Resolved: Prostitution should be legalized

See the comments for rule clarifications. DefinitionsLegalize: To make lawful/legal (. http://tiny.cc...)Prostitution: The act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. (. http://tiny.cc...)Prostitution will still happenIt is irrelevant whether prostitution is legal or illegal - there will still be prostitutes. I quote from an article published by The Economist (. http://tiny.cc...): "Prohibition of gambling and alcohol have both been tried in varying degrees in dozens of countries around the world, always with the result of stimulating illegality and sleaze. The sex industry appears to be no different. All developed economies have conceded that the business is impossible to stamp out. " There remains ongoing evidence of this to this day. In the United States, 15% of men admit to having paid for sex in 2004 - despite it being illegal in all states except Nevada (. http://tiny.cc...). An even larger number of men probably didn't want to admit to a crime to a random person conducting a telephone survey. Similar kinds of survey effects happen with drugs as well. There are a number of reasons for this. The most important thing is to consider why people become prostitutes, and the typical answer is that they need money. Prostitution is selling yourself - this is not a decision made on a whim. These are usually people who feel they have few other options. This is why an extraordinarily large proportion of prostitutes contemplate suicide. Prostitutes are the broke college students who need to make a little money to finish their degrees. Prostitutes are the homeless who can't find work. They're the hard working mothers whose day job doesn't earn them sufficient income to give their kids a good education. These people do not just magically disappear because you make prostitution illegal. There's no reason to think this kind of group - who probably need the work more than anyone else - will just accept unemployment as an alternative. The main difference is that prostitutes would be more likely to honor local restrictions on how they can practice, but more importantly, where they can practice. For instance, there are good reasons not to allow street prostitutes to solicit customers right outside a public school, so it's good to put such restrictions in place. However, if prostitution is illegal everywhere, then prostitutes have little incentive not to solicit anywhere they want, so long as the police isn't watching at the time. The problem here is that the police can't watch everywhere all the time, so prostitutes tend to practice just as much in places where we don't want them as in places that are a little more appropriate. SafetyThe harm of having prostitutes work underground is that they cannot be monitored by the government. Prostitution is still relatively easy to do because unlike many industries, prostitution is by nature a secretive kind of business, particularly since many clients will be married or similar. Having support networks available for prostitutes to find out more information, share details about bad clients and get out of the industry if they want to is really important, but it this is almost impossible to organise when the government is trying to stop you. Prostitution is one of the world's most dangerous professions. For instance, clients who do not get what they want or find themselves unable to pay will often rape the prostitute for that reason. More mean clients may engage in sexual harassment. Some clients abuse prostitutes or blackmail them. The difference is that while prostitution is illegal, if one party was asking for money from the other it's a crime. That means that the prostitutes rarely come forward to police with these kinds of crimes - because THEY'RE the criminals. Talking to other prostitutes is also very difficult because they're all trying to work secretly. The very fact that they're doing something illegal can also be used by clients as a form of blackmail. If the prostitute fails to deliver something the client wanted, and the client responds badly to that, the client may threaten the prostitute that they may end up in prison too. All this is bad for a number of reasons. First, it provides additional incentives for clients to do bad things to prostitutes. Second, it means more crime goes unreported. Both of these are particularly harmful since the sort of people who do bad things to hookers are exactly the kind of people we want in prison, as they are likely to also be bad in other aspects of their lives. In addition to putting them in prison directly, they are less likely to commit the crimes in the first place as their root cause is often a build up of sexual frustration - prostitution being a way for these people to let off steam. As well as clients, managers of illegal brothels are also rarely the nicest people, as the fact they are exploiting young women to do something criminal would suggest. Given their volume of sexual contact, prostitutes also need to be very aware of safe sex practices. The trouble is that prostitutes are often afraid even of visiting a doctor because of the fear of being found out as a result. Doctors have several incentives to do exactly this, not least among them that few people like to visit a medical practice that breaks laws, and the importance of reputation in the medical profession. The harms of this are that sexually transmitted diseases spread more readily from one prostitute to the next, causing health issues in the population as a whole. For prostitutes, the most dangerous of these is one known as "pregnancy". It's dangerous because it financially ruins the prostitute - both because it stops their primary income stream, and because the resulting child costs the prostitute money (unless they get an abortion, which is also expensive, controversial and dangerous). In any event it's a quick and obvious way of being busted as a prostitute. Within the wider prostitution industry, there is also the significant risk of human trafficking. This is much harder to do when you're a legal brothel or similar than when you're illegal. Connections to the prostitution network directly allow police to monitor warning signs that human trafficking may be going on somewhere. Other management practices that can also be monitored include the age of the prostitutes, which is impossible if the police are trying to catch the prostitutes rather than process them. Underage prostitutes sometimes, although more rarely, start practicing on their own, which would indicate immediate intervention is required in their lives. This is more difficult to monitor if, for example, they are not only too ashamed to open up to their family, but doing so would get them incarcerated and give them a criminal record as well. In general, having labor protections is important in any industry, but the rule of law does not extend to the black market, thus posing a significant workplace safety risk. Beyond the immediate risks of their own industry, forcing them into circles of people who engage in illegal activity may get them involved in other illegal activities, such as taking drugs. Safety is relative not just to the threat but to whom you are putting in a position of danger. The worst part about this is that the poor and vulnerable and the most likely to be prostitutes, and perhaps the most in need of law to protect them. This is because they are the most likely to be sufficiently motivated by the need to get resources as they have the least of them. Making prostitution illegal stigmatizes not only prostitutes, but this whole population who become typecast as frequently being prostitutes. That creates classism and harms the ability of the poor in any given country to work their way out of poverty. Next round I'll do rebuttal and will add an extra point I didn't have space for, on the role of the state.