assumptions (e.g., abuse,
exploitation, violence) are by no means inherent in prostitution . The first step in normalizing
prostitution, as I write in my book Legalizing Prostitution, is that “consensual adult prostitution be officially
recognized as work and that participants be accorded the rights and protections available to
those involved in other occupations .”[1]
McNeill is also right to mention conflict over prostitution policy. Such conflict should not be surprising: it is a staple of other
controversial issues, such as same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, and doctor-assisted suicide. Opponents are often well
organized, media savvy, and influential with politicians. In the prostitution arena, the most important “anti”
forces (1) equate prostitution with sex trafficking, (2) demand blanket criminalization where it
currently doesn’t exist, or (3) champion the Swedish system where the clients of sex workers,
but not the workers themselves, are criminalized. These forces have met with success, in many
nations, in redefining prostitution in ideological terms, creating new offenses and stiffer punishments, and
defeating proposals for legalization. McNeill is right to criticize these misguided and counterproductive policies and
the fallacious claims on which they have been based.[2] Draconian punishments for consenting adults who
exchange sex for money compel them to operate underground, exposing both parties to risk
of victimization and exploitation . I should also point out that all of these anti-prostitution campaigns
are blatantly gender-biased: they ignore male and transgender workers and are obsessed with
controlling women’s bodies – women who are denied individual agency and respect for their
decisions and depicted as passive victims . Such anti-feminist paternalism is part of the answer to George Carlin’s
famous question: “Sex is legal. Selling is legal. Why is selling sex illegal?”
I don’t know whether McNeill has conducted her own research. Relying on others’ writings, she does recapitulate several mistakes
that deserve correction here. First, the criminalization model is not confined to a handful of countries, as she claims. It is
essentially – de facto if not de jure – the reigning system in several nations, where the act of
prostitution may be “legal” but everything surrounding it, including solicitation or
communication regarding price and service, is criminalized. Second, I know of no society that has
adopted a policy of pure “ decrim inalization,” entirely lacking in government regulation. It is a
myth that New Zealand and New South Wales, Australia, have decriminalized prostitution
with no regulatory apparatus. New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003 but coupled this
with nuisance-abatement laws for street prostitution and regular inspections of sex
businesses by the police, health department, and social services. This is minimalist
legalization, not unregulated decriminalization . New South Wales delegates regulatory decisions to local city
councils, and they vary tremendously in both their general orientation to commercial sex (pragmatic vs. moralistic) and in the kinds
of restrictions (geographic and otherwise) they place on both businesses and independent operators, some of which are quite
onerous. NSW is not an example of pure decriminalization as McNeill imagines.
McNeill uses the terms “heavy” and “loose” legalization; she gives a few examples of each but fails to define these terms. Thus, we
have no way of evaluating any particular system, since she offers no criteria for distinguishing the good from the bad. But perhaps
McNeill would consider this a fool’s errand anyway, since she seems to advocate radical, unfettered decriminalization. She
writes: “even in looser legalization regimes, laws create perverse incentives and provide
weapons the police inevitably use to harass sex workers.” These outcomes are neither
“inevitable” nor “perverse,” as evidence from several legal regimes shows. Nevada’s extremely
comprehensive regulatory system explains why legal brothels have persisted in the state for four decades without controversy.
Several other jurisdictions have legalized at least one type of prostitution without “perverse”
consequences. A government evaluation of legal brothels in Queensland, Australia, concluded
that, “Legal brothels now operating in Queensland provide a sustainable model for a healthy,
crime-free, and safe legal licensed brothel industry” and are a “state of the art model for the
sex industry in Australia.”[3] The report found that both legal brothels and sole operators (in-call or
out-call) had little adverse impact on the local community . And one survey found that 70% of a sample of 205
legal brothel workers and independent escorts said they would “definitely choose” such work if they had it to do over again, and half
of each group felt that their work was a “major source of satisfaction” in their lives.[4]
Taken to its extreme, total decriminalization sans regulation would allow street prostitution in any
neighborhood; would leave brothels, escort agencies, and massage parlors unmonitored and
their owners unscreened for criminal ties; and would allow explicit advertising of sexual services
virtually everywhere (internet, newspapers, billboards, television). Whatever one thinks of any of the specific regulations now
being instituted in the newly legal marijuana regimes in Colorado and Washington, there is good reason why the framers of these
ballot initiatives eschewed unrestricted decriminalization. The failure of Oregon’s more radical ballot measure in 2012 shows the
danger of proposing something that is not pragmatic, and the same point applies to efforts to liberalize policies on sexual commerce.
The public is much more likely to endorse proposals containing reasonable restrictions than a free-for-all approach.
Fortunately, a set of “best practices” has been proposed. In Legalizing Prostitution, I list about 30 practices that can be used to
evaluate existing legal regimes and serve as guidance for states considering legalization in the future. Space limitations prevent a full
discussion of these norms here, but I will offer a few that relate directly to McNeill’s essay. I agree with her that the
rules
should not be “heavy” if by that she means onerous, stigmatizing, arbitrary, or costly to
comply with. There should be no “sin tax” imposed on sex operators that does not apply to
other business operations. The overall objectives should be health, safety, workers’ rights , and
minimum impact on the public:
I assume McNeill would agree with me that minors should be prohibited from selling sex. This rule is universal
among nations that have legalized prostitution.
I agree with McNeill that sex
workers should not be forced to register or be licensed by the
authorities. Such attempts have failed everywhere they have been attempted, except in Nevada’s
exceptional rural brothels. As the National Organization for Women declared in its landmark 1973 decriminalization resolution,
mandatory registration “will result in ongoing persecution of women who register because they do not wish to publicly proclaim
themselves prostitutes.”[5]
Erotic businesses are different: Their owners should be subjected to rigorous background checks. Operators who pass the screening
should be licensed, and these licenses should be subject to a periodic renewal process to maintain oversight of these businesses. The
cost of the license should be low, as an incentive to operate within the legal sector rather than underground.
Police are not necessarily malevolent, as McNeill assumes. They can play a constructive role in
protecting sex workers’ safety and rights.[6] In the Netherlands, special teams of police officers
routinely inspect sex premises and question the workers and owners in a collegial manner . These units
are governed by a code of conduct, reprinted in my book.
Restrictions on advertising are needed, just as they are for alcohol and tobacco products. Given the sensitivity of prostitution for
many people, it is best to keep it as discreet as possible. The same goes for the location of erotic businesses, which should be
prohibited from locating near schools and playgrounds. Minimizing encroachment on the public reduces the chances of backlash if
sex businesses and advertisements are too visible.
Safe-sex practices and routine health examinations should be encouraged , repeatedly, by the
government,but not mandated because of both enforcement difficulties and privacy
considerations. Many sex workers already practice safe sex and get regular health checks.
Institutionalized discrimination against prostitutes and business operators should be illegal. An
example is the refusal of banks in several European nations to lend money to owners of legal brothels and erotic clubs. Both workers
and business owners should have the same rights as the participants in other types of commerce.
Finally, we should increase penalties for anyone who engages in exploitation or abuse. Too often, law
enforcement has
turned a blind eye to instances of parasitical pimping, assault, robbery, and rape of sex
workers. Robust punishment for these crimes will send a (hopefully deterrent) message to would-be
predators that they will be held accountable.
A regulatory system built on these (and some additional) restrictions is far superior to either
criminalization or unregulated decriminalization: it guarantees workers’ rights and can
enhance their health and safety; it imposes vital oversight over business owners ; and it will attract
much more public support than a policy of simple, unrestricted decriminalization .

Removing penalties and regulating the businesses with worker rights is the only
way to solve—decrim just allows private actors to replace pimps, and changing
penalties, like the Swedish model, just marks sex workers as exploitable.
SHOWDEN 11 Assistant Prof of Poli Sci at UNC Greensboro [Carisa R. Showden, “Choices
Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted reproduction, and Sex Work,” University of Minnesota Press, p. 172-184]
How the State Can Respond
Although state action is not the only source of regulation of sexual ideology and the shaping of
prostitution, it is an important arena that needs to be engaged . There are three broad legal approaches
available to dealing with prostitution: criminalization, decriminalization, and legalization. Decriminalization removes legal penalties
from engaging in prostitution; legalization imposes some form of state regulation, which can be achieved through a number of, and
different combinations of, means: zoning, mandatory health testing of prostitutes, brothel residency rules, required registration with
state authorities, and so on. Criminalization is the tactic supported by radical feminists, and abolitionism has had the most success as
a political and legal argument in the United States. Unfortunately, making prostitution illegal has done nothing to decrease the
demand for prostitution, the cultural understanding of prostitution, or the harms to women in prostitution. Instead, the
abolition arguments help to continue to mark "whores" off from other women as a separate and
stigmatized category; they vest in the state continued power over women's bodies and with it powers of domination and
discipline; they essentialize male and female sexuality and their relationship to each other. At a practical level, criminalization
contributes to some of the worst abuses of streetwalking in particular and makes it harder for women to leave prostitution for jobs
in the licit economy, particularly if they have a criminal record because of prostitution work.
Where prostitution is criminalized, streetwalkers account for 85 to 90 percent of prostitute arrests, despite streetwalking comprising
only 10 to 20 percent of all prostitution (Kuo 2002, 74). Additionally, "although
women of color constitute
approximately 40 percent of streetwalkers, they constitute 55 percent of those arrested for
streetwalking and 85 percent of those incarcerated" (74- 75). The effect of criminalization is control

of already marginalized women, not the abolition of prostitution. Legalization or

criminalization schemes seem to have no effect on the number of women who enter
prostitution , bur making women criminals does increase the dangers they face as prostitutes while
doing nothing to solve the economic conditions that drive them into prostitution in the first place.32 ''Arrestingprostitutes
often serves only to heighten their isolation and estrangement, not only from friends, family, and the
community but also from the very social services they may need in order to access alternative means of income" (Kuo 2002, 125). It
also strengthens their reliance on pimps. "In prohibitionist countries like the United States, the legal
harassment of street workers by the police drives prostitutes into the 'protection' of pimps and
undermines the worker's ability to protect herself from dangerous clients by making speedy
negotiations necessary to avoid detection and arrest" (Chapkis 2000, 183). Criminalization is a form of domination ,
not a means of enabling the production of new modes of relation in and beyond the sexual economy.
Critics of legalization schemes often rightly point out that legalization can be and often is at least as
harmful to prostitutes' interests as criminalization. Certainly the one case of legalization in the United States-in rural
counties in Nevada-has been quite poorly implemented and ought not be a model of feminist policy making.
That current legalization schemes are deeply flawed does not mean all efforts at legalization
have to be abandoned ; it means that it needs to be done better. A brief comparison of Nevada's approach
to legalization to the hybrid decriminalization/legalization model that the Netherlands has begun implementing offers some insight
into how to approach the development of alternatives. The point of this brief comparison is to think about how to change the
working environment for sex workers to enable them the greatest degree of control over their sexuality and income. Although these
cases are not perfect comparisons-different jurisdictions (national versus state-level jurisdiction) and different political cultures
(Dutch pragmatism versus U.S. moralism)-there
are no other legalization or hybrid approaches within the
United States with which to compare Nevada's model, and the approaches of both the Netherlands and
Nevada are efforts at regulation rather than abolition, making them instructive counterpoints in some important respects.
In Nevada, prostitution is only legal in state-licensed brothels. "Because the state has given brothel owners
an outright monopoly on legalized sexual commerce, all independent prostitution is a criminal offense. The effect is that no woman
can work legally without agreeing to share her income with a state-licensed 'pimp"' (Chapkis 1997, 162). Further, although they have
to work in brothels to avoid being criminals, the prostitutes do not count as employees but rather are categorized as
independent contractors, so that they get no state-provided workers' benefits, nor can they unionize.33 They
have to live in
the same place where they work, and they have to register with the police. In most brothels, if a prostitute needs to go
into town during her weeks on shift, she has to be accompanied by a nonprostitute, and most are required to live outside of the
town limits during their week off each month. They work a standard shift: twelve to fourteen hours per day, seven days a week, for
rwenty-one days straight. Fifty
percent of the money earned per transaction goes back to the brothel
management. In addition, prostitutes have to pay fees for room and board, purchase supplies (including condoms), and tip
house employees. To be allowed to refuse a customer, the prostitute has to provide management with what it considers an
"acceptable reason" (Chapkis 1997, 163; see also Kuo 2002, 82-84; Hausbeck and Brents 2000). In
most brothels, women
are required to participate in a lineup: "Prostitutes are required literally to line up and pose whenever a new
customer enters, thus displaying 'his options"' (Kuo 2002, 83). It seems the only benefit to the prostitutes in this system is that they
are not in danger of being arrested, as autonomy has been legalized out of the Nevada brothel system. Note that none of these
requirements is necessary to brothel prostitution, as Kathryn Hausbeck and Barbara G. Brents (2000) explain in their social and
political history of the Nevada system. Additionally, Kuo (2002) describes cooperative brothels in the Netherlands that provide a high
level of physical protection for prostitutes while also giving individuals control over their working conditions, offering a very different
model of brothel prostitution than that practiced in Nevada.
The Netherlands offers a different legal model premised in part on protecting the labor
interests of prostitutes rather than focusing on the interests of third-party moralists or neighbors,
as we see in the Nevada scheme. In the Dutch model, "acts of prostitution between consenting adults are decriminalized" (Kuo 2002,
88),but the conditions of work are matters of regulation since a change in the law in 2000. (Before the
change, brothels and pimping were banned, but being a prostitute was legal.) Here, zoning of streetwalking consists
primarily of safe parks (tippelzones) and red-light districts. In the former, police-patrolled parks are established
where women are permitted to congregate for purposes of soliciting, and service centers are provided for women who need
counseling. In the latter, brothels and window prostitution are located in specified zones in twelve cities
(88-93). In some cities, the parks are located too far from public transportation or population centers to make them viable for most
streetwalkers, so they risk arrest by working outside of the zoned areas. Brothels have to be licensed and are subject to health and
safery regulations, and coercion, deceit, and abuse are ostensibly prohibited.34 Registered,
tax-paying prostitutes
can get state-sponsored workers' benefits, but many prostitutes avoid registration because of
the bureaucratic stigma attached and the risk oflosing their anonymity. For example, being a known
prostitute will get one barred from entering many countries, such as Switzerland and Austria, thus limiting prostitutes' freedom of
movement and future job prospects (Chapkis 1997, 156-57; Wijers 2008).
The EU-citizen sex worker response to the changes in the law have been mixed but generally positive, noting particularly
"independence (setting prices, organizing working hours and choosing what services to provide), an improvement in the image of
the profession and the enforcement of rules on health and safery" as the main benefits to legalization of organized prostitution
(Wijers 2008). There are still a number of problems with this system, including the variabiliry by
local jurisdiction in the licensing of establishments and enforcement of health codes. The Red Thread (the Dutch prostitutes'
organization) is seeking more uniform laws, the establishment of a hotline to which prostitutes can report abuses, greater labor law
enforcement, greater state support of independent operators, more licenses for small, cooperative brothels, and more support for
prostitutes who want to leave the profession (Wijers 2008). One of the main problems seems to be with the
licensing system, which works well for brothel owners but fails to protect prostitutes' privacy
interests. But importantly and positively, "individual sex workers do not have to register [with police] and are not submitted to
mandatory health checks" (Wijers 2008).
Although the Netherlands is a hybrid decriminalization/legalization model, it is also a hybrid
legalization/criminalization model. The repeal of the brothel ban was motivated partly to improve women's labor
interests and partly to protect EU women while further criminalizing non-EU sex workers. The political hope was that by
regulating prostitution, trafficking could be eliminated, and thus the "problem" of non EU women within the
Dutch border would be ameliorated (Hubbard, Matthews, and Scoular 2008, 142; Dag Stenvoll, personal communication, September
7, 2009). Further, brothel regulation has led municipalities to decide that there is less need for safe parks for streetwalkers, and so in
the last few years, cities have begun closing these spaces, further marginalizing the needs of streetwalkers. Thus, the effects of the
Dutch reforms have been decidedly ambiguous. On the one hand, the health and safety of some women have been aided; on the
other, the most marginalized and at-risk women are now further marginalized and at greater risk. Although the Dutch model is in
many ways preferable to the Nevada model, it is hardly a panacea. (In fact, any prostitution-specific policy is going to be
inadequate to address the problems of sex work.) What is clear in reviewing the Dutch model is that labor interests can be
protected in a law that emphasizes cracking down on coercion (trafficking) while legalizing
consensual sex work, and that state regimes are better at regulating sexuality than they are at promoting freedom. This is
why I argue that decriminalization should be the default position, and women working independently should be free from state
intervention in their labor.
The problem with simple decriminalization is that third parties , such as escort services or brothel owners,
can still take advantage of women's labor, so although the state is no longer disciplining her
sexually, her labor interests would not be improved tremendously. This is why some sex-as-work
advocates argue that legalization is preferable to decriminalization because, as the current status of pornography
demonstrates, if we leave it up to the goodness of the hearts of porn producers or pimps to obtain
consent and insist on safer sex practices, we have not done all we can to help women (see
Alexander 1998, 225). Decriminalization can aid the sex radicalism agenda, but it alone does not meet the needs
pointed out by the sexed labor analysis. To shape sexual and labor relations more positively-to
create different social relationships within sexual commerce- prostitutes need to be decriminalized , but any
business that hires sex workers needs to be regulated in line with meeting women's interests. This will not necessarily
change the violence that is faced by streetwalkers, especially in the short term. But the most significant policy change that could
improve the lot of streetwalkers is a change in broader economic and social service policies, specifically drug rehabilitation and child
protective services, rather than any prostitution-specific policy.
Consider the results of lne Vanwesenbeeck's study of the experiences and psychological states of prostitutes in indoor and outdoor
venues in the Dutch system, where criminalization is not a factor affecting the experience of sex workers. She found that about one-
quarter of prostitute women suffer severely. About half of the women are doing far better than the stereotyped view, at or slightly
less well than the average nonprostitute woman in the Netherlands. And a little more than onequarter are faring "quite well"-even
better than the average nonprostitute woman. 35 "The differences in how women fare appear to depend on five factors: childhood
experiences, economic situation, working conditions, survival strategies, and interaction with clients" (Kuo 2002, 95). The first two of
the five factors are nonspecific to prostitution; the final three are related to changing the structure of the job of street prostitutes.
The first two factors need to be addressed by changing women's overall cultural and economic well-being so that they do not face
the worst forms of prostitution as their best employment options to start with. Those who suffer under exploitative labor conditions
in sex work do so for two main reasons: criminalization, and poverty and abuse outside of prostitution. Prostitution policy can only
address the former. Hence, economic policy is prostitution policy. Additionally, domestic violence policy is
prostitution policy: "At highest risk were those women who would never prostitute but for great economic necessity. 'Abuse
by a private partner' was often the source of this extreme economic need" (96).
Economic policy is also prostitution policy for another reason. Women are not the only beings affected by exploitative labor
relations and poverty. Although male violence crosses class lines, frustration and lack of a sense of control are factors leading to
violence, and economically disempowered men are more likely to feel frustration and a lack of control. Sociologist Martin
Monro's study of seven hundred men arrested for trying to hire street prostitutes indicates
that most violence against prostitutes is committed by a small proportion of clients (zooo, 76) and
that "motives for buying sex differ according to social class .... Noncollege graduates were more likely than college graduates to say
they wanted to be in control during sex" (81). This
drive for control, which can lead to more violent client-
prostitute interactions, is not surprising given that these men have little control in other areas
of their lives. The argument that violence correlates with men's economic frustration corresponds to the reports cited above
from sex workers at the high end of the industry (call girls, escorts), who report more satisfaction with their work and much less on-
the-job violence.
Legalization schemes have tended to protect community interests and brothel owners'
interests , but as currently constructed, they operate almost as oppressively as criminalization for the
women involved. Individual interactions may be therapeutic or resistant, but the material structure of the work environment
requires serious sex-as-labor challenges in order to meet the possibilities sex workers can provide for a more open sexuality
discourse while avoiding the perpetration of the harms abolitionists have documented. Thus, state policies must be a target of
if the only goal is abolition , not only is the policy doomed to fail, it is also
feminist activism. But
doomed to punish poor women while failing to attend to the primary reason most women go
into sex work: economic need. Because the state sets so much of the discursive and material framework within which
women's sexuality and work are determined, the law and its enforcement are central tools for changing the framework and social
meaning of prostitution and women's sex.
Ideally, feminists would move to supporting a hybrid legalization/ decriminalization model
that opens up space for women to operate singly or in small groups without state
intervention while labor law and safety provisions were applied to any third-party business
interests working with prostitutes such as escort service providers or corporate brothel owners. Certain features of current
practices would not be part of an ideal state policy. For
example, prostitutes must not be required to register
with police, and
self-employed independent operators should not be required to get a state license.
Registration is a further effort to monitor and control prostitutes-to mark "whores" off from "respectable"
women-and is not necessary to allowing women to engage in sex work or to receive services that might put them on the path of
improving their working conditions or leaving prostitution. Registration schemes are also unlikely to work.
Prostitutes across the globe generally try to avoid complying with registration imperatives, even when it would garner them public
benefits. Partly this is because of the temporary nature of most prostitutes' work in the field, and partly because they wish to avoid
the bureaucratic stigma of registering (Kuo 2002, 132).
Another reason to opt for a hybrid model rather than simple legalization is that the latter just shifts the site of the
problem. With sex work illegal, the result is paternalism, the daddy state telling women what
is good for them . The profit the state here gets is that it has a heavy hand in deciding what
kind of sexuality and gender regimes are permitted and desirable, and which are not. With
legalized sex work, at least as it has been practiced in Nevada, the result is the pimp state, where the state functions
as an (abusive) pimp and profits from women's labor, but leaves the sex worker almost as bad off as before.
Decriminalization could begin to change the structures within which sex work-and sexuality more generally-develops and is
regulated and produced. It is not meant to be a panacea for all of the harms of prostitution; nor can prostitution alone transform
sexual relations between men and women (or between gays or lesbians or transgender people). But because the law helps regulate
(that is, it does not determine but it shapes) not only the way we interact sexually but also the desires we have and can imagine and
the relationships we build from those desires, changing the law is one important element in creating a more just sexual order.
Because the state can be just as coercive as individual pimps and traffickers, it is important
not to displace one source of coercion for another. The power of the state to do good-promote
more equitable economic policies, for example-must be harnessed while not handing the state
more paternalistic powers over women's sexual self-development.
To be clear, prostitution is a fraught, ambiguous, multivalent phenomenon (or, more accurately, phenomena). As Hynes and
Raymond rightly note, "The
challenge for governments today is to punish the growing numbers of
sexual exploiters-traffickers, pimps, procurers, and buyers-while not penalizing the women who find
themselves in conditions of sex trafficking and prostitution" (2002, 221). Hynes and Raymond then argue that prostitution needs to
remain a crime, but it seems to me that turning women into criminals in order to
punish their abusers does precisely
what they and I agree needs to be avoided: penalizing the women involved . Women are
penalized when the state marks their only lucrative career option as illegal primarily because of a rigid
sexual ideology that says "good girls don't." It is important to be clear that making a job category legal does not condone
harm on the job. For example, "lawyer" is a legal (noncriminal) job category, but the sexual harassment of lawyers (to use Hynes and
Raymond's example) is not legal. One
way to challenge the conflation of sex with violence is to insist
that sex be allowed while violence is not. So long as we continue to say that to allow prostitution is to allow
victimization of women, we are assuming a natural law of male sexual desire as violent. But surely men can be sexual without being
violent. Although sex may be used as a tool of violence, that does not mean that sex is always violence. As with marriage, violence
must be strictly not tolerated while the institution or the sexual practice-is allowed to continue. Selling sex in some ways
denaturalizes it, demystifies it, and makes it something more obviously malleable and variable.
My argument is not that prostitution is an idealized, playful freefor-all of radical sexuality; nor is it that commodification should be
the model of sexuality we as a society or as feminists ought to work toward. I do contend, however, that prostitution as it currently
exists has many different contexts, that most of them need to be revised, and that decriminalization is one tool to bring about
necessary changes within the institution. A specific context that needs to be altered is the dire economic circumstances that drive
some women into sex work. Prostitution in and of itself is neither inherently good nor bad, but prostitution engaged solely because
of a lack of viable alternatives is coercive, and coercion is inherently bad in that it undermines both freedom and autonomy.
Economic policies that lift wages so that the working class can make a living wage are necessary so that anyone who opts to engage
in sex work only does so out of a desire for sex radicalism-to engage directly in the challenge that prostitution can provoke in the
sex/gender order. When
employed in sex work under conditions of autonomy, freedom, and
legality, prostitution can help to dismantle the Madonna/ whore dichotomy structuring
women's affective, sexual, and legal lives.

State action alone is sufficient to solve

CURVA 12 Research Editor, Rutgers Law Review [Ione Curva, Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: How
New Jersey Prostitution Law Reform Can Reduce Sex Trafficking, Winter, 2012, Rutgers Law Review, 64 Rutgers L. Rev. 557]
Though prostitution is often referred to as the "oldest profession" n51 in the world, surprisingly sex trafficking was not regulated or
criminalized in the United States until 1875. n52 In 1875, Congress enacted the Alien Prostitution Importation Act, which made it a
felony to import a noncitizen woman into the United States for the purpose of prostitution, which was punishable by up to five
years' incarceration or $ 5,000 in fines. n53 Though less people are aware of this law, it was Congress' first attempt at regulating sex
trafficking. n54 Initial jurisprudence reflected Congress' belief that prostitution was immoral, and regulation was based on notions of
morality, as in United States v. Bitty. n55
In 1910, Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, better known as the Mann Act. n56 The Mann Act made it a "federal
crime to transport any woman or girl in interstate commerce for the purpose of prostitution, "debauchery,' or any other "immoral
purpose.'" n57 However, only three years later, the
Supreme Court held [*565] that Congress could not
regulate prostitution per se, as that was within the power of the states. n58 Instead, Congress
could only regulate interstate travel for purposes of prostitution or other immoral purposes. n59
Today prostitution is controlled entirely by state law . n60 Currently there is no federal law that
prohibits prostitution . n61 States' power to regulate prostitution derives from an 1884
proclamation by the Supreme Court in Barbier v. Connolly, where the Court characterized state police
powers as those that "promote the health, peace, morals, education, and good order of the people." n62
Since each state is entitled to create its own laws and regulations on prostitution, it is not surprising
that the treatment of the various parties involved differ from state to state. Punishments differ from state to
state, as well as the particular prostitution-related charges. n63
An examination of state prostitution statutes reveals a trend that shows the majority of states impose the greatest punishments for
pimps, including the degree of punishment, length of imprisonment, and monetary fines. n64 The District of Columbia and 31 states,
including New Jersey, have statutes that impose the harshest penalties on pimps, while imposing lesser but equal penalties on
prostitutes and johns. n65 There are six states that impose [*566] equal penalties on pimps, prostitutes, and johns. n66 There are
eight states where pimps are punished the most harshly, followed by prostitutes, and then consumers. n67 Finally, there are five
states where pimps are punished the most harshly, followed by consumers, and then prostitutes. n68
Despite the differences, there are many similarities between the states' legislation. First, "prostitution
is legally recognized in all fifty states as a sexual offense involving female and male prostitutes, and mostly
male clients." n69 Many studies have found that there is a clear gender bias against females involved in prostitution cases,
particularly shown through their higher rates of arrest and incarceration. n70 Despite the fact that prostitution involves at least two
parties (namely the prostitute and client, or john, assuming arguendo that the prostitute is working for herself), in the majority of
cases, only the prostitute ends up involved in the criminal justice system. n71
The criminality model normalizes violence against sex workers [Swedish model,
rehab, offer services, etc.]
-Violence is conducted by police more often than by the clients
Melissa Gira GRANT Contributing Editor Jacobin Magazine ’14 Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work p. 4-12
To produce a prostitute where before there had been only a woman is the purpose of
such policing. It is a socially acceptable way to discipline women, fueled by a lust for
law and order that is at the core of what I call the " prostitute imaginary "-the ways in which we
conceptualize and make arguments about prostitution. The prostitute imaginary compels those who seek to
control, abolish, or otherwise profit from prostitution, and is also the rhetorical product of their
efforts. It is driven by both fantasies and fears about sex and the value of human life .
The sting itself, aside from the unjust laws it enforces, or the trial that may never result, is intended to incite
fear. These stings form just one part of a matrix of widespread police misconduct
toward sex workers and people profiled as sex workers. In New York City, for example, 70 percent of
sex workers working outdoors surveyed by the Sex Workers Project reported near
daily run-ins with police, and 30 percent reported being threatened with violence.
According to "The Revolving Door:
An Analysis of Street-Based Prostitution in New York City," when street -based sex workers sought help from the police, they
were often ignored.
Carol told researchers, "If I call them, they don't come. If I have a situation in the street, forget it. 'Nobody told you to be in the
street.' After a girl was gang-raped, they said, 'Forget it, she works in the street.' She said, 'I
hope that never happens to your daughters. I'm human.'" Jamie had an incident where she was "hanging out on the stroll ...
these guys in a jeep driving by ... one guy in a car threw a bottle at me ... I went to the cops [who told me] we didn't have a right
being in that area because we know it's a prostitution area, and whatever came our way, we deserved it.''
Police violence isn't limited to sex workers who work outdoors. In a parallel survey conducted by the Sex Workers Project, 14
percent of those who primarily work indoors reported that police had been violent toward them; 16 percent reported that
police officers had initiated a sexual interaction.
This was in New York City, where the police department is notorious for violating civil rights in the course of law enforcement,
but look globally, where violations of sex workers' rights by police are also common-and well documented. In
West
Bengal, the sex worker collective Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee surveyed over [twenty
one thousand] 21,000 women who do sex work. They collected [fourty eight
thousand] 48,000 reports of abuse or violence by police in contrast with [four
thousand] 4,000 reports of violence by customers, who are conventionally thought of
as the biggest threat to sex workers, especially by campaigners opposed to prostitution.
Police violence against sex workers is a persistent global reality. As the economy collapsed in
Greece, police staged raids on brothels, arrested and detained sex workers, forced them to undergo HIV testing, and released
their photos and HIV status to the media. These actions were condemned by UNAIDS and Human Rights Watch. In China,
police have forced sex workers they have arrested to walk in "shame parades," public processions in which they are shackled
and then photographed. Police published these photos on the Web, including one in which a cop humiliated a nude sex worker
by pulling her hair back and brutally exposing her face to the camera. When the photo went viral, the outcry reportedly
prompted police to suspend these public shaming rituals, though they continue to make violent arrests and raids. One could
hope that the photos and videos like these could make the pervasiveness of this violence real to the public. But to truly
confront this type of violence would require us to admit that we permit some violence
against women to be committed in order to protect the social and sexual value of
other women.
Violence's Value
I've stopped asking, Why have we made prostitution illegal? Instead I want an explanation for, How much violence against
"prostitutes" have we made acceptable? The police run-ins, the police denying help, the police abuse-all this shapes the context
in which the sting, and the video of it, form a complete pursuit of what we are to understand as justice, which in this case is
limited to some form of punishment, of acceptable violence.
As I was working on this book I was invited to give a presentation to law students and fellows at Yale University. In my talk, I
described these videos. Afterward, as I stood in the door about to leave, several students approached me individually to say
that they thought my presentation would have been more persuasive if I had prefaced it by stating my "position on
prostitution."
"Do you need to know if I oppose prostitution," I asked these students, "before you can evaluate how you feel about police
abuse, about a persistent pattern of denying justice to people labeled 'prostitutes'?" Are these videos to be understood only as
documents of an acceptable form of violence, to be applied as a deterrent, to deliberately make prostitution less safe?
My presentation remains, with this addendum: these students taught me to see how narrowly and insistently people can focus
their opposition to what they understand as "the system" of prostitution, so much so that even police violence against sex
workers is collapsed into that system, how this violence appears inevitable. The
stigma and violence faced by
sex workers are far greater harms than sex work itself, yet this is illegible to those
who only see prostitution as a self-enforcing system of violence. For them, prostitution marks
out the far reach of what's acceptable for women and men, where rights end and violence is justice. This is accepted as the cost
of protecting those most deserving of protection. Opponents of sex work decry prostitution as a
violent institution , yet concede that violence is also useful to keep people from it.
The Fargo videos invite the public to witness this violence against sex workers, a criteria we don't admit to using to define
their existence. Here we
see evidence of their lives only as they are put on display the last critical minutes of a
police tactic meant to exert control over sex workers' abilities to move in public spaces,
to make a living, to determine the conditions of their labor. These videos capture and relay the
moment-an agreement made and money exchanged-that is nearly universally understood as defining prostitution, though it is
also marked here with the particulars of the indoor, Internet-powered sex trade: Two people going behind closed doors,
seated on floral bedcovers, and counting bills before getting down to business-and before the cuffs go on. In the prevailing
view, this is the moment to which nearly all sex workers' lives are reduced. As seen from a motel room in Fargo, North Dakota,
those lives are worth comparatively little to the public until they pass in front of the
policeman's camera.
The Carceral Eye
This is the social act to which the prostitute is reduced: the moment cash is handed to her; the moment she makes an
agreement. It's not a coincidence that this is what the law is most concerned with. In most cases, it's not necessary for police to
observe a sex act in progress in order to make an arrest. In fact, in some countries, like Canada and the UK, the sex act itself is
not illegal. What is illegal in many jurisdictions is the "communication for the purposes of . .. solicitation" or even, "loitering
with intent to solicit."
Prostitution is, much of the time, a talking crime. In some cities, it's a walking crime. In
Washington, DC, cops have the leeway to arrest people congregating in groups of two or more if they are doing so in areas
decreed by the chief of police as "prostitution free zones." In Queens, New York, transgender women report in significant
numbers that they cannot walk freely in their own neighborhoods-from their apartments, to the train-without being followed
by cops, who accuse them of being out "working"-whether they are or not. "I was just buying tacos," a transgender Latina
woman from Jackson Heights told Make the Road New York. "They grabbed me and handcuffed me. They found condoms in my
bra and said I was doing sex work. After handcuffing me they asked me to kneel down and they took my wig off. They arrested
me and took me away." Sex workers and anyone perceived to be a sex worker are believed to
always be working, or, in the cops' view, always committing a crime. People who are
profiled by cops as sex workers include, in disproportionate numbers, trans women,
Women of color, and queer and gender nonconforming youth. This isn't about policing sex. It's
about profiling and policing people whose sexuality and gender are considered
suspect. It's not just that police need to appear "tough on crime," to follow orders and keep certain people off the streets
through harassment, profiling, and arrests. Appeals for stepped-up vice enforcement come not just

from command but from feminist corners , too. Take the relatively recent swing in
antiprostitution rhetoric, the assertions of even mainstream women's rights
organizations that rather than arrest those they call "prostituted women," police
ought to arrest "the johns," "the demand." This is how we find the National Organization for Women and
Equality Now on the same side as those who commit violence against sex workers: cops ... This is how we come to have a
female prosecutor such as New York's Nassau County district attorney Kathleen Rice celebrating the arrest of 106 men for
allegedly buying sex in a single month-and leaving out of her press conference the arrests in that same month sex of twenty-
three women for allegedly selling sex, omitting their mug shots from the blown-up poster board that was at her side in front of
the news cameras. Women are still getting arrested in the course of busting johns.
District Attorney Rice is a near perfect model of what sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein describes as " carceral
feminism ," a reliance on the law-and-order power of the state to bring about gender
justice. Rather than couching crackdowns on sex work as fighting crime, now some feminists appeal to the
police to pursue stings against the sex trade in the name of gender equality. We can't
arrest our way to feminist utopia , but that has not stopped influential women's rights organizations from
demanding that we try.
This is how District Attorney Rice is able to claim that when she arrests men she is
"going after the demand," but when she arrests women she is only "getting them into
services." How, exactly, is someone who is most used to having the police threaten
them, or demand sex with them in exchange for not being arrested, then supposed to
trust the police in any way, let alone to connect them to services which are already
freely available? Is it that impossible to imagine there is a better party for reaching
out to sex workers than the police? Have we so internalized law enforcement as the
go-betweens, the regulators, and the bosses of sex workers that we can't imagine
prostitution without them?
We are using the policeman's eye when we can't see a sex worker as anything but his or her work, as an object to control. It 's
not just a carceral eye; it's a sexual eye . If a sex worker is always working , always
available , she ( with this eye, almost always a she) is essentially sexual . It's the eye of the
hotel room surveillance video but applied to our neighborhoods, our community
groups, and our policies. Even the most seemingly benign "rehabilitation" programs
for sex workers are designed to isolate them from the rest of the population . They may
be described as shelters, but the doors are locked, the phones are monitored, and guests are forbidden.
When we construct help in this way we use the same eye with which we build and fill prisons. This isn't compassion.
This isn't charity. This is control.
When we look at sex workers this way we produce conditions in which they are always being policed."
Criminalization" isn't just a law on the books but a state of being and moving in the
world, of forming relationships-of having them predetermined for you. This is why we
demonize the customer's perspective on the sex worker as one of absolute control, why
we situate the real violence sex workers can face as the individual man's
responsibility , and why we imagine that all sex workers must be powerless to say no.
We have no way of understanding how to relate to the prostitute we've imagined but
through control.
This fixation on control is what constrains our vision of sex work just as much as sex work's clandestine nature. I want to remove
these constraints and move beyond the imaginary. What follows is not a promise of some new reality beyond the fantasy for hire
that sex workers engage in but the slow circling around of a more persistent fantasy, and its end.

Abolitionist writers are paradigmatic and ignore confounding evidence

Ronald WEITZER, Professor of Sociology, George Washington University, 11 [“Sex Trafficking and the Sex Industry: The Need
for Evidence-Based Theory and Legislation,” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Fall 2011, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1337,
Lexis]

Oppression writers have been roundly criticized for violating standard canons of social science
inquiry and for viewing sex work through a monochromatic lens. n9 Despite this criticism,
proponents rigidly adhere to the central tenets of their paradigm , even when confronted
with compelling counter-evidence. n10 Moreover, most oppression writers restrict their citations
to writings of like-minded authors and ignore research findings that contradict the pillars of
their paradigm. n11 Such inconvenient findings are plentiful. n12 Scientific advancement depends on researchers' due
diligence in weighing findings and arguments that challenge their own: It is standard practice to situate a study within the related
scholarly literature. Oppression writers' neglect of relevant research is a radical departure from conventional scholarly writings. And
on those rare occasions when contrasting work is cited, the findings have sometimes been distorted or [*1340] even inverted by
the author. n13
The oppression model is grounded in a particular branch of feminist thinking: radical feminism. It
differs from the religious right's objections to commercial sex, which center on the threat it poses to marriage, the family, and
society's moral fiber. n14 The oppression paradigm's central
tenet is that sexual commerce rests on
structural inequalities between men and women and that male domination is intrinsic to
sexual commerce . n15 Women would not be compelled to sell sexual or erotic services if they had the same socioeconomic
opportunities as men. Moreover, the
very existence of prostitution suggests that men have, according to
Carole Pateman, a "patriarchal right of access to women's bodies," thus perpetuating women's
subordination to men. n16 Another writer declares that prostitution [*1341] "dehumanizes, commodifies and fetishizes
women ... . In prostitution, there is always a power imbalance, where the john has the social and economic power to hire her/him to
act like a sexualized puppet. Prostitution excludes any mutuality of privilege or pleasure ... ." n17 Oppression
theorists
argue that these fundamental harms will endure no matter how prostitution, pornography, or
stripping are governed; legalizing these practices (where currently illegal) in order to reduce harms will
not lessen the gender inequality that is intrinsic to sexual commerce. Domination will persist simply by virtue of men's
paid access to women's bodies. n18

Sex work is inevitable—there’s no root cause to make it go away. Vote aff to

improve an inevitable part of society
SHRAGE 06 Prof of Philosophy @ Cal State Polytechnic – Pomona [Laurie Shrage,
“Prostitution and the Case for Decriminalization,” from Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry,
edited by Jessica Spector] Page 240 – 246
Responses to prostitution from the left have been radically contradictory. Marxist thinkers, for
example, are committed to study social phenomena in terms of systems of production and their
related labor forms. But they rarely treat prostitution as a kind of work; instead they treat it as a side effect of
the moral decay, corruption, or cultural collapse that occurs under particular social conditions. Why? Leftists generally
respect working-class people and their political and economic struggles. Yet they rarely exhibit respect
toward prostitute organizations or their political activists and intellectuals. For the most part, such groups and
individuals are ignored.1 Again, why?
Many on the left want to believe that prostitution would not exist or would not be common or
tolerated in a world free of economic, gender, and sexual exploitation. The problem of
prostitution would solve itself once other problems are solved. Yet speculative judgments like this one
are abstract and academic . Prostitution isn't any single thing-a unitary social phenomenon with a particular
origin-and so it doesn't make sense to argue about whether it would or wouldn't be present in this or that type of society.
Working from crosscultural and historical studies, I have examined institutionalized and
commodified exchanges of sexual services between women providers and their male customers in many different social
contexts. 2 I conclude that there are (or have been) places and times where exchanges of sexual services
between women and men are (or were) relatively free of gender and class domination. How
then should leftists respond to the varieties of prostitution in the contemporary United States, where the
labor practices involved are shaped by pernicious class and gender asymmetries?
I want to argue that we should include in our political agendas the dismantling of the legal and

social structures that criminalize prostitution and stigmatize prostitutes . In conjunction with this
project, we will need to invent regulatory alternatives to the current punitive systems of control. These are
the primary aims of numerous prostitute civil rights and labor groups, and I think both feminists and socialists should
support them, though not for the libertarian reasons many representatives of these groups give. Arguments for
decriminalizing prostitution can be made by appealing to notions of workers' rights and the
dignity of lowstatus work; they need not appeal to the libertarian ideal of total freedom from governmental intrusion into
the lives of presumably independent individuals. These arguments can also be strengthened by accepting a robust pluralism with
regard to sexual customs and practices. I
don't mean that we cannot criticize sexual practices, only that
the criticism must take into account different cultural conceptions of human sexuality and not
dismiss out of hand those that are unfamiliar. Again, this desire to understand alien customs should not be confused with a
libertarian laissez-faire morality. The libertarian sees sexual desires as a natural force that society should respect; the pluralist
understands that desire, including the desire for noncommodified sex, is shaped by cultural and social forces.
Feminist theorists have argued that prostitution involves the sexual and economic
subordination, degradation, and exploitation of women and girls. Many forms of prostitution are indeed
brutal and oppressive: the near slave conditions that have been reported recently in brothels in Thailand, the use of "comfort
women" by the Japanese during the Second World War, the prostitution that exists around U.S. military bases and in many
contemporary urban spaces ("streetwalking," "massage parlors," "escort services," and so on). Women and girls have been tricked,
or physically and economically coerced, into the prostitution business and then kept in it against their will. Women have contracted
fatal diseases; they have been beaten and raped. These are common aspects of contemporary prostitution that anyone concerned
with social justice must address. 2
But we must also ask whether the legal structures that have been set up to control and
discourage prostitution-including voluntary prostitution where it exists- also oppress women. Both women
who work as prostitutes and women who are suspected of doing so (usually poor women of color) are
frequently harassed, manipulated, and exploited by police officers and others who have power over
them. Criminalization contributes to the stigma that prostitutes bear, making them more vulnerable to
hate crimes, housing and employment discrimination, and other violations of their basic rights. Because both
the operation of prostitution businesses and their legal suppression typically sacrifice women's interests, feminists generally oppose
both prostitution and its criminalization. Many feminists aim to devise nonpunitive, extralegal responses, such as providing other
work opportunities. Yet there
has been no concerted feminist attempt to undo the laws that define
acts of prostitution as criminal offenses and impose penalties on participants- more often the female
vendors than the male customers. Certainly feminist groups have not given the decriminalization of prostitution the same priority
they have given to other issues, such as ensuring the legality of abortion, reforming rape and sexual harassment laws, and
desegregating corporate management and the professions. Moreover, feminists have been more vocal in opposing sex businesses
than the
laws that criminalize the activities of commercial providers, and thus have contributed to creating a
climate conducive to the continued degradation of prostitutes. Feminists have not mobilized around the
decriminalization of prostitution because of our lingering ambivalence about the subject. Some question whether commodified
exchanges of sexual services are ever voluntary and regard prostitutes always as manipulated victims rather than autonomous
agents- a view that requires us to second guess the motives, desires, and values of all prostitutes. Other feminists argue
for decriminalizing only the prostitute's work while maintaining the criminal status of pimping, pandering,
and so on . But this requires the state to determine which of the prostitute's partners are
exploiting her and which are not unless we wish to punish all the prostitute's possible business
partners, including her spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, parents and siblings, and other comrades. Although
feminists are fully aware of the varieties of abuse prostitutes suffer, many of them fear that decriminalization will
lead to more prostitution and thus more exploitation of women and children. So they are willing to
tolerate the often brutal enforcement of laws against it. Yet realistically, we are more likely to discourage
the exploitation of women and children by regulating the labor practices followed by sex businesses.
If businesses that provide customers with personal sexual services could operate legally, then they would be
subject to the same labor regulations that apply to other businesses (given the nature of the work,
additional regulations might be necessary)) Such businesses would not be allowed to treat workers like
slaves, hire underage workers, deprive them of compensation for which they contracted, or expose them to unnecessary risks.
The businesses could be required to enforce health and safety codes, provide workers with a minimum income and health
insurance, and allow them to form collectives to negotiate for improved working conditions, compensation, and benefits. Many
feminists find it frightening to imagine a society where sex can be purchased as easily as soap, where selling sex is an occupational
option like selling shoes, and where businesses that profit from commercial sex are as legitimate as Ben and Jerry's. Such imaginings
usually lead to the question, "What next?" This is the slippery-slope argument, which is elaborated as follows: "Are we now going to
allow the sale of x?"where xis your favorite tabooed object (babies, vital organs, bombs, and so on). The answer to this question is
"No-not unless by tolerating the commercial distribution of x we can better protect the rights of particular people or better realize
some moral ideal."By tolerating the commercial distribution of sexual services within certain
limits, we can better protect the rights and interests of those who seek these services and,
importantly, those who choose to earn income by providing them. Though it is useful to ask what social forces
lead some people to seek the relatively impersonal provision of personal sexual services, we should be equally critical of the cultural
assumptions embedded in this question and in our various answers. At best, such excursions may help us understand how
prostitution is shaped by large and small capital interests, as well as dominant gender, racial, and sexual ideologies, and thus how to
devise regulatory instruments that discourage the recognizable forms of abuse, exploitation, and humiliation. The argument I am
making is simply this: that the
forms of exploitation and abuse suffered by prostitutes are similar to
those suffered by other workers (though they are often more intense because of the illegal status of this work).
Therefore these abuses should be addressed by mechanisms that improve the condition of workers generally. Sweatshop conditions
should not be tolerated, violations of workers' constitutionally protected rights should not be tolerated, customers should not be
permitted to engage in behaviors that endanger the workers' health or well being, care should be taken to avoid harm to
noninvolved third parties, contracts for compensation and services should be voluntary and take into account the interests of all
affected, and when these conditions are met such contracts should be respected (though not necessarily enforced by outside
authorities). If
the sex trade were regulated like other businesses, we would not have a perfect
world-labor would still be underpaid and exploited and needs would still go unmet-but the world
would be modestly improved.

Legalization eradicates workplace violence & makes trafficking less likely

REISENWITZ 14 Editor-in-Chief of Sex and the State, featured previously in The Week, Forbes, the
Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, VICE Motherboard, Reason magazine &Talking Points Memo [Cathy Reisenwitz, WHY IT’S TIME TO
LEGALIZE PROSTITUTION, http://cathyreisenwitz.com/blog/2014/08/18/time-legalize-prostitution/]
WHY IT’S TIME TO LEGALIZE PROSTITUTION
Evidence shows that it would protect sex workers, reduce violence, cut down on sex
trafficking, and more. There’s no good reason not to.
A prostitute has a 45 percent to 75 percent chance of experiencing workplace violence at some point,
according to recent research indicates, and a 32 percent to 55 percent likelihood that she or he was victimized
the past year. Worker safety, along with concerns about exploitation and objectification, are behind much of the
continued support for keeping prostitution illegal.
But there’s a movement afoot to challenge conventional wisdom about prohibition. Or, rather, to incorporate what we already know
about black markets into our thinking about sex workers and their rights.
As with the drug trade, much
of the violence associated with sex work is exacerbated by its illegality. Violent
people are more likely to prey on sex workers, confident that they won’t be reported to police. This leaves
workers dependent on pimps and madams for protection, which often leads to more violence. And then there’s abuse from police.
In Ireland, where prostitution is still criminalized, one study estimates that 30 percent of the abuse that sex workers report comes
from police. Some estimate that police actually abuse American sex workers more often than clients do.
Illegality also forces sex work outdoors. Craigslist and Backpage should be havens for workers to connect with and
vet clients from the safety of their homes. Instead, cops monitor such sites to ensnare workers and their clients. Sex workers traded
safety tips and rated clients on My Redbook until the FBIseized the site, destroying the data and forcing sex workers onto other sites,
or the streets.
After Germany and New Zealand legalized sex work, violence against sex workers decreased,
while workers’ quality of life improved. There, occupational health and safety laws protect sex workers. And the ability to
screen clients and take credit card numbers has reduced violence. “It’s been just fantastic,
really,” said Catherine Healey, national coordinator for the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective.
Some worry about legalized sex work leading to more widespread sexually transmitted infections. But in reality, after testing began
post-legalization in Germany, researchers discovered no difference in sexually transmitted infection rates between sex workers and
the general population.
In fact, the data are pretty clearly in favor of legalizing sex work to improve public health. The World Health Organization
recommends that countries decriminalize sex work. According to a recent WHO report, “Violence against sex workers is associated
with inconsistent condom use or lack of condom use, and with increased risk of STI and HIV infection. Violence also prevents sex
workers from accessing HIV information and services.”
It’s not just the WHO. Editors of the top medical journal The Lancet wrote that there is “no alternative” to decriminalizing sex work
in order to protect sex workers from HIV. In 1980, Rhode Island effectively legalized prostitution by accident when lawmakers
deemed the state statute on prostitution to be overly broad. They accidentally removed the section defining the act itself as a crime
while attempting to revise it, though lawmakers didn’t realize the error until 2003. Over the next six years new cases of gonorrhea
among women statewide declined by 39 percent. Interestingly, reported rapes also declined by 31 percent.
As far as worker exploitation goes, working conditions in black markets are nearly always worse. In
Germany, sex workers get to avail themselves of the same social-welfare infrastructure as all other German workers. Perhaps it
makes sense that a country that has always taken workers’ rights seriously would choose that it should no longer exempt sex
workers. There, they are represented by a union and are afforded full police protection when something goes wrong.
Another huge impetus behind the movement to legalize sex work is the current focus on ending
the scourge of sex trafficking. People are waking up to the fact that laws against sex work actually help
human traffickers. This is why the U.N. Human Rights Council published a report from the Global Alliance
Against Traffic in Women which criticizes anti-trafficking measures which restrict sex workers.
According to the report, “The criminalization of clients has not reduced trafficking or sex work, but has
increased sex workers’ vulnerability to violence, harmed HIV responses, and infringed on sex workers’ rights.”
Furthermore, it said, “Anti-trafficking discussions on demand have historically been stymied by anti-
prostitution efforts to eradicate the sex work sector by criminalizing clients, despite protests from sex workers’ rights groups
and growing evidence that such approaches do not work.”
Human rights powerhouse Amnesty International concurs: “Amnesty International is opposed to the criminalization or
punishment of activities related to the buying or selling of consensual sex between adults.” Thus begins a recently leaked document
calling for an end to prohibitions on sex work. Criminalization discourages sex workers from reporting
suspected sex trafficking to police.
Working with instead of against sex workers will lead to more slaves being rescued. In Germany, it
already is. While prohibitionists claim that legalizing prostitution has increased human trafficking in
the country, the data don’t support them . In fact the opposite happened. Germany legalized sex
work in 2001. Between 2001 and 2011, cases of sex-based human trafficking shrank by 10
percent.
Now most German sex workers, 74 percent, are foreign born. But these migrant workers are hardly
child sex slaves. The mean age of a sex worker in Germany is 31. A massive study of the sex trade in New York revealed
a similar pattern. Researchers found very few underage sex workers actually working. When they started talking to pimps they found
many won’t work with underage sex workers, not because of fear of arrest or moral qualms, but because teen workers don’t make
enough money.
The claim that legalizing prostitution increased human trafficking also defies common sense.
Whether you think bargain basement blowjobs are a good thing or a bad thing, the fact remains that criminalization makes
things more expensive. In Germany, you’ll still pay a lot for high-quality service. But the days of paying
more than 15 Euros for sex from someone who clearly doesn’t want to be there are over. Time spoke to one tourist who described
the country as “The Aldi for prostitutes.”
This matters for trafficking because it costs a lot to kidnap someone and hold her against her
will. This new economic reality means it makes zero sense for traffickers to keep their slaves
in Germany, where prices are low. It’s true that traffickers must bring their victims through the country. But they are
rewarded with higher prices if they keep going until they get to one of the countries where
prostitution is still illegal, like France.

Anti-trafficking discourse ensures labor exploitation, racist criminal justice

enforcement, and global inequality.
Janie CHUANG Law @ American ’10 “RESCUING TRAFFICKING FROM IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE: PROSTITUTION REFORM
ANDANTI-TRAFFICKING LAW AND POLICY” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 158 (6) p. 1694-1705
1. The Focus on Sex Trafficking The influence of neo-abolitionist discourse traces back to Representative Smith's original anti-
trafficking bill, which was presented to legislators and the American public as a necessary response to the "50,000 innocent women
and young children . . . thrust into the international sex trade industry with no way out" each year. Though the 50,000 figure actually
encompassed trafficking of men, women, and children into the United States for sweatshop labor, domestic work, and agricultural
labor (and was downgraded in 2003 to a figure of 18,000 to 20,000),157 "[t]he misleading claim that all these . . . were 'sex slaves'. . .
was useful in rallying public support for victims of mi grant abuse in a climate generally hostile to undocumented workers in
America's factories and fields."158 The
neo-abolitionist feminists strategically "fram[ed] the harms of
prostitution and trafficking as politically neutral questions of humanitarian concern about third
world women."159 In the wake of anti-prostitution feminists' failed domestic pornography and prostitution wars in the early 1980s
and 1990s, focusing on Third World women was "pivotal to waging the fight against commercial sexuality" at home and abroad.160
Accordingly, congressional testimony in the lead-up to the TVPA played on the imagery of women and children forced into literal
sexual slavery, utilizing graphic images of women and girls locked in trailers, raped, and deprived of food.161 Victims were
"portrayed as no more than unwilling goods exchanged between unscrupulous men, . . . 'commodities . . . bodies exchanged on a
market.""" The imagery used in this new campaign against "modern-day slavery" was reminiscent of that used in the early 1900s in
the feminist-conservative crusade against "white slavery" of innocent women lured, deceived, and seduced into prostitution by evil,
wanton men.163 The inordinate focus on sex-sector trafficking belies the reality that non-sex-sector trafficking accounts for nearly
as many and arguably more164?trafficking cases worldwide. Yet "U.S. enforcement priorities, media attention,
and NGO practice" have treated trafficking for forced prostitution as the "paradigmatic
instance of what 'modern-day slavery' is assumed to be."165 A comparison of the number of U.S.
prosecutions during the period 1996 to 2000 (pre-TVPA) and the period 2001 to 2005 (post-TVPA) reveals an 871% increase in cases
involving sex sector trafficking and only a 109% increase in non-sex-sector trafficking cases.166 Media reporting on sex-sector
trafficking is hugely disproportionate to the reporting on non-sex-sector trafficking,167 as evidenced by the attention garnered by
Nicholas Kristof s high-profile and controversial New York Times series on "sex slavery" in Cambodia168 and India169 and Peter
Landesman's New York Times Magazine expose on "sex slavery" in the United States. The vast majority of documentaries and films
on trafficking focus on sex-sector trafficking.171 By contrast, Chicago Tnbune reporter Cam Simpson's award winning Pipeline to
Peril series on the trafficking of Nepalese men into U.S. military bases in Iraq for forced labor172 garnered relatively little attention
in mainstream media and public discourse. Cases of women and girls trafficked into forced domestic work in the United States, a
phenomenon exposed by Human Rights Watch back in 2001,173 only began receiving media attention within the last three
years,174 when non-abolitionists made it a priority in lobbying for the 2008 TVPRA. Recent case law reveals that those trafficked
into non-sex sectors tend to be viewed simply as exploited migrants rather than trafficked per sons; the problem is viewed as one of
hiring illegal immigrants, not of abusive labor conditions.175 Critics of the biased treatment of the different forms of trafficking
attribute the disparity to the "mediagenic" nature of sex-sector trafficking simply put, the fact that "sex sells."176 The
reductive narrative of trafficking as being about women and children forced into prostitution
resonates because of its simple narrative structure, with a bad guy ( evil trafficker or deviant,
sex-crazed male ) doing bad things (sexual violence or enslavement) to an innocent ,
ignorant, impoverished victim ( trafficked woman or child, sex slave, or prostitute ). The
imprisoned nanny or the forced male farm worker is not nearly so compelling an object of pity
or compassion as a brothel captive. The tendency to assume that the nanny and male farm worker are illegal migrants
masks the reality that many cross borders legally. And even if they do not, the notion that consent to cross borders illegally does not
translate into consent to all subsequent exploitation is harder to sell than the standard sex-sector trafficking narrative of innocence
debauched. Migrants exploited in fields, farms, restaurants, hair and nail salons, homes, and factories are par for the course in the
United States, their exploiters quite possibly our neighbors, colleagues, and friends. The sense of urgency and threat to "our"
communities is far greater when it comes to "loose" modern sexual mores, which can coerce or lure "our" daughters, sisters, and
wives into the sex industry.177 This simplified version of trafficking is much easier to explain to the general populace than the
complex, multilayered narrative concerning the destabilizing effects of globalization and the resulting transnational flow of capital,
goods, and people.178 2. Conflating Sex Trafficking and Prostitution Neo-abolitionists
have capitalized on this
intense focus on sex-sector trafficking to conflate sex-sector trafficking and prostitution and to
pursue abolition of prostitution under the banner of "trafficking." Their success is well evidenced by the
direct link between trafficking and prostitution that NSPD-22 posits and publicizes in the State Department Fact Sheet, and by the
neo-abolitionist law and policy reforms described above. Focusing on women's impoverished backgrounds, histories of sexual abuse,
and the exploitative conditions in the sex industry, neo abolitionists have shaped and fed public skepticism over whether meaningful
consent to prostitution is possible. The
discursive slippage between prostitution and trafficking sweeps
any exercise of agency by the putative victim under a totalizing narrative of victimization that
refuses to engage in any marking of relative control or freedom "men dominate and all
prostitute women are subordinated, oppressed and unfree."179 Instead, those women? the self-
proclaimed "sex workers" who defy the dominant narrative are explained away as suffering
from a false consciousness and thereby unaware of their oppression or as deviant in desiring
abuse. Under this construction, Third World prostitutes represent the paradigmatic example of prostitution amounting to sex-
sector trafficking. They are characterized as "perpetually underprivileged and marginalised" by all-encompassing economic and
cultural oppression, such that the very possibility of choice or agency is negated.180 "By equating choice with wealth, and coercion
with poverty, no space re mains to recognize and validate the choices that women make when confronted with limited economic
opportunities."181 As sociologist Kamala Kempadoo argues, the
universalizations and generalizations that the
neo-abolitionists adopt and export abroad reveal the epistemic privilege of a social group
that has a racialized power to define the world and to create new meanings about social
realities.182 The reductive portrayal of the trafficking victim sets up a neoimperialist power
relation that presumes and establishes an essential divide between East and West, South
and North exotic, archaic, and authoritarian versus progressive and enlightened; it positions
Third World women as ignorant, tradition bound, poor, and infantilized , resembling minors in
need of guidance.183 In the prostitution context, the neo-abolitionist narrative "do[es] offer an important critique of liberal
notions of freedom and consent that presume autonomous individuals abstracted from relations of power."184 These liberal
notions miss their mark in the trafficking context by failing to appreciate the nuances of context for example, how significant
economic, gender, and racial inequalities severely compromise the ex ercise of choice in many prostitution contexts. As sociologist
Laura Agustin notes, many migrant prostitutes do not contrary to the view of some Western sex-worker advocates adopt the view
that sex work is art, therapy, or like any other job.185 While formalizing the industry might enable workers to advocate on their own
behalf, many migrants do not self-identify as sex professionals but rather view sex work as a temporary financial measure. As
Agustin explains, there is an inescapable, fundamental "contradiction [] of working in a sector where illegality is the norm."187
Normalizing sex work through harm-reduction strategies cannot avoid the practical obstacles to agency that most mi grant sex
workers suffer as a result of their unlawful migration status.188 Nonetheless, treating prostitution as possibly a form of work at least
focuses attention on the specificities of context: for instance, the fact that certain working conditions are better for some (e.g.,
nationals) than others (e.g., migrants). Moreover, as Sullivan explains, the
prostitution-as-work "discursive
strategy. . . opens up a space for the formation of new identities not based on passivity, or
sexual exploitation and sexual victimhood."189 Perhaps "[i]t is not sex work itself that promotes
oppression] . . . but rather the particular cultural and legal production of a marginalized,
degraded prostitution that ensures its oppressive characteristics while acting to limit the
subversive potential that might attend a decriminalized, culturally legitimized form of sex work."190
Indeed, when it comes to the commodification of sex, what matters ultimately is who controls the meaning of the purchase. In this
sense, perhaps sex-worker
unions could be an example of the "victims of commodification . . .
appropriating] the chains that bind them." 91 The neo-abolitionist refusal to mark the
differences between rape and sex for money has discursive and practical perils. It implies that
prostitutes are "publicly available to be raped, " a position held by many law enforcement
officials and judges who "refuse to accept" that prostitutes can be raped.192 It also perpetuates
the Madonna-versus whore stigma, or the sense that only those who unwittingly ended up in
prostitution are deserving of protection. Because all prostitution is trafficking, and thus a crime and a human rights
abuse, neo abolitionist strategies prioritize prohibition and antiproliferation of the prostitution
trade rather than the welfare and empowerment of prostitutes within the trade. And while the neo-
abolitionist perspective resonates with widely held views that sex should be market in alienable and noncommodified, it cannot, as a
practical matter, escape what Margaret Radin calls the "commodification double bind."193 In other words, "it is unacceptable for
society to embrace commodification of [sex] when it is in practice the only avenue of survival for the powerless, and equally
unacceptable for society to heap opprobrium and further oppression on those who try to create and enter such markets under those
conditions."194 While in an ideal world sex would perhaps not be commodified, in our nonideal world some women face a choice
between selling sex and letting themselves or their children go hungry.195 For the neo-abolitionist, the latter option is an acceptable
trade-off in exchange for the ideal world of noncommodified sex but unacceptable for non-abolitionists favoring harm reduction. 3.
"Militarized Humanitarianism" and "Carceral Feminism" Through the two discursive moves described above, the neo abolitionist
narrative delimits and collapses complex forms of women's migration ranging from deception and abuse to informed decisions into
a simple portrayal of women as victims of crime. It thus precludes understanding of the complex structural, social, and economic
aspects of women's migration, including the possibility that "trafficked women" may be migrant sex workers or migrant women at
tempting to meet their own needs or responding to labor demands in the West. What is called "trafficking" when it involves sex is
often called "international labor migration" when it involves other kinds of work. As political scientist Jacqueline Berman argues,
the neo abolitionist narrative "elide [s] and displace [s] this specific intersection of gender,
immigration, economics, and globalization."196 Thus construed, trafficking is no longer the product
of the disparities of wealth created by globalization, gendered labor markets, or inadequate
migration frameworks, but rather the result of the sexual proclivities of deviant individuals . The logic
of this representation suggests that to resolve the problem of trafficking, women should be rescued or deported back home, or
prevented from traveling in the first place, and that governments should pass and aggressively enforce laws to punish these deviant
elements. As Bernstein notes, the
criminalization paradigm recasts "big business, the state, and the
police ... as allies and saviors, rather than enemies, of unskilled migrant workers. "197 This
construct deflects attention from the dependence of big business on cheap and malleable

workers who populate the unregulated, unprotected labor sectors, and obviates any need to
address the structural factors that push individuals to migrate under increasingly dangerous
conditions. Capitalizing on the "recycled" "tropes" of "violated femininity, shattered
innocence, and the victimization of 'womenandchildren,'"198 the neo-abolitionist campaign
promotes, in Bernstein's terms, a " militarized humanitarianism and carceral feminism " in its pursuit of
social remedies.199 The neo-abolitionist approach thus feeds a border protection and crime-control agenda by framing trafficking as
a humanitarian issue that the "privileged" can combat by supporting efforts to rescue and restore victims and punish the depraved
individuals who perpetrate the abuse.200 Epitomizing this approach are the "rescue and restore" campaigns popularized by the
International Justice Mission (IJM), a faith-based organization that catapulted to prominence for its dramatic "rescues" of women
and children from South and Southeast Asian brothels. These media-friendly rescues, "often conducted in partnership with [and
displayed on] such press outlets as Dateline, CNN, and FOX News," typically involve male IJM employees who "go undercover as
potential clients to investigate brothels, partnering with local law enforcement to rescue underage and allegedly unwilling brothel
occupants and deliver them to state-sponsored or faith-based re habilitation facilities."201 Notwithstanding multiple reports of
failed rescues where surprisingly high percentages of involuntarily "res cued" women escaped the shelters in order to return to the
brothels? the "rescue and restore" model has been enthusiastically embraced by faith-based and
anti-prostitution feminist organizations alike, and lauded and generously funded by the U.S.
government.202 At the same time, the neo-abolitionists are committed to punitive and criminal paradigms of justice. As
prominent neo-abolitionists have explained, "trafficking isn't a poverty issue but a law-enforcement
issue."203 Though "the U.N. blames social and economic disparities for fostering trafficking, the demand for prostitutes
is the driving force behind sex trafficking ."204 The source of the harm thus lies not in
institutions of corporate capitalism and the state but in "individual, deviant men: foreign
brown men ... or even more remarkably, African American men living in the inner city," against whom the
full power of law enforcement and criminal law must be brought to bear.205 Indeed, the "root cause"
of much of the suffering in the developing world is not "hunger, homelessness, lack of education or disease" but "the fail ure of the
criminal justice system to protect the poor from violence."206 Traffickers should be prosecuted and incarcerated to the full extent of
the law and the johns sent to "john school" to be educated about the harms of prostitution. For the neo-abolitionists, in reducing
prostitution "supply" by targeting demand, criminal justice provides the path to salvation. In this sense, the criminalization approach
to trafficking has effects analogous to those found in the domestic violence context where criminalization has entrenched the view
that domestic violence is "an insular rather than endemic wrong" and that the problem is solved once the "wicked people"
perpetrating the violence are "managed." Under this construction, the government and society are
absolved of their responsibility for having fostered the broader socioeconomic conditions that feed the trafficking
phenomenon. At the same time, trafficked persons become a tool for those pursuing penological goals ,
their access to assistance legally contingent on their cooperation with prosecutions. Trafficking thus becomes yet
another context in which "feminist liberatory discourse challenging patriarchy and female de
pendency . . . has been replaced by a discourse emphasizing crime control."208 Policies that fixate on
criminalization as the solution to trafficking should similarly "be viewed with a jaundiced eye."209 Together, the neo-abolitionist
legal reforms and reductive narrative have remapped the landscape of anti-trafficking advocacy, narrowing anti-trafficking law and
policy development to focus on sex-sector trafficking and prostitution and shaping service provision on the ground. Whether these
developments are beneficial to trafficked per sons is explored in detail below.

That frame authorizes police and military violence against demonized Others.
Nandita SHARMA Social Sciences @ York ‘5 “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” NWSA Journal
17.3 p. 88-90
In contemporary discourses of national security, it is the eradication of the "dangerous
foreigner" that is paramount to notions of protecting the "homeland." This demands of "us,"
the nation's subjects, that "we" be vigilant against "outsiders" seeking increasingly clever ways to
circumvent national border controls and thereby usurp the authority and integrity of the nation-state. Such rhetoric
is, of course, readily apparent in the post-September 11 war on terror with its widespread practice of nationalized, racialized, and
gendered profiling of security threats. Yet, it is important to remind ourselves that such national security agendas have
long
been in place. Remembering this may allow us to better understand how legitimation for this latest
war is organized. In this paper I investigate how national and international governance regimes together shape the
experiences of migrants exiting, moving in between, and resettling into various nationalized societies, and how increasingly these
regimes rely on the trope of "homeland security" to police the bodies of the majority of the
world's migrants (Balibar 1991, 90).
Such an investigation is crucial in light of the global system of apartheid that is firmly in place-a
system that celebrates the mobility of capital and some bodies, while the bodies of others face
ever-growing restrictions and criminalization. Today's system of global apartheid has been put together in part through
the United Nations (UN), which increasingly regulates the global mobilities of (some) people, as well as through the universally
legitimate ideological practice of nationalism. The underlying principle of "national sovereignty" embedded within the original U N
mandate enables nation-states to legally, and with little, if any, outcry discriminate against those who can be cast as the nation's
"others."
This article examines one increasingly important, and increasingly obfuscated aspect of the national and international security
agenda-that of anti-trafficking campaigns directed, in particular, at controlling the migration of women and children. I argue that
anti-trafficking practices operate as a moral panic that simultaneously obscure the
vulnerability of migrant women in the nexus of state and capitalist practices while
representing them as victims solely of traffickers. This moral panic serves to legitimize
increasingly regressive state practices of immigration control . These controls, in turn, form
the basis for the construction and maintenance of a global apartheid whereby differential
legal regimes are organized within nationalized space: one for "citizens" and another far more
regressive one for those, such as people categorized as "illegal," who are denied a permanent legal status
within the nation space. The ideological frame of anti-trafficking minimizes and often makes
migrants as displaced people completely invisible. The ideology of antitrafficking does not
recognize that migrants have been displaced by practices that have resulted in the loss of their
land and/or livelihoods through international trade liberalization policies, mega-development projects,
the loss of employment in capitalist labor markets, or war. Not only does the frame of anti-trafficking
lead to a suspicion of women's (and children's) migration so that it is only ever seen as
crisis-producing instead of life-saving, it further renders as unseeable the reasons why
migrants are forced to make clandestine movements, usually with the help of people who
know how to get them across national borders undetected.
Since the problem of displacement and the state-controlled process of illegalizing migrants are represented as
problems of trafficking, a particular" solution" come s to make common sense: criminalize
those who move people clandestinely and return those who have been moved by traffickers
to their "home" societies as soon as possible. This solution fits smoothly into existing national
and international security agendas, for the discourse of anti-trafficking with its law-and-order
agenda of "getting tough" with traffickers diverts attention from restrictive immigration
practices that make it impossible for most of the world's migrants to move legally and safely or to
live securely in the places they move to. By drawing attention to acts of clandestine migrations, anti-trafficking campaigns pay no
real attention to how best to ensure safe migration practices for women (including exit, transit, and resettlement). This is because
the more influential versions of anti-trafficking campaigns do not see the victims of trafficking as women exercising agency (however
much constrained) in crossing national borders. Instead, anti-trafficking
campaigns view women solely as
victims forced or duped into migrating for the sole benefit of the predatory trafficker.

Ignore their increase trafficking studies—they conflate illegal immigration with

sex slavery. The latter is more likely to decrease under legalization—ZERO
empirical support for the neg on this question
WORSTALL 13—Economist, London School of Economics, Forbes Contributor
[Tim Worstall, Legal Prostitution and Sex Trafficking: From The Annals Of Bad Economic
Research, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-prostitution-and-sex-
trafficking-from-the-annals-of-bad-economic-research/]

Over here in Europe there’s been something of a scare campaign going on over “sex trafficking”. This is the idea that brutes and
gangsters trick or force women into moving country and then hold them in sexual slavery: usually being forced to work as
prostitutes. There’s been all sorts of research trying to look into how much this actually happens. Some says it’s pretty much non-
existent, others that it’s a substantial minority of the whole sex industry. The truth is that people are simply using
different definitions of what is “trafficking”. And it’s there that the entire subject becomes a
complete and total mess.
The latest piece of research is this (and sadly it’s from my Alma Mater: I do wish they could do better).
One of the advertised advantages of legalizing prostitution is that it should reduce illegal human trafficking. The theory is
that customers will favor legal over trafficked prostitutes, thus reducing demand for the latter. Yet, legalization
may also raise overall demand for prostitution. This increase in the size of the market may lead to more
trafficking even if most customers prefer legal prostitutes.
Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher, and Eric Neumayer find in a recently published article in World Development that this
latter effect dominates empirically: countries that legalized have larger reported
inflows of human trafficking than similar countries where prostitution is illegal. They also
found this effect in a more detailed study of Sweden, Germany and Denmark, which changed their prostitution laws.
The full paper is here. And I’m afraid that it’s a horrible mess . And not just because they rather gloss over the
two meanings of “trafficking” that are used in the debate.
Those two meanings are as follows:
1) The transport of unwilling people (usually women, but of course can at times be either men or children) into forced
prostitution. This is of course illegal everywhere: it’s repeated rape just as a very start. It is also vile and we should indeed be doing
everything possible to stamp it out.
2) The illegal movement of willing people across borders to enter the sex trade. Strange as it may
seem there really are people who desire to be prostitutes. People would, other things being equal,
similarly like to be in a country where they get a lot of money for their trade rather than very
little. Given these two we wouldn’t be surprised if people from poorer countries, who wish to
be in the sex trade, will move from those poorer countries to richer countries. And such is the
system of immigration laws that many of them will be unable to do this legally: just as with so
many who wish to enter other trades and professions in the rich world. You can make your own mind
up about the morality of this but it is obviously entirely different from definition 1).
There is a third possible meaning which is used by some campaigners which is any foreigner at all who is a sex worker. This is
obviously a ridiculous one: especially in the EU given the free movement of labour.
We might paraphrase the two definitions as the “sex slavery” definition and the “illegal immigrant” one. I would certainly argue that
the first one is a moral crime crying out to the very heavens for vengeance while the second leaves me with no more than a heartfelt
“Meh”.
When we look at this full paper we see the following sorts of numbers being bandied about:
Di Nicola et al. (2005) provide annual estimates of human trafficking victims for sexual exploitation in Sweden during the 2000-03 period, suggesting anywhere
between 200 to 600 victims per year. This would mean a share of trafficked individuals among the estimated 1,500 prostitutes of between 13.3% and 40%.
….
The ILO estimates the stock of human trafficking victims in Denmark in 2004 at approximately 2,250, while the estimated number in Sweden is about 500 (Global
report data used in Danailova-Trainor and Belser, 2006).

This implies that the number of human trafficking victims in Denmark is more than four times that of Sweden, although the population size of Sweden (8.9 million)
is about 40% larger than that of Denmark (5.3 million). Importantly, the Global report also estimates the number of prostitutes in Denmark – about 6,000 – to be
three to four times larger than the number in Sweden. This comparison thus tentatively suggests that the share of trafficked individuals among all prostitutes is
fairly similar in the two countries, despite one prohibiting and the other permitting prostitution.
….
In terms of human trafficking victims, the ILO estimated the stock of victims in Germany in 2004 to be approximately 32,800 – about 62 times more than in
Sweden (Danailova-Trainor & Belser, 2006). Again, the share of trafficked individuals among all prostitutes appears to be quite similar in both countries,
corroborating the view that any compositional differences across prohibitionist and legalized prostitution regimes are likely to be small. Additionally, Di Nicola et
al. (2005) provide annual estimates of trafficking victims used for sexual exploitation in Germany over the 1996-2003 period, which can shed some light on the
changing number of trafficked prostitutes. The estimates show that the number of victims gradually declined between 1996/97, the first years of data collection,
and 2001, when the minimum estimate was 9,870 and the maximum 19,740.
However, this number increased upon fully legalizing prostitution in 2002, as well as in 2003, rising to 11,080-22,160 and 12,350-24,700, respectively.
If that’s the number in the sex slavery definition of trafficking then clearly we’ve got an enormous problem and we’d be correct in
taking very severe action against those who do it. If
it’s the illegal immigrant definition then I, as above, would
simply shrug my shoulders. But how are we to work out which definition they are using? It’s not something that I can
immediately see them explaining in the paper. Fortunately, we do have another possible method: Operation Pentameter.
The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who
had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign
by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.
The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex
trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work
as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without
any source at all.
We could simply assume that there’s something wildly different about the UK. Something that means that there are, to a reasonable
approximation, zero sex slaves in the UK while 30% or more of sex workers in Denmark, Sweden and Germany are all sex slaves. This
isn’t an argument that’s likely to pass the smell test to be honest. The
explanation is instead that the two
different meanings of “trafficked” are being used here.
Which is a great pity. For it entirely obviates the findings of the research :
This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory,
there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of
the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women
as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries
shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal
experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.
This result will fall over the first time we divide sex workers into the three classes they should
be, not the two being used.
Domestic workers, trafficked (illegal immigrants) and trafficked (sex slaves).
We can even see this in the paper:
What will be the effect of legalizing prostitution on the demand, supply, and thus equilibrium quantity of prostitution?
Starting with the demand effect, some clients will be deterred from consuming commercial sex services if prostitution is
illegal and they expect that there is a reasonable probability of being prosecuted, as this raises the costs of engaging in
such activities. Legalizing
prostitution will therefore almost invariably increase demand for
prostitution.
Concerning supply, legalizing prostitution will induce some potential sex workers (or
their pimps) to enter the market, namely those who were deterred from offering such services by the threat of
prosecution and for whom the pay premium that arose from the illegality of prostitution represented insufficient
compensation – i.e., the risk of prosecution creates costs that are not easily expressed in monetary terms and can
therefore not be compensated for with a higher wage.
The problem is they’ve simply failed to apply their own reasoning to those three classes , relying instead only upon the two.
But if we do take the three classes we can replicate their finding very easily indeed.
Legalising prostitution will indeed lead to greater demand. There will also be some increase in
domestic supply. It is possible that the demand for sex slavery will rise, leading to an increase in trafficking (sex slavery
definition). But that’s the thing that we want to find out of course.
The really important point being that there will also be an increase in willing supply from
foreigners as a result of legalisation. Thus there will be an increase in trafficking (illegal
immigration definition). Clearly and obviously there will be: for the incentives will be exactly the same as for
that increased domestic supply.
In the end I have to agree with the results of the paper: that legalisation of prostitution is indeed likely to increase human trafficking.
But given that the largest investigation ever undertaken into trafficking (sex slavery) failed to find
evidence of it at all, at least no one that could be prosecuted for it, the effect is really upon trafficking (illegal
immigration). Which is, I think we’ll all agree, a very different thing indeed.
The result shouldn’t surprise us at all either. Imagine that rabbit butchery was illegal in one
country, then it legalised it. Some domestic labour that desired to be rabbit butchers who were
dissuaded from doing so given the previous illegality would now become rabbit butchers. We would also
expect to see some people quite willing to be rabbit butchers currently in poorer countries
immigrating, either legally or illegally, to become rabbit butchers in this country where it is newly legal. And we’d
be most surprised indeed to hear that people were kidnapping foreigners to import them and
force them into rabbit butchery .
2AC
 AT: Circumvention/Gray Market
Prostitutes prefer legalization with employment rights—this answers any
circumvention argument
Ronald WEITZER, Department of Sociology, George Washington University, 14 [“Researching
Prostitution and Sex Trafficking Comparatively,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy, August 22,
2014, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-014-0168-3/fulltext.html]

Now, it is certainly possible that different regimes may have some similar effects on the ground. It is true that sex workers are fairly
resistant to control by the state. And, it is true that a policy can result in the privileging of some sex workers more than others, as
there will always be some categories of ineligible workers (minors, illegal migrants, trafficking victims, etc.). But, Bernstein
and
Agustín disregard important qualitative differences between nations. There is a stark
difference—both practical and symbolic—between nations where prostitution is officially condemned
and participants demonized and criminalized (e.g., Sweden, the USA, and China) and nations
where workers and clients are legally free to engage in sexual commerce (e.g., the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Germany, and Australia).
Law and state policy can and do impact the social organization of sex work, power relations
among participants, and their lived experiences (see Scoular [2010] on this point). Even if, as Agustín notes,
many actors ignore legal requirements (e.g., not registering, not paying taxes, and avoiding
mandatory health exams), it still makes a difference to them whether they are regarded as
criminals or legal actors with rights . And, they also have opinions about specific laws and regulations. Interviews with
100 migrant sex workers working in London, for example, found that all of them thought that decriminalization “would improve
their living and working conditions and enable them to exercise their rights more fully” (Mai 2009, p. 6). And, a surveyof 247
prostitutes in San Francisco found that 71 % endorsed decriminalization, 90 % wanted laws to
protect their rights, 83 % supported a policy of mandatory health screening of prostitutes, 79 % believed that sex
workers should “determine their own working conditions without being taxed or regulated by
government,” and 91 % felt that if prostitution remained illegal, prostitutes should be offered social services rather than being
incarcerated (Lutnick and Cohan 2009).
Evidence from many nations shows that the type of policy regime in place can influence—
positively or negatively—what happens on the ground. When policy is liberalized, it can indeed
redound to the benefit of sex workers:
Almost all (97 %) of the 102 legal brothel workers interviewed in a Queensland, Australia, study said
that an advantage of working in a legal brothel was the safety that it provided. They were 17
times less likely to have been “raped or bashed” by a client in the preceding year than a sample of
illegal street prostitutes working in Queensland (3 and 52 %, respectively) (Seib et al. 2009).
New Zealand legalized prostitution in 2003. A survey of 772 prostitutes 5 years later found
that more than 90 % of them were aware that they now had legal and employment rights
under the new law, two thirds felt that the law gave them more power to refuse a client or his
requests, and a majority (57 %) felt that police attitudes toward them had improved since passage
of the law (Abel and Fitzgerald 2010). Stigma persisted and employment conditions remained somewhat inadequate, but overall, a
second study concluded that legalization had achieved many of its objectives and that the
majority of those involved in the sex industry were better off now than under the prior system
(PLRC 2008).
An analysis of questionnaires completed by 4,559 female sex-trafficking victims, who had
received assistance from field missions run by the International Office for Migration (IOM), was
unequivocal: “These results confirm results of many other studies that have looked at the consequences of criminalization
policies. Whenever sexwork has been criminalized, sexworkers have been moved to more
secluded places with the consequences of being more exposed to different kind of risks:
assault, fraud, control, and lack of freedom” (Di Tommaso et al. 2009, p. 155).
Likewise, when a policy becomes more restrictive or onerous, as it has in the Netherlands since 2008 (Aalbers and Deinema 2012;
Outshoorn 2012; Weitzer 2012), this is reflected in both sex workers’ working conditions and their views of state policy. A survey of
94 window prostitutes working in Amsterdam’s central red-light district in 2010 found that 80 % had heard about the city council’s
plans for the area (closing some window-brothel buildings, restricting working hours, registration of prostitutes, and raising the
minimum age from 18 to 21), but only 2 % supported these plans. Fully 88 % thought that the current policies toward prostitution
were already too repressive, 95 % believed that the city’s plans for the red-light district are “not good for prostitutes”, and 93 %
disagreed with the idea that “politicians know the issues of prostitutes” (Amsterdam Sociaal 2010).
One implication of the critique above is that comparative analysis must be based on solid empirical
evidence from the cases compared. Although Bernstein and Agustín claim that their cross-national conclusions are
empirically grounded, the evidence that they present is actually quite meager, and their claims are contradicted by other research
findings.
 AT: Farley
Reject ev from Farley—she’s academically and juridically indefensible
Maggie MCNEILL, BA in English from the University of New Orleans, MLIS from Louisiana State
University in 1993, former sex worker and is frequently consulted by academics and journalists
as an expert on the subject, 13 [“Treating Sex Work as Work,” December 2, 2013,
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/12/02/maggie-mcneill/treating-sex-work-work]

It hardly seems productive to attempt to refute Ms. Post’s contention that sex workers are unable to make “truly” free choices,
because I can no more do so than she can refute mine that sex workers’ choices are no less free than those of radical feminists.
Similarly, it seems self-evident that anyone who pays for a thing cannot reasonably be declared to believe he has a “right” to that
thing, else he would simply take it rather than offering payment. Instead, I will concentrate on a critique of the shaky factual claims
Several of these (including but not limited to the material at footnotes 1, 5,
which make up the latter portion of her essay.
and 12) originate with Dr. Melissa Farley, a radical feminist ideologue with a long history of

distorting and even inventing data . Dr. Farley is well-known for selecting unrepresentative
convenience samples (such as street workers in prison or forced drug rehabilitation) and then
incorrectly applying her finding to all sex workers, despite the fact that street workers
represent less than 15% of all sex workers ; this short but thorough critique of her work by a number of academics
(including Dr. Weitzer) provides much more detail than I have room for in this essay. In the Bedford v. Canada case which
struck down anti-prostitution laws in Ontario, Justice Susan Himel wrote:
I found the evidence of Dr. Melissa Farley to be problematic…her…unqualified
assertion…that prostitution is inherently violent appears to contradict her own
findings that prostitutes who work from indoor locations generally experience less
violence…her…choice of language is at times inflammatory and detracts from her conclusions…and…[she has]
stated…that some of her opinions…were formed prior to her research, including, “that
prostitution is a terrible harm to women, that prostitution is abusive in its very nature, and that
prostitution amounts to men paying a woman for the right to rape her.”
Dr. Farley has also been accused of gross ethical violations , as detailed at length in this 2011

request to the American Psychological Association, asking that her membership be revoked for
those violations . That complaint contains a refutation of one of Ms. Post’s claims, that decriminalization in New Zealand has

the “increases” in prostitution Dr. Farley “found” were simply made up . Dr.
“failed;” to put it bluntly,
Farley is also the source of the now-ubiquitous “the average sex worker debuts at 13” canard
which Ms. Post quotes; the study she supposedly drew that “fact” from actually found that the
average age at debut for underage workers (a group making up only 3.5% of all sex workers)
was 16, the same general age found by most studies (such as the U.S. Department of Justice-funded John Jay
study of 2011). The only mention of “13” in the study Dr. Farley quoted was the average age at which one of the surveyed groups
reported first (noncommercial) sexual contact of any kind; a similar substitution is reported in the APA complaint, in which Dr. Farley
tried to claim that “Māori women were entering prostitution as young as 9 years old” because two of her subjects had reported
The false (and demonizing) claims about clients Ms. Post quotes are from
juvenile sexual contact at that age.
the Farley paper analyzed in the short critique I linked above, and they are refuted by other,
more methodologically sound studies (including one of Dr. Weitzer’s). And Dr. Farley’s lack of
qualification to diagnose PTSD is discussed in the APA complaint.
 2AC AT: T—No Regs
Legalization includes decriminalization plus application of labor or employment
regulation. It does not require a specific type of regulation.
Janet HALLEY Royall Professor of Law @ Harvard Law School ET AL ‘6 “FROM THE
INTERNATIONAL TO THE LOCAL IN FEMINIST LEGAL RESPONSES TO RAPE, PROSTITUTION/SEX
WORK, AND SEX TRAFFICKING: FOUR STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY GOVERNANCE FEMINISM”
(Additional Authors: Prabha Kotiswaran Hila Shamir & Chantal Thomas Harvard Journal of Law &
Gender 29 p. 338-339

All of those observations (and many more) bear on the feminist goal of criminalizing sexual violence and rape in war through
international humanitarian law. We also note a wide range of regulatory modes specific to sex trafficking regimes, differently
affecting the players we see as the key “stakeholders” in the regime: the sex worker, the pimp, the john, the brothelkeeper, and the
landlord. Thus we will distinguish four “ideal types” of regulation:
A complete criminalization regime criminalizes all aspects of sex work, so that both the sale and purchase of sex by the sex worker
and the john, and all third party involvement (of the pimp, the brothel-keeper, and the landlord) can be prosecuted and punished
criminally.
An abolitionist or partial decriminalization regime decriminalizes the activities of sex workers alone, but criminalizes involvement of
other actors in the sex industry, including customers. As we understand it, the term “abolition” is adopted to claim an analogy with
nineteenth-century American antislavery abolitionism.7 Decriminalizing sex worker involvement in sex work is motivated, in this
formulation, by the assumption that sex workers are vulnerable victims of systematic patriarchal exploitation, and that at minimum
the state should protect them by not criminalizing their sex work activity.
Complete, as opposed to partial, decriminalization involves the repeal of any special criminal
legislation dealing with sex work. Various activities involved in sex work can still be
prosecuted as criminal offenses under generally applicable laws.
Legalization involves complete decriminalization coupled with positive legal provisions
regulating one or more aspect of sex work businesses. The typical options include labor law,
employment law, zoning of sex businesses, compulsory medical check-ups, licensing of sex
workers, etc.
 2AC AT: Swedish Model
Swedish model evidence is biased, leaves stigmatization in place, increases
violence and destroys the autonomy of sex workers.
HULUSJÖ 13 PhD Faculty of Health & Society - Malmö University [Anna Hulusjo,
The multiplicities of prostitution experience Narratives about power and resistance, Malmö
University, Health and Society Doctoral Dissertation 2013:5]

The evaluation of the law

In 2010, approximately ten years after the purchase of sexual services had been prohibited, the report of the first official
evaluation of the law was published. The focus of the evaluation was how the provision had worked in
practice and what effects the prohibition had had on the prevalence of prostitution and human trafficking for
sexual purposes. The starting point for the evaluation was that the purchase of sexual services was to remain
criminalized. The evaluation was positive towards the effects of the law, in the report it was concluded that: “Our assessment
shows that the ban on the purchase of sexual services has had the intended effect and is an important instrument in preventing and
combating prostitution” (SOU 2010:49a, p. 40). As
soon as the official evaluation was published, it was criticized on a
number of accounts. In the consultation process following the publication of the evaluation, it was severely

criticized , particularly by those referral bodies who conduct prostitution research, and those
working with health and discrimination issues (Dodillet & Östergren, 2011). The criticism was primarily
focused on the evaluation’s lack of scientific rigor. Since the starting point was that the purchase of sex was to
remain criminalized there was a clear bias. Moreover it was argued that there were methodological
problems, inconsistencies and contradictions and that conclusions were drawn without factual
backup and at times were of a speculative character (Dodillet & Östergren, 2011). Another criticism that was
raised was that the evaluation did not engage with the claimed unintended effects of the law, such as
increased stigmatization and stereotyping of women involved in prostitution as victims, weak and exploited
and the decrease in clients leading to higher levels of vulnerability and women taking greater risks,
accepting lower prices and being less able to demand safer sex practices (Dodillet & Östergren, 2011).
People with prostitution experience, in the evaluation referred to as ‘women exploited in prostitution’, did not
participate in the evaluation to any substantial degree . However, fourteen women did answer a brief survey
conducted by email. Seven of the women had exited and seven of them were still involved in prostitution. The women who had
exited prostitution were mostly positive towards the law and spoke of it as empowering for women with prostitution experience in
the sense that it had shifted the responsibility and the shame from the seller to the buyer. The
women who were still
involved in prostitution were on the other hand mostly negative towards the law, they made sense
of their involvement in prostitution as a ‘free choice’, and stated that the criminalization had
intensified the social stigma of selling sex, that they felt hunted by the police and that they
resented being treated as “incapacitated persons whose actions are tolerated, but whose wishes and choices are
not respected” SOU 2010:49a). The evaluation responded to this with stating that:
It is clear, and it seems logical, that those who have extricated themselves from prostitution take a positive view of
criminalisation, while those who are still exploited in prostitution are critical of the ban. […]For people
who are
still being exploited in prostitution, the above negative effects of the ban that they describe must be
viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is indeed to combat prostitution (SOU
2010:49a, p. 129).
This conclusion is controversial since the reason for criminalizing only ‘the client’ was to not
additionally stigmatize an already vulnerable group. The understanding of prostitution as a form of violence against women
builds on an understanding of power as repressive building on a binary model of oppression. According to this understanding,
the only way to resist the sexual objectification of prostitution is to exit from it. The purpose
of criminalising only ‘the client’ was that ‘the prostitute’ should not risk legal penalties but
“have a right to assistance to escape prostitution” ( Ekberg, 2004 , p. 1189). The evaluation’s statement illustrate
how the framing of prostitution as a form of violence against women leaves little room for ‘the
prostitute’ to not want to ‘escape’, for her to talk back and challenge the idea of prostitution as inherently exploitative.
The responses that challenged the evaluations view on prostitution as inherently exploitative
were disregarded .
Concluding remarks
The reframing of prostitution as a criminal justice issue and the
emergence of the law against purchasing sexual
services mark a historical shift in prostitution legislation. Sweden was the first country that made ‘the client’
rather than ‘the prostitute’, the main target for legislative and regulatory measures. With the law prohibiting the purchase of sexual
services, the feminist struggle to hold clients accountable for their involvement in prostitution had, after almost a century of
recurrent attempts, been accomplished. The effects of the law is, as has been discussed, a contested issue .
Holmström and Skilbrei assert that, although both those in favor of and those against the sex purchase act
argue their case with uttermost conviction, the lack of sound empirical evidence make it
impossible to conclude whether the legislation has had its intended effects or not (Holmström &
Skilbrei, 2013, p. 128). Even though the law in itself does not frame prostitution as inherently exploitative but rather as inherently
problematic, the discourse on the law as expressing the view that prostitution is a form of
violence against women has gained momentum after it was enacted. In the prostitution debate, two camps have
been established. In this debate the sex purchase act is of great symbolical value. The antagonist
character of the debate obscures the complexities and contradictions of prostitution
experience and produce stereotypical ideas of ‘the prostitute’/’the sex worker’. On one hand, the
radical feminist camp naturalizes ‘the prostitute’ as victim and ‘the client’ as perpetrator as identity categories. The discourse
employed, universalizes certain experiences of prostitution experience and makes narratives about prostitution experience different
from that fitting the idea of prostitution as inherently exploitative unintelligible. On the other hand, the sex work camp employs a
liberal feminist reverse discourse in which ‘the sex worker’ is constructed as a counter identity to ‘the prostitute’. While ‘the
prostitute’ is constructed as ‘a victim in need of protection’ ‘the sex worker’ is constructed as ‘a strong
agent’, while ‘the prostitute’ is constructed as ‘exploited in prostitution’ ‘the sex worker’ is constructed as ‘an empowered worker’,
while ‘the prostitute’ is constructed as ‘a disempowered sexual victim’ ‘the sex worker’ is constructed as ‘powerful sexual being’.
Both camps of the prostitution debate thus produce stories of authority that regulate of what can be
known and said about prostitution experience.

Carceral approaches to abolition infantilize female prostitutes and increases

violence and stigma—Swedish model can’t solve
Maggie MCNEILL, BA in English from the University of New Orleans, MLIS from Louisiana State
University in 1993, former sex worker and is frequently consulted by academics and journalists
as an expert on the subject, 13 [“Treating Sex Work as Work,” December 2, 2013,
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/12/02/maggie-mcneill/treating-sex-work-work]

The common belief in criminalization and legalization regimes is that sex work is unique among all forms of
work; this view is solidly rooted in an archaic and sexist view of women as particularly fragile
and vulnerable, and the “Swedish model” posits that paying for sex is a form of male violence
against women. This is why only the act of payment is de jure prohibited: the woman is legally defined
as being unable to give valid consent, just as an adolescent girl is in the crime of statutory rape. The man is thus defined

as morally superior to the woman; he is criminally culpable for his decisions, but she is not . In
one case, a 17-year-old boy (a legal minor in Sweden) was convicted under the law, thus establishing that in the area of sex, adult
women are less competent than male children.
One would expect that feminists would be vehemently opposed to a law that so thoroughly infantilizes women, but it was first
enacted in 1999 under pressure from state feminists; its radical feminist supporters in Sweden and other
countries seem wholly oblivious to its insulting and demeaning assumptions about women’s
agency . Nor is the damage caused by this remarkably bad legislation limited to dangerous
precedent; despite unsupported claims by the Swedish government to the contrary, the law
has been demonstrated to increase both violence and stigma against sex workers , to make it
more difficult for public health workers to contact them, to subject them to increased police
harassment and surveillance, to shut them out of the country’s much-vaunted social welfare system,
and to dramatically decrease the number of clients willing to report suspected exploitation to
the police (due to informants’ justified fear of prosecution). Furthermore, these laws don’t even do what they were supposed to
do; neither the incidence of sex work (voluntary or coerced) nor the attitude of the public
toward it has changed measurably in any country (Sweden, Norway and Iceland) where they
have been enacted.
Yet despite this complete failure, Swedish-style rhetoric has been heavily marketed to other countries. In legalization
regimes, the sales pitch is based in the same sort of carceral paternalism which is used to
justify the drug war and supported by the same bogus “sex trafficking” claims which are being
used to justify so much draconian legislation in the United States (despite the fact that Sweden
found no effect on coerced prostitution, and a Norwegian study found that banning the
purchase of sex had actually resulted in an increase in coercion ). In criminalization regimes, “end
demand” approaches (client-focused criminalization backed by Swedish-style rhetoric) are
used to win the support of radical feminists, to blunt criticisms that criminalizing sex work disproportionately
impacts women, and to win federal and private grants by disguising business-as-usual prostitution stings as “anti-sex trafficking
operations.” But despite the hype, the
truth is that even operations framed as “john stings” or “child sex
slave rescues” end up with the arrest and conviction of huge numbers of women ; for
example, 97% of prostitution-related felony convictions in Chicago are of women, and 93% of
women arrested in the FBI’s “Innocence Lost” initiatives are consensual adult sex workers
rather than the coerced underage ones the program pretends to target. And it hardly seems necessary
to call attention to the grotesque violations of civil liberties which are the inevitable result of any “war” on consensual behavior,
whether it be paying for sex or using illegal substances.

Swedish model fails – the government study they cite was flawed
WASHINGTON TIMES 12 – 22 – 14 [Sweden prostitution reduction model’s success a myth,
skeptics warn, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/22/sweden-prostitution-
reduction-models-success-a-myt/?page=all]

BERLIN — For years Sweden has been celebrated for its innovative strategy to reduce prostitution — in
particular its laws that target not the women but their johns and pimps.
Swedish officials say they have halved the number of streetwalkers, kept the number of prostitution cases level
and reduced human trafficking to around 500 victims per year, a fraction of the rate in its Scandinavian neighbors in the
years following the adoption of the so-called Kvinnofrid law in 1999.
The Kvinnofrid — “protection of women” — law criminalizes paying for sex but legalizes sex work, treating prostitution as violence
against women — a long-held view among feminists in progressive Sweden similar to members of the New York-based Coalition
Against the Trafficking in Women.
“It is critically important to look at the demand for core prostitution and the demand that fuels sex trafficking,” said Taina Bien-
Aime, the coalition’s executive director. “Prostitution is inherently violence against women. The majority of the people exploited in
the sex trade are women.”
more and more countries look to adopt the Nordic country’s model, some skeptics are
But as
warning that the country’s success at reducing prostitution is an illusion and is not doing nearly enough to stamp
out the world’s oldest profession.
While Ms. Bien-Aime and others point to Sweden’s progress in protecting women, some academicsand activists say the
numbers don’t always hold up: Government statistics say Sweden, which counted 730 streetwalkers in 1999,
saw the number fall to 300 by 2008. But the actual figure is far higher when those who work out of bars and solicit via the
Internet are included.
“ The Swedish model does not have the research supporting those claims, ” said Petra Ostergren,
a Swedish writer and social commentator specializing on gender politics and prostitution issues. The
government “talks about 2,000 to 3,000 sex workers in Sweden, but it is much more than that.”
Ms. Ostergren blames faulty methodology in a 2010 Swedish government study for inspiring

myths about the Kvinnofrid law.

Swedish Chancellor of Justice Anna Skarhed, who helped compile the report, defended her findings.
“The results in my report are accurate,” said Ms. Skarhed. “We were very careful not to exaggerate. But anyone who has worked
with questions concerning prostitution or trafficking knows that it will never be possible to give exact numbers.”
Pye Jakobsson, a former sex worker and the coordinator at the Rose Alliance, a Stockholm-based sex worker
advocacy group, also doesn’tbelieve that prosecuting johns has curbed the demand for sex work in Sweden.
Another Swedish government report published in 2011 found that eight officers with the Stockholm police spoke to 42
sex workers in a year to provide counseling and help leaving the profession. Ms. Jakobsson thought that number was
laughable .
“I talk to more sex workers a month than the Stockholm prostitution unit does in a year,” she said. “I
hear [sex workers] complain about a lot of things. But no one complains about lack of clients.”
Ms. Jakobsson also contends that the government isn’t paying sufficient attention to forms of prostitution
other than streetwalking. Prostitution is flourishing elsewhere, she said.
“The only baseline [government officials] had was the known street zones,” said Ms. Jakobsson. “But there are many different
settings. Some work in casinos, opportunistically in bars or online.”
Ms. Ostergren and Ms. Jakobsson say that instead, the
law has increased pressure on sex workers who feel
hunted by police in search of johns — the opposite of the law’s intended impact.
“How do you think [police] find the clients? By following random men around?” Ms. Jakobsson said. “No, they
target us.”
More difficulties
Although the Kvinnofrid law is the most well known Swedish prostitution law, it works in conjunction with a string of other laws that
also present difficulties for prostitutes. For instance, the law against soliciting is supposed to outlaw pimps, but it also effectively
outlaws workplaces for sex workers.
“If you rent an apartment, your landlord can be charged with pimping,” Ms. Jakobsson said. “If you perform sex work in an
apartment that you own, you have forfeited your right to own it under renter laws and the pimping law.”
The anti-soliciting act makes it difficult for sex workers to find places to live, but it also discourages them from reporting abuse.
Sophie, 35, has worked as a prostitute since the age of 13. When she suffered domestic abuse from her partner, she didn’t dare to
go to the authorities.
“I didn’t call the police then, because I know that my partner would say that I’m a sex worker,” Sophie said. “Then I would have to
tell my story to the police. I would be in the papers, and my apartment would be staked out.”
Other sex workers said the anti-soliciting law forced them to remain in the shadows too.
The Rose Alliance conducted the biggest study on prostitutes in Sweden, interviewing 124 sex
workers this year. Thirty-six reported violent attacks from clients. Nine — 25 percent — felt
comfortable reporting the incident to the police. But even of those nine, only two said that they would
report a future attack to authorities.
Still, other countries have been drawn to the reported successes of the Swedish approach: Iceland and Norway
have adopted Sweden’s measures against sex work over the past five years, while Ireland and Canada are in the process of enacting
similar laws now, and Stockholm’s approach still has some strong supporters.
Canada’s parliament adopted a law last month criminalizing the purchase of sex, but even there some are questioning the Swedish
model. A new position paper by the Canadian Public Health Association said the law did not
address the “root causes and pathways” that lead to prostitution, while it could put sex workers in
even greater danger .
“We looked at all the evidence that was available, and we didn’t see a significant decrease in demand around the
purchase of sex in countries where the Nordic model has been adopted,” CPHA Executive Director Ian Culbert
told CMAJ, the
country’s leading medical journey. “But we did see that it continues to place the sex workers’ safety at risk.”

Targeting demand doesn’t reduce prostitution or trafficking—CP links to net

benefit
-Swedish model only drove the market underground
Ronald WEITZER, Professor of Sociology, George Washington University, 11 [“Sex Trafficking
and the Sex Industry: The Need for Evidence-Based Theory and Legislation,” Journal of Criminal
Law & Criminology, Fall 2011, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1337, Lexis]

V. Targeting Customers
Over time, the
focus of the anti-prostitution campaign has expanded to include prostitutes'
customers, who are seen as the root cause of trafficking . n127 Today, customers are being vilified
as much as traffickers. One writer, for example, declares that clients "are not just naughty boys who need their wrists
slapped. They could be more accurately described as predators." n128 A recent government-funded report on clients of prostitutes
[*1362] in Scotland proclaims that "prostitution is best understood as a transaction in which there are two roles: exploiter/predator
and victim/prey"; the report advocates putting customers "in the same category as rapists, pedophiles, and other social
undesirables." n129 The authors represent two staunch anti-prostitution organizations, which guaranteed that their report would
reflect the oppression paradigm exclusively. n130
Oppression writings present the customers of prostitutes (whether trafficked or not) in a one-
dimensional, simplistic manner. For example, Yen imagines that "Johns feel their gender and
money entitle them to have sex whenever, wherever, however, and with whomever they
wish." n131 This sweeping broadside is hardly data-driven . In fact, academic research documents
tremendous variation among clients on key axes: demographic background, motivation, and
behavior. There are several reasons why customers buy sexual services, and clients vary in the kinds of services they seek and in
the settings and conditions under which they engage in this activity. n132 Moreover, research comparing clients with the larger male
population finds few differences between them. n133 There is no evidence that most of them, as claimed,
feel entitled to have sex "whenever, wherever, however, and with whomever they wish." n134
Some men - both clients and other men - do indeed feel some sense of sexual entitlement, n135 but Yen's all-
encompassing claim is a caricature. Similarly, the notion that most clients are violent predators is
not borne out empirically. Some act violently and some seek out underage prostitutes, but
abusive clients appear [*1363] to be in the minority. n136 In one study, only 8% of arrested
customers had a previous conviction for a violent or sexual offense. n137 Some clients find distasteful the
idea of buying sex from anyone who is vulnerable or desperate and say that if they met a trafficked victim they would try to help her
escape or contact the police. n138
A staple of the oppression literature is that "male demand" fuels sex trafficking. It goes without saying
that consumer demand is a necessary condition for the survival of any market. What is missing in the "male demand"
explanation is consideration of other factors that might lead people to move away from home
and relocate in a place where they engage in sexual commerce. Some of these "push" and "pull" factors
were sketched in Part III.A above. What is important here is that the "demand" thesis has been used
quite successfully by advocates in lobbying government officials to target clients under
trafficking statutes. The 2005 Trafficking Victims Prevention Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) authorized $ 25 million for fiscal
years 2006 and 2007 to state and local police departments for expanded targeting of those who "purchase ... commercial sex acts."
n139 Efforts to link customers to trafficking and to fund local enforcement efforts against
clients, as the TVPRA does, signal a broader shift toward federalizing prostitution enforcement,
traditionally the domain of local authorities.
Sweden's recent experience in combating "the demand" has served as the inspiration for changes in the law or enforcement
practices in some other countries, including the United States. n140 It is therefore worth taking a [*1364] brief look at the
outcomes in Sweden. In 1998, Parliament passed unprecedented legislation penalizing the buyers of
sexual services but not the sellers. n141 After just a few years in operation, the law was proclaimed a resounding
success by activists and by the government. n142 Yet several independent analysts, who have examined the
effects of Sweden’s crackdown, conclude that it has mainly driven prostitution underground,
rendering the activity riskier.143 And the National Board of Health and Welfare, in three
evaluations of the law, concluded that it has not achieved its objectives. The Board’s 2007
report states that street prostitution is on the rise after an initial decline and that many other
prostitutes use the internet and mobile phones to arrange meetings.144 Yet the Swedish
government continues to claim that the law has reduced both prostitution and trafficking.145
 AT: Courts CP
Court will backfire – judiciary isn’t the solution
QUINN 06 Associate Professor, University of Tennessee College of Law [Quinn,
Mae C., Revisiting Anna Moscowitz Kross's Critique of New York City's Women's Court: The
Continued Problem of Solving the 'Problem' of Prostitution with Specialized Criminal Courts.
Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. 33, p. 665, 2006]

C. Failing to Solve Problems

The various questionable features of the specialized courts addressed above might be less troubling if they
really helped to solve societal problems. That is, if such specialty venues fostered substantive change, there might
be reason to consider embracing them at the cost of more traditional conceptions of the criminal court system. This, however,
has not been the case. Rather, such courts have tended to exacerbate the problems sex workers
already face while failing to produce meaningful results for the rest of society. For instance, the Women’s Court,
which began with some intention of assisting prostitutes, came to be viewed by Kross as harsh and punitive.326
Indeed, as Freda Solomon noted, “[i]n the final analysis, the legal structure designed to promote the salvation
of women, to be courts for women, ultimately would prove instead to become courts against
women.”327 Similarly, it appears that the Midtown Community Court may negatively affect the lives of sex workers more than it
improves them.328 Many of those who continue to prostitute do so under worse conditions, more
dangerous circumstances, and for less money.329 And their arrests, followed by sanctions and mandated
services through the Court, not only impede prostitutes’ ability to support themselves, but are
generally ineffective in assisting those who may wish to leave the sex trade.330 As one social service
provider has remarked, mandated programs through specialty courts like Midtown often amount to
nothing more than “window dressing.”331 Moreover, as Wolf concedes, the changes fostered by the Midtown
Court do not substantially “‘solve’ the problem of prostitution.”332 Rather, not unlike the Women’s Court, it
has merely caused sex work to be “less visible and to a significant degree less disturbing to
community members.”333 Or, as one longtime resident of Midtown said, “[i]t’s been a sweep-it-under-the-
rug kind of situation.”334 Thus, while one community’s conditions may change as a result of such institutions like the
Midtown Court, the practice of prostitution unquestionably continues.335 And although this may be
sufficient to appease some members of the Midtown Community, pushing street walkers to work other
neighborhoods is probably not something those “other” communities, or the world at large, views as
“problem-solving.” This is particularly true given that not every neighborhood can afford to establish and run a community
court.336 Thus, the Midtown’s problem-solving rhetoric is somewhat misleading. In many ways, the
institution is merely problem-shifting.
D. Diverting Attention from the Real Issue
Indeed, the failings outlined above demonstrate that establishing
specialized criminal courts to deal with
prostitution simply avoids the real problem337—that is, whether we should continue to
criminally prosecute such conduct. Prostitution, obviously, is a complicated issue.338 But, like Kross,339 I believe
it must be discussed and examined outside of the confines of the criminal justice system.
Conversations about the trade need to be better informed by the community of individuals doing the work,340 not dominated by
those who wish to exclude sex workers from their communities.
Indeed, persisting in locating the issue of prostitution within the realm of deviance and crime
fails to adequately take into account the complex underlying issues related to the sale of sex.341
Reflexively continuing to criminalize prostitution342 does nothing to achieve understanding of
its causes and effects,343 to empower those engaged in such work,344 or to ensure that those who may be
victimized by the trade are protected.345
Moreover, particularly given court reformers’ implicit concession that modern community stakeholders are not so
much interested in suppressing sex work, as they
are interested in regulating the behaviors of those
engaged in the trade,346 our current arrest and criminal prosecution practices seem well off the mark. Thus,
prosecution of sex workers in expensive, experimental, criminal courts, when funding for such
institutions could be used to problem-solve in more meaningful ways, is just wasteful.347
V. CONCLUSION
Our justice system has reached a crisis state with more and more individuals cycling through
our courts, jails, and prisons. It is high time for reform. In our desire to improve the workings of our justice system,
however, we must be careful not to add to its problems. Moreover, in this time of precious few resources, we should avoid throwing
money at solutions that have not proven successful. With this in mind, rather than press for the creation of additional
specialized criminal courts that focus on prostitution and other community “problems,” I would suggest that
reformers pull back from their somewhat overzealous call to action. We should take more time to carefully assess the extent
to which today’s reforms may be repeating history’s mistakes and, as a result, eroding our societal fabric more than the act of
prostitution itself. Moreover, we
should more thoughtfully consider the real problems plaguing today’s
criminal justice system— including its extreme overuse as a response to societal issues, at a time when so
many members of our national community are underserved by other government institutions.
 AT: Trafficking DA
Evidence about the magnitude of sex trafficking should be discounted—
methodological, transparency, and definitional issues. U.S. statistics actually
show it’s decreasing
Ronald WEITZER, Professor of Sociology, George Washington University, 11 [“Sex Trafficking
and the Sex Industry: The Need for Evidence-Based Theory and Legislation,” Journal of Criminal
Law & Criminology, Fall 2011, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1337, Lexis]

B. THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM: MYTHICAL NUMBERS

When it comes to estimating the magnitude of any illicit vice (be it drug sales, illegal gambling, or
prostitution), it is crucial that analysts carefully examine the quality of the data sources and
the procedures used to arrive at figures. n51 Unfortunately, many of those writing about sex
trafficking ignore this scientific canon and recapitulate potentially bogus claims regarding the
scale of the phenomenon, uncritically accepting figures that should be questioned. With
human trafficking, as with drug and arms trafficking and other illicit global enterprises, "the numbers are often
highly suspect but nevertheless popularized and rarely critically scrutinized, and ... there are
strong incentives [e.g., for governments, activists, and media interests] to accept and
reproduce rather than challenge and critique them ." n52
According to many oppression writers and the government officials they influence, n53 sex trafficking has reached
epidemic levels worldwide, victimizing "hundreds of thousands" or "millions" of people every year. But not only is
trafficking said to be a mammoth problem worldwide, its incidence has also skyrocketed in
recent years. In her book, Sex Trafficking, Kathryn Farr boldly asserts: "The sex trafficking industry is voluminous,
and it is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate ... . Over 1 million are trafficked into the sex industry, and the volume just keeps
increasing." n54 [*1348] Yen agrees that things are only getting worse: Sex trafficking is "mushrooming," child
prostitution is increasing at "alarming rates," and "sex trafficking victims are getting increasingly younger." n55
There are reasons why the problem may have grown over time in certain regions - for example,
due to more porous borders in Europe in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Soviet empire and the
growing freedom of movement resulting from the expansion of the European Union after 2004. But
this does not mean that the problem is actually increasing worldwide as claimed. Writers who
make such assertions provide no solid evidence to support these grandiose claims. In fact, the
numbers and trends asserted are impossible to substantiate, given two fundamental evidentiary
problems: (1) the clandestine nature of trafficking, n56 and (2) the lack of a baseline from which
to measure changes over time. n57 Data are simply not available for drawing macro-level
conclusions . n58 While some writers make such claims perhaps naively, simply reiterating others' assertions, other writers
acknowledge their political motivations. High numbers are designed to alarm the public and convince
governments to commit greater resources to fighting prostitution , to fund rescue operations, and to
enhance penalties against traffickers and clients . As two critics suggest, the human trafficking issue
has become "a battleground for different positions on prostitution, immigration, and the
position and status of women." n59
[*1349] Claims regarding a growing worldwide epidemic are contradicted by the U.S.
government's own figures. Over the past decade, the State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons
report has steadily reduced its figures on the magnitude of both transnational and domestic trafficking. In 2002, the
maximum transnational figure was 4 million. n60 The following year, the figure was put at 800,000-900,000 victims, falling to
600,000-800,000 in 2004. n61 Subsequently, the estimate has stabilized at 800,000 trafficked across national borders. n62
These figures on trafficking between countries are "in addition to the far larger yet indeterminate number of people trafficked
within countries," according to the 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report. n63 Four years later, the State Department was making a
similar claim: the 2008 report asserts that "approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not
include millions trafficked within their own countries." n64 These claimsare remarkable for their (a) fuzzy
elasticity, (b) shock value, (c) implication that the between-nations figures are not themselves
"indeterminate" and lacking in reliability, and (d) failure to recognize that if something is
"indeterminate" it may not be "far larger" than the (already problematic) international
figures.
Further undermining the U.S. government's assertions of an "indeterminate" but huge domestic trafficking problem, official
domestic U.S. figures have plummeted over the past decade. The TVPA states that "Congress finds that ...
approximately 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year." n65 This figure was repeated in the State
Department's Trafficking in Persons report for 2002. n66 But just one year later, the State Department's figure fell to 18,000-20,000,
n67 and in 2004 the figure was further reduced to 14,500-17,500 per year. n68 Apart
from the lack of transparency
in how officials arrived at these figures, when [*1350] we compare the 2000 figure (50,000) with the lower figure
for 2004 (14,500), we see an astonishing 71% decrease in the estimate in just five years . Such
dramatic downscaling should give pause to researchers and policymakers alike. More recent
reports have substituted vague language for numerical estimates of the domestic situation. The 2008
Trafficking in Persons report, for instance, simply declared that "thousands" of people are trafficked into the U.S. every year. n69
Some researchers have attempted to "resolve" the numbers problem through a meta-analysis of figures from a variety of sources. A
recent analysis of 207 estimates concluded that a figure of 5,166 annual victims of all kinds of trafficking "provides a more reliable,
although still flawed, estimate of the minimum number of trafficking victims in the United States." n70 But the authors qualify this
with numerous cautions. The studies consulted offer estimates that
range from 1,349 to 46,849 victims of labor trafficking and from 3,817 to 22,320 victims of sex trafficking ... . The highest estimate
from a type of source for any of the identified types of trafficking (labor trafficking, sex trafficking of adults, and sex trafficking of
children) is greater than the lowest estimate for that type of trafficking by at least 400 percent, suggesting that there is enormous
uncertainty about the national scope of the problem ... . n71
Given these serious problems, one might also question the 5,166 figure, which the authors concede is "flawed." As the saying goes,
"bad data are worse than no data," and I would question whether any of the 207 estimates were based on what social
scientists would consider genuine "data" to begin with. For these reasons, I do not think there is any logic in the analysts' claim that,
"despite the limitation of the data, however, this [*1351] research enables us to say more about the scope and character of human
trafficking in the United States than is currently accepted as fact." n72 Instead, their report leads to quite the opposite conclusion:
that it
is not possible to count the number of victims involved in an illicit, clandestine
underground economy at the macro level, nationally or internationally. The wildly varying
estimates , based on numerous problematic assumptions, testify to the futility of this
exercise . Estimating the size of the problem is only possible at the micro level (e.g., in a city or small region of a country) and
then only insofar as the data pertaining to this limited arena are reliable, which is rare.

Not all trafficking is the same—evaluate the quality over the quantity for the
purposes of impact calculus
Ronald WEITZER, Professor of Sociology, George Washington University, 11 [“Sex Trafficking
and the Sex Industry: The Need for Evidence-Based Theory and Legislation,” Journal of Criminal
Law & Criminology, Fall 2011, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1337, Lexis]

But there is also a parallel story - a robust mythology of trafficking. While no one would claim that sex
trafficking is fictional, many of the claims made about it are wholly unsubstantiated . This Article offers
a critique of the paradigm responsible for this mythology, a perspective that has become increasingly popular over the past decade.
This oppression [*1338] paradigm depicts all types of sexual commerce as institutionalized
subordination of women, regardless of the conditions under which it occurs. n4 The perspective
does not present domination and exploitation as variables but instead considers them core ontological
features of sexual commerce. n5 I will contrast this monolithic paradigm with an alternative -
one that is evidence-based and recognizes the existence of substantial variation in sex work.
This polymorphous paradigm holds that there is a broad constellation of work arrangements ,
power relations, and personal experiences among participants in sexual commerce. Polymorphism
is sensitive to complexities and to the structural conditions shaping the uneven distribution of workers' agency and subordination.
Victimization, exploitation, choice, job satisfaction, self-esteem, and other factors differ
between types of sex work, geographical locations, and other structural conditions. Commercial sexual exchange and
erotic entertainment are not homogeneous phenomena. n6
 AT: Obama DA
TPA thumps
FINANCIAL REVIEW 3 – 29 – 15 [John Kehoe, Obama scrambles at home for Asia trade deal,
http://www.afr.com/news/world/north-america/obama-scrambles-at-home-for-asia-trade-
deal-20150329-1m9u8b]

In the US, congressional

and industry sources are expecting powerful Congress committees to release
legislation soon after Easter , proposing to give the White House the power to finalise the details
of the TPP deal with Pacific Rim nations.
Australia and the US signed a bilateral free trade agreement in 2004; this proposed deal is wider and multilateral, incorporating a
much bigger group of nations.
US President Barack Obama has said the TPP is in the interests of the US so America – not China – can write the trade rules for the
Asia Pacific.
The so-called trade promotion authority (TPA), which presidents Bush, Clinton and Reagan relied on to finish trade deals, is
considered vital to give other TPP countries confidence that the administration can stick to its negotiated promises.
The special TPA power prevents Congress amending the details of a trade pact negotiated by the administration, and would only
give the House and Senate a yes or no vote on the final TPP.
Hard-left congressional Democrats – aligned to trade unions worried that free trade ships American manufacturing jobs to cheaper
Asian economies – oppose the TPP. Populist Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading the opposition.
At the same time, a block of conservatives in the House oppose granting President Obama the authority to seal the TPP. Their
opposition is not necessarily to free trade, but rather to delegating power to their political enemy, Mr Obama, whom they have
clashed with over immigration, an Iran nuclear deal and the budget.
Many Republicans in the 435-seat conservative-controlled House have signalled they will support granting Mr Obama TPA, but the
President still needs an estimated 40 to 50 House Democrats to win a majority.
"The President will have the challenging task of having to deal with the politics of his own party because there is minority support
among Democrats for free trade," said Scott Miller, Center for Strategic and International Studies international business adviser in
Washington.
A senior Democratic aide said Democrats could support TPA legislation that pledges high labour and
environmental standards in the TPP.
" It's going to depend on the administration really ramping up the case forcefully to members
that this is a substantial improvement to the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] model on trade," the aide said.
April is shaping as crucial for House and Senate committee negotiators to finalise the release of a
TPA bill into Congress, ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to the White House at the end of the month.
Japan and the US are the two key players in the 12-country talks, as they negotiate how to liberalise their protected respective
agriculture and automotive sectors. The Japanese chief negotiator has been in Washington in recent days.

Iran’s reaction key to the vote count

POLITICO 4 – 2 – 15 Republicans trash Iran deal,
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/bob-corker-iran-bill-116629.html

But on-the-fence
Democrats are also waiting for a signal from leaders in Tehran. Will Iran step
forward and publicly embrace Obama’s description of an agreement that would pull apart two-thirds of the
country’s centrifuges? And will Iran accept the president’s claim that the deal prevents Tehran from making a nuclear weapon?
That, said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), is the sticking point.
“If the Iranians do not publicly agree to what the president says they’ve agreed to, then I’m ready to
vote for both bills,” Sherman said in an interview. “If Iran cares what Congress does, the first step is to
publicly agree to what the president puts out.”
The deal is bad—it’s a shield for weapons—their ev assumes full compliance
which doesn’t happen
Fleitz 4/3 (Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst, is senior vice president for policy and programs for
the Center for Security Policy. He worked on the Iranian nuclear issue for the CIA, the State
Department, and the House Intelligence Committee. “Not a Good Deal” 4/3/15
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416404/not-good-deal-fred-fleitz)
The details of the framework agreement as spelled out in a White House fact sheet and President Obama’s speech
raise many questions about a final deal. It is troubling that no final agreed-upon text has been
released and that Iranian and EU officials were vague in their statements about the framework. Earlier today on National
Review, Patrick Brennan wrote about tweets by Abas
Aslani, the head of an Iranian government news
agency, that show how the Iranian view of the agreement differs from the Obama administration’s
view. Aslani tweeted, for instance, that Iran will continue to develop advanced centrifuges during
the duration of the deal and “all economic sanctions by EU, US will be lifted immediately
including financial, banking, insurance, oil.” Here are my initial thoughts about the preliminary agreement, based on our knowledge
of it at this hour. Uranium Enrichment According to the White House fact sheet, Iran
will go from 9,000 operational
centrifuges to 6,104. Of these, 5,060 will enrich uranium for ten years. All centrifuges will be
Iran’s first-generation IR-1 design. The remaining 10,000 operational and non-operational centrifuges will be put in storage
and monitored by the IAEA. These machines will be used to replace operating centrifuges. For 15 years, Iran has agreed not to enrich
over 3.67% U-235 and not to build additional enrichment facilities. Iran also has agreed to “reduce” its current enriched-uranium
stockpile of about 10,000 kilograms (enough to fuel eight or more nuclear weapons if enriched to weapons-grade) to 300 kilograms.
President Obama said in his speech today that Iran’s enriched uranium would be “neutralized.” The U.S. fact sheet says Iran will not
use advanced centrifuge models for ten years and will develop them according to a schedule worked out under the agreement.
However, an Iranian spokesman tweeted that Iran
will continue its R&D on advanced centrifuges during the
agreement and will do “the beginning and completing process” of IR-4, IR-5, IR-6 to IR-8
centrifuges during the ten-year span of the agreement. Iran will move most of its centrifuges out of its
underground Fordow enrichment facility and will not enrich uranium there for at least 15 years. Two-thirds of Fordow’s centrifuges
will be put in storage, and the facility will be used for peaceful purposes. Comment This agreement will allow Iran to
continue uranium enrichment , an activity that the United States has refused to agree to in nuclear-technology
cooperation agreements with its friends and allies because it is so easy to use a peaceful enrichment program to make weapons fuel.
There is no practical reason for Iran to conduct uranium enrichment with 6,000 centrifuges. It would take about 200,000 centrifuges
for Iran to enrich enough uranium to fuel its Bushehr power reactor. 5,000
centrifuges are far too many for other
peaceful purposes such as producing medical isotopes or fuel plates for the Tehran research
reactor. Moreover, it would be far more economical for Iran to purchase reactor fuel rods, fuel plates, and medical isotopes from
other countries. The Obama administration hopes to address the risks of Iranian uranium enrichment by
having intrusive IAEA inspections and by requiring Iran to “reduce” or “neutralize” its
enriched-uranium stockpile. From the president’s statement and the White House fact sheet, it appears that Iran is
refusing to send its enriched uranium to Russia as the U.S. had proposed. Also, the U.S. fact sheet says only that Iran’s current
enriched-uranium stockpile will be reduced; it
does not say what will happen to uranium enriched during
the agreement. We also don’t know what the words “reduced” or “neutralized” mean. The
Obama administration previously claimed that the risk of Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile had been reduced because some of it
had been converted to uranium powder. Experts later discounted this claim because this process can be reversed in about two
weeks. If Iran’s
enriched-uranium stockpile remains in the country and is only reduced to
powder, Iran will retain the capability to make eight or more nuclear weapons///

in about three months. Former IAEA deputy director Olli Heinonen recently published a chart on Iran’s nuclear “breakout” time that
shows how Iran could make enough enriched uranium for one weapon in twelve weeks from
reactor-grade uranium using 6,000 centrifuges, and how it could do so in 16 weeks using only 1,000 centrifuges.
Click here to view. The decision to let Iran keep its previously secret, heavily fortified Fordow

enrichment facility is a major American cave . President Obama said in 2012 about this facility: “We know they
don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful [nuclear] program.” Bottom line The
preliminary agreement legitimizes — and even allows the advancement of — Iran’s uranium-
enrichment program . It does not appear to delay the breakout time for an Iranian nuclear
weapon. Incredibly, no enrichment equipment or facilities will be disassembled or destroyed.
Given Iran’s long history of cheating on nuclear agreements and covert nuclear activities, allowing it to do any
uranium enrichment is very dangerous. This is why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said that Iran’s
enrichment program has only one purpose: to make nuclear bombs. This is reason enough for the U.S. Congress to reject this
agreement and impose new sanctions until Iran complies with U.N. Security Council resolutions requiring it to halt all uranium
enrichment. Inspections and Verification President Obama said today: “Iran will face strict limitations on its program, and Iran has
also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in
history. So this deal is not based on trust. It’s based on unprecedented verification.” According to Obama, “If Iran cheats, the world
will know it.” The president also said, “Iran has agreed to give the IAEA access to the entire supply chain that supports Iran’s nuclear
program, from uranium mills that provide the raw materials to the centrifuge production and storage facilities that support the
program.” According to the White House fact sheet, the IAEA will have access to these facilities for 20 to 25 years. According to the
fact sheet, Iran has agreed to implement the IAEA additional protocol, which requires it to provide the IAEA with information on
declared and undeclared nuclear sites. Iran also “will be required” to give the IAEA access to possible covert sites related to uranium
enrichment. The president said “Iran’s past efforts to weaponize its program will be addressed.” The fact sheet says “Iran will
implement an agreed set of measures to address the IAEA’s concerns regarding the possible military dimensions of its program.”
Comment Although the verification measures detailed by the president go beyond what Iran is
currently subject to, Tehran has never fully cooperated with IAEA inspectors . Moreover, this
verification plan does not permit snap inspections and unfettered access to all Iranian nuclear
facilities, including military bases where Iran is believed to have conducted nuclear-weapons
work. The agreement also is vague on requiring Iran to answer questions about past weapons-
related work. Iran agreed to a twelve-step program with IAEA in late 2013 to address these questions but has addressed only
one of them. It is hard to trust the Obama administration and Iran on verification and compliance. Iran
violated the terms of the interim agreement that set up the nuclear talks, but the Obama
administration repeatedly has claimed it was in compliance. President Obama again made this false claim in his speech today.
Bottom line Verification of a final agreement must require Iran to answer all outstanding
questions about weapons-related work and allow unfettered access by the IAEA to all facilities where nuclear activities are
believed to have taken place. The preliminary agreement appears to give Iran a pass on previous
nuclear-weapons work and set up a verification plan that will not detect all weapons-related
activities. Arak Heavy-Water Reactor According to the White House fact sheet, Iran will remove the core of this
reactor and install a new core so this reactor will not produce weapons-grade plutonium. This reactor will remain a heavy-
water reactor and will be operated for peaceful purposes. Iran has agreed not to reprocess the spent fuel of
this reactor to produce plutonium indefinitely, will sell its excess heavy water not needed for the redesigned reactor, and will not
build more heavy-water reactors for 15 years. Comment Heavy-water reactors are a very serious proliferation risk because they are
a source of plutonium. If this reactor remains a heavy-water reactor, it will be a plutonium source. Iran constructed this reactor in
defiance of IAEA resolutions. Allowing
Tehran to operate it undermines the credibility of the Western
states who pushed these resolutions and increases Iran’s expertise in operating and building
plutonium-producing reactors. Sanctions According to the fact sheet, U.S. and EU sanctions will be lifted after the IAEA
verifies that Iran has complied with “all of its key nuclear-related steps.” These sanctions will “snap back” if Iran fails to comply with
its commitments. Previous U.N. Security Council resolutions on Iran will mostly be lifted if Iran complies with key nuclear-related
steps, including resolving possible nuclear-weapons-related activities. As stated above, the Iranian government appears to believe all
sanctions will be lifted immediately. U.S. sanctions on Iran for terrorism, human-rights abuses, and ballistic missiles will remain in
place. Comment Iranian cheating on nuclear agreements has usually been slow and subtle. It is
unlikely to engage in any unambiguous cheating that will force the Obama administration to restore
sanctions if they are lifted. Moreover, once sanctions are lifted — especially EU and U.N. sanctions — it will be very
difficult to reimpose them. The framework seems to set fairly easy benchmarks that would allow most
sanctions against Iran to be lifted quickly. This would be a boon for the Iranian economy and
would generate significantly more funds that Iran could use to bolster its ever-increasing
efforts to interfere with its neighbors and spread its influence in the Middle East. An American Capitulation
This framework appears certain to lead to a deal that will significantly advance Iran’s
uranium-enrichment program, though agreement is supposed to reduce the threat from Iran’s nuclear program. By
allowing Iran to improve its expertise in uranium enrichment and plutonium production and by
legitimizing its nuclear program, a deal based on this framework will increase the risk from an
Iranian nuclear weapon . Such an agreement will probably further destabilize the Middle East
and could lead to a regional nuclear-arms race. President Obama’s
claim that the only alternative to this
agreement is war with Iran is false. Continuing the status quo would be a much better
outcome than an agreement that paves the way to an Iranian nuclear bomb. The president claimed that the United States will
be blamed for the failure of diplomacy if Congress kills this deal. I believe the opposite is the case. Our
Middle East friends
and allies are likely to reject this preliminary agreement as a sell-out to the Iranian mullahs that puts
their security at risk at a time when Iranian influence is growing in the region. For the sake of American security and the security of
America’s Middle East friends and allies, Congressmust do what it can to kill any nuclear agreement with
Iran based on the deeply flawed framework unveiled today.
1AR
 AT: CP
Ekberg is a government hack and relies on faulty sources—discard her data
Janie A. CHUANG, Assistant Professor of Law, American University, Washington College of Law,
‘9 [“Rescuing Trafficking from Ideological Capture: Anti-Prostitution Reform and its Influence on
U.S. Anti-Trafficking Law and Policy,” Feminist Theory Workshop, Fall 2009,
http://www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/FTW2009/Chuang%20Paper.pdf]

240 Gunilla Ekberg, a former Swedish government advisor and anti-prostitution activist, authored
a report that has provided the basis of knowledge upon which neoabolitionist strategies and
approaches have been constructed. See Gunilla Ekberg, The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual
Services, 10 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN [insert page cite] (2004). In the article, Ekberg situates herself firmly in the
neoabolitionist camp, characterizing prostitution as a form of sexual violence, regardless of
the circumstances, and inseparable from the issue of sex trafficking. Id., at ____. The vast majority of Ekberg’s
claims rely on inferior sources, including newspaper articles and personal conversations
rather than social science literature . [confirm] For a critique of Ekberg’s key assertions, see Vincent Clausen, An
assessment of Gunilla Ekberg’s account of Swedish prostitution policy (January 2007) (on file with author).

Abolitionism fails to reduce demand. Supply produces demand – their model

can’t solve – comprehensive review of studies proves.
Belinda CARPENTER School of Social Justice & Director of Crime and Justice Research Centre @ Queensland University of
Technology ET AL ’13 Erin O’BRIEN – School of Justice @ Queensland Univ. of Technology Sharon HAYES School of Social Justice
@ Queensland Univ. of Technology The Politics of Sex Trafficking: A Moral Geography p. 139-141

Questioning the link between demand for sexual services and increased trafficking
In an attempt to unpack the role of demand, researchers for the
International Organisation for Migration
questioned whether or not demand exists for a 'trafficked' person, as opposed to an 'exploitable' person.
They suggest that: It is hard to imagine an abusive plantation manager or sweatshop owner turning down the opportunity to subject
a worker to forced labour or slavery-like practices because s/he is a 'smuggled person' rather than a 'victim of trafficking', and harder
still to imagine a client refusing to buy the sexual services of a prostitute for similar reasons. (IOM 2003, 9) The same study also
questioned whether or not there is a strong demand for exploitable people, particularly in the
sex industry. They found that among 'clients' there is a 'reluctance to buy sex from prostitutes
who work in the most visibly exploitative conditions'. However, this reluctance is sometimes reduced when
clients are intoxicated or short of money (!OM 2003, 26). The study shows that there is a greater demand for sex
workers who clients perceive as being 'free' and voluntarily choosing to work in the sex
industry, while migrant sex workers are 'viewed by some clients as a "poor man's substitute" for more desirable and "classier"
local sex workers' (IOM 2003, 23). This challenges the assumption made by some abolitionists that
demand for women who are 'more compliant and will accept higher levels of violence' (Project
Respect, APJC Submission 200J) is responsible for fuelling the trade in trafficking victims in the sex
industry. It also suggests that it is possible to differentiate between a general demand for commercial sex, versus a demand for
cheap services. While abolitionists construct borderlines of moral harm which condemn all demand for commercial sex as a pull
factor for trafficking, this research suggests that the real harm can be more accurately located in the desire for cheap goods and
services, regardless of the industry in which they are found. The report from the IOM also argues that it
is likely that the
availability of sex workers generates demand, rather than demand originating with clients (10M
2003, 41). Criminalisation of sex work as a strategy to redt]ce demand for sexual services. has also been challenged. Della Giusta's
study of the complex factors surrounding demand for sexual services found that a client's fear of a damaged reputation due to the
public stigma surrounding prostitution had a direct impact on their willingness to pay for sex. While this suggests that prohibitionist
or abolitionist policies should decrease demand for prostitution, Della Giusta also found that criminalisation had
not reduced demand (Della Giusta 2008, 127). In fact, the sex industry is experiencing unparalleled
growth in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Sanders 2006; Agustin 2003; Bernstein 2007). This
includes the increasing acceptability of strip clubs and lap dancing bars as well as sexual commercialisation via the internet and
mobile phones. A review
by Di Nicola and Ruspini (2009) of studies focused on clients of sex workers led
them to the conclusion that there is very little evidence of abolitionism, non-regulationism or
prohibitionism eradicating demand for sexual services. This is especially the case since zero
tolerance policies directed toward street prostitution now means that the vast majority of
sexual commerce occurs indoors the creation if you like of new moral communities. In line with this is some evidence of
a shift in social and sexual relationships, structures and attitudes (Hayes et al. 2012). And with this comes a great potential to
capitalise on some clients' willingness to differentiate between free and forced prostitution. According to Di Nicola and Ruspini
(2009, 233) 'the
chance of getting free and non-exploited commercial sex could represent a
strong tool against trafficking'.
 AT: Trafficking DA
Serious problems with the Cho study – 14
Ronald WEITZER, Department of Sociology, George Washington University, 14 [“Researching
Prostitution and Sex Trafficking Comparatively,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy, August 22,
2014, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-014-0168-3/fulltext.html]

Two other studies go further—attempting to discern whether countries where prostitution is legal
have better or worse trafficking records than countries where prostitution is illegal. Both
studies are based on information from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), whose report on 161
countries was based on information from an assortment of 113 different sources (governments, the
media, research institutes, NGOs, and IOs).3 For some countries, only one of these sources was available,
resulting in a gross lack of uniformity and comparability across countries. Using the UNODC
report, economists Cho, Dreher, and Neumayer (2012) tried to determine if prostitution laws were
related to the incidence of human trafficking—despite the fact that the UNODC expressly
cautioned against using its report for either single-nation assessments or for multination
comparisons because “the report does not provide information regarding actual numbers of
victims” (UNODC 2006, pp. 37, 44–45). UNODC highlighted the absence of a standard definition of
trafficking across countries, the lack of transparency in data collection and reporting in many
nations, the diverse nature of the 113 sources, and the conflation of smuggling, trafficking,
and irregular migration numbers in some country figures. Cho et al. (2012, p. 70) acknowledge that the
figures do “not reflect actual trafficking flows” and that it is “difficult, perhaps impossible , to
find hard evidence” of a relationship between trafficking and any other phenomenon, but
they proceed to use the UNODC report anyway and draw profound conclusions about the
relationship between trafficking and national prostitution laws. Another problem is the use of a
cross-sectional design (at a single time point) to measure something that should be examined
longitudinally: trafficking before and after legalization. But, this kind of design would require
solid baseline figures///

to compare to subsequent figures— neither of which exists for most countries . Even more
problematic, the authors rely on aggregate national human-trafficking figures (which combine
labor, sex, and other kinds of trafficking) in their attempt to assess whether legal prostitution
makes a difference. Thus, there is a striking mismatch between the trafficking figures and their
relationship to prostitution law: The trafficking “data” are based on a compound of different
types, yet these aggregate figures are then used to assess whether prostitution law is related
to the incidence of trafficking. Finally, it is important to note that the amount of trafficking is
influenced by a variety of push and pull factors— not just the legal regime in place —and it is
difficult to control for these factors when some or many of them cannot be measured in all of
the 161 countries in the study.