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Prostitution May Become Legal This Saturday in Ontario

To the delight of civil libertarians and libertarians alike, the Canadian courts have been leading the world in dealing with conflicts between privacy principles and morality legislation. I am serving as an expert in the review of Canadian polygamy laws in British Columbia. In the meantime, the Ontario Superior Court may allow three prostitution laws to die this Saturday.

In September, the Court struck down the laws. The federal government is charging that this is nothing short of a “social experiment unprecedented in this country.” However, it is also a frank acknowledgment that consenting adults came engage in sex for money as a consensual choice. Currently, an individual can have sex with any number of partners but can be arrested if they accept anything of value in exchange for sex. They can receive gifts as part of a “relationship” no matter how fleeting but not as payment.

The Court previously noted that criminal laws force prostitutes in the shadows where they are easy prey for abuse and even homicides. Once legal, protections and regulations can apply to the world’s oldest profession. With the demise of the laws, street walking will be legal.

Source: Star

Jonathan Turley

606 thoughts on “Prostitution May Become Legal This Saturday in Ontario”

  1. 1.) There probably is more use of marijuana where it is legal than where it is not. When Prohibition ended consumption of alcohol surged.
    2.) Limited prostitution in Nevada has been legal for decades but they still have forced prostitution and prostitution of minors. How would you possibly stop prostitution in apartments?
    3.) Just look to the history of prostitution in Nevada and you will find that the State was requiring women to work as prostitutes in order to get government benefits. Probation and parole programs and statutes already refer to employment and they won’t change the wording if prostitution is legal. And it will be men as well as women.

  2. “Legalization of prostitution will result in:
    1.) More prostitution”

    An assumption without basis. The Dutch do not enforce marijuana laws and provide clean needle services yet they see a markedly lesser problem with hard drugs (heroin, cocaine, meth) than most countries with draconian drug laws.

    “2.) An assumption of legality even when the prostitutes are underage”

    That’s why you issue licenses and regulate the activity to centralized brothels capable of regular inspection, disallowing street walking altogether.

    “3.) A requirement to work as a prostitute as a condition of government benefits or probation”

    Completely unfounded. I’m pretty sure under any legalizing schema that prostitution doesn’t/won’t count as community service and I’ve already addressed the idea of conscription into a Prostitutes Corp. In addition, you are required to work (or not to work) to get certain government benefits now.

  3. We do outlaw many dangerous acts such as driving without a seatbelt.

    Many couples who meet in bars and have casual sex go onto have long term relationships and even marry. That is much less likely to happen when a couple meets in a brothel because for one thing the prostitute is prohibited from seeing the customer again outside of the prostitution context. A woman who goes home with a man she meets at a bar can stay the next day and develop their relationship but a prostitute is onto the next customer in an hour or two.

    On blogs I keep meeting people who claimed to know happy hookers but their accounts are not generally verified.

  4. P.S. I should have said “just legalizing possession”, obviously possession should be legal along with consumption.

  5. Legalization of prostitution will result in:
    1.) More prostitution
    2.) An assumption of legality even when the prostitutes are underage
    3.) A requirement to work as a prostitute as a condition of government benefits or probation

  6. @Canadian Eh:
    >> Are you both really resorting to a comparason of substances to people ? <<

    I am not suggesting legalizing the possession of alcohol, or the posession of pot, I believe the **act** of consuming alcohol or pot should be legal. Acts are committed by people. Sex acts are committed by people.

    My comparison is perfectly valid, an adult should be able to voluntarily choose whatever they want to do with their own body, including ruining it or killing it. We don't outlaw football, or Hollywood stuntmen, or river rafting, or skydiving for entertainment, or hunting for sport, or car racing on approved tracks, and there are instances in which each of these activities has killed or maimed the voluntary participants.

    The only valid reason for outlawing a dangerous activity is if one can show at least a preponderance of evidence that a typical (not mentally ill) person engaging in such an act is very likely to harm other people that have not volunteered to be a part of this activity.

    In that category, NASCAR racing has killed fans that were watching in the expectation of being safe from the crashes.

    If a woman volunteers to have sex for money, and a man volunteers to pay her, nobody is harmed by that anymore than if the same woman in a bar volunteered to have sex for free, and the same man in the bar volunteered to be her partner. The latter is legal, the former is not, and the only reason I can discern for that discrepancy is that you think its immoral and you wish to enforce your moral viewpoint on the world with guns and violence and imprisonment and other punishments (by the police). Thus I assume you do not think enforcing your view of morality with violence would be immoral.

    I too have known a prostitute. More specifically a friend of my mother's (my mother was a waitress), was a call girl. From the age of 13 to 16 (at which my academic situation changed) I babysat for this call girl during her "dates." She had a young boy and a young girl, both by a former husband. She worked three nights a week, left at 6:30 and was always home by midnight, was never beat up, and prostitution was her only job. That is all I know directly, but from my mother she says the woman chose to be a call girl to better care for her two children. It gave her more time and more money.

    Taking the call girl's side of the argument, how is having safe sex three times a week on *actual* dates any more "damaging" than having safe sex three times a week with johns? And I mean damaging to her, damaging to society, damaging to the johns, whatever. It just isn't, and both should be legal because they involve adults.

    I argue for the equivalence of *acts*. The things you use to argue against it are all against the law, they involve assault, coercion, and the exploitation of minors. Well, alcohol leads to criminal activity also; it is probably the primary fuel of underage sex, and a known enabler of assault, accidental maiming and death, and intentional murder. Probably far more than legalized prostitution would be; because alcohol impairs judgment while people undertake other public acts (like driving or socializing) and sex is typically accomplished in private without endangering anybody.

  9. Thanks for the links and the additional information, Kay.

    It’s an ugly business, no matter what, so why not legalize it (in all states), and then deal with the residual crimes that are inevitable?

    I don’t have the answers and am the first to admit it. Having said this, I still don’t understand why legalizing prostitution will make the situation any worse for victims than it already is…

  10. I agree with Canadian Eh. Tremendous emotional harm is done to those that work as prostitutes whether legal or illegal. There is a reason most of them are drugged up. I think some make the mistake of glorifying prostitution while not looking at the damage that is done.

  11. Prostitution is legal in Nevada but

    Okhotina took possession of her niece’s passport and told her that she would have to work as a prostitute.

    Okhotina coerced her niece to work as a prostitute by telling her that she would be arrested if she went to the police because she was here in the United States illegally. Okhotina also told the niece that if she left the apartment, or if Okhotina made her leave the apartment, she would have no place to stay and would be on the street. As a result of this coercion, the teenager engaged in prostitution in California and Las Vegas, Nevada. Okhotina took the money that her niece received for prostituting herself.
    http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/pressroom/pr2005/164.html

  12. Prostitution is legal in Nevada but

    A federal jury has convicted a Sacramento, California man of transporting a 15-year-old girl to Las Vegas on two occasions for the purposes of prostitution, announced Daniel G. Bogden, United States Attorney for the District of Nevada.
    http://www.justice.gov/usao/nv/press/march2006/weicks030306.htm

    http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2006/June/06_crm_394.html
    Doss prostituted two minor victims in both California and Reno, Nevada, during the first two weeks of May 2005. Doss, along with his wife Jacquay Quinn Ford, conspired to transport a 14-year-old female and a 16-year-old female to work for Doss as prostitutes. Doss recruited and transported the 16- year-old victim by the use of force.

  16. Prostitution is legal in Nevada but

    the defendants used violence and intimidation to recruit and control the women and girls being prostituted by them or their co-conspirators, reciting that one individual defendant described beating prostitutes so brutally that “both my hands were swelled up.”…the youngest of these girls was only 12 when she was prostituted by the defendants.he defendants operated an organized prostitution enterprise in several states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas, Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, the District of Columbia, California, Florida, Nevada,
    http://www.justice.gov/usao/pam/press_releases/2009%20archive/ProstitutionRing_01_12_09.htm

  17. kay,

    “Most men will not marry a woman who has worked as a prostitute. By working as a prostitute for even a month, a woman risks her acceptance into normal society for the rest of her life. Many families will not accept even their daughters into their homes if they have worked as a prostitute.”

    These are all matters of personal choice and preference rooted in modern culture. If you remove the stigma of a criminal record, you make it easier for women to overcome these obstacles and change that culture of rejection and thus making it easier for women (and men) in that profession to leave it should they wish.

    As to the list of negatives from the DOJ?

    Spillover effect concerns
    • Street prostitution and street drug markets are often linked.

    They are both criminalized ergo they will both be found with criminals. Remove the status of crime and regulate distribution and marketing and this problem goes away.

    • Prostitution may provide the seedbed for organized crime.

    Again, if it’s illegal, there’s usually excess profits associated with the risk. Remove the illegality and it quickly becomes not only less profitable for criminals, but opens the door for the criminal element to be replaced by legitimate business.

    • Prostitutes create parking and traffic problems where they congregate.
    • Prostitution attracts strangers and criminals to a
    neighborhood.

    Addressable through regulation and decriminalization.

    Economic concerns
    • Legitimate businesses may lose customers who avoid the
    area because of prostitution.
    • The presence of prostitutes may negatively affect the area economy, reducing property values and limiting property use.

    Addressable through regulation and decriminalization.

  18. http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/e05021552.pdf

    Spillover effect concerns
    • Street prostitution and street drug markets are often linked.
    • Prostitution may provide the seedbed for organized crime.
    • Prostitutes create parking and traffic problems where they congregate.
    • Prostitution attracts strangers and criminals to a
    neighborhood.
    Economic concerns
    • Legitimate businesses may lose customers who avoid the
    area because of prostitution.
    • The presence of prostitutes may negatively affect the area economy, reducing property values and limiting property use.

  19. The jails aren’t filled with prostitutes. There actually isn’t that much prostitution in the states in which it is illegal.

    Most men will not marry a woman who has worked as a prostitute. By working as a prostitute for even a month, a woman risks her acceptance into normal society for the rest of her life. Many families will not accept even their daughters into their homes if they have worked as a prostitute. If a woman is arrested for prostitution, that information goes into her NCIC and JDIS records and is made available to the local police and potential employers for the rest of her life.

  20. Then Canadian Eh….I have done my job…too bad you all don’t celebrate Thanksgiving when we do….lol

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