Some anti-trafficking activists and organizations claim that legalizing prostitution adversely affects the well-being of sex workers, including their vulnerability to trafficking. Others claim the contrary, which is consistent with the conventional understanding that bad actors and organized crime thrive under conditions where a commodity or service has been criminalized, not legalized.
Are these claims evidence-based? Does legalization affect the well-being of sex workers or impact the level of human trafficking into a country and, if so, what are these effects? When elected officials debate changes to prostitution laws, what kinds of data should inform their deliberations? This essay examines the evidence from two sources: large, multi-national correlational studies and in-depth case studies.
I will argue that the latter provide a far superior evidential base on which to formulate public policies. Two studies by economists have attracted favorable attention from anti-prostitution activists and policymakers in several countries. The studies have been invoked as definitive evidence when the issue of legalization is being considered by legislatures or in the media, as recently as when Oregon, New York, Vermont, and Louisiana were considering bills to legalize prostitution.
Anti-legalization forces cite the studies as definitive evidence supporting their position. At first glance, this seems like a straightforward and worthy comparative exercise, but there are several fatal flaws in the methods and logic:. It is impossible to determine the quality of such diverse sources across so many countries. There is much room for error when the sources are inconsistent across countries. The amount of trafficking is influenced by a variety of push and pull factors—not just the legal regime at the destination.
It is difficult to control for all of the potential influences on trafficking when many of them cannot be measured across all countries due to lack of reliable measures.
