Legalizing Indoor Prostitution Can Reduce Rape and STDs

From FiveThirtyEight
By Ben Casselman

Authors: Scott Cunningham, Manisha Shah

What they found: Decriminalizing indoor prostitution reduces forcible rape and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Why it matters: Experts have long debated whether legalizing prostitution would improve the well-being of sex workers by establishing minimum health and safety standards and by making it easier for prostitutes to go to the police if they are assaulted. But evaluating the effect of legalization is difficult because prostitution is illegal in most places, and the laws governing it change infrequently. In this paper, the authors take advantage of a 2003 Rhode Island court ruling that effectively decriminalized indoor prostitution from 2003 to 2009, when the state legislature recriminalized it. They find that decriminalization led to more prostitution, but that it led to a 31 percent decrease in reported rapes and a 39 percent decrease in cases of female gonorrhea. (All comparisons are versus model-based expectations of what the numbers would have been if prostitution had remained criminalized.) The declines came not just among sex workers, but in the population as a whole.

Key quote: “This study provides the first causal estimate of the impact of decriminalization on the sex market as well as outcomes related to sexual violence and public health. The results suggest that decriminalization could have potentially large social benefits for the population at large — not just sex market participants.”

Data they used: Weekly classified advertisements from the “adult services” section and restaurant advertisements from the Providence Phoenix; data on prostitutes and their transactions from a website called The Erotic Review; prostitution arrests and criminal offenses (including rape) from the Uniform Crime Reports; gonorrhea cases from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s gonorrhea surveillance program,; sexual-behavior outcomes from the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey; and state-level covariates from the Current Population Survey.