Access
Here’s why legalized use of women for sex is so fabulous: it means that Good women won’t be attacked, only Bad Slutty women will.
Is it time to legalize prostitution? "When prostitution is decriminalized and regulated to some extent, as it is in the Dutch tippelzones, sexual predators are less likely to strike at random women and children." Could reduce rates of STD too. https://t.co/Y0iGZM82NW https://t.co/BiG9TMoc48
— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) November 16, 2017
See? Great. Herd the rapey men off into this area over here where the women it’s ok to rape are. Problem solved!
2. "Researchers at a public research institute in Netherlands discovered that when major cities in that country opened areas where street prostitutes could work legally, reports of rape and sexual abuse declined by as much as 30-40% in the first two years" https://t.co/Y0iGZM82NW
— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) November 16, 2017
Not counting the “street prostitutes” of course, and why would we count them? They ask for it.
Legalizing prostitution is a sustainable route to stop sexual assaults by curbing sexual frustration and increasing access.
— Erik Stanger (@erikforCO) November 16, 2017
Yes, increasing access! It’s a terrible mistake to restrict access by allowing women to say no to sex when they want to. Women are a natural resource, like air, and it’s not up to them how much access there should be. It’s up to the men who want increased access to decide.
By this same logic, the US could reduce its incidence of mass shootings by opening up free fire zones where killing a small subset of designated people is completely legal.
@YNnB, hollow gallows-humory laugh.
Plus, this nonsense assumes the stat on rapes reflects actual incidence. It’s at least worth asking whether prostitutes in the “legal” zone bother reporting rapes. I don’t think that study did. And I, for one, can just hear the “Yeah, right” reaction of cops in that precinct.
And also plus, trafficking goes up in “legal” zones, so a higher proportion of prostitutes may be foreigners and even less likely to report.
Then there is the notion that rapes occur because the rapist has a desire to engage in sexual intercourse.
Rather than a desire to humiliate and harm their victim.
I don’t think the prostitutes are being left out of that evaluation; rape and sexual abuse declined by 30 to 40% amongst prostitutes and non-prostitutes alike as far as I can tell from the verbiage of the article. Perhaps my impression is wrong, but it strikes me that your objection might be based on the idea that merely purchasing time with a prostitute is itself considered rape / sexual abuse. If that is the case, I find the last line of the article proper quite apposite: “Indeed, as the Dutch researchers note,“95 percent of the interviewed prostitutes report feeling safer within the tippelzone.””
It’s interesting how easily people slide between “decriminalization” and “legalization” as if they are the same thing.
I read the article and…
Where does it say the figures exclude sex workers?
I’d like to see the evidence that there are fewer rapes in places where prostitutes are common compared to places they are rarer.
This is one of those, “men are animals who need handling” arguments. In this case male libido is so intense that men cannot control it and must therefore be provided with an outlet lest society collapse. It’s insane, and utterly insulting to men. It also assumes that rape is always – or mostly – the result of sexual frustration. And I’d like to see the evidence for that too.
Well sure, the REPORTS decline. But can we re-bottle the genie about the problems of getting assaults reported in the first place? Especially by stigmatized victims like sex-workers.
The German IZA paper about Dutch tippelzones is one thing (Street Prostitution Zones and Crime, by Bisschop et al, 2015). What Allison Bass wrote about it is another thing (in her Huffpost article). And what Adam Khan tweeted is a slightly different thing (quoting Allison Bass).
First I’ll correct a mistake that does not affect the arguments. Bass called the IZA paper “a new Dutch study” by “Researchers at a public research institute in the Netherlands,” but the cover page says:
Now about the arguments, she misrepresents the paper two ways:
1) She says the paper says what she has been saying, then she makes claims not supported by the paper; e.g. she quoted an escort she interviewed, “Sex work can be real preventative of sexual abuse — clients can indulge their fantasies with us rather than with other women or children.” Emphasis mine because the IZA paper makes no claims about children.
2) The one quote she does take from the paper is out of context. Bass wrote:
The IZA paper really said this paragraph:
In other words, Bass quoted the second of two hypotheses as a conclusion, when the complete paragraph says they cannot make that conclusion.
Khan’s tweet was also misleading. Bass wrote, “When prostitution is decriminalized and regulated to some extent, as it is in the Dutch tippelzones, sexual predators are less likely to strike at random women,” and her sentence ended there. Khan quoted her sentence as, “When prostitution is decriminalized and regulated to some extent, as it is in the Dutch tippelzones, sexual predators are less likely to strike at random women and children.”
I see Bass and Khan make these invalid arguments — especially bringing children into this fallaciously — and I think if the facts were on their side, they would make valid arguments instead.
Wasn’t there also a study showing that child trafficking increased after decriminalization in Germany?
Ah, yes, found it: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453