There are many crimes in the world: in families, businesses and in sex biz. But a generalisation of more exploitation and trafficking in legalized sex biz can not be proven by evidence. Just the opposite has been shown many times:

New Zealand – Decriminalisation of sex work in 2003, Evaluation in 2008:
Review finds no sign of more sex workers since Act passed
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz-government/news/article.cfm?c_id=144&objectid=10512123
http://justice.govt.nz/prostitution-law-review-committee/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1847423345

Germany – Decriminalisation of sex work in 2002, Evaluation in 2007:
http://sexworker.at/phpBB2/download.php?id=77 pdf 440 KB
KOK counter statement of bad misinformation from anti prostitution activists:
http://www.kok-buero.de/data/Gegendarstellung_080610.pdf (pdf, 2 pages, 32 KB)

Netherlands – Amsterdam:
There is a relatively new law (BIBOB) that gives the mayor the power to take away a license when he thinks there is something wrong of this nature. This means that it is not necessary that a brothel owner is convicted in a criminal procedure, the mere suspicion is enough. With such a regulation in place, a after globalisation more prostitution hostile government can produce any figures for the news. The new concern about the exploitation of women and crime is simply a ploy to see these areas gentrified for mainstream businesses. Amsterdam spent €25-million on the purchase of 18 buildings. The leading brothel owner Geerts was never sentenced, but subject of media rumours and forced to sell his houses. Now there is a state funded student clothing design scene, where before women could make good money.
La Strada Netherlands http://www.lastradaInternational.org (CoMensHa http://www.mensenhandel.nl ), BLinN (Bonded Labour in the Netherlands) and LSI are critical about the Amsterdam mayor’s plans to restrict prostitution with the argument to counter trafficking. Rather, existing anti-trafficking measures should be implemented and the rights situation of sex workers improved. We believe that there is sufficient legislation in place today to tackle labour and human rights violations in the sex industry in the Netherlands. No initiatives are taken to actually improve the social position or labour rights situation of sex workers. Is is not wise to close brothels only, if there were women trafficked, but the trafficker should be caught. After a bank robbery nobody asks for closing down the bank, but getting the thief.

Sex workers never had a voice in the process of legalisation beforehand:
DEMOCRACY AND PROSTITUTION: Deliberating the Legalization of Brothels in the Netherlands
Hendrik Wagenaar, Leiden University, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY, Vol. 38 No. 2, May 2006 198-235
http://tinyurl.com/2wwhgq

Prostitution in the Netherlands since the lifting of the brothel ban
Daalder, A.L. WODC 2007:
http://english.wodc.nl/images/ob249a_fulltext_tcm45-83466.pdf (104 pages)

Prostitution in Amsterdam // De Amsterdamse Prostitutie Monitor:
http://www.amsterdam-sociaal.nl/Downloads/DeAmsterdamseProstitutieMonitor.pdf

Australia:
“Small little Asian women” are by no way helpless victims per se as we strong big westerners may think on the first sight, even if they do not yet know the foreign language on arrival. Not entrapped sex workers are in fact strong and leading the business relation with their clientele.
If you need more citations, please ask.

Sex work is so diverse as human beings are. Of course, you can find every shade of life within prostitution. But why polarize black and white, why is there so much ideology? There are criminals and also very many independent self decided women, males and transsexuals in this very old trade and life style.

What can be done / What do you need, to end the moral crusade against all prostitution and sex workers per se? It hurts us who have a human right to make our livelihood. Your fight besides saving some victims only makes the many self decided independent sex workers more dependant on organizers and hence vulnerable, if you define prostitution as outlaw!

Let’s unite instead to jointly fight perpetrators and exploiters in all private fields and businesses.
There is so much hearty relationship and even unconditional love possible in sex work as is in hospitals, schools or kindergarten.

So at last you have to decide whom you want to put your trust in.
In “investigative journalists” and some members of the helping industries, who make a living out of serving the dirty phantasies of their clientel, or in us, who do our job on a regular basis and know what (and whom) we are speaking about?
Furthermore ist seems a bit strange that a single “investigative journalist” should have found during his short visit more trafficked persons along a singele road, than German police in the whole country all over the year. Did you ever think about a bit of national bias? They ain’t as stupid here as you imagine
Arguments about how lagalization would boost trafficking are pure fantasies, and it’s no prove just to cite other fantasies to support them, but the day to day impairmant of our basic and human rights triggered by your propaganda is brute reality. So don’t exspect us do buy into your ideas about how people who have their own lifes could be “helped” to a lifestyle you’d approve!

Love, Aoife

The situation for prostitutes in America is that we don’t have the right to negotiate our labor or our own work conditions. It’s illegal to work, so the federal agents pose naked as customers in high end hotels to arrest consensually a working 40 year old woman so poverty pimping non profit rescuers can get paid come in and violate that workers civil rights to justify their existence…and nobody is rescued.

All ‘investigative reporters’ profit off the criminalization of prostitution and have a vested interest in dramatizing everything that has to do with us as it makes them money and feeds the public panic to make sure the reporter has an audience for their next ‘reporting’.
That’s not investigative reporting.

…’vast majority of women who are forced into the sex trade fiasco…’
Where’s the documentation for this statement?
You can call it reporting when what you are doing is promoting propaganda.

Thanks for facilitating this discussion.

While Mr. Malarek and I share a long-vision of no-woman and no-man in a power-based, transactional sexual relationship, again is it his right or mine to say that there is only one part of the spectrum of this that should be criminally enforced -namely prostitution? I’ve read his books and he is correct that there are no other work environments where society would accept such levels of violence against the workers as they do in sex work. He’s absolutely correct in that.

So what it comes down to a fundamental difference of opinion on what the solution is. His is to abolish the practice of prostitution. Good luck with that! Mine is to make people see the difference between the crime of violence and the work.

I see that this is fundamentally the question at hand. There are many parallels here to using an enforcement model to regulate women’s bodies in the abortion question. The same abolitionist-allies can be found working to “educate” us on both, and to “abolish” both. But, again, fundamentally, I agree that in an ideal world, not only would there be no transactional sex but there would be no unplanned pregnancies. But we don’t live in an ideal world and enforcing non-realities just masks the realities by driving them deep underground… and we all know that consequences of that are decreased health and safety for women. Ultimately, as feminists we are duty bound to recognize the importance of personal, informed choice. If your life is such that your franchise has been removed – then deal with THAT – the loss of access to choice is the issue. Many things can remove one’s ability to control one’s life: addictions, housing, spousal abuse, poverty, fucked-up childhoods, or – perhaps more important on an international scale: desperate local economies going through devastating upheaval, in which you have no skills or education to make a go of it and so perhaps end up in prostitution in a far-away place. These are ALL issues that must be worked on, in my opinion, before we start using the justice system to “abolish” one of the few practical solutions available to women.

I’m feeling again the silencing effect of a male voice on an issue I feel should be left to the voices of women. Where Mr. Malarek is being an aggressive, silencing male is when he says that when I express my opinion and say WE MUST distinguish the selling sex from violence against women, he says I am using a “divide and conquer” strategy and that to even suggest such a thing is to be a shill for a profit-based sex industry. I am not a sex consumer, not a sex worker, not a shill for any sex industry. But I have a feminist interest in this and I feel we must talk about it more and more and more, not less and less and less. I’ve read the research and the opinions – and I have come to my own conclusions. I’ve UNlearned some of my assumptions about “saving victims” based on the research using participatory model where real women doing the work in the streets here in Canada tell me/us their real needs. They – not a one – are asking me to criminalize “Johns”. They’re saying go after the bad guys, find me a place to stay or leave me alone.

I see a huge industry of exploitation all right – and much of it comes from authors trying to sell books, newspapers trying to sell papers and even charities trying to earn donations to things that have only tangential connection to the women they claim to be “saving”. In every case they are moving people to give based on horrific language and imagery. I know women in the street – and their stories are NOT the stories I see in the Avaaz campaign, for example. For one, the women I’ve met don’t typically identify as victims. They may think their life is hard, but they don’t particularly want to be saved. They want housing and they want someone to go after the “bad guys” and leave the “good guys” alone. In their minds there is a very, very big difference between selling sex and violence against women. I take my cue from them and the peer-juried research that shows their lives are safer if they are not forced to be invisible.

I don’t believe regardless of the conditions of women in the “buisiness”, that a society should accept the buying and selling of human beings. I think that is a very very dangerous message to send, that you can buy women.
Now, there is no porpuse for Malarek to dedicate his life to spreading lies that only bring him hate and cynicism. Yet the pornographic industry make enormous profits out of trafficking. Why should you believe them ?
In addiction, endless studies show that the background of women in prostitution can make us seriously question the use of the word “choice”.
I don’t and will never believe in legalisation because above all, even if you can find arguments about how it *would* be better, the fact is that it.doesn’t.work.
The Sweden law in defenetly the best option for the exploited (including those who work “willingly”) and for the entire society.

It’s more than time to end human trafficking, sexism and exploitation. This has to start with the respect of both halfs of humanity.

I think Malarek is one of the best in proving his point and his interviews in “Enslaved and Exploited” are priceless.