A prostitute works the streets of Vancouver's downtown Eastside in 2009.JOHN LEHMANN
Marina Adshade is an economist at Dalhousie University. She writes regularly on the economics of sex and love on her blog Dollars and Sex
Last week, the Globe quoted federal government lawyer Michael Morris as saying that Canada will be plunged into an "social experiment unprecedented in this country" if sex work is decriminalized. At least he had enough sense to add the qualifier "in this country", since many countries around the globe have decriminalized sex work.
Yet the fact that this is seen as an experiment suggests that decision makers have not looked at economic research on the effect of regulation in the sex trades. Anyone who thinks the street sector will disappear overnight is ignoring the overwhelming evidence against that claim.
The argument for decriminalization is that it will make it easier for sex workers to move off the streets and into brothels, making prostitution a safer occupation. The argument made for legalization is that will make it possible to regulate sex work by issuing licenses to sex workers and brothel owners, enforcing condom use and requiring sex workers to be regularly tested for STI's.
That makes selling and buying of sex safer for everyone, including the spouses and partners of clients. The economic evidence, however, is that while decriminalization may get (some) sex workers of the street, regulation will push them right back out there.
So, if we are going to have any form of legal sex work in Canada, policy makers will have to decide if the benefits from regulation are worth the cost of an expanded street sector.
Even without regulation, the street sector will persist just as it does in other countries that have stopped treating the sex work as criminal behaviour. Men who don't want to pay brothel prices, or don't want to play by brothel rules (especially if condom use is enforced), will make sure there is a steady demand for sex work on the street.
Where there is demand, supply will follow; sex workers with addictions, sex workers with STIs, underage sex workers, and illegal immigrants -or perhaps those who don't want to collect HST and pay income taxes -will continue to work on the streets.
Adding regulation to this mix, in the form of licenses and enforcement, will drive up the price of sex in a brothel even higher sending more clients out on the streets looking for the cheaper unregulated service.
They will find there too, especially if sex workers are moving out onto the streets either because they are unwilling (or unable) to bear the cost of regulation or because they have failed STI testing.
The solution is a policy mix of street sector and brothel regulation that keeps in mind that workers and clients can move between the sectors. The question is: How far will we be into the 'social experiment' before policy makers start to think about the economics behind sex work?
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