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San Francisco weighs decriminalizing prostitution

Good for them, provide a safe haven for a service that is needed, how else will the closeted Republicans get their jollies off :)

At least democrats can finally file W-2's.
 
I've been saying that prostitution should be legal for the past 40 years.
Why must our nation be so backward ?
Fear ?
Look to Holland for guidance then, learn from their mistakes..
Have a President who can think, can originate an original idea..
 
Have any of you guys been to Amsterdam its like Disney world had a red light district.If your a guy with your mates people follow you down the street asking you to by cocaine asking you if ya wanna buy cocaine.

As for the prostitutes alot of them are African and eastern european women who have often been tricked into coming.Some are also illegal immigrants but the liberal laws dont act against that so well.However their pimps and these guys are pimps can chuck them out in which case whats is the girl suppose to do with nowhere to live.I know in the perfect world its just 2 consenting adults but it isn't gonna cut the abuse.

It must be known that prostitution is WRONG; that does not mean that it should be illegal.. It should be taxed and controlled. Obviously Holland is not up to this task...I wonder if we are ?
As to cocaine, what are its overall effect on Holland ? In a society there will always be a certain percentage of worthless citizens; keep that number low enough and there should be minimal problems..
 
I think I read that SF decided not to pass this measure at this time.
more's the pity.
But at least they considered it, which is progress, and I'm sure it'll keep coming back to the table- much like gay marriage- until it does pass.
All societies must progress and evolve, or else wither.
 
I've been saying that prostitution should be legal for the past 40 years.
Why must our nation be so backward ?
Fear ?
Look to Holland for guidance then, learn from their mistakes..
Have a President who can think, can originate an original idea..
Xianity. :2wave:
 
It must be known that prostitution is WRONG; that does not mean that it should be illegal.. It should be taxed and controlled. Obviously Holland is not up to this task...I wonder if we are ?
As to cocaine, what are its overall effect on Holland ? In a society there will always be a certain percentage of worthless citizens; keep that number low enough and there should be minimal problems..
Why is buying your wife a new fridge so that she'll be happy and keep blowing you, wrong?
 
It is a cruel lie to suggest that decriminalization or legalization
will protect anyone in prostitution. There is much evidence that
whatever its legal status, prostitution causes great harm to
women. The following sections summarize some of the many
studies that now document the physical and emotional harm
caused by prostitution.
In the past two decades, a number of authors have documented
or analyzed the sexual and physical violence that is the normative
experience for women in prostitution, including Baldwin (1993,
1999); Barry (1979, 1995); Boyer, Chapman, and Marshall (1993);
Dworkin (1981, 1997, 2000); Farley, Baral, Kiremire, and Sezgin
(1998); Giobbe (1991, 1993); Hoigard and Finstad (1986); Hughes
(1999); Hunter (1994); Hynes and Raymond (2002); Jeffreys
(1997); Karim, Karim, Soldan, and Zondi (1995); Leidholdt (1993);
MacKinnon (1993, 1997, 2001); McKeganey and Barnard (1996);
Miller (1995); Silbert and Pines (1982a, 1982b); Silbert, Pines, and
Lynch (1982);Valera, Sawyer, and Schiraldi (2001);Vanwesenbeeck
(1994); and Weisberg (1985).


Of 854 people in prostitution in nine countries (Canada,
Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey,
United States, and Zambia), 71% experienced physical assaults in
prostitution, and 62% reported rapes in prostitution (Farley, Cotton,
et al., 2003). Eighty-nine percent told the researchers that they
wanted to leave prostitution but did not have other options for
economic survival. To normalize prostitution as a reasonable job
choice for poor women makes invisible their strong desire to
escape prostitution.
Vanwesenbeeck (1994) found that two factors were associated
with greater violence in prostitution. The greater the poverty, the
greater the violence; and the longer one is in prostitution, the
more likely one is to experience violence. Similarly, the more time
women spent in prostitution, the more STDs they reported
(Parriott, 1994).
Those promoting prostitution rarely address class, race, and
ethnicity as factors that make women even more vulnerable to
health risks in prostitution.

Throughout history, regardless of its legal status, prostitution
has had a devastating impact on women’s health. In 1858, Sanger
asked 2,000 prostitutes in New York about their health and concluded
that premature old age was the invariable result of prostitution
(as cited in Benjamin & Masters, 1964). Sanger described
conditions of despair, degradation, decline, and early death
among prostitutes who survived on average only four years after
entry into prostitution. A physician, he wondered how they
lasted that long (Benjamin & Masters, 1964). Making the same
observation in the parlance of today’s global marketplace, an
anonymous pimp commented on the “brief shelf life” of a girl in
prostitution.
Pheterson (1996) summarized the health problems of women
in prostitution: exhaustion, frequent viral illness, STDs, vaginal
infections, back aches, sleeplessness, depression, headaches,
stomachaches, and eating disorders. Women who were used by
more customers in prostitution reported more severe physical
symptoms (Vanwesenbeeck, 1994). A Canadian commission
found that the death rate of women in prostitution was 40 times
higher than that of the general population (Special Committee on
Pornography and Prostitution, 1985). Amortality survey of more
than 1,600 women in U.S. prostitution noted that “no population
of women studied previously has had a . . . percentage of deaths
due to murder even approximating those observed in our cohort”
(Potterat et al., 2004, p. 783). In this survey, murder accounted for
50% of the deaths of women in prostitution. Reviewing comparable
studies, Potterat et al. (2004) noted that murder accounted for
between 29% and 100% of all prostituted women’s reported
deaths in Birmingham, UK; Nairobi, Vancouver, Canada; and
London.
Violence Against Women -- Sign In Page

Yes, legalize prostitution, it's such a good thing, a good thing for women.

The facts bare out how much better legal prositution is...

You guys should go read some of the studies on the horror that prostitution is, and you'll see there is more then "pushing morality" fighting against prostitution.

I care about people, legalizing evil isn't a good thing.
 
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Violence Against Women -- Sign In Page

Yes, legalize prostitution, it's such a good thing, a good thing for women.

The facts bare out how much better legal prositution is...

You guys should go read some of the studies on the horror that prostitution is, and you'll see there is more then "pushing morality" fighting against prostitution.

I care about people, legalizing evil isn't a good thing.

Regardless of what studies may indicate you can't legislate morality nor what someone will do to their own body. This has been proven as well.

Driving a car has been proven to be dangerous to all living things, yet we still drive cars, cigarettes have been proven to be dangerous, not only to the smoker but innocent bystanders as well, alcohol has been proven to be dangerous to the drinker as well as anyone they may come into contact with, mountain climbing and sky diving and gambling, motorcycle riding and swimming... if your point is that prostitution should remain illegal because it's harmful to women then you must also be against anything being legal that can cause harm to women (like giving birth) especially those things that cause more harm to women and men than prostitution. So where should your legislation begin and end?
 
Violence Against Women -- Sign In Page

Yes, legalize prostitution, it's such a good thing, a good thing for women.

The facts bare out how much better legal prositution is...

You guys should go read some of the studies on the horror that prostitution is, and you'll see there is more then "pushing morality" fighting against prostitution.

I care about people, legalizing evil isn't a good thing.

Thats the thing though this isnt about whether or not prositution is particually pleasant vocation for those involved but how to reduce the unpleasantness. Citeing statistics for countrys like the UK where prostitution is legal is kinda missing the point.
 
Also the standard is to prove that legalized prostituion is worse then criminalized prostitution.

Even if legalized prostitution was no better for the prostitutes at all, it has various other benefits for broader society (being able to control where it goes on, taxing it, etc.)

You can't stop prostitution.
 
Legalize and regulate. Safer for everyone involved.
 
Someone very close to me has worked in the sex industry for just over a decade, and she has said on many occasions that the biggest hinderance to her life and the life of her co-workers is not potential abuses, but the law.

Where prostitution is illegal, it does a double whammy. Women who are abused and seek help with law enforcement instead have the law turn on them, or treat them badly because for many breaking the law is something immoral. The courts are less likely to feel sympathy for rape victims when they are prostitutes; those who abuse prostitutes tend to get off easier because their victim was seen as doing something "immoral" anyway.

Systemic bias against prostitutes prevents those who want to get out from doing so. Many become defacto slaves to their pimps because they cannot run to any official agency to beg for help. Those that run to the law if they are raped or held captive by anyone risk having the law turn on them. Immigrants who are willingly lured from overseas with the promise of lucrative opportunities in the sex industry (i.e. more money) can easily become indentured servants if they are not careful. If it were legalized, this would be a non-issue. It would take the power away from the creeps that routinely seek pleasure in holding people captive.

On the flipside, those that want to do this line of work lack the agency to do so because the law prevents them from forming working groups, registration databases (to track people who go missing), institutions where they can report bad clients to (right now this process is currently very underground), and regulate standard prices.

This industry is going to exist one way or another, and it is an industry that caters to all levels of society. Rich and poor people alike use prostitution services. The fact that it is not legal shows that our society, on a surface level, likes to pretend that certain needs don't exist, and that our collective morality is somehow "better than that". That is not the truth. The sex industry as a whole is number two only to the movie industry in North America in terms of profits, it's time we realize the reality of what is really going on.
 
Legalize and regulate. Safer for everyone involved.

And reality, facts and studies that say otherwise be damned!

You guys REALLY hate women don't you?
 
And reality, facts and studies that say otherwise be damned!

But have not done a comparative analysis of legalized vs. illegal prostitution and its effect on the people involved. For example what you quoted stated

Of 854 people in prostitution in nine countries (Canada,
Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey,
United States, and Zambia), 71% experienced physical assaults in
prostitution,

This includes at least one country where prostitution is legal.

Now lets look at San Francisco where prostitution is illegal:

Violence
80% had been physically assaulted since entering prostitution
SF Task Force on Prostitution: Health Services/Needs Assessment

A 9% jump in violence.
 
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