Last week I pointed out that there was a prostitution problem which had spilled into some residential neighborhoods in San Francisco. Neighbors complained about the noise from cars cruising the street, but they also saw trafficked girls being victimized by pimps:

…neighbors told us the situation has become dangerous, with presumed pimps seen violently attacking sex workers and threatening residents.

“They not only intimidate the women and manhandle them aggressively, they also sometimes intimidate the neighbors,” said one resident named Christina.

On Tuesday, City Supervisor Hillary Ronen announced that she was introducing legislation to legalize prostitution in San Francisco.

Statement calling for the Legalization of Sex Work: "None of these strategies deal w the underlying issues & reality that sex work happens in San Francisco & everywhere in the world. It is time to recognize this & move towards decriminalization & ultimately legalization." 1/3 pic.twitter.com/iDaqw7OalL

— Hillary Ronen (@HillaryRonen) February 15, 2023

According to Ronen, this will help “combat trafficking” and “reduce violence against sex workers.”

& unhealthy practices in this line of work. Today I am introducing a resolution asking our State Delegation to introduce a bill to legalize sex work. 3/3

— Hillary Ronen (@HillaryRonen) February 15, 2023

As I said last week, this makes very little sense to me.  Granted there is probably already a lot of prostitution taking place in SF but how will legalizing it reduce trafficking? Michael Shellenberger responded to Ronen’s proposal in a piece co-written by Leighton Woodhouse:

Defenders of legalizing prostitution point to European cities like Berlin as a model. In 2002, Germany defined prostitution as a profession and gave “sex workers” the right to health care, a pension, and unemployment benefits. Arrests for exploiting prostitutes declined from 1,365 to 45 between 2000 and 2014. “The law governing sex trafficking was not modified,” notes an analyst, “yet there were less than half as many trafficking cases in 2014 than in 2000…. The decline may mean that legalization reduced the involvement of bad actors.”

But sex trafficking increased in Germany upon legalization, according to one quantitative study of 150 countries, a correlation that holds for countries across the globe that legalize prostitution. A police detective responsible for investigating and prosecuting human trafficking in Germany said in 2020 that for two decades, there had been a degradation of conditions for prostitutes and a reduction in the state’s ability or willingness to prosecute organized crime and abuse, resulting directly from legalization…

Even the analyst quoted above, who is sympathetic to the German model, acknowledged, “Many of the madams [in Germany] are connected to organized crime networks based outside of Belgium, and they exercise tight control over the African or Eastern European women working for them.”…

One study showed that sex customers in Germany, where prostitution is fully legal, reported witnessing sex trafficking more than their counterparts in the UK, Scotland, and the United States, where prostitution is fully or partly illegal, and reporting it to authorities less.

The same study showed that German sex customers were more likely than their counterparts in other countries to regard prostitutes as “unrapeable,” meaning that johns can do whatever they want to prostitutes without their consent.

This story follows a report earlier this month about San Francisco’s failure to protect a 14-year-old girl who was being trafficked.

A 14-year-old girl is being sex trafficked by MS-13 gang members in a housing project in the Hunter’s Point neighborhood of San Francisco, say private investigators working for an anti-child trafficking nonprofit organization. Public has learned the girl’s name and interviewed her grandmother, who said the girl, an orphan traumatized by the death of her parents, fled foster care last summer…

Last summer, California’s Child Protective Services issued a no-bail warrant for the girl’s rescue and yet, on the evening of January 11, officers at the San Francisco Bayview Police Station failed to act on urgent information provided by the Special Operations investigators.

Former SFPD Gang Investigator Paul Lozada, who is working with Lacey and Special Operations, said he called the SFPD on January 11 and spoke to two supervising officers on two separate work shifts. Both promised to send a patrol car to bring the girl into custody. But when Lozada followed up, he said he was told that the station’s patrol units were tied up responding to “priority calls.”

So City Supervisor Hillary Ronen is asking us to believe that a city that can’t manage to send a patrol car to pick up a 14-year-old being prostituted by MS-13 will reduce trafficking if we just make prostitution legal. Let me suggest that it won’t happen that way. With more girls being trafficked and the ability of pimps to hide behind the legality of prostitution, the problem will get worse. The only difference will be that, because it’s legal, we won’t hear about it as much.