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A Washington, D.C. city councilmember has introduced a bill that would decriminalize prostitution:
D.C. Councilmember David Grosso is behind a bill that would decriminalize prostitution, arguing it's in keeping with his advocacy for human rights and marginalized communities. "We basically criminalize too many activities," Grosso argued in a recent news conference. "It is time for the District of Columbia to reconsider the framework in which we handle commercial sex work, and move from one of criminalization to a focus on human rights, health and safety."
Grosso says he worked with the Sex Worker Advocates Coalition, and followed recommendations from a variety of human rights organizations from around the world as he drafted the bill. "The bill is quite simple, really," argues Grosso. "It repeals a number of laws or parts of laws that criminalize adults for exchanging consensual sex for money or other things of value." "By removing criminal penalties for those in the sex trade, we can bring people out of the shadows, help them lead safer and healthier lives, and more easily tackle the complaints we hear from communities about trash or other nuisances."
If passed, D.C. would become the only city in the U.S. to decriminalize prostitution:
While prostitution has been legal in some parts of Nevada in the form of brothels for more than a century, what's often called "the world's oldest profession" remains criminalized in the rest of the United States. An effort to decriminalize prostitution via referendum in San Francisco failed in 2008, after heavy criticism from city officials at the time. Kamala Harris, then the city's district attorney and now a rising star senator, said the measure "would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco."
But in the near decade since then, there's been a shift in perspective alongside a growing international movement further popularizing the policy change that sheds stigma in favor of pragmatism. The idea is that if sex workers don't fear arrest, they'll be able to access healthcare and other services. One 2014 study from The Lancet found that decriminalizing sex work could "have the largest effect on the course of the H.I.V. epidemic."
Reducing Criminalization to Improve Community Health & Safety Amendment Act of 2017
Also at Reason. Grosso press release at Scribd. HIPS.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:07AM (6 children)
I'm not saying I agree that any of this justifies the law - quite the contrary, I'm clearly an advocate for eliminating all these laws. But I can see where those who oppose me are coming from, at least.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:39AM
Funny how under republican kill planned parenthood we are only seeing spikes in stds.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by termigator on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:09PM (4 children)
Logic does not follow reality. IIRC, where prostitution is legal, there is less incidents of disease since workers have better access to healthcare and sanitation practices.
Laws against sexual activities amongst consenting adults is more about power and control then any perceived health concerns.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday October 12 2017, @06:00PM (2 children)
If you're comparing a high traffic - red light type area where prostitution is going on illegally with the same area after normalization then yes, you've probably improved the situation in the short term there. But the next town over where it's never been tolerated may suddenly discover it's spread to their neighborhood, and it's legal, they can't do anything about it, and maybe you've marginally improved the situation in the red light district but you've endangered the safety of these folks that used to be sheltered from such things *and would prefer to remain so.* From their point of view it's not an improvement, it looks more like an attack.
"Laws against sexual activities amongst consenting adults is more about power and control then any perceived health concerns."
I think it's more subtle than that. It's about specific tendencies in thinking, involving power and control yes, but the tendency itself has everything to do with health concerns, in an evolutionary sense. In other words, these people are not *consciously* exaggerating health concerns, they're simply predisposed to be focused on that risk, to fear it and to avoid it, to a substantially greater degree than others. (Sure, individual politicians might consciously do this to pander to this audience, but that doesn't mean the audience isn't for real.)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by termigator on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:59PM (1 child)
I think this audience you talk about is extremely small. Anything deal with sexuality activity tends to get framed in arguments of morality and religious doctrine vs public health. If it was a purely a public health argument, then a rational, scientific debate can be had. But I have yet to see that, likely because any public health-based debate would favor legalization.
The arguments against legalized prostitution are the similar to the arguments against legalizing drugs. Treating non-violent, consenting attacks as criminal leads to real crime and violence. The so-called "War on Drugs" and Prohibition clearly show criminalizing such behavior is an overall detriment to society.
As aside, I have always found it amusing that folks can get paid to have sex as long as you record and sell it. But if you do not record and sell it, it is considered criminal.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:00PM
"Extremely small" isn't a number so it's hard to falsify, but I think you live in a bubble. Studies that have looked at people with common conditions such as OCD and Agoraphobia find at least half of people so identified exhibit extremely heightened disgust responses. Extrapolated that means more than a million just from the OCD bucket alone, just in the USA. If we extrapolate that to the whole bundle of recognized phobias, we're looking at an additional 10 million people, give or take.
And that's just the most extreme cases, so extreme as to be disfunctional. Roughly half of people are above average on this scale (by definition) and it correlates quite well with politics. The further towards one end of the scale (disgust) someone is, the more likely they are to be associated with a generally right wing party (in the US, the 'publicans) and vice-versa.
And again, this has nothing to do with intelligence, or information. It has to do with values and instinctive reactions. Someone who is very high on the disgust scale doesn't care that it's relatively unlikely you'll give her a disease - she's going to be fighting mad that you imposed ANY risk of it on her whatsoever. If anything about you sets off her disgust-o-meter she just doesn't want you anywhere near her, and she's going to feel threatened, attacked, if you force your way into her bubble.
Now, morally speaking, I haven't changed my mind at all. The principle is clear and valid. The state should have absolutely no authority to prohibit honest and consensual exchanges, the law is fundamentally illegitimate at that level.
But as I've grown older and more experienced I've come to understand why going straight from A to Z is sometimes truly not possible. To give you a hypothetical, let's say you're the last Senator to vote on the bill to decriminalize prostitution, nationwide. The vote is tied and you have the deciding vote. (This is in the future and the rules have changed so this is possible.) The question is simple, do you vote yes or no?
Would it change your mind if you were visited by a time-traveller who showed you the consequences of your actions; if you realized that voting no would result in a timeline where it took another 40 years for this to happen, but there was no major dislocation of society, while voting yes would result in a chain of reactions culminating in a civil war, won by a new Hitler, whose brutal and efficient version of civilization lasted for nearly a century before being defeated in yet another bloody war, with a total loss of lives numbering billions?
Would that make you hesitate at all?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday October 13 2017, @04:56AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?