Even if you legalised it the slavery thing would still go on. Women from say Lithuania are promised good jobs over in England but what it ends up as was criminal gangs who send them into the sex trade. The family are threatened back home and they're basically trapped. It's so easy to say to make it legal and suddenly everything will be okay. Human trafficking will still go on. The police can't cope with it now so imagine if it was legal... It basically opens up for human traffickers to do what they want as a lot of it would get overlooked as normal brothels.

the one thing i'm not to sure about is the safety of it all... surely there would be a MASSIVE increase in the number of STI's... and you can't do much to ensure that it's definitely safe...

If it was legal, brothels would be better advertised and wouldn't be these seedy "heard about it from someone who knows" places that the general public aren't immediately aware of. Prostitutes wouldn't automatically avoid the police or be hostile with them if it was legalised and would probably co-operate with the police to figure out which prostitutes were there under their own free will and which ones weren't. Human trafficking is a problem either way, but if prostitution is legal then there's more chance the police can regulate it and figure out who's running these rings.

There's plenty of legal professions that can be seen as immoral so I don't see how that impacts on anything.

Unless they're a high class hooker; most women in the UK are on drugs or do it because there's no other choice. I just don't see how making it legal would help the women who are already in trouble. They have teams dedicated to that kind of thing but they need to really clamp down on the problem before they even think about making it legal. The police already know most brothels that operate, but if it was made legal they would be popping up at a massive rate. There's already police cuts as it is so they couldn't pick them all with a fine tooth comb. I think it would just make it easier for criminal gangs to make it out as a legitimate brothel with the police doing a lazy job of properly searching. And who is to say any of the women would cooperate anyway? Some are in fear of their lives. People are just making out it would be an easy switch. But the UK isn't like Amsterdam or other places, it's just not in our culture.

Yeah, but if you legalise prostitution, it cuts out a huge part of the problem. If prostitutes and police co-operate, it eradicates a lot of the problems that come with prostitution. If a prostitute is beaten to within an inch of her life, she's not going to go and report it to the police because she was committing a crime when she became the victim of a crime, in the same way that a burglar wouldn't report being beaten up by a home owner while he was in the middle of a burglary, because he would be at fault. But if you make prostitution legal, prostitutes can talk to the police more freely.

As I side in a previous post, having something as simple as a log book or database of prostitutes with pictures, known aliases and personal information goes a long way in helping to monitor things. Prostitutes wouldn't go missing if someone knew where they were meant to be, their home addresses, their family situations, their usual haunts - if said database had photos of the prostitutes, it would help police to spot unfamiliar faces. Police laziness is another matter entirely, I still think legalising it and regulating it makes far more sense than ignoring a problem that is not going away and is only getting worse by ignoring it.

I Thought It Was Legal?

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I suppose it should be legalised, but I've always felt so weird about it. It's odd really, because I'm liberal in just about every other topic like this, but prostitution has always had this aura of extreme sleaze in my mind. I just can't shake that perception, which makes me kind of hesitate over the idea of its legalisation.

But, as others have already stated, legalisation would allow proper regulation of an underground industry that is currently inseparable from grotesque abuse of those that work within it, so maybe it would help more people than it would harm. I mean pornography in many ways is a form of prostitution, yet there isn't as many qualms within people over that nowadays (myself included).

It's just there are so many problems with the implementation of a legalised version - the method in which such a system is regulated being my main area of concern.

I think it should be as it isn't harming anybody so I don't get why it's illegal, obviously you would need to have the system that Holland has in place so that the prostitutes are safe.

But it will be a long time before it gets made legal as a lot of people are quite snobby and ignorant when it's things they don't understand.

The problem with prostitution is that its not as simple as a transaction between two parties carried out in safe business like way. It often involves violence, control, drugs, human trafficking, blackmail, coercement , underage sex etc...

So it would be difficult to legalise as these elements could not be legalised and as such you would still have illegal prostitution which would then have to be cheaper to compete with the legalised equivalent and as such would make conditions for these women even worse.

It's a difficult topic to just try and bring in one law and hey presto everything's fixed.I imagine the Govt would love the new revenue stream it would generate but any party that crossed this line( similar to legalising Drugs) may find itself facing a voter backlash at the next general election.

They do report it in some cases. The law on prostitution is weird here. It's something like that it's legal for a man and woman to exchange sex for money but the curb crawling and hanging around on corners is against the law. I'm not totally familiar with it as I read up on it a while ago now. But it's more the curb crawlers who are getting arrested rather than prostitutes. The police do try to protect them but often they're unwilling, scared or too far gone on the drugs for help.

I do agree about that thing in Estonia though, it seems a good idea. But no doubt you'd still get the women who don't register. I guess the cold fact is you can help some but not them all.

Precisely - recent court cases have highlighted the dingy world of enslavement and abuse of young women and girls.

But it think it would cut down on a lot of the problems you mentioned because the Johns would prefer to go to a professional establishment, where he knows the girls are clean, and also knows that he's safe. A lot of Johns are also victims, they approach a prostitute, goes back to a hotel room, then when he gets there her boyfriend is there and beats him up and robs him, then he feels he can't go to the police cause he'd be admitting to a crime himself. So i think most Johns would prefer to use the legal prostitutes, even if it is more expensive.

IME, the opposite is frequently true - after all, the "john" is not after a bag of peas ..... :pipe:

You mean the risk and danger is part of what turns them on? Maybe that's true, I hadn't thought about it like that.

Even Hugh Grant ..... ;)

i like your way of thinking.