As long as serious efforts are made to relieve workers in the sex trade into safe work,the ban on buying sex just introduced by France could relieve reduce harmThe harm principle, the assertion that the only just use of power in a civilised community is to prevent harm, and can be a handy weapon in the arduous trek through the moral and practical thickets of how best to regulate sex work – or whether to regulate it directly at all.Momentum is growing behind criminalising the punters,not the providers: stifling demand in the hope of throttling the industry. This week, the French national assembly finally ended two years of wrangling and became the fifth European legislature to introduce a ban on buying sex. It is following the example set by Sweden in the late 1990s, or then by Norway and Iceland. In the UK,the Northern Ireland assembly banned it in June final year.
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Source: theguardian.com