Banning the purchase of sex increases cases of rape: evidence from Sweden

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-024-00984-2

by cubefox • 2 years ago

47 28 2 years ago

link.springer.com

However, it is not accompanied by a decrease in the number of pimps
Pimping is also closely related to coercive exploitation of prostitution and human trafficking

This paper seems to hint at the conclusion "legal prostitution results in fewer rapes" but is "coercive exploitation of prostitution" meaningfully different?

My understanding is that prostitution was most recently banned in Sweden because of the human trafficking problem in the first place, not moral grandstanding.

alphabettsy• 2 years ago

I realize this is not addressing your point, but it seems that law enforcement and politicians using the term “human trafficking” for everything from prostitution to coyotes helping illegal immigration has done a disservice.

dwighttk4• 2 years ago

What other term would you like for buying and selling people?

TimPC• 2 years ago

Several nations have legalized prostitution in ways where you can be a prostitute in business for yourself, but can't have someone above you taking a cut. This has the downside of preventing prostitutes from banding together to share rent for a space but it does a lot to limit pimping. Further improvements to the law could potentially allow for shared rental agreements of various types as long as there isn't someone getting a % cut and that would still effectively keep pimping illegal.

dwighttk4• 2 years ago

Taken together, the empirical evidence hints at the notion that the rise in rapes is not connected to the supply of prostitution but rather to changes in the demand for prostitution due to the ban.

Wild that some end up raping instead of illegally visiting a prostitute.

yonixw• 2 years ago

The first graph [1] does not show correlation in trends ... But If someone have the full PDF, sure would like to read it

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378962808_Banning_t...

okeuro49• 2 years ago

Does the study account for the increase in rape through liberalised immigration policy over this time?

A total of 3 039 offenders were included in the analysis. A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8330751/

bhouston2• 2 years ago

A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden.

How can you have an immigrant who was born inside of Sweden? They are no longer an immigrant then.

tivert2• 2 years ago

How can you have an immigrant who was born inside of Sweden? They are no longer an immigrant then.

Not every country has jus soli/birthright citizenship. Sweden appears to be jus sanguinis/inherited citizenship only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nationality_law

Swedish nationality law determines entitlement to Swedish citizenship. Citizenship of Sweden is based primarily on the principle of jus sanguinis. In other words, citizenship is conferred primarily by birth to a Swedish parent, irrespective of place of birth.
In general, children born in Sweden to foreign parents do not acquire Swedish citizenship at birth, although if they remain resident in Sweden they may become citizens later on.

torstenvl• 2 years ago

Sweden is a jus sanguinis jurisdiction.

ethagknight• 2 years ago

I was gonna say, without even reading the article, there is no way to pin down such a conclusion, as if men who had never raping before, suddenly turned to raping because they couldn’t visit a prostitute legally.

overthemoon• 2 years ago

This study is a breakdown of the demographics of offenders, not an account of the increase in incidents of rape, unless I'm missing something. The increase is a key point of the original post.

netsharc• 2 years ago

Also in Rhode Island: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5898187/prostitution-rhode-isl...

bhouston2• 2 years ago

Did rape decrease as porn got more ubiquitous? I would think it is a similar correlation, no?

Found an answer to my own question: "Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

I hope so, cause I'm 2nd-amendment on porn. I'm hoarding it for the end times.

lo_zamoyski• 2 years ago

That’s great. I’m not; it isn’t even speech, and I reject the Lockean view of “freedom” anyway (which is actually license). Porn is incredibly destructive. Indeed, both pornography and prostitution are unethical, but of the two, prostitution is less bad. At least there’s another person involved, and the sex act is real, however defective. Less defective and destructive than glad handing yourself and laying waste to your mind that’s also difficult to recover from.

Here we must distinguish between state permission and state sanction. The state can licitly permit certain evils if banning them leads to a worse situation, given the crooked state of humanity. Prostitution was traditionally one of these.

mumblemumble• 2 years ago

Apparent earlier draft of the paper: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100393/1/MPRA_paper_100393.p...

I haven't paid to read the linked article, but the abstracts do differ significantly. Perhaps the work in the above link is presumably not representative of the final published version, which is about 20 pages shorter. That could just be formatting differences, though. About 60% of the pages in the earlier version are figures and tables, many of which get, but do not fill, a dedicated page. The author has presumably had ~5 years to keep working on it in the intervening time. That could either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on various factors including one's own opinion on how the scientific process should work.

Personally, I'm always pretty a priori skeptical of this style of economic "natural experiment". I'm rather fond of economist Ronald Coase's observation that, "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess." And 5+ years is a long time to spend p-hacking one set of data. But it's hard to know what all is in a 30-page paper based on just a 150-word abstract. So I would encourage people to be very cautious about getting too caught up in dissecting and discussing this without taking some time to digest the whole thing first. Arguably Hacker News is just not the right venue in the first place because it's set up to reward opinions that people can assemble in a matter of minutes, and digesting and understanding the merits of a 30-page economics paper probably deserves more like a week's worth of time.

toxik• 2 years ago

The paper: "Prior to 1999, prostitution was not regulated in Sweden."

Reality: "The earliest law to explicitly ban prostitution was in the Civil Code of 1734."

sandstrom• 2 years ago

I think the liberal immigration policy might play a role here. Sweden has taken a huge amount in the past 15 years, twenty percent of the population are immigrants.

Obviously, most of them are not criminals. But on a group level, they are more likely to commit crimes. About 2x compared to Swedes, after adjusting for income, age and education (it's higher before adjusting, obviously).

Digging deeper, there are large differences between groups.

For example, the group men (compared to women) are much more likely to commit crimes. Another factor that stands out is geography. People from East Asia have similar crime-rates as Swedes, while people from Africa are 5-10x as likely to commit crimes (compared to Swedes).

This holds for most categories, including violent crimes, sexual crimes and a bunch of other groups.

Here is the landing page from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, a governmental agency:

https://bra.se/publikationer/arkiv/publikationer/2021-08-25-...

Here is the report with the data mentioned above:

https://bra.se/download/18.1f8c9903175f8b2aa70f6df/163110731...

cubefox• 2 years ago

Yeah. It is important to point these things out, despite quite a few people wanting to suppress this information.

Banning the purchase of sex increases cases of rape: evidence from Sweden

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