In order to find out if Sweden's laws lessen the exploitation of women as compared to legalized prostitution, you need to find a way to measure exploitation and then compare the various methods implemented to find out which lessens the exploitation the most. My study provided that. Your position (Ivor) is that keeping prostitution illegal, but focusing the punishment on the clients is better.
Sweden's method seems to mean that prostitutes are less likely to get beat up then in places where the prostitutes are arrested--that is true; women who work in places where it's legal, however, have better protection of the law and money for treatment regarding drug addiction--also, they have an incentive... (a high paying job they want to keep) for doing so... There is no evidence that the women in Sweden feel less like they "have" to have sex for money-- or that even one women has experienced less "exploitation"--your claimed goal. Sweden's goal seems to take away the ickier social aspects of prostitution... they do have less trafficking-- it doesn't mean that
less women are trafficked.
Trafficking, nonconsensual sex, and violence are already against the law. Loitering is also against the law in many cases. Most states have laws to deal with the social problems with the sex trade. Legalizing and taxing the profession gives you more resources to enforce those laws-- all laws where nonconsensual sex occurs.
A majority of women involved in the sex trade have indeed been abused sexually-- this means that for many years, people were
taking sex from them-- many feel empowered to finally be able to get paid for what others have taken freely. Taking sex form an unwilling partner is much more exploitative, don't you think? Having a pimp take a girls money and beat her up is also more exploitative. So is making her afraid of losing her livelihood by going to the police.
In order to make a case that a given method lessens the exploitation of women--(your supposed goal) you'd need to compare it to other methods and have a statistical means of measuring "exploitation" as my article did. There have been many documentaries and many books on the subject. I've read and watched many. We all have a vested interest in protecting vulnerable people in our societies. But we really don't have a right to regulate who consenting adults have sex with and the reasons they do so or what consenting adults do in private-- whether it involves the exchange of money for orgasms or not.
When choosing a method for dealing with a problem-- you need to define the goal... find a means of measuring so that you can see which methods are the best for reaching that goal. There are male prostitutes, transgendered prostitutes, people with fetishes, people who are turned on by anonymous sex, men who feel insecure due to virginity, men who recently lost spouses-- there are men willing to pay or barter for sex and partners of both genders willing to make that trade. Sweden's solution may be better than traditional methods of handling illegal prostitution, but you have offered nothing to suggest that Sweden's method is better than places where it's legalized in regards to "exploitation of women" or women feeling like they
have to have sex for money.
In many cases through out history, prostitutes have had in much better than their non-prostitute counterparts in regards to control, finances, and exploitation. Many men consider their wives people who must give them sex on demand. How is that less exploitative than what a prostitute is subject to?
Laura Shaner's book on the subject and interviews with the women is a good source for hearing what women had to say on the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheri's_Ranch
It's the prostitutes themselves and the clients who use them whose voices need to be heard in regards to deciding whether prostitution should be legalized, regulated, illegal, and who should get punished and how for what... and what sort of treatments and so forth should be offered at what cost and what sort of ways they feel exploited and how those things might be addressed.
Non consensual sex is already illegal. Nobody has made a valid case as to why prostitution between consenting adults should be as far as I can tell. Humans are free to have sex with whom they want and humans are free to give their money to whom they want.
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