What Consenting Adults Do In Private Is Their Own Business. Period.

[jeff47]

76. If they can not consent, then you do not think they can't be out on their own.

If you wish to take away their ability to consent in the bedroom, you are taking away their ability to consent anywhere else. What you're proposing is to institutionalize these women. Because that's what we do to adults who can not take care of themselves due to psychological issues.

Also, be very careful about the prostitution statistics that you "heard". It's extremely difficult to get real data, so a great deal of it is made up, or extrapolated from very small samples that don't cover a broad enough spectrum to say "prostitutes are _____".

For example, surveying streetwalkers is going to give you a completely different result than surveying callgirls, which is going to give you a different result from the women who "marry a rich guy". All of them are prostitutes, but they have vastly different experiences. Likewise, surveys done on women turning to charities to get out of prostitution are going to have different results from the women who are happy with the work.

As far as I know, nobody has actually been able to produce decent statistics. There's always sample size issues and selection bias. The people who tend to come forward are the ones trying to leave that career behind. There's some promising studies in the works to address these problems, but I've no idea if they've been able to overcome the problems.

As an example of the made-up nature of the stats, in 2006 anti-prostitution groups in the UK were screaming about the massive number of child prostitutes and trafficked women in the UK forced to work as prostitutes. Large sums of money were allocated by the government to clean up the problem. They did an awful lot of investigation, talking to tens of thousands of prostitutes all over the UK. They offered the women police protection while still in the UK, and work visa to stay in the UK, or free trip back to their country to get away from the traffickers. A tiny number of women took them up on their offer (less than 10 IIRC). Also, a very tiny number of underage prostitutes were found during that sweep. So the doomsday statistics really were not born out.

That's not to say trafficking doesn't happen, nor that underage prostitution does not exist. But the scale of the problem is very much unknown, mostly due to the underground nature of prostitution.