Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank several individuals who gave invaluable feedback and insights on drafts of this manuscript, including Anna Fisher and Brooks Anderson. Political decisions to legalize or criminalize prostitution would ideally be determined by comparing outcomes observed under various policies. However, in the case of prostitution, comparing relevant data for policy analysis has proven challenging due to the subjective nature of many salient outcome measures chosen in previous research e.
The new law ratified an Equality Model -type partial decriminalization of prostitution in this text simply referred to as the Equality Model , [1] in which buying sex, pimping, [2] and brothel-keeping was criminalized while selling sex was decriminalized. The potential implications of a recurring problem of surveys with large item non responses that grounded pivotal conclusions about prostitution policies will be reviewed. I review how the aggregation of administrative data from one of the most popular commercial sex websites in NI into unbalanced pre-legislation and post-legislation groups Ellison et al.
I further review how comparisons between unadjusted baseline indicators of the sex industry in advertisements and estimates of unique people in prostitution vs. I next explore these same study findings as reported publicly , tracing a cascade of media misreadings which in turn appear to have had significant political influence Human Rights Watch, , ACLU, n.
As this paper will show, a detailed review of original data indicates that the scale of the sex trade has reduced dramatically under the Equality Model. The Equality Model seeks to protect and empower people in prostitution by decriminalizing the sale of sex and by enhancing social support and exit services. This allows for people in prostitution to rebuild confidence in law enforcement and to report abuse without fear of arrest. Simultaneously, this framework aims to dampen demand for commercial sex and human trafficking, and punish perpetrators of abuse by criminalizing purchasing sex, pimping, and brothel-keeping.
The facilitation of prostitution is seen as exploitative and inconsistent with greater ideals of gender, racial, and economic equality, as people being purchased in prostitution are overwhelmingly female, migrant, or low-income.
