Of the top of my head, I would think it would involve identifying signs of sexually transmitted diseases and means of preventing transmission.
Based on my wife’s experience as a massage therapist, a big part of continuing education is about demonstrating knowledge of best practices in hygiene and ethics. And she never has to perform a massage on anyone to get recertified.
Sorry to disappoint you. 
ETA: Also what @doreen said.
I’m guessing it would be classes on safe sex, maybe a little something about the law, and quite possibly how to recognize human trafficking and who to report it to. I think prostitutes would likely be required get regular tests and exams to ensure they don’t have any STDs.
…with legalization it does.
…prostitution is " the practice of engaging in relatively indiscriminate sexual activity, in general with someone who is not a spouse or a friend, in exchange for immediate payment in money or other valuables". (ex Encyclopaedia Britannica)
If you are imagining a scenario where the criminal penalties for buying and selling of sexual acts are removed, but prostitution remains illegal, then I’d love to hear it. Because this scenario is much closer to the Nordic model, where its legal for one party but not legal for the other. So while sex work is “legal”, it very much isn’t actually legal under this framework. They are just pretending that it is.
Where I live sex work has been decriminalised, and sex workers aren’t treated as criminals, they do not get arrested or harassed by the police.
This of course isn’t a requirement here. As I’ve cited up thread, the government and organizations like Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers Collective do a lot of work to help sex workers get the resources they need. A lot of it can be found here.
But the only requirement is being of age, all parties consent, and all parties practice safe sex. Because what the law allows is for a sex worker to, if they wish, maybe only work a couple of times a year. There simply is no way that you can police that. And a requirement to get certified/accreditation also means that you have to, in some way, get registered, which means you get put into a database, which, as we can see with what happened in Germany, the majority of sex workers (an estimated 90%) won’t register.
I fully understand that a framework like we have here would never be adopted in the United States for the various reasons that people have already stated in this thread. But what the evidence shows is that decriminalization, and a framework like we have here in NZ, is safer for both sex workers and the buyers than any of the alternatives. You don’t need to make it any more complicated than what we’ve done.
I’ve been arguing about this on the dope for decades for some very personal reasons that I won’t elaborate on. I was much less sure of my position back in 2003 when the reforms were first intoduced. But 20 years later? Its a no-brainer. Decriminalisation works. I’ve had the very same argument over and over again. But for me it all comes down to the same thing: listen to sex workers. What you think might work best, and what sex workers will tell you is needed to keep them safer, are often two very different things.
I’m guessing that if sex work were ever close to being legal, then this would be a requirement. But the evidence (all cited in the links I’ve posted above) show that mandatory testing doesn’t produce better outcomes. They aren’t a requirement here. And considering the very real threat to bodily autonomy in some of the more extremist states, it would be something that sex workers would largely avoid if it were to be made mandatory. And I’d back them 100%. It wouldn’t be safe.
I don’t imagine those more extremist states are likely to legalize/decriminalize prostitution anyway.
I think that confusion is being created by the fact that “decriminalization” and/or “legalization” have developed a common meaning (at least in the United States) with respect to the debate over controlled substances.
When we talk about drugs, “decriminalization” is generally what you describe in the second quote. That is, possession (etc.) of the substance remains illegal, but there is no criminal penalty (perhaps, it’s a civil penalty; perhaps, it’s simply not enforceable). Possession (and distribution, etc.) of the drug remains illegal, but enforcement is directed elsewhere.
“Legalization” would, for example, deschedule the substance. It could result in the application of a new or existing regulatory regime, but it certainly doesn’t need to.
For that specific definition , it does because that’s how legalization is defined. But that’s not the ordinary definition of legalization - the ordinary definition of legalization is to allow something that was previously illegal. It is indeed possible to completely legalize prostitution without any regulation at all just as fireworks can become legal without regulation in a place that previously prohibited them.
That’s kind of what I’m talking about when I say “decriminalization doesn’t mean legal” but not exactly. Imagine that buying and selling sex acts isn’t a crime but it’s a violation of the public health code and subjects either party to a $50 fine. It would be neither criminal nor legal - if it were legal, there would be no fine. The “neither legal nor criminal” can absolutely happen in the US - I don’t know about anywhere else.
I think @doreen and @Banquet_Bear are talking across a bigger cultural divide than is quite recognized.
In the USA, “decriminalize” most times means “Leave it fully illegal, but cause the enforcement authorities to turn a blind(ish) eye to it.” This way we can have social progress delivered by the executive, while the legislature is hopeless locked into impasse and/or is totally beholden to the moral panics of the hidebound reactionaries. Or while we have a battle of opinions between federal, state, and local levels.
In the USA, “decriminalize” sometimes means “Leave it illegal, but adjust the laws to reduce the severity of offense for doing it to a mere inconvenience. At which point the enforcement authority is dis-incentivized to pursue those cases even if, culturally speaking, they wanted to.” Compared to the first method this requires legislative action and is hence much more difficult to achieve in politically polarized jurisdictions. But has the advantage for the doers that now they’re not in fact committing a real crime, merely a bad act on a par with illegal parking.
The astute reader will have noticed in both cases that the idea of doing the socially beneficial honest thing for honest reasons honestly articulated has no place in any of this. It’s entirely government by subterfuge, “white” lies, doublespeak, and outmaneuvering intransigent foes.
…yeah, but:
This is what you asked for. In regards to sex work these are the standard definitions. I provided a link to the ACLU, an explicitly US organization, for that very reason. If you don’t want to use the standard definitions then this conversation is going to get confusing real quick.
This is legalization, very close to the Nordic model. It isn’t decriminalization.
Look: the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, all of these organizations aren’t trying to catch you out. This isn’t an attempted gotcha. The terms that they are using are the same terms they have been using for years. The models for decriminalisation are very much modeled on the NZ framework. And I’ve shared links to our legislation. You can go read them yourself. This isn’t theoretical. Buying and selling sex acts isn’t a crime here. And it isn’t a violation of any public health code. Decriminalization relies on not having contradictory, conflicting statutes on the books. It’s a harm-reduction model. Every aspect of it is designed to protect the human rights of sex workers and their buyers.
Because ultimately what we are talking about here is just consenting adults having sex.
It isn’t helpful to conflate your understanding of what these words mean with the definitions that all of the major human rights organizations, sex workers unions, their advocates, and their allies have been using for a long time.
The definitions that are being used here are in line with how the words are commonly used and it exactly matches here.
I would imagine the stats changed significantly with the passing of FOSTA/SESTA
Part of why it’s difficult to have discussions of this in the US these days is it has been legally conflated with trafficking. States, such as Texas, have been increasing penalties such that it is now a felony offense for both customer and sex worker. This doesn’t stop the world’s oldest profession, of course, especially in hard economic times when police departments are stretched thin and the most vulnerable among us are the most desperate.
Enjoy,
Steven
It’s been a long while since I delved into this topic and the sources that were available on the Internet in English weren’t great, and computerized translation wasn’t available.
But, so far as I could tell, there seemed to be a general pattern in places that legalized prostitution.
- High end places would convert to legal, follow regulations, and possibly improve the situation for their workers. (Though, possibly, there wasn’t too much of a change since these were already fairly clean operations.)
- Places who employed underaged people, illegal immigrants, etc. wouldn’t convert - since they couldn’t. Some 20 year old thug, prostituting out his runaway 14 year old “girlfriend”, is not eligible and can’t be regulated in any meaningful sense.
- The total amount of prostitution expanded by about double (if I recall correctly). The legal places stayed fairly constant in number but the number of illegal expanded to match the demand, mostly through trafficking of women, illegally.
New Zealand did seem to have escaped this pattern, from everything that I could tell. And, as said, the numbers that I could find weren’t well sourced and could have been using different methods. The above might not be true.
But, likewise, New Zealand might have been saved by sharing no borders with other nations and being too far out of the way for most tourism. And the downsides of illegal prostitution are large enough that it’s worth taking the question seriously.
…the world has gone so wacky in the last few years I’m not even going to try to predict what the extremist states will do in the future, and there is a dystopian version of what they could do which is simply to horrifying for me to even type out. But my advice would be the same in all the other states as well. Names and details of sex workers in a government database is a bad thing, especially in a politically charged environment.
…because we decriminalised. We followed a harm-reduction model that prioritized all of the available evidence and the words of sex workers themselves. In most other implementations of the legalization of sex work, from the Nevada model (which prioritizes the already rich brothel owners and the state) to the Nordic model (which prioritizes eliminating sex work) they aren’t based on a harm reduction model, and the voices of sex workers were not listened too.
And Australia are doing just fine as well.
These were decriminalized?
- kidnapping
- child prostitution
- illegal immigration
…nope.
Then it would be good to address the points raised, not the ones you prefer.
…there isn’t anything to address. You made a bunch of unsupported assertions. I don’t even know what countries you are talking about, or if you are relying on the same flawed data that you have used in other threads on this topic.
I used all data that was available at the time. No one ever proposed any better or found any particular reason to discount any of it. As I recall, none of it seemed to have been collected with any particular agenda. In cases like German sources, I had to rely on quoted numbers in random journals targeted to English speakers in Germany, with no ability to track down the original source of those numbers or what their methodology was. Then, as now, I admitted that this wasn’t ideal but still better than making blind pronouncements.
These days, I don’t have the time to research the topic so I’m proposing it for others to investigate and report on. It should be easier to find data, now, and track that down to the sources and methods.
…you made the assertions in this thread. If you don’t want to back them up, that’s fine. But that just means that there isn’t anything for me to address. New Zealand “escaped the pattern” because I suspect the countries you are talking about have implemented frameworks that aren’t based on a harm-reduction model, and aren’t the frameworks being recommended by the ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The reasons and the evidence why they support decriminalization are all linked to up thread. And decriminalization explicitly doesn’t allow “kidnapping, child prostitution, and illegal immigration.” These are either covered by already existing legislation, or new legislation is introduced.
My definition of an assertion is different than yours.
Jack: “Careful Jane, you might be allergic to other legumes, if you have a peanut allergy. But…also maybe not…just be careful.”
Jane: “Oh my god, Jack, why are you asserting that this chickpea will definitely kill me!?”