[Igor Antunov]

Legal here, not even a public agenda issue anymore, because it just makes sense, like any other industry.

[AFAIK]

I'm pro-legalisation with accompanying regulation in the current context.
If we lived in a socialist society then prohibition could be workable but there's no way an ideology that maneuvers millions of people into extreme privation is going to convince them not to sell sex or drugs.

My main concern with criminalisation is that it denies sex-workers any autonomy and makes working conditions more dangerous, increasing exposure to violence and disease.

The internet is making the buying and selling of sex easier and safer. Governments should stop trying to ban it

STREET-WALKERS; kerb-crawlers; phone booths plastered with pictures of breasts and buttocks: the sheer seediness of prostitution is just one reason governments have long sought to outlaw it, or corral it in licensed brothels or “tolerance zones”. NIMBYs make common cause with puritans, who think that women selling sex are sinners, and do-gooders, who think they are victims. The reality is more nuanced. Some prostitutes do indeed suffer from trafficking, exploitation or violence; their abusers ought to end up in jail for their crimes. But for many, both male and female, sex work is just that: work.

This newspaper has never found it plausible that all prostitutes are victims. That fiction is becoming harder to sustain as much of the buying and selling of sex moves online. Personal websites mean prostitutes can market themselves and build their brands. Review sites bring trustworthy customer feedback to the commercial-sex trade for the first time. The shift makes it look more and more like a normal service industry.
[...]
Moralisers will lament the shift online because it will cause the sex trade to grow strongly. Buyers and sellers will find it easier to meet and make deals. New suppliers will enter a trade that is becoming safer and less tawdry. New customers will find their way to prostitutes, since they can more easily find exactly the services they desire and confirm their quality. Pimps and madams should shudder, too. The internet will undermine their market-making power.

But everyone else should cheer. Sex arranged online and sold from an apartment or hotel room is less bothersome for third parties than are brothels or red-light districts. Above all, the web will do more to make prostitution safer than any law has ever done. Pimps are less likely to be abusive if prostitutes have an alternative route to market. Specialist sites will enable buyers and sellers to assess risks more accurately. Apps and sites are springing up that will let them confirm each other’s identities and swap verified results from sexual-health tests. Schemes such as Britain’s Ugly Mugs allow prostitutes to circulate online details of clients to avoid
[...]
This new consensus is misguided, as a matter of both principle and practice. Banning the purchase of sex is as illiberal as banning its sale. Criminalisation of clients perpetuates the idea of all prostitutes as victims forced into the trade. Some certainly are—by violent partners, people-traffickers or drug addiction. But there are already harsh laws against assault and trafficking. Addicts need treatment, not a jail sentence for their clients.

Sweden’s avowed aim is to wipe out prostitution by eliminating demand. But the sex trade will always exist—and the new approach has done nothing to cut the harms associated with it. Street prostitution declined after the law was introduced but soon increased again. Prostitutes’ understandable desire not to see clients arrested means they strike deals faster and do less risk assessment. Canada’s planned laws would make not only the purchase of sex illegal, but its advertisement, too. That will slow down the development of review sites and identity- and health-verification apps.

The prospect of being pressed to mend their ways makes prostitutes less willing to seek care from health or social services. Men who risk arrest will not tell the police about women they fear were coerced into prostitution. When Rhode Island unintentionally decriminalised indoor prostitution between 2003 and 2009 the state saw a steep decline in reported rapes and cases of gonorrhoea[L].

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 ... hould-stop

The problems of people trafficking and indentured labour isn't unique to prostitution so I don't consider it a good argument against sex-work. I'd be open to banning foreigners from working as prostitutes and other difficult to monitor industries to prevent people being exploited due to language and culture barriers.

[anasawad]

though i am against the existence of prostitution but its an undeniable fact that it is all around us ....and in places ravaged by wars in many parts of the world ...
girls are forced to enter the sex market in order to survive having no other option...and some even forced by pimps or traficking networks....

so in case of having no other viable option ...i will vote for its legalization....if we cant vanish it ...then atleast we can protect that people who had no other option but it from suffering ...

[Wellsy]

I generally find the industry problematic but often for it's existence within our current economic and cultural climate, thus I don't have a solid opinion as the issue is complicated but am probably skeptical to how much empowerment is thought present for legalized contexts in the short or long term.
It certainly seems to be harmful to try and punish those who do sex work of varying degrees by the coercion of poverty, which has been distinguished by the term 'Survival sex' since there is efforts to make clear that not all sex work is of a coerced nature.
I think Philosopher and Feminist Martha Nussbaum makes says this point well.
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2008/03/martha-nussbaum.html

the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque

But I'm not sure I much care for those who perform sex work from a position lacking economic coercion if it poses a harm to those not in more powerful position.

The concern for legalization is it yielding greater trafficking, as it's thought in terms of market supply and demand to increase demand and not enough women wish to be sex workers locally to meet the demand side of things.
https://andreaskotsadam.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/trafficking.pdf
http://www.lse.ac.uk/geographyAndEnvironment/whosWho/profiles/neumayer/pdf/Article-for-World-Development-_prostitution_-anonymous-REVISED.pdf

Summary. — This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.

The 2nd paper takes a nuanced stance in also trying to explore both the intake but also the possible decrease in trafficking due to hiring local women.
I do acknowledge that legalization results in better health outcomes, I assume this relates to how much power the individual has to negotiate terms just it applies to people outside the sex industry.
https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3802312.html

Though I think this was a point raised with Sweden's decriminalization of sex workers but criminalization of their clients, that it presumably gives legal leverage to the sex worker as she is then not as threatened by fines or imprisonment but their client is. Though the realistic concern there is the culture that often permeates police forces that renders them not only ineffective by possibly harmful to sex workers. http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/12/15/ending-police-abuse-sex-workers/ Though this is more of an issue within criminalization, but my suspicion is that even with decriminalization the stigma still marks a barrier for the interactions between police and sex workers.

On the moral side that I believe is informed by Kant with the whole treating people as an end unto themselves, there is a concern that treatment of women as sexual objects perpetuates the mentality in which women aren't considered moral equals.
Rae Langton's Sexual Solipsism is a good piece and is perhaps a good introductory paper to the moral implications in treating people as things.
http://web.mit.edu/langton/www/pubs/SexualSolipsism.pdf
Here's a review of her paper on it's strengths and limitations: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24072-sexual-solipsism-philosophical-essays-on-pornography-and-objectification/

It is curious to me the disproportionately gendered nature of the sex industry, despite emphasis on other sex workers who are often marginalized groups as well, like homosexual men and transgender people. Criminalizing sex workers certainly isn't the answer, though whether legalization is, will remain to be seen in the outcomes and policies of those that legalize and those that follow Sweden's lead in decriminalizing the industry but criminalizing it's payment.
I do like the prospect that if the industry was legal then could work on getting greater benefits to sex workers with unions though I'm yet to further consider if there is a difference of significance to place on consent in the context.
http://moreradicalwithage.com/2015/06/03/standing-up-for-all-women-statement-in-response-to-london-young-labour-summer-conference-motion-8/

Belief 1: “Sex work is work. Sex work is the exchange of money for labour, like any other job. It is different because it is currently criminalised and stigmatised.”

We fundamentally disagree. Sex work is not identical to other forms of labour. Firstly, unlike other labour, sex is an activity which the majority of people engage in freely without remuneration. In this context, it is not labour, but an activity motivated by mutual desire. So, in the buying and selling of sex, what is effectively paid for is the waiving of this requirement of mutual desire. It is emphatically not the exchange of money for labour; it is the exchange of money for consent.
Framing the debate as an issue of labour rights thus rests on obscuring the fact that the sex industry involves financial coercion of consent, not an exchange of labour for money. And that, moreover, this takes place in the context of a society in which women have less social and economic power than men, and are hence particularly vulnerable to financial coercion. And as the legal strictures around paid organ donation indicate, there is significant potential harm to coercing an individual’s consent to transgressions of their bodily integrity. Since the sex industry relies on this coercion, it should therefore be seen in the same way.

Which of course doesn't apply to all within the industry, and still seems only problematic in the same sense of any other industry with workers which makes me skeptical to it and it's not exactly clear to me why organ donation is a suitable comparison.

The disagreement I see comes from liberal feminists who I believe emphasize the choice of the individual, they cite that stigmatization is the reason much harm befalls those in the sex industry and to that I can agree. Though I'm less sure whether it is the source of all the harm that comes to all in the sex industry as it seems this doesn't address all within the industry.
Am also concerned with possibly supporting a commodification of mostly women's bodies that may help maintain meanings projected onto women that posits their flesh as inherently sexual which I believe holds negative implications.
Though that's a weird area in which witnessing commodification of women doesn't necessarily render one of sexist beliefs but it may have a correlation in affirming the mentality of those that do, so perhaps not a causal relationship but correlation.

Not that this necessarily means we can't legalize the industry but I don't wish to disregard it's possible implications for furthering sexist beliefs. Though with all this emphasis on the sex industry I do like the point that it's unclear why there is significant focus on the sex industry for the points of objectification when clearly modern media has greater influence with modern technology extending it's reach, saturating us in images and messages of an unprecedented amount in human history.

The main goal always seems to be improving women's economic potential considering the big concern is with women who are coerced is assumed to often come from being in poverty.

*I'm still yet to figure out how to link a single word rather than providing an entire text of the url