The research into prostitution supports and informs my perspective.

What research informs your personal perspective? Are you a client or a sex worker? Frankly, I fail to see what insight you could possibly bring when you utterly refuse to address the real lives of women involved in prostitution as evidenced by the research data.

Perhaps an expertise in Criminal Justice should inform you as well. I have that, as well as a more than passing familiarity with "the profession" as you call it. I'm not sure if you know the definition of that term.

Again, you refuse to acknowledge that no one here is arguing for the legalization of street hustling or any of the exploitation that goes along with that.

Here's a link to help you begin the process of educating yourself about the profession:

http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/c-prostitution-research.html

Studies are a dime a dozen and can be used to argue for any position. If this one argues that street hookers have a tough life and it should not be tolerated, no one here is disagreeing with you or it.

I'll take a look and give you my considered "professional" opinion.

They are not free when their behavior is driven by powerful and destructive forces such as... poverty.

You mean people do things they don't want to do just because of poverty, like working in jobs that other people don't want?

Seems to me that all we have to do is abolish poverty and then there will be no more prostitution or other crummy jobs. This would be win-win for everyone.

I can't see any downside, but I bet some right winger will pull a Kyoto on this one.

Profession, Professional, Professionalism

Street hookers aren't professionals. They aren't even amateurs.

Throw that all out the window. They are not part of this discussion because no one here is arguing that it be legalized.

You want to focus on it. Why, we can't be sure.

You wrote:

"The reason that I think that illicit activity will stop if the behavior is legalized is that the "victim" has alternatives. Bootleggers went out of business after prohibition ended.

I did read Kristof today, and it did give me pause.

But it still seems to me that you are denying women full adulthood by saying that they are incapable of managing their own lives, and that laws have to be passed restricting their decisions."

__________________________________________________________

Your first premise is one that is, sadly, not sustained by the evidence. As I stated before, the Netherlands CONTINUES to have a problem with sex trafficking despite legal, registered, tax paying prostitution. That, by your logic, should not happen. I asked someone (perhaps you) in an earlier post to explain why. Any theories?

The second argument for "adulthood" and choice is an interesting one but fails on two measures. First, it is common in our country to prevent people from harming themselves. For example, the mentally ill and the drug addicted can be forced to get treatment. I know that this is generally not the reason for anti-prostitution laws. These are derived from our more historically rigid moral codes. However, given what we know today about the impact of prostitution on the individual, it is an ethical stance to adopt for the good of society. I believe that Spitzer actually endorsed this part of the argument in pursuing increased prosecutions of johns.

Secondly, from a philosophical persepctive, one has to address the question of consent. Is consent free when it is driven by powerful and negative forces? Perhaps we can look around and find one example here or there of a very happy prostitute making a bundle of cash with no negative forces driving her behavior or controlling her life. Is that by any means representative of the vast majority of prosititutes? Clearly not. So how can we say that the consent is freely given when the bulk of the profession is peopled by the mentally ill, addicts, the abused and the very poor (even homeless).

When droves of college-educated, stable, and clean men and women are all clamoring to work in the sex industry, then I'll believe that it is a consenting activity. I'm a teacher with a Masters degree and I'm quite certain that Kristen made much more money than me. How come I don't envy her job?

That website is this woman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Farley

I'll have to go with "axe to grind".

Kook is more like it, but only on the issue of her wanting to prohibit all forms of prostitution.

She's entitled to her opinion. It's wrong. She's entitled to interpret facts in her own way and slant her arguments as she wants to, regardless of the fact that it is intellectually dishonest activism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden

It won't last long.

Just happened in 1999.

Comprises what?

I find it amusing that some people are shifting from the broad stance of legalized prostitution. In the Netherlands, where it is legal and prostitutes are licensed, it occurs everywhere from the streets to brothels.

Now there's a way out of poverty for everyone!

CAIRO -- He sits quietly at the corner cafe, a gold watch flickering on his wrist. If you need a liver, or want to sell a piece of yours, grab a chair and get acquainted with Mustafa Hamed, a 24-year-old ex-bus driver who fell unexpectedly into a life as a broker in human organs.

Hamed's 4-year-old son, Mohamed, was dying of cancer and needed an artery transplant that cost $5,000. The only savings Hamed had was what he fished from his pockets at the end of the day.

There was another way, one whispered about for those with nothing. A man could wager part of himself, slip into a hospital gown, and wake up with an incision above the gut.

Hamed sold a section of his liver for a bit more than the price of his son's operation. The boy died in surgery.

With his scar healing and his son buried, Hamed, whose knowledge of anatomy would perhaps fill a single page, decided that driving a bus was not the fate of the man he wanted to be. He brokered his first liver deal four months ago. He earned $900. Four more sales have followed.

"Things shouldn't be this way, but they are," he says. "I sold part of my liver to save my son. I had to do it. . . . You cut your body and sell your pieces. But some people who come to me aren't that desperate. They could find other solutions. Many men I see now want to sell their organs so they can afford to buy an apartment to get married. That doesn't seem desperate enough to me. I try to tell them: 'Be patient. You don't need to do this.' "

Patience and desperation move in curious currents in Cairo. Nearly half of Egyptians live in poverty, and although the nation's economy is privatizing and growing, inflation is crushing the poor and working class. The price of green peppers has risen 90% in the last year.

Thousands have moved to the richer Persian Gulf; many have put off marriage, a delay that in Egypt is the stinging sign of a man's failure. Others, such as Hamed, have bartered kidneys and livers to pay off debts and reinvent dreams.

Similar tales echo around the globe. Human organs are brokered from Pakistan to China; kidney-theft rings have swept through villages in India. The poor in underdeveloped nations, such as Moldova and the Philippines, are offered "transplant tourism" packages that arrange for them to travel to another country and sell their organs to rich patients. It is a market of desperation and ingenuity in which doctors ask few questions and donors often end up ill, and sometimes dead.

...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-organs13mar13,0,7142627.story

Why is Hamad trying to second-guess another free agent's own decision about their body? Surely they know what's best for their own selves? Why is this illegal in the US? You can donate organs, why shouldn't you be able to make a profit at it? It's no different from wasting your life away at a dead-end job in an office. It just involves people selling the gifts God gave them, after all, and if it were legalized, maybe the participants wouldn't end up injured and dead so often.