Originally published in LifeSiteNews
LONDON, UK, December 12, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A study of the impact of legalised prostitution has found that countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows than countries in which prostitution is prohibited.
Professor Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a team of researchers analysed data on human trafficking from a global sample of 116 countries in order to determine what effect a country’s domestic policy on prostitution has on trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims.
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The authors described international human trafficking as “one of the dark sides of globalisation,” where the victims, the vast majority of whom are women and girls, end up being sexually exploited through prostitution.
Domestic policy on prostitution in countries of destination, the researchers found, has “a marked effect.”
“Most victims of international human trafficking are women and girls coerced into the sex industry abroad,” said Professor Neumayer. “We wanted to find out if legalized prostitution increases or reduces demand for trafficked women.”
The researchers considered two opposing economic theories that could come into play to support their findings: the “scale effect” where legalised prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, thus increasing human trafficking, and the “substitution effect” that reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones.
“One theory is that legalised prostitution reduces demand because legally residing prostitutes are favoured over trafficked ones after legalization,” Professor Neumayer wrote.
“However, our research suggests that in countries where prostitution is legalised, there is such a significant expansion of the prostitution market that the end result is larger reported inflows of human trafficking. While legalising prostitution can have positive effects on the working conditions of those legally employed in the industry, it also appears to boost the market for this fast-growing global criminal industry.”
The research team identified the contrasting domestic policies on prostitution of Sweden, Germany and Denmark as significant examples that were representative of their conclusions.
In 1999 Sweden passed legislation that criminalised the buying of sex, and decriminalised the selling of sex. The principle behind this legislation is clearly stated in the government’s literature on the law: “In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem… gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them.”
The legislation virtually wiped out prostitution and sex trafficking in Sweden. The Swedish government estimates that since 1999 only 200 to 400 women and girls have been annually trafficked into Sweden for prostitution, while in neighboring Finland the number is reported to be 15,000 to 17,000.
Germany legalised prostitution in 2002. The researchers found that “Germany showed a sharp increase in reports of human trafficking upon fully legalizing prostitution in 2002.”
Moreover, reports from German authorities have shown that legalisation has not had the expected “workplace” benefits for prostitutes, nor has it improved the situation for German women at large.
In 2005, news agencies around the world carried the story of a young German woman who had been told that she faced suspension of her government relief benefits if she refused to take a ‘job’ as a prostitute in a Berlin brothel.
The unemployed woman, a qualified information technologist, had indicated her willingness to take jobs outside her field and had worked in a café. After refusing an offer to work as a prostitute in the brothel, she was told by the job centre that her benefits would be cut off if she did not go into prostitution.
Under German law, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take any available job or lose her unemployment benefit, creating a situation where women can be ‘sold’ by the state into sexual slavery.
The LSE researchers’ examination of Denmark, where “self-employed prostitution” was decriminalised in 1999, revealed that the number of human trafficking victims was more than four times that of Sweden, although the population size of Sweden is about 40 percent larger than Denmark.
The LSE study corroborates a 2003 study by the Scottish government on the consequences of prostitution policies in several countries. That study found that countries that had legalised and/or regulated prostitution had a dramatic increase in all facets of the sex industry, saw an increase in the involvement of organised crime in the sex industry, and found a dismaying increase in child prostitution, trafficking of women and girls and violence against women.
The LSE authors pointed out that “due to the clandestine nature of both trafficking and prostitution markets” the data that their analysis of human trafficking inflows was based on was necessarily incomplete, but noted that the United Nations estimated in 2008 that nearly 2.5 million people from 127 different countries had been being trafficked into 137 countries around the world.
The study, titled “Does legalized prostitution increase human trafficking?” will be published in the January 2013 edition of the journal World Development.
