Despite extensive social science research documenting the coercion and damage attendant and endemic to the sex industry and decades of legal debate on approaches to this problem, no effective legal challenges have resulted. Countries following the Swedish (now “Nordic/Equality”) prostitution model law, which penalizes buyers and third parties while supporting prostituted persons to escape, have decreased prostitution’s incidence, while countries in which prostitution is legalized have seen trafficking and other violative abuses metastasize. This project, conducted together with law professor, human rights lawyer, and feminist Catharine MacKinnon, analyzes in depth the prospect of holding authoritative actors accountable for legalized prostitution under the international legal rubric of crimes against humanity.
The project has documented that legalized and fully decriminalized prostitution release a tsunami of crimes against humanity for which these policies guarantee domestic impunity. Empirical evidence marshaled shows that legal prostitution exponentially increases “widespread” and “systematic attacks” against prostituted persons, including “rape, enforced prostitution, human trafficking, sexual slavery,” and other atrocities enumerated under international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Gender-based persecution of women and girls in and outside prostitution demonstrably results. Close case readings focusing on the ICC support the theory that legal prostitution be recognized as a crime against humanity.
Officials who legalize and fully decriminalize prostitution are argued to be criminally responsible for the crimes against humanity that their actions unleash. Theories of co-perpetration, inducement, aiding and abetting, and other forms of liability under ICC rubrics are explored in light of potential evidence.
