A new study suggests that the sex industry saves women from rape. Is that so?

By Luba Fein

Last month (March 2023), the Journal of Law and Economics published an article, "Do Prostitution Laws Affect Rape Rates? Evidence from Europe".[1] The two researchers, Huasheng Gao and Vanya Petrova from Fudan University, stated in the abstract that they "identified a causal effect of the liberalisation and prohibition of commercial sex on rape rates, using staggered legislative changes in European countries. Liberalising prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase".

The summary indirectly states that the researchers discovered a promising method to reduce sexual crime: liberalising prostitution. However, those who continue to read the article may be disappointed. First, from the summary, one can already see that the researchers see prostitution as a substitute for sexual violence. They repeat the claim over and over again throughout the article. For example, in the "Development of the Hypothesis" section (p. 761), they suggest:

"Suppose that a man could be a purchaser of commercial sex or be a rapist and that he makes a choice based on the costs and benefits of these two options. We expect prostitution liberalisation to reduce rape via the substitution mechanism: men who view commercial sex and rape as having similar costs may choose prostitution over rape if prostitution becomes cheaper and more easily available, and they may choose rape if prostitution becomes costlier and less accessible".

The idea that "prostitution is a substitute for rape" is often made by the less informed public, and I've heard it countless times from sex industry apologists. However, I did not expect to find it in such a naive form in the study. Consider, indeed, the rapist struggling to choose between forcing himself on a "normative" woman who does not want him and paying the woman in prostitution. In that case, his choice of a woman in prostitution does not alter the level of violence of the act he commits. The woman in prostitution still does not want him; the payment guarantees her silence, the force of which, in the case of a poor woman, does not fall short of the strength of the arm.

Even if we were to ignore the element of violence in buying an unwanted sexual act from a destitute woman, we could not ignore the growing evidence of severe physical and sexual violence suffered by women in prostitution, including in legal brothels in countries with legalised prostitution. One can learn a lot about violence in prostitution from the new study by Dr Melissa Farley and her colleagues, conducted among consumers of prostitution from six different countries, including Germany – a country with a regulated and extensive sex industry. The German brothel visitors told the research team that they witnessed violence against the women in brothels, that many women there are held captive by pimps or dealers (as one respondent put it, "The Romanians and Asians are 100% conned"), that the women show obvious mental distress and are afraid of their pimps. Below is a quote from one of the sex buyers who participated in Dr Farley's research:[2]

"When the women didn't pay the pimp enough, they had their fingernails pulled off, or the pimps took their drugs, or beat the women to a pulp. The women were scared and never said anything. They had bloody noses, but they never received medical attention."

In other words, the researchers believe we have the moral right to turn "the conned Romanians and Asians" into a live shield for the local and normative women. The women in prostitution will suffer double violence: from sex buyers and pimps, just for others to be safe. According to them, the Orwellian "take her, not me, you monster" should solve the sexual violence issue.

In addition to the ethical problem, the paper is full of sometimes puzzling methodological problems. For example, the research divides the existing regulatory models into five categories according to fuzzy internal logic. The category "neo-abolitionism" (a term that some use as a synonym for the Nordic model) unites in the paper countries with extremely liberal sex industry legislation, such as Belgium, alongside countries with much stricter legislation, such as Finland, which punishes sex buyers who exploit victims of trafficking. Moreover, Britain, which has never legalised brothels, is classified in the sample under the "legalisation" category with countries like Germany, the signature project of the sex industry legalisation. Another methodological problem is the reliance on only eight countries that liberalised their regulation (in different ways – some established licensed brothels while others stopped criminalising individuals in prostitution) and only six countries that tightened the restrictions on the sex trade (most of them are Nordic model countries, except for Croatia which made prostitution itself an administrative offence).

Due to the brevity of the format, I cannot enumerate all the methodological problems of the research. Still, I urge the readers to look at a much more detailed article by Esther, a prostitution survivor and activist from London.[3] Here, I will focus on the central one: relying on reported rape cases as a measure of the rate of rape. The level of rape reporting may be influenced more by culture, legal climate, complaint procedures, data collection methods, and social norms than by actual rape rates. Even the researchers agree that only about 3% of all rape cases are reported.

The researchers state that the "Increase [in reported rape] in prohibited countries is clearly greater than in the other two groups. From 1990 to 2017, the average rape rate in prohibited countries increased from 7.70 to 36.81 (380 per cent). In contrast, the rape rate increased from 6.49 to 9.71 (50 per cent) in liberalized countries and from 4.67 to 8.48 in control countries (82 per cent)." An increase in the rate of rape by 380%, and even "only" by 82% or 50%, is enormous. Without a well-founded and well-reasoned explanation, it is impossible to simply assume that in only 30 years, rape cases have multiplied at such high rates. Without such an explanation, we have no choice but to accept that we are dealing with an increase in reporting and not an increase in rape.

A better explanation for the connection between adopting the Nordic model and the higher rate of reported rape cases could be as follows: a society that respects women does not allow men to buy their bodies. In such a society, there is more support for rape victims and more serious treatment of their rape complaints. Therefore, the willingness to report rape will be higher in Nordic model countries.

It is worth noting that the researchers refer to the problem of underreporting of rape. Thus, they claim that "sex workers, who are often victims of physical and sexual abuse, are more likely to report rapes after prostitution is liberalized, as they are no longer engaging in illegal activities". However, this claim contradicts what we already know about the limited freedom individuals in prostitution enjoy. According to the formal report published in Germany by a committee headed by ex-police officer Helmut Sporer, most women in the legalised German sex industry are foreigners held in the industry under one level of coercion or another. Similar to the independent research by Dr Melissa Farley, Helmut Sporer's formal report states that these foreign women are victims of various types of crime but do not report it due to language barriers, limited knowledge of their rights, fear of traffickers and also just a low trust in authorities: "In the absolute majority of cases, women will only affirm that they have been victimized after extensive investigations into their environment and arrest(s) of the perpetrator(s)"[4].

In conclusion, although the researchers Huasheng Gao and Vanya Petrova present in their abstract an optimistic conclusion that the sex industry liberalisation is associated with a moderate increase in reported rape cases while the legal restrictions on the sex industry are associated with a sharp increase in them, in practice, the conclusion may be biased and insufficiently grounded. Thus, the researchers assume that the changes in the reporting of rape cases reflect the changes in the rape cases, while in practice, they may only represent the public's willingness to report. To accept the authors' claim, one must explain a vast increase of 50% to 380% in rape cases in just three decades. In addition, the researchers refer to the reality of individuals in the sex industry as "consensual sex" and a suitable substitute for rape. At the same time, there is plenty of personal and research evidence about sexual and other violence that these people experience daily. The suffering they experience is not a "small price to pay" to protect "fair" women – they are human beings like the rest who deserve a life of well-being and freedom.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/720583

[2] https://prostitutionresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Sex-buyersEnglish-11-8-2022pdf.pdf

[3] https://nordicmodelnow.org/2023/03/22/do-prostitution-laws-in-europe-affect-the-incidence-of-rape-analysis-of-a-recent-study/

[4] https://nordicmodelnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/helmut-sporer-statement-in-english-1.6.21.pdf