Right, but clearly in some cases (if this post is accurate) the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again.

It's a tough problem...

> the police have managed to turn these laws around and still use them to terrorize sex workers

The OP isn't describing sex workers being "terrorized," it's describing people not wanting to associate with them because of the legal peril of supporting prostitution.

> which defeats the purpose as it risks pushing these women underground again.

I don't see any incentive for these women to go "underground" because they are in no legal peril themselves. The simple solution the ostracism is to stop being a prostitute and get a different job, which is probably what the law was intended to encourage.

> It's a tough problem...

The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation. The key seems to be a broad interpretation of what "profiting from prostitution" is, so landlords, hotels, boyfriends, etc. won't want to take the risk. That replaces the legal pressure to get prostitutes to stop with social pressure.

>I don't see any incentive for these women to go "underground" because they are in no legal peril themselves.

Sure no legal peril, but if a sex worker does come forward to the police about an abusive John or a pimp she risks being kicked out of her home, locked out of her bank account and having her family and friends harassed by police.

This creates a strong disincentive to get help from authorities, which seems like exactly the barrier legalization efforts aim to eliminate.

Tell me you're missing the point without telling me you're missing the point.

>The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation.

Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap.

I think you're missing the point. There appears to be no aboveboard legal prostitution in Sweden, nor is that what the law envisions. Rather all prostitution involves someone committing a crime (the John), and the law has chosen to not directly punish one party because that leads to undesirable outcomes in cases where that party wasn't willing participating.

There is no trap, if you don't break the law, and don't help other people break the law, then you aren't involved in the industry at all.

I'm not going to take a position on whether or not prostitution should be legal, but pretending that prostitution is currently completely legal when it always involves a crime doesn't seem like a good argument.

> Except that’s not the situation this solution generates. It makes any aboveboard legal situation impossible, recreating the problems of prohibition and creating a trap for women.

How does this create a trap, when a trafficked women can always run to the police and get everyone who tried to exploit them arrested, without being in any legal peril themselves?

that isn't how it works. any police interaction is fraught with legal peril.

nwsp has a report on harms involved with this model of prohibition

https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/4.%20Impacts%20of%...

occasionally there are news stories about particularly bad travesties of this kind of prohibition

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ireland-migr...

one thing to keep in mind is that many people cannot seek help from the police. people who are victims to forced labor are often in a complex legal situation created or exploited by the perpetrators. undocumented people, the most vulnerable victims of trafficking, risk being arrested and deported if they seek help. this may destroy lives, separate families, render people homeless, or deliver refugees back to their peril.

the only way to reduce this kind of exploitation is to legalize and proliferate good options that don't exploit people, and provide social support services to vulnerable people that do not involve law enforcement, so it becomes not easy or profitable to exploit people.

> one thing to keep in mind is that many people cannot seek help from the police. people who are victims to forced labor are often in a complex legal situation created or exploited by the perpetrators.

I mean, isn't that the exact problem that structuring prostitution laws in this way solves?

> undocumented people, the most vulnerable victims of trafficking, risk being arrested and deported if they seek help.

Illegal immigration is separate legal issue from prostitution, and issues caused by it won't get solved by normalizing prostitution.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between legalizing prostitution and normalizing it. It's quite clear this Swedish model does the former without doing the latter, in order to solve a specific legal dilemma. That's still going to irk those who really want the latter.

>The kind of strict-enforcement situation the OP describes actually seems like a tidy to solution to the problem of prohibiting prostitution without crating a trap for women in a trafficking situation.

That's a good point, but if the government is going to do that they should be above board about it.

Presumably the law was sold to the public and legislators as applying to pimping under the everyday definition. Calling everything pimping is abusing the law, just like in the US where calling everything interstate commerce so that the Federal government can control it is abusing the law.

And if you passed law A, you shouldn't get to interpret it as law B and say that that's okay because law B is a tidy solution to a problem.