This is a very complicated situation. Yes, legalizing sex work has been shown to increase demand. This is why proper regulation is so important. The problem is that whenever governments make laws about this stuff, they tend to not talk to sex workers and not talk to the police. In Amsterdam, for example, the city council keeps closing red light windows, and the girls don’t want them closed, and the police would rather they stay, too. Makes it much easier for law enforcement to monitor if it’s out in the open, and it makes it much safer for sex workers and their clients if they have safe places to work.
Ultimately, human trafficking and abuse will happen either way. What we need to combat that is transparency. Have brothels, maybe even a whole red light district. Hell, convert Ontario Place, no one really lives there and nothing much is happening there anyway. Require the owners and maybe the girls themselves to be licensed (but don’t make it prohibitively expensive), make strict policies regarding underage and trafficked girls, if a brothel is found to be employing them, shut them down and press criminal charges. There are examples of this sort of model working already. It works well in Nevada, works well in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, etc. We could refine those models, come up with something that would work for us.
Decriminalization and regulation is absolutely necessary, in my opinion. The sex trade is not going away. It’s literally the world’s oldest profession. The more you crack down, the more the criminal elements will emerge to fill the gap. Demand will never go away. If we continue to ignore this issue, we are tacitly condoning trafficking. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We’ve tried criminalization, we’ve tried crackdowns. It doesn’t work. We need a new model.
