One of the most common rationalizations you’ll
hear for criminalizing prostitution is that permitting it would
lead to more sexual violence. It’s a tale shared by
anti-prostitution feminists and Christian conservatives alike,
though the former may
see its roots in patriarchy and the latter immorality. Still,
both believe that permitting people to pay for sex—a situation
which, for their purposes, always involves a man paying for a
woman’s affections—somehow encourages men to rape.
I’m not quite sure how this argument is supposed to work—does
the legal status of fruit encourage people to steal kiwi? Should we
criminalize barber shops to stop people from forcing staff into
free buzz-cuts? It’s a silly idea, that prostitution encourages
rape—and also one that’s been routinely repudiated by
researchers.
The latest study to show a correlation
between decriminalizing prostitution and declining sexual
violence comes from Rhode Island. A loophole in Rhode Island
law effectively decriminalized
indoor prostitution there for a several year
period ending
in 2009. During that time period, the state also saw
significant decreases in both sexual violence and cases of
gonorrhea, according to data analyzed by the National Bureau of
Economic Research.
“The results suggest that decriminalization could have
potentially large social benefits for the population at large–not
just sex market participants,” wrote economists Scott
Cunningham and Manisha Shah in a working
paper about their research. Between 2004 and 2009, they
estimate that decriminalization led to a 31 to 39 percent
per-capita decline in rapes and a 39 to 45 percent decline in cases
of female gonorrhea in Rhode Island.
Perhaps, however, something else was happening that could
explain both declines? After all, the overall gonorrhea rate in the
United States did decline around the same time period as this study
covers. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the gonorrhea rate
decreased 15.8 percent overall during 2006–2010. And
the number of
rapes reported in the U.S. as a whole also declined
somewhat over this time period.
But Cunningham and Shah used several economic models to track
decriminalization’s effects versus other possible causes and
compare Rhode Island to other states. “Robust evidence” across
models points to decriminalization as the cause, they write.
Basically, while other states saw some decreases post-2003, Rhode
Island exhibited much sharper declines.
Numerous studies from other parts of the world have showed a
correlation between decriminalizing the sex trade and lowering rape
rates. A 2004 working
paper from The Independent Institute’s Kirby R. Cundiff
concluded that rape rates were “correlated with the homicide rate
and anti-correlated with the availability of prostitution. It is
estimated that if prostitution were legalized in the United States,
the rape rate would decrease by roughly 25% for a decrease of
approximately 25,000 rapes per year,” Cundiff wrote.
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