The Prostitution Solution

The outing of Eliot Spitzer's hooker-buying caused me to take another look at an issue that's always puzzled and frustrated me in the past: Should prostitution be legal? On one hand, we have individual freedom, and the fact that a legal prostitution industry would be safer than an underground one. On the other hand, we have my hunch that widespread prostitution severely curtails women's economic equality (and therefore general happiness), as well as the fact that legalized prostitution typically leads to more demand for hookers, which in turn increased international human trafficking.

Slate's Emily Bazelon reports that Sweden may have found the best method of all - punish pimps and johns, but not the hookers themselves. She writes:

[L]ately there's another favorite model. In 1999, Sweden made it legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it—only the johns and the traffickers can be prosecuted. This is the only approach to prostitution that's based on "sex equality," argues University of Wisconsin law professor Catharine MacKinnon. It treats prostitution as a social evil but views the women who do it as the victims of sexual exploitation who "should not be victimized again by the state by being made into criminals," as MacKinnon put it to me in an e-mail. It's the men who use the women, she continued, who are "sexual predators" and should be punished as such.

According to this Web site for the Women's Justice Center, Sweden's way of doing things is a big success. "In the capital city of Stockholm the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds, and the number of johns has been reduced by 80%." Trafficking is reportedly down to 200 to 400 girls and women a year, compared with 15,000 to 17,000 in nearby Finland. Max Waltman, a doctoral candidate in Stockholm who is studying the country's prostitution laws, says that those stats hold up. He also said the police are actually going after the johns as ordered: In 2006, more than 150 were convicted and fined. (That might not sound like many, but then Sweden has a population of only 9 million.)

Sounds good to me. Reduce demand without punishing the victims. From now on, this is my official position on the issue of prostitution. Damn, Sweden, how'd you get so smart?