Why opposing prostitution doesn’t mean blaming women, and why pushing the market underground helps traffickers more than victims.
A few days ago, local news in my city, Bat Yam, reported a police raid on an apartment suspected of operating as a site for human trafficking. Four women were found inside. The comments followed a familiar script. “This is spreading like mushrooms after the rain,” one woman wrote. “They shut down one place and another opens. We need harsher punishment. Otherwise it will never stop.” I replied with something that, in hindsight, I knew would trigger anger: “You might be surprised, but one of the most effective ways to reduce trafficking is decriminalizing sex work.” Within minutes, the discussion stopped being about trafficking. It became about me. I was accused of supporting prostitution, normalizing exploitation, and even enabling the trade in women.
As a classical liberal feminist who feels deep revulsion toward men who pay for sex, this accusation is more than wrong. It is insulting. I find the commodification of women’s bodies morally repugnant. I do not believe prostitution is empowering, liberating, or socially healthy. I would prefer to live in a world where no one wanted to buy another person’s body. But personal disgust is not a policy framework. Wanting something to disappear does not mean criminal law can make it disappear.
Public debates about morality tend to collapse two very different questions into one. Is something wrong? And does banning it reduce harm? People often assume the answer to the second automatically follows from the first. If an activity is immoral, then outlawing it must be the correct response. This intuition feels clean and decisive. It also repeatedly fails.
Israel’s current legal framework already treats prostitution as something that should exist only in shadows. Selling sex itself is not a criminal offense when done independently, but nearly everything surrounding it is illegal. Running or maintaining a place for prostitution is prohibited. Pimping, brokering, or profiting from another person’s sex work is illegal. Since 2020, purchasing sexual services has also been criminalized under Israel’s version of the Nordic Model. The stated intention is to reduce demand while “protecting” those who sell sex. In practice, this layered criminalization structure pushes the entire industry underground. Clients fear arrest. Sex workers fear exposure. Anyone connected to the space knows that contact with authorities can spiral into investigation, raids, or loss of housing. When violence, coercion, or trafficking occurs, reporting becomes risky rather than safe. A system designed to offer protection ends up producing silence.
This is the central problem with criminalization: it does not eliminate markets. It reshapes them. When an activity continues to exist despite prohibition, it moves into darker, less visible spaces. And invisibility is exactly what traffickers rely on. The more hidden a market becomes, the harder it is to distinguish between consensual participation and coercion. The harder it is to inspect workplaces, reach victims, and intervene early.
Decriminalization is not an endorsement of prostitution. It is not a celebration of the sex industry. It is a harm-reduction strategy. It allows sex work to exist in open, regulated environments where health services, labor protections, and social workers can operate. It lowers the barrier for reporting abuse. It reduces dependence on pimps and third-party “protection.” Most importantly, it makes coercion easier to detect. Trafficking flourishes in secrecy, not in daylight.
Opponents often argue that any legal tolerance increases demand and therefore increases trafficking. This argument assumes a simple linear relationship between legality and exploitation. Reality is more complicated. Demand for commercial sex exists in virtually every society, regardless of legal status. What changes is not whether the market exists, but how it is structured. Evidence from multiple countries suggests that criminalized systems are associated with higher rates of violence against sex workers and lower rates of reporting abuse. Decriminalized or regulated systems consistently show better health outcomes and greater contact with support services. No model is perfect. But some clearly produce less harm than others.
My position is not rooted in ideological purity. I am not interested in being a perfectly consistent libertarian. I am interested in fewer exploited women. I am interested in policies that measurably reduce suffering, even when they clash with my moral instincts. Disliking an activity does not obligate me to support the most punitive response available. It obligates me to ask what actually works.
If the goal is to reduce demand, criminal law is a blunt instrument. Law can punish behavior. It cannot manufacture empathy, reshape desire, or build healthy sexual norms. Long-term change comes from education. From teaching boys that desire does not equal entitlement. From teaching consent as mutual and ongoing. From addressing how pornography shapes expectations. From challenging cultural narratives that treat women as consumable products. These interventions are slow. They are unsatisfying. They do not generate dramatic headlines. But they target the roots of the problem rather than its surface.
The reaction to my comment in Bat Yam illustrates a broader political failure. We have become addicted to policies that feel morally satisfying, even when they perform poorly. We confuse harshness with seriousness. We treat complexity as betrayal. Anyone who suggests a less punitive approach is immediately suspected of sympathy for the very harm they are trying to reduce.
I do not support prostitution. I do not support trafficking. I support fewer women being beaten, raped, and controlled by criminal networks. If decriminalization achieves that better than criminalization, then decriminalization is the responsible choice, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us feel.
Good policy is often counterintuitive. It rarely aligns with our emotional reflexes. Growing up politically means accepting that reality. Not everything that feels right works. Not everything that works feels right. The question is not what satisfies our anger. The question is what leaves fewer people trapped in rooms like the one that was raided in Bat Yam.
