I’m not against those who work for sex, but the idea to earn for a living doesn’t seem nice. IMO, sex should be for 2 people (or more for others who prefer polyamory) who wants to be intimate/romantic with each other. My point is money should not be the purpose.
While I agree with your argument that prohibition has seldom made anything better, the problem with prostitution is that it often does not happen voluntarily. While the transaction itself might still appear to be, in the background there are dire lives and more often than not human trafficking and extortion.
Germany has tried establishing sex work as “real” and regulated work for voluntary self-employed persons, including healthcare and consulting services. In the end this lead mostly to a steep increase in effectively illegal prostitution, as pimps used cover-constructs. Consequently forced prostitution esp. from eastern Europe flooded the marked with dirt-cheap offerings.
There is no easy solution for this. I believe that as with everything that happens within isolated milieus the only way to effectively tackle this problem is to reach out directly to the affected persons on a broad basis. But this is laborious and costly…
You raise some very good points, I don’t want to pretend to have all answers.
Sex work is vulnerable work, and much depends on all parties involved earnestly waning to make and keep it safe.
As I was typing this, I thought that since we can’t trust the private sector with this, what about forming a government agency to deal with licensing and care of sex workers.
But I quickly realized that the organizational issues are just part of the issues, there have been many, many examples of administrators abusing their position.
There is no quick fix for this, the one thing I can think of is a cultural shift to raise the status of the work, then it could be a way forward, but this takes time.