STDs, Rape Decreased When Prostitution Legal in Rhode Island

LOS ANGELES—A new study by researchers from UCLA and Baylor University found that during the six years when, as AVN previously reported, it became known that indoor prostitution was legal in Rhode Island, the incidence of gonorrhea among women in the state decreased by 39 percent, while the number of rapes reported to police decreased by 31 percent. The study was conducted by Scott Cunningham of Baylor and Manisha Shah of UCLA, and the latter researcher paid a visit today to KCRW radio's "Press Play" program, hosted by Madeleine Brand. According to Shah, prostitution in Rhode Island was actually made legal in 1980 when legislators, concerned about citizen complaints about a rise in streetwalking in Providence, the state capital, changed state law to make such activity illegal, and for good measure, made pimping and human sexual trafficking crimes as well. However, what they didn't realize was that in changing the language of the law and deleting certain terms and phrases, they had inadvertently made it legal to conduct a prostitution business as long as the sexual activity took place indoors, in a brothel or massage parlor. The inadvertent legalization wasn't made public until 2003, when police in Providence raided two massage parlors under a program they dubbed "Operation Rubdown." The defendant prostitutes hired Michael Kiselica as their attorney, and it was through his legal research that the women were acquitted at trial when the legal status of indoor prostitution came to light—and within two years, that legality was well-known across the state, if not New England in its entirety. After debating the issue for several years, lawmakers finally revamped the law in 2009 to make indoor prostitution illegal once again. "The push for recriminalization probably started by some folks in 2005, 2006, but it took quite a while for the law to pass because there was quite a lot of debate about whether or not it should be recriminalized," Shah said. Shah's and Cunningham's research revealed that almost as soon as the massage parlor women were acquitted, advertising for sexual services increased dramatically, both in "underground" newspapers like the Providence Phoenix, on websites like Total Erotic Review, and anywhere else online where ads for the services could be placed. But the decriminalized paid sexual activity turned out to have unexpected benefits, as the researchers found. "A lot of the literature on sex markets has focused on disease transmission because in a lot of places, we worry that sex markets are places where you have the spread of sexually transmitted infections from sex workers to the general adult population," Shah said during her interview. "So we said, let's look at gonorrhea [which] is one of these STIs which is really associated with risky heterosexual markets. We were able to get good data from the CDC and one of the first things we find is that post-2003, post-decriminalization of indoor prostitution, we're finding decreases in gonorrhea incidence among the population of heterosexual men, and that's big finding number one. "There's a lot of data suggesting that indoor sex work is a lot safer than street work, in that people tend to use condoms more, disease prevalence is lower, and one thing we find is that post-2003, women are a lot less likely to engage in anal sex, which is the riskiest type of sex one can have, and they're much more likely to be using condoms [and] providing oral sex with condoms, so it looks like their behavior is getting safer post-decriminalization," Shah added. "You also have all these new entrants into the market, and you have this supply increase. A lot of the new entrants tend to be lower risk, so when you change a sexual network, even if more people are having sex, if you're infusing safer people into that network, there's possibilities for disease incidents to actually decrease." The researchers also found that reports of rape decreased nearly one-third from pre-legalization figures. "The FBI collects uniform crime reports data, and they have data on forcible rape offenses, and when we looked at rape as an outcome, we found that along with decriminalization, we also find decreases in rape incidents." While Shah and Cunningham could come to no clear conclusions why sexual violence decreased, they had a couple of theories. "We hypothesize that these sex workers are probably more likely to report rape after indoor sex work has been decriminalized than they were before," Shah noted. "There's another hypothesis, that there's these men that might substitute between rape and prostitution, and we do find a pretty significant correlation between men who both admit to seeing prostitutes and men who admit to raping, and so one potential hypothesis is when these markets grow, with supply increasing and prices decreasing, there might be some men on the margin where, if 'all of a sudden I can buy sex a lot cheaper than I could buy it before, maybe I'm going to be more likely to go to see a prostitute rather than raping.'" Interestingly, the Washington Post covered the study last week, but rather than do any real investigation on legalized prostitution, they went to "resources" like anti-prostitution activist Melissa Farley, who claimed that, "Women in prostitution generally describe it as paid rape. That’s what if feels like to them." The Post also found Kristen Berg of the "feminist organization" Equality Now, who opined, "Demand fuels trafficking. With the demand for commercial sex, there's an incentive for traffickers to traffic women and girls to these locations. With increased demand, you’d expect to see increased supply." However, the opposite appears to have been true in Rhode Island: It was the influx of prostitutes post-decriminalization which led to an increased demand for the services—and lower prices. Another long-time anti-prostitution (and anti-porn) activist the Post consulted was Donna Hughes, who is actually a professor at the University of Rhode Island, and the article claims that while she considered supporting the "Swedish model" where prostitutes are not criminalized but their customers are, she decided to go with criminalizing both. "The situation was so horrible in Rhode Island, that the pimps and traffickers were operating with absolute impunity," she said. "They [sex workers] have heard that, and they laugh at it," countered attorney Kiselica. "The frontline workers, the girls, they were free to move around, and would do so if one of the other places offered them a more attractive working environment or a better clientele." Ah, well; Americans are not likely to see an "experiment" like that again anytime soon—and sadly, neither politicians nor law enforcement nor the criminal justice system are likely to learn anything from Rhode Island's example.