Resolved: Prostitution should be legalized

Thanks to my opponent for his great arguments. In this round I will rebut his arguments, then defend mine, then add my final argument.Human TraffickingI agree that anything that increases human trafficking is bad. I disagree with my opponent's assertion that legalising prostitution creates more human trafficking. My opponent has two sources, one from a blog that pretty much asserts this based on the opinions of a site called "Bible Knowledge" (with no research to back it up), and the other one is from the opinion pages of a minor newspaper. Both say that studies have been done but do not cite the studies, and despite a good search I cannot find any of them anywhere. His sources would do well to note that prostitution in Amsterdam is not legalised but decriminalised.Why does human trafficking happen? Prostitutes do not smuggle themselves. They get smuggled and traded by gangsters and criminal organisations. Prostitutes have no choice but to join these - they have no legal protections because they are also criminals, and they need protection from the law which the criminals can provide. This dependency is the problem. There is zero empirical evidence from peer-reviewed research that smuggling increases when prostitution is legal (http://eprints.qut.edu.au...), and it's because of the reduced dependency on criminal groups.Prostitution is only a tiny fraction of human trafficking that happens in the world (http://www.jstor.org...). It would be much better to tackle this problem rather than make the wrong assumption that all prostitutes are victims of trafficking (http://femlaw.queensu.ca...) and therefore need to be victimised by the government some more, by throwing them in jail and/or (if they are indeed trafficked) sending them back home with nothing. It's like banning retail in order to stop theft.But even if this were somehow the prostitute's fault, 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."Prostitution will still happenMy opponent's argument basically boils down to this: stealing still happens, so let's make that legal too. I'm not saying this is a reason to make it legal. That's what my safety and role of the state points are for. The reason I make this argument is because all the counter-arguments to prostitution rely on prostitution actually being reduced as a result of criminalisation, which all the evidence indicates it isn't. So while my opponent may make a good argument that legalisation does not follow from this, that isn't my point - my point is that prostitution will still happen. In my own country we have plenty of empirical evidence for this (http://www.nzherald.co.nz...).SafetyIf my opponent wants me to draw a distinction between other crimes and prostitution, I would be able to give several, such as the fact that prostitution does not have a victim and that no party is dissatisfied with the outcome. Having said that, my point is that prostitutes are better off when they are safer. Thieves are rarely raped and murdered. Every year that is the reality for thousands of prostitutes in countries where it is illegal. Our society has a problem with violent crime, and I've provided tons of analysis in the last round that legalising something that is (for no good reason) a "soft crime" can actually prevent a lot of this harder, more violent and more dangerous crime. That's good not only for the prostitute, but also for people like me that abhor prostitution.My opponent also argues that to be a profession it must have standards for safe sex and so on. I agree. Prostitution should have standards. The reason it doesn't is that there's no advocacy for prostitutes. As a result if prostitution is illegal, anybody with the ability to have sex can become a prostitute. When it's legal, legal requirements can be put in to ensure that prostitutes have safe sex, just like we ensure doctors are competent.Like my previous opponent, this opponent asks me to give sources citing empirical evidence of everything I say. Something that's logical, as my argument is, is true whether you have empirical proof or not, but in fact I can support everything I said there empirically. I just need my opponent to be more specific about what fact he disagrees with. If he would actually tell me what was wrong with my argument, I'd be happy to prove him wrong.He does mention that I lack a source that opening up to families leads to those families being able to make an intervention if the child is underage, which was my point about families. Actually there is a lot of evidence that legal prostitution can open up a whole range of discourse with young people and their families about it: http://goo.gl...He also does not believe prostitutes are more likely to honor other laws if prostitution is legal. This has been proven many times in academic journals, for instance: http://jiv.sagepub.com...Furthermore, he misreads my point on trafficking, and how it can be REDUCED (not increased) with legal prostitution.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 arbitrary "moralizing" of our lives, including our private lives. Second, it reduces general trust in the law, which impacts on crime rates.