@ Kevin Lowe. I see you continue to read my mind.Well done!
@ Articulett. Instead of continuing to apologise it would probably be a better strategy if you started to actually read what people say instead of skimming. Just sayin...
For those who are suggesting that Ivor is off topic: It is my impression that the whole discusssion is off topic. The question was "why is prostitution illegal".That is not addressed by arguing about whether it
should be illegal, is it? Things are made illegal for all sorts of reasons: and I think it is probably quite a complex question whose answers are lost in history. It may be we cannot answer it at all.
In those circumstances it was perhaps inevitable that we had to address a different question. And most have chosen to narrow that discussion to the question of the pragmatic benefits of legalising/not legalising it. I used to be very much in favour of legalising prostituion: the dutch experience does not support the case I based on and so I have changed my mind: as I said, the legal status of prostitution does not seem to make much difference on the evidence we have at present. There is some quite interesting stuff in the Swedish experience but not enough to settle the matter because there are too many confounding factors. So it seemed to me that we needed to look at the underlying reasons for the existence of prostitution, and build a view from what we can determine of those. This would entail thinking about why it exists: and also about why we make laws against some activities. Then thinking about how prostitution fits into whatever conception of law we come up with.
Passing Trucker clearly argued it exists because men have "needs" and "rights" to have those needs met. If that is the basis then I believe it to be wrong for the reasons I gave.
I Ratant addressed this issue too: He suggested that prostitution is largely a human phenomenon and that it exists because it is an easier way to provide the necessities of life than other types of work (as I understand his post). It is interesting that he sees the existence of "exploitation" in the transaction though he considers it is the prostitute who is exploiting the buyer: not the other way round. If this conception was correct then I personally would have a hard time seeing it as different from other types of commercial transaction, and this is another underpinning set of assumptions running through a lot of posts here.
However I do not think it is possible to sustain this case. The evidence we have overwhelmingly suggests that the proposition that it is an easy way to make a living is not correct. As Articulett has said,
I don't have the ability to fake pleasure and delight when I find someone repulsive. I think the women who can-- really earn their money.
So she at least does not seem to see this easy and exploitative relationship in the terms suggested by I Ratant. The evidence of the adverse mental health outcomes associated with prostitution does not suggest he is right, either (see domofish's posts in this connection): nor does the evidence of the frequency of violence against the prostitue; the high incidence of drug abuse and the inflated mortality rate. It is also telling that the evidence about onset of drug dependency is unclear: at least some studies suggest that drug misuse starts after a person becomes a prostutute, not before. But there are studies which counter that so we do not really know. Similarly the fact that women with real choice (see the dutch experience) do not often choose this route does not support the idea that this is an easy way to make a living and so I must reject this idea.
Evidence from studies of trafficking tend to refute the idea implicit in many of the posts here that this is a individual choice, since there is reason to suppose that much of the prostitution in the world is organised and it is a big business. Big business by itself is not a bad thing, but we do have labour laws for a reason, and without them there is coercion in many fields of work. The free market is a market in misery and lack of choice. Business does not change of itself and corporate ethics are nowhere to be seen. Where laws protecting workers are non-existent or ineffective there are bad outcomes and so in most rich countries there are quite close controls. This seems to lead to to a case for legalisation to ensure better working conditions and was the basis of my own earlier position. We have seen that it does not work in this field. Perhaps it would if there were strong laws everywhere, but that is not obvious to me. In other fields where there is strong law the workers have some protection at least in the countries with those laws. But this is not the case with prostitution in Holland and so I am driven to the conclusion there is indeed something different about this trade.
And so I ask again. Why does prostitution exist and what does the answer to that question tell us about what its legal status should be, if anything?
