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Prostitution, Sex Trafficking, and Finding the Correlation

Sammy Ford

ENC3315

11/28/27
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This discussion will include the following:

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, author of Should Buying Sex Be Illegal?, is an op-ed columnist for

The New York Times, though she has previously been a columnist for Slate and been featured in

Newsweek, The Nation, The Guardian, and others. Her reporting focuses on politics, gender,

religion, and ideology, and is international in scope. She has written several articles on the

subject of sex trafficking, including a piece that focused on sex trafficking at the Super Bowl and

a piece for The New York Times titled “Getting Serious About Sex Trafficking.” Taking a more

qualitative approach, Michelle bases most of her ideas about prostitution and its effect on human

trafficking on what she’s seen personally in the Netherlands and on interviews with those

involved in legislative action.

SIMON HEDLIN, author of Can Prostitution Law Reform Curb Sex Trafficking? Theory and

Evidence on Scale, Substitution, and Replacement Effects, is a researcher in law and economics

focusing on behavioral economics, gender equality, and human rights. He is also a research

consultant to nonprofit organizations. He got his masters degree in Public Policy from the

Harvard Kennedy School and Quantitative Methods (Economics Statistics) from Colombia

University. Hedlin also spent a brief time serving as a political advisor for Gender Equality and

Human Rights at the prime minister’s office in Sweden. He has identified three main responses

to prostitution and has analyzed their effects on human trafficking.

SEO-YOUNG CHO, co-author of Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?, is

a junior professor of economics at the University of Marburg and the head of the Empirical

Institutional Economics Groups at Philipps-University of Marburg. She has her doctorate in

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Economics from Georg-August University Goettingen in Germany, and a masters degree in

Public Affairs from Colombia University. Cho is also the author of the 3P (prosecution,

protection, and prevention) Anti-Trafficking Policy Index, which gauges the effectiveness of

anti-trafficking policies as well as the causes and consequences of human trafficking and its

subsequent policy implications. Her views on human trafficking as it relates to prostitution come

from a mathematical, quantitative-based process.

SAMMY FORD, a third-year student at the University of Central Florida, was first introduced

to the concept of human trafficking about a year ago and hasn’t let go of it. She’s spent a week in

Miami with a local nonprofit dedicated to combatting human trafficking and got an in-depth look

at the city’s trafficking problem. She’s also had the opportunity to meet Francis Bok, the first

human trafficking refugee brought to the United States. Much of her research has been on her

personal time, and she’s interested in hearing what the data says about the correlation between

sex trafficking and prostitution laws really is. Is it as positive as the preliminary reports countries

like Sweden say?

(All quotes and pieces of discussion from these researchers are derived from the pieces

mentioned in their biographies.)

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GOLDBERG, HELDIN, CHO, and FORD are sitting around a table in Washington DC. They’ve

just listened to the President’s Interagency Task Force give its annual report on Monitoring and

Combatting Trafficking in Persons, and have struck up a conversation about the various laws in

place to combat trafficking through prostitution.

FORD: Let’s get started with the obvious—prostitution and sex trafficking are often conflated.

How do you distinguish them?

HELDIN: “Sex trafficking typically refers to the ‘recruitment, transportation, transfers,

harbouring, or receipt of persons’ through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of sexual

exploitation,” according to the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons,

Especially Women and Children, and is the definition used by leaders worldwide. Prostitution,

on the other hand, is the voluntary selling of sex.

GOLDBERG: It should be noted, however, that “[d]efining ‘trafficking’ can be politically

fraught; there is a gray area between absolute exploitation and total free agency.” That, coupled

with the inherent hidden nature of both prostitution and sex trafficking, makes it hard to

determine how many people are actually being exploited.

CHO: Heldin and Goldberg both have a point—the area between these two are gray, though the

technical definitions help make it clear. In terms of making the laws, though, I find that people

who want to combat prostitution through the law think that prostitution is “almost always forced

and rarely truly voluntary.” Those who want to legalize prostitution, on the other hand, “believe
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that the choice to sell one’s sexual services for money need not always be forced, but can be a

voluntary occupational choice.”

GOLDBERG: According to the Red Umbrella Fund, a global fund founded and guided by sex

workers for sex workers, trafficking and prostitution are connected in the sense that “‘most cases

of trafficking are about women who were actually already working as a sex worker but decided

to work somewhere else as a sex worker, and came into a situation where they faced some form

of exploitation.’”

FORD: Clearly we’re already facing some controversy here. At the end of the day, perhaps it’s

best to simply view trafficking as involuntary and prostitution as voluntary. Let’s focus now on

the issue at hand: the possible correlation between legalization of prostitution and number of

humans being sex trafficked. Thoughts?

GOLDBERG: Evidence shows that legalizing prostitution can make the trafficking situation

worse. “[This] can seem counterintuitive—shouldn’t legalization reduce the role of force in the

industry, since it allows more women to enter sex work legally? The explanation…is that while

more women enter prostitution voluntarily in a legal market, the increase in number of clients is

even greater. Demand outstrips supply.”

HELDIN: Even so, “[s]ome countries have tried to combat prostitution - and, by extension, sex

trafficking - by focusing exclusively on the supply side of the market…while leaving the demand

side untouched.” Other countries made it “illegal to both sell and buy sex. In theory, such laws

aim at eradicating a market for paid sex, including both voluntary prostitution and trafficking, by
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targeting both supply and demand. In practice, though, most prostitution-related arrests in the

United States are made against sellers - not buyers - of sex.”

FORD: Which we usually see in the form of the victims being criminalized, not the pimps that

forced them into that situation in the first place, at least here in the United States.

GOLDBERG: In Europe, their way of solving that issue is through something called the Swedish

model, which legalizes the sale of sex while criminalizing the purchase of sex. It’s supposed to

criminalize exploiters, not the victims. However, in terms of prostitution, feminists are fiercely

divided. On the one hand, “full legalization…has failed to curb the abuses associated with

prohibition. Trafficking has increased, organized crime has grown more powerful, and conditions

for women in the sex industry have worsened.” On the other hand, some say “the real failure

belongs to the Swedish model, which has made life more hazardous for prostitutes by increasing

stigma and driving work underground.”

HELDIN: The Swedish model has its fair share of criticisms. “While criminalizing the sale of

sex may discourage voluntary prostitutes from entering the prostitution industry, the sex-

trafficking victims who are part of the market for prostitution are forced, deceived, or coerced

into selling sex. Arguably, then, the risk of legal sanctions will not affect their behavior in the

market for prostitution. Criminalizing the sale may not have an effect on traffickers either.

Trafficking is already illegal in most countries, and traffickers are typically not personally selling

sex. Such a legislative approach may, therefore, result in both increased arrests of trafficking

victims and an increase in the proportion of individuals in the market for prostitution who are
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subject to force, fraud, or coercion.” With the purchase of sex made illegal, fewer people will

choose to go into prostitution, dropping the supply and driving up the prices. This would thus

encourage traffickers to traffick even more victims.

CHO: I understand that laws often put prostitution and sex trafficking together, but we need to

keep in mind that “the legalization of prostitution is not equal to laxer enforcement of anti-

trafficking laws and, conversely, the fact that prostitution is illegal does not imply stricter anti-

trafficking enforcement. Human trafficking always remains illegal even if prostitution becomes

legal.” I just want to be clear that even though these laws put them together, prostitution and sex

trafficking are separate issues. However, we also cannot “overlook other demand and supply

effects that the legalization of prostitution may have on human trafficking.”

FORD: So how, then, do you see the relationship between prostitution and sex trafficking

playing out?

CHO: “The full answer to the question depends on what happens to the composition of

prostitutes and whether any substitution effect away from trafficked prostitutes (toward domestic

prostitutes or foreign prostitutes legally residing and working in the country) is stronger than the

scale effect.” In other words, would making prostitution legal push people towards hiring more

legal prostitutes and away from trafficked victims? Or would it simply increase the demand for

both legal prostitutes and trafficking victims? “Under conditions of illegality, [however,] a

certain share of prostitutes will [still] consist of trafficked individuals, given the difficulties in

recruiting individuals willing to voluntarily work in such an illegal market. This share of
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trafficked prostitutes is likely to fall after legalization. Sex businesses wishing to take advantage

of the legality of prostitution (instead of remaining illegal) would want to recruit more national

citizens or foreigners legally residing with a work permit in the country since employing

trafficked foreign prostitutes… endangers their newly achieved legal status.” So perhaps

legalization may help, but again, the correlation is still hard to posit with complete confidence.

HELDIN: The correlation is certainly on shaky ground. In fact, it has long been debated whether

“it is necessary to curb prostitution in order to reduce sex trafficking and human

trafficking…actual empirical evidence is scarce, and the link between prostitution and trafficking

has been debated for decades without nearing anything resembling consensus.”

GOLDBERG: Maybe the correlation is vague, but “[w]ith the laws of many countries at stake,

this is far more than an academic debate… In Canada, where the Supreme Court struck down the

country’s anti-prostitution law last year, the government is currently proposing a bill based on

the Swedish model. Initiatives focused on the demand side of prostitution have even taken off in

the United States, through here that tends to mean increasing penalties on johns without

decriminalizing sex work.”

HELDIN: “[T]he United States Department of State, in its annual report on human trafficking,

has written that ‘sex trafficking would not exist without the demand for commercial sex

flourishing around the world.’ Such views seem to suggest that countries can best fight sex

trafficking by eliminating the domestic market for all commercial sex, including voluntary

prostitution.”
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FORD: It’s a little hypocritical for the United States to claim that the only way to combat sex

trafficking is to lessen the demand for commercial sex considering we’re trying to not

decriminalize sex work. That, and the fact that you can’t drive down a highway without seeing at

least one billboard advertising a sex shop. What do those who’ve legalized sex work say?

HELDIN: “The Bureau of the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings has

suggested that legalized prostitution benefits voluntary prostitutes, who may replace trafficking

victims in the market, and at the same time makes trafficked women less attractive to buyers -

both of which would reduce sex trafficking. In the same vein, one study found that New

Zealand's 2003 reform of its prostitution laws, which among other things decriminalized

prostitution, helped improve the relationship between police and individuals who sell sex.”

GOLDBERG: I found the opposite to be true of legalized sex work, at least in the highly-praised

Sweden itself. “In 2012, a Swedish district court awarded parental custody of Jasmine’s two

children to her former partner, a man with a history of violence, because she was seen as

inherently self-destructive and untrustworthy because of her work.” During her fight for custody,

she had a supervised visit with her children at a home that social services used for such visits.

Her ex was present. Having run into him and the children on the bus on the way there, they got

into an argument. Upon arrival, she sat outside with the social worker in tears, and her ex went

inside. He grabbed a kitchen knife, came outside, and proceeded to stab Jasmine thirty-one times,

killing her. It’s an extreme case, but shows how deadly such stigma can be. Had law enforcement
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not discredited her purely because of her work as a prostitute, she may still be alive to raise her

children.

CHO: But legalizing prostitution—despite its indeterminate effects on sex trafficking and

inevitable social effects—can undoubtedly provide benefits to those voluntary sex workers,

which can be seen in Sweden as well. Through legalization, “[w]orking conditions could be

substantially improved for prostitutes—at least those legally employed.”

GOLDBERG: I will admit that’s true—though the stigma cannot and should not be overlooked,

there are many benefits involved in the legalization of prostitution, even in Sweden. “Not only

do Swedish prostitutes make more money than their colleagues in other countries: thanks to

lobbying by sex-worker activists, they also have access to the country’s welfare state, including

sick leave and parental leave. And they’re safer than sex workers elsewhere: not a single

prostitute has been murdered on the job in Sweden since the law was introduced… Swedish

collectivism has also created one of the most gender-equal societies the world has ever known,

and Swedish feminists generally see the prohibition on buying sex as a crucial element of that.”

FORD: So with legalizing prostitution we see perks, but its effects on sex trafficking are

inconclusive? Is this even an effective angle to attack sex trafficking through?

CHO: “The problem here lies in the clandestine nature of both the prostitution and trafficking

markets, making it difficult, perhaps impossible, to find hard evidence establishing this

relationship. Our central finding… that countries with legalized prostitution experience a larger
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reported incidence of trafficking inflows, is therefore best regarded as being based on the most

reliable existing data, but needs to be subjected to future scrutiny.”

HELDIN: In theory, Cho’s findings are right: “a focus on the demand side of the sex trade has

the potential to shrink the market for prostitution and thereby reduce the profitability of sex

trafficking, which means that traffickers should supply fewer victims to the market.” But because

the pimps themselves are not the ones personally selling sex, the risk level for them is relatively

low, while the potential profits are high. Under a Swedish-type model, it’s more likely then that

less people will go into prostitution, dropping the supply and driving up the prices. This would

thus encourage traffickers to traffick even more victims. Again, though, the correlation between

the two are hard to distinguish.

FORD: Which is a problem that we aren’t hearing a lot of solutions for. How do we target the

pimps that are trafficking these victims in the first place, when they’re so hard to find? And

while we figure that out, how can we continue to eliminate the possibility of trafficking victims

being criminalized? And on top of that, as you all mentioned, we can’t even measure accurately

how many trafficking victims there are. Being able to tell if those numbers are affected by

prostitution laws seems a tall order when considered from that perspective. We need more data

before we can give a definite answer on whether there’s a correlation here at all. Until then,

though, we need to keep in mind that this is a human issue, and should be working to do

something to alleviate the suffering of these trafficked victims.

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References

Cho, Seo-Young, et al. "Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?." World

Development, vol. 41, 01 Jan. 2013, pp. 67-82. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.05.023.

Goldberg, Michelle. "Should Buying Sex Be Illegal?." NATION, vol. 299, no. 7-8, n.d., p. 18.

EBSCOhost,

login.ezproxy.net.ucf.edu/login?auth=shibb&url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=edswss&AN=000339988700012&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Hedlin, Simon. "Can Prostitution Law Reform Curb Sex Trafficking? Theory and Evidence on

Scale Substitution, and Replacement Effects." University of Michigan Journal of Law

Reform, no. 2, 2017, p. 329. EBSCOhost,

login.ezproxy.net.ucf.edu/login?auth=shibb&url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.485126326&site=eds-live&scope=site.