In some legal regimes, sex workers have panic buttons in their rooms and train each other how to get away from violent clients. While not every john is violent, it's not unreasonable to say that violence is inherent to prostitution. This is because of three things. It thrives on anonymity, preys on vulnerability, and seeks to fulfill a one-sided fantasy. These three characteristics are present whether prostitution is legal or illegal, indoor or outdoor. While decriminalizing the purchase of sex may have an illusion of empowering women, in reality it leads to a deeper entitlement by men.
We had an opportunity to interview a john who had spent over $300,000 on porn and prostitution. When we asked him what effect legalization would have, he said it would just create more men like him.
We acknowledge that there are some people who, as adults with an education and other options, choose to go into the sex industry. These people might have a little more power and resources to carefully select their clients or negotiate safe sex practices and hire bodyguards. But considering that the industry disproportionately targets the most vulnerable, it would be foolish to think that the majority of those in prostitution would have that kind of relative bargaining power, even within a fully decriminalized context.
In many of the countries we visited, demand for paid sex had caused an illegal sex market to grow alongside the legal sex market, and the most vulnerable continued to be exploited. Since many of the women targeted by Robert Pickton were in the most vulnerable category to begin with, decriminalizing the purchase of sex would not have given them the relative bargaining power to resist him.
While harm reduction efforts are vital and definitely should continue, our government is going to have to pour more and more resources into harm reduction efforts until it seriously looks at the question of why these are needed in the first place.
The question we really need to ask is this. What are the wide-scale, long-term effects of making it easier to pay for sex?