> That's a narrative (like the comment I was responding to), not backed by any studies as far as I can tell.
The legalization narrative is about sexual abuse (in the general sense both for sex workers and the broader population) and not specifically trafficking.
You are redefining English in attempt to use a paper that is entirely conjecture based on the predispositions of the authors. I stated _abuse_ as in sexual abuse, not trafficking specifically.
Sex workers are objecting to this law because it is cutting off their ability to communicate dangerous clients to each other. That will lead to an increase in them getting raped.
Like, I get you want to say "Sex trafficking bad and clearly that is the only issue that matters" but it is far from the only issue.
Trafficked persons, in a legal environment, are going to have their place of work inspected, regular interviews with the police for licensing, and their citizenship status checked. The studies of early legalization Germany are so fun for opponents to push because they know Germany did not do this for the first years.
It is like comparing a known, obviously broken implementation and insisting all implementations look like that or that is the only measure of success.
> I was a #sexworker organizer for years in NYC. #FOSTA would undermine almost every single thing I would tell people for how to stay alive. ALL screening, ALL peer references, ALL bad date lists I could send. #SurvivorsAgainstFOSTA
> The authors provide “causal evidence” of a 32 to 40 percent reduction in rape and sexual abuse within two years of a city opening a tippelzone. The higher number is for cities that license sex work in the tippelzone; the lower figure is for cities without a licensing process. “The decreases in sexual abuse are stronger in cities with licensed tippelzones.”
> In cities with both a tippelzone and a licensing requirement, the authors find a 25 percent reduction in drug-related crimes within two years. That result persists beyond two years.
> Most governments in the world including the United States prohibit prostitution. Given these types of laws rarely change and are fairly uniform across regions, our knowledge about the impact of decriminalizing sex work is largely conjectural. We exploit the fact that a Rhode Island District Court judge unexpectedly decriminalized indoor prostitution in 2003 to provide the first causal estimates of the impact of decriminalization on the composition of the sex market, rape offenses, and sexually transmitted infection outcomes. Not surprisingly, we find that decriminalization increased the size of the indoor market. However, we also find that decriminalization caused both forcible rape offenses and gonorrhea incidence to decline for the overall population. Our synthetic control model finds 824 fewer reported rape offenses (31 percent decrease) and 1,035 fewer cases of female gonorrhea (39 percent decrease) from 2004 to 2009.
Sex trafficking has always been illegal, and the reasons for its under-reporting have little to do with prostitution being illegal.