Should Prostitution Be Legal Essay

Decent Essays
Should Prostitution Be Legal & Regulated?

Globally over 40 million people, most of them women, work as prostitutes and all of whom add to a $100 billion plus a year industry. This is a conservative estimate as reliable numbers are unavailable for many countries. But it does give a sense of the scale of money and people involved, which is to say it is not disappearing in a hurry. Not that one would expect it to even without knowing the above figures since commercial sex is likely to have existed since the time humans learned to trade.

The point being made is, making prostitution illegal is not going to stop prostitution. Simple!
In fact prohibiting anything anywhere has never succeeded in stopping its trade. All it does is to create a parallel economy that is controlled by criminals. Whether sex or alcohol or cigarettes or drugs or guns, if there is a demand, there will be a supply, legal or not. And in the case of prostitution, those who suffer the most are the ones who are supposedly to be protected by the prohibition.

Prostitution has been condemned around the world as a violation of human rights. As far back as in 1949, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a convention which stated that: "prostitution and the accompanying evil of the traffic in persons for the purpose of prostitution are incompatible with the dignity and worth of
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This creates a conundrum since without all of these activities it is near impossible to carry out the business legally, and so the business is controlled by criminals and involves trafficked women and minors, who are kidnapped, cheated, abused, threatened, raped and sold like

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