Can legalizing porn and prostitution help reduce rape?

Here’s the thing.

Most sex workers that voluntarily and willingly enter the sexual services professions want decriminalization.

Decriminalization puts control of sex workers’ health, working conditions, and self-respect in the hands of sex workers themselves.

Legalization, yet again, puts those decisions in the hands of law enforcement and other outsiders. It also creates a two-tiered system whereby law enforcement can move the goalposts and entrap otherwise “legal” sex workers as “illegal” ones.

Sex workers, almost to a one, don’t want this. In a decriminalized system, sex workers can …

1. Report sexually abusive clients and rapists to law enforcement without fear of arrest.
2. Report sexually abusive law enforcement officials to their superiors to get them thrown of the force and convicted. In criminalized and even “legalized” systems, unethical law enforcement officials can coerce, blackmail, and even straight up rape sex workers without much fear of identification or imprisonment.
3. Report those that truly exploit and abuse sex workers (instead of always assuming those that help and assist sex workers are “pimps” and “traffickers”). Yes, there are real pimps and traffickers. In a decriminalized system, their abuse would be the focus, not the illegality of sexual professions themselves.
4. Establish their own working conditions, safety procedures, and rates to their own liking, further bolstering their inherent agency. Legalization infantilizes sex workers, yet again running their adult agency past a board of presumptuous outsiders that don’t know the work as well as insiders.

In this way, decriminalization doesn’t focus on mitigating the harm rapists cause. Decriminalization ensures sex workers can freely exercise agency without restraint, making it all that easier to identify and prosecute rapists (and anyone that exploits them). It also puts to bed the myth that sex workers are an inherently “unrapeable” class of individuals that will consent to anything a client wants (which is just rape culture that benefits rapists).

Decriminalization also reduces sex work stigma. Those that want to leave the sexual professions can do so with lessened concern that their past will automatically close off avenues to other professional options.