hey Amanda,

You’re confusing prostitution (consenting adults having sex for money) and trafficking again.

Since trafficking takes place in a whole range of non-criminal and regulated industries (many of which you’ve blogged about), we cannot expect Taiwan’s recognition of sex workers’ rights to be a “silver bullet” against either trafficking into the sex industry (which is different from prostitution: “consenting adults having sex for money”) or against commercialised child abuse (which is different from prostitution: “consenting adults having sex for money” and also different from trafficking: “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purposes of exploitation.”)

You’re also using the term “buying women” to describe the transaction sex workers engage in: again, this is a fundamental misunderstanding - buying something means you own it, that you _keep it_. The _temporary_ nature of the transaction in sex work is a major part of its attraction for our clients.

Selling sexual services is an exchange of agreed services, usually over an agreed period of time, for money. Often sex workers, including myself, feel that use of the term “buying women” sees us as nothing more than our vaginas (if we have them, many sex workers don’t). To speak of women being “bought”, describes selling sex as a unilateral and irreversible surrendering of self: heterosexual sex is conceptualised as something that men do to women. In reality, male clients do not “buy” women: they receive specific services for a fee, sometimes within as brief a timescale as ten minutes.

Remember, policies that solve problems are based in reality, not on ideology, assumption and stereotypes.

"...criminalizing the buyer and decriminalizing the seller is a better way to go than flat out legalization."

I disagree, I believe that if it is illegal, both parties need to be punished. If you arrest the man for having a prositutute, and the woman gets away free, what would be her incentive to stop and vice versa? Sure, there are less buyers/or sellers, however, the people that are not arrested are free to move on to the next provider or service/consumer.

Prositution is going to happen, regardless of the legality of the issue. Which is why legalization would be much better because we can regulate who is in the system, help prevent STDs, protect the women in the service by giving them regular check ups, and helping the people from being taken advantage of.

Finally someone has some sense to make this right. It is a womans choice and it is mutually beneficial relationship between consenting adults, how on earth is making it illegal justifiable?

Good...