LogFAQs > #905631497

Rika, you posted "a study" and claim victory because shockthemonkey didn't have time to look over it in detail.

Fortunately, I do.

While that study is certainly damning for proponents of legalized sex work, there are a few caveats to it.

One, while the study states it did a full cross-sectional study on over a hundred countries, it admits that the study can only support "an association" between prostitution legalization and sex trafficking, but cannot establish causality.

Two, they then went to the case studies, examining Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. The results they put together indicate support their hypothesis, but one still has to examine the fact that the study was done over the series of five years (1999-2003), and admits a lot of factors. For one, pre-legalization in Denmark data is not available, nor is pre-criminalization data in Sweden. Pre-criminalization in Sweden, the law stated that individual sale was legal, but not organized brothels. That's just a couple of examples of caveats that can put bias in the data.

So, while this study *supports* Rika's argument about legalization of sex work increasing human trafficking, it's not *proof*. It's always important with these studies to go all the way to the details to realize that one study is rarely the be-all end-all for an argument.

...

Oh, and has been said multiple times in this topic, the study has nothing to contribute to the argument of whether a new law can reduce trafficking in a country where prostitution is already largely illegal.
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CyricZ