DDO Official Tournament 2: That prostitution should be legalised

If we put aside the fact that my opponent just randomly dissed all Asians, especially those from Korea or the Philippines, as mysogynists, his entire case was premised on a view that all prostitutes are trafficked or smuggled into the country. Curiously labelled as a subpoint, he also argued that prostitutes are the major source of HIV, which will apparently eventually kill us all. Let me deal with these points now...We agree on trafficking and smuggling peopleTrafficking or smuggling any person (not just prostitutes) is a crime and rightly so. This is what police ought to be stopping instead of ordinary, legal citizens who are simply trying to earn a little extra money when times get tough. Right now, there is a situation where many of these "legal" prostitutes (legally citizens, not legally prostitutes) feel they need the protection of gangs and criminal groups to hide them from the police while they are doing their work. This is really bad for the prostitutes because this makes it very easy for the gangs and criminals to traffic them - the prostitutes become dependant on them. If government could keep an eye on prostitutes, they could stop this kind of trafficking from happening. It's because prostitution is illegal that prostitutes avoid the government at all costs, which allows this activity to go on without the government realising. If the smuggled prostitutes are caught, then they are often deported because they're there illegally, rather than being questioned or kept to use as evidence against the smugglers.My opponent asserts breifly that where prostitution is legal, more smuggling happens. Empirically there is no evidence for this (http://eprints.qut.edu.au...) and everything my opponent cited was nothing more than opinion. Why? It's for all the reasons I've described already that the opposite is a logical outcome of the status quo in places where prostitution is illegal. In my country of New Zealand, where prostitution is legal, a recent government report indicated that we have no significant problems with human trafficking at all (http://www.justice.govt.nz...), notwithstanding perhaps two or three individual cases. Beyond that most victims of trafficking aren't prostitutes (http://www.jstor.org...), and most prostitutes aren't victims of trafficking (http://femlaw.queensu.ca...). But even if this were true, the solution is not to ban all prostitution just because some people do it wrong. Banning all prostitution because some people smuggle prostitutes is analogous to banning all TV because some people watch too much TV. Rather, it should be illegal to smuggle prostitutes, not to be a prostitute.As one book put it (http://goo.gl...) "trafficking in women, coercion and exploitation can only be stopped if the existence of prostitution is recognized and the legal and social rights of prostitutes are guaranteed."Prostitutes are not a major source of HIVEven if they were, prostitution will still be there. They will still be spreading the same deseases. The difference is that I want to give the prostitutes government support to help them find out more about safe sex practices, as I outlined in my previous round. My opponent wants to deny them this. Right now prostitutes in most of the world are not contributing more to STDs than your average person (http://www.thebody.com...) - the only real exception to this is in third world countries where protection is often not available. If ending unprotected sex among vulnerable groups is criminal, however, they advocate for sex being criminal for all young people, as this is where most diseases spread.HIV is quite distinct from the apocalypse, for a wide variety of reasons that I do not have the space to describe. I don't consider it the main issue of the debate anyway, so I'm not going to launch a major defense of this argument. The point is that very little of it is spread by prostitutes because most prostitutes are very concerned about safe sex, given how much of it they do.SafetyMy opponent ignored almost all of my analysis on this point. This is a shame because my analysis was really good. Here's what he did say. First, that unregulated markets do better than regulated ones. Although I'm not sure his source supports that conclusion, I think we can all agree that if economic efficiency was the goal here, a legal but unregulated market would work better than an illegal and unregulated market. Such a view also supports the resolution. What I'm advocating in this debate, however, is that the government takes a role in ensuring the safety of prostitutes, because to me the impact on the economy of prostitution - while it certainly exists in the sense that spending is often (but not always) higher when prostitution is legalised - is nothing compared to the impact of a prostitute getting raped. We need to assure the safety of prostitutes if we want to have a safe society, because as I established and my opponent seems to have conceeded, you can't stamp out prostitution.The other thing he said is that my safety point lacked evidence. This is a really general statement and I'm not sure exactly which of my points my opponent objects to. Therefore I must ask that this be clarified somewhat in the next round, giving details of what evidence my opponent sees as lacking in my case.Role of the StateIn general, prostitution fits a class of actions that the state has already deemed to be legal. The state decided long ago that people ought to be free to use their bodies sexually to make a profit - this is why the pornography industry exists. Sex is no more illegal than posing nude, so the only principally consistent application of the law is not to ban either of them when money is added back into the equation. If we accept the view that the state is to determine moral rules about what should and should not be done, we must also expect the state to actually have a consistent and coherent moral code. The harm of this is that the general lack of principle in what determines right from wrong reduces clarity in certain borderline situations, thus reducing legal certainty. It's a lot more difficult to respect both the law in general, and any given law, when you aren't really sure what the law is or why it's there. This is definitely the case with prostitution.There are several arguments from specific perspectives on how the state should be behaving, in addition to the above argument from inconsistency in how the state is behaving. Prostitution is a privacy issue, because it concerns things done in the most private of all possible spaces. Government regulation over what we do on the internet, which is somehow also considered private, is not allowed - so then why is regulating prostitution allowed? Almost all of privacy law is about getting others out of our private lives - the only major exception is prostitution. This itself raises another question - since prostitution is so private and there are no spillover effects on others when it is managed and regulated correctly, why should the government even care? Prostitution law would therefore be a major overstepping of the state's role in our society. There are two impacts of this. First, there is a slippery slope towards more arbritrary "moralising" of our lives, including our private lives. Second, it reduces general trust in the law, which impacts on crime rates.My opponent says, right at the end, that it's bad that illegal things should be made legal because them being illegal is a problem. I disagree. Government ought to be solving problems, not making them by keeping something illegal.The resolution is affirmed.