Thanks for the post, I thought about this before and am glad you shared the idea and that it wasn’t filtered out by the moderators!
One perspective I learned about from an interview with Manisha Shah on Probable Causation was the idea that legalizing sex work can have fairly large effects on reducing sex related crime:
And what these three coauthors do is they study the effects of of what they call Tipplezones in the Netherlands. And so Tipplezones are basically these like legal these these neighborhoods where they create these legal street prostitution zones in the Netherlands. And they do this, if I remember correctly, in about nine different cities in the Netherlands. And so what this paper does is they look at the impact of creating these these legal street prostitution zones on things like sexual abuse and rape and drug related crimes. And they find a decrease in all of these things, right. So they find sexual abuse and rape decreases 30 to 40 percent. They also find reductions in in drug related crimes in the Netherlands.
And again, in both cases, very similar to the Netherlands paper, we find that there is a decrease in gonorrhea incidence by around 40 percent and there is also a decrease in reported rape offenses by about 30 percent [after legalization in a natural experiment].
I can generally well imagine that decriminalizing sex work and making it a better and safer experience for sex workers could have fairly large effects on mental health of people whose sexual needs are not met at all, which I expect to be maybe a third of the adult population?
Would be interesting to see studies looking at the effect on mental health outcomes of decriminalization, or maybe of actually meeting with a sex worker and how many people are less well due to lacking sex.
I think there’s still ongoing debate on whether legalization and/or decriminalization actually increases human trafficking. Here’s a natural experiment in Europe estimating that legalizing did increase human trafficking in the countries legalizing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453
I haven’t read the paper, and I don’t know if this just reflects trafficking increasing overall in the world, or just moving to countries with legal prostitution from countries without.
If this effect is real, maybe there’s regulation that could eliminate it.
Thanks for the post, I thought about this before and am glad you shared the idea and that it wasn’t filtered out by the moderators!
One perspective I learned about from an interview with Manisha Shah on Probable Causation was the idea that legalizing sex work can have fairly large effects on reducing sex related crime:
www.probablecausation.com/podcasts/episode-6-manisha-shah
I can generally well imagine that decriminalizing sex work and making it a better and safer experience for sex workers could have fairly large effects on mental health of people whose sexual needs are not met at all, which I expect to be maybe a third of the adult population?
Would be interesting to see studies looking at the effect on mental health outcomes of decriminalization, or maybe of actually meeting with a sex worker and how many people are less well due to lacking sex.
I think there’s still ongoing debate on whether legalization and/or decriminalization actually increases human trafficking. Here’s a natural experiment in Europe estimating that legalizing did increase human trafficking in the countries legalizing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453
I haven’t read the paper, and I don’t know if this just reflects trafficking increasing overall in the world, or just moving to countries with legal prostitution from countries without.
If this effect is real, maybe there’s regulation that could eliminate it.