In more sane high income countries, New Zealand, parts of Australia, the UK, et. al, prostitution is legal and regulated. If sex workers get into trouble, there are places and people they can go to get help. It at least attempts to be a legitimate industry.
In America, we have parts of Nevada and that's it. Filming a sex act and paying for it is legal (if you do your due diligence and make sure you have all the right paperwork, a good lawyer, and for good measure you should probably only film in California and Florida -- it's why there are so few industries who can afford the lawyers to do porn, but that's another issue entirely...)
The right way to deal with sex trafficking is to make it legal for people to do what they want with sex/their bodies, create as safe a sex-work industry as you can, and make it more difficult for illegitimate people in the sex industry to work.
This just takes me back to the Child Safety Protection Act of 1994. Over a decade later we're fighting the same bullshit.
I'm wasn't aware of the UK having legal and/or regulated sex workers.
The closest I'm aware of is that Leeds has the first (and only?) "official" red light district, and my understanding was that that's more a case of the police not asking or prosecuting rather than it actually being allowed or legal.
(There's plenty of discussion to be had over whether we should or not, this reply is more of a "oh really, do we?" sorta comment).
Sex work is perfectly legal in the UK, subject to certain restrictive conditions.
You cannot work in a "brothel" (i.e. not under the same roof as another sex worker), you cannot have a paid "pimp" (arguably not even to do the accounts or to make sure you are safe), you cannot solicit in a public place.
As you say, sometimes police will not enforce these rules, but other times they may use the threat of criminalisation to coerce sex workers.
Sex workers typically advocate for the "New Zealand model" of full decriminalisation - which is understood to be safer for sex workers.
As it turns out, countries with legalized prostitution have higher levels of illegal sex trafficking (the real kind, where people are forced into it as well). This is one of those areas where the rubber of libertarianism meets the road of reality. If you really want to curb sex trafficking, the best way to do it is to go after the demand side: decriminalize prostitutes, but punish pimps and johns severely.
> As it turns out, countries with legalized prostitution have higher levels of illegal sex trafficking (the real kind, where people are forced into it as well).
The extremely small numbers of countries involved and the methods that exist of estimating the actual magnitude make it very hard to do any of (1) control for potential confounding factors, (2) be confident in the correlation even assuming no confounding factors and accuracy in the figures, (3) be sure there are not systematic measurement biases (resulting in higher count to actual number ratios with legalized prostitution) distorting the results, or (4) be sure that the measured differences are real even absent systematic bias.
(3) is perhaps especially important because a central thesis of the advocacy of legalization as a means to fight trafficking is that it makes trafficking more detectable by breaking the apparent or actual shared interest of perpetrators and victims in concealing sex trafficking when prostitution is illegal. (One sided decriminalization also aims to do this, but arguably stigmatizes and marginalizes all participants in prostitution of any kind in much the same way as criminalization, even though it only penalizes one side.)
How does "punishing pimps and johns" help prostitutes? It still forces them to fight the law every time they work, because no prostitute is going to get clients if they don't conceal them.
If a pimp or client beats or threatens a prostitute, she can go to the cops with no fear because her work doesn't warrant criminal prosecution. As it is, prostitutes are kept in line because they have no one to turn to when they are abused by their clients or pimps.
It transfers power from the pimps to prostitutes by radically shifting the terms of trade in cases of conflict.
Note that this is policy being tried in India to fight corruption--don't penalize giving bribes, just taking them. Now every bribe taker is at risk of being reported and the reporter is not at risk.
In America, we have parts of Nevada and that's it. Filming a sex act and paying for it is legal (if you do your due diligence and make sure you have all the right paperwork, a good lawyer, and for good measure you should probably only film in California and Florida -- it's why there are so few industries who can afford the lawyers to do porn, but that's another issue entirely...)
The right way to deal with sex trafficking is to make it legal for people to do what they want with sex/their bodies, create as safe a sex-work industry as you can, and make it more difficult for illegitimate people in the sex industry to work.
This just takes me back to the Child Safety Protection Act of 1994. Over a decade later we're fighting the same bullshit.