Talk:Prostitution by region

Redirects

If you find yourself redirected here from a "Prostitution in X Country" page, my apologies. I went through and noticed that the majority of the "prostitution in X country" pages had a single line of text, not even a full summary. The subject itself is notable, so I preserved the information by simply copying and pasting all of the data from each individual page, onto this compilation page, and then having the original page redirect.

With as little information as was available on each individual page, it seemed to make more sense to have a "survey"-esque encyclopedia entry, that can later be expanded as information for each country is added. MycroftHolmes4 (talk) 20:03, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Article improvement suggestion

I suggest dividing the sections up in tables split up by the legal status; an example based on Europe would look something like this:

Illegal	Restricted	Legal And Regulated
Andorra Austria Belarus Iceland Lithuania Russia Sweden Ukraine	Czech Republic Denmark Estonia France Republic of Ireland Italy Portugal	Germany Hungary Netherlands Turkey United Kingdom

The table itself needs work (yes, I know, I’m not good with Wikipedia tables), but this would allow readers to see instantly what the general status of any given country is (especially if they’re looking for example of places where it is banned or legal specifically, which is what brought me here). (Just a thought.)174.25.104.203 (talk) 18:24, 12 May 2010 (UTC)A REDDSON

That's done somewhat in Prostitution and the law, but ultimately the 3-way division is much too simplistic and needs to be revisited. Kuguar03 (talk) 02:05, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that what the law says and what is done are quite different things. Prostitution thrives everywhere. --Michael Goodyear (talk) 16:28, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Organisation

I don't really see the point of a partial list of country links under the regions that already have their own main pages. They should be replaced with summaries of the region instead. --Michael Goodyear (talk) 16:26, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Israel

Israeli law is very similar to the Swedish and Norwegian laws. Client and client only commits a crime, period. 84.108.174.49 (talk) 01:43, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Canada

Color for Canada should be also changed as it now has Nordic laws — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noob2013 (talk • contribs) 12:10, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Speaking of the colored illustrations, on a couple of them I can't tell the difference between the green and the dark blue. I don't know if they were pre-made images, but should be edited. Rwdmars (talk) 09:54, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

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What does "illegal" mean?

Does "illegal mean that it is illegal for everyone involved? That is, are all aspects of prostitution illegal? Is it both illegal to sell sex and to pay for sex? What about pimping? There are many aspects of this industry. It would be helpful with better explanation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.210.115.70 (talk) 20:08, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Legality of prostitution in Oceania which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 00:31, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Consider Adding Chart?

Graphic in upper-right is very helpful. Would it be possible to make a chart summarizing those findings? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 35.1.58.219 (talk) 21:30, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Has this article lost it's way?

The article starts This is a list of countries by prostitution statistics, yet apart from the table of number of prostitutes added recently there are few statistics.

A lot of the content is duplicated in the Prostitution in {continent} articles, and the lists of countries are duplicated in the templates at the bottom of this page. There are also details of some countries, but the choice of countries has no logic to it.

I'm not sure how the article could be improved or even what the purpose of the article really is.

I would suggest this article should be a list of all the "Prostitution in ..." articles, including the less easily found article such as Prostitution in Kolkata and Prostitution in colonial India. A sort of "site map" of "Prostitution in ..." articles. John B123 (talk) 17:25, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Some of the discussion above seems to echo your concerns. I'm not sure why this article was originally created, but it looks like it might have been an alternative to having many one-line country articles. Now that they have mostly all been expanded into full articles, that aim would no longer be relevant. The suggestion of converting this article to a list article is interesting, but I can't quite figure out how to do it. I'm assuming we would need a WP:STANDALONE list of some sort, probably just an alphabetized list, but I'm having trouble finding a title. List articles generally have formulaic beginnings to their titles, such as "List of...". The simplest one I can think of is List of prostitution-related articles by country, but this misleadingly sounds like it lists all prostitution-related articles (including articles such as brothel) and groups them by country. Broad titles such as List of prostitution-related articles or List of sex-work-related articles might be more suitable for an WP:OUTLINE (if we want to sort all the prostitution- or sex-work-related subjects into sections) or even an Index (CAT:IOT) if we want to get involved with the WP contents system. I'm not sure whether we can simply use the existing title for a list article – would that be your proposal? There's also the Prostitution law article which in part attempts to sort counties into groups on the basis of their sex-work legislation and which probably also needs significant reform. But overall... yes I agree that this article would benefit from being slimmed down in some way to remove most of the duplication. One either question: where would you intend to put your new table of "Numbers of prostitutes per country"? - Polly Tunnel (talk) 13:57, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

@Polly Tunnel: The article history bears out your thoughts on the origin, and as you point out is it really needed now? Agree the title isn't really suitable for a list of 'Prostitution in .....' articles. It would seem there are a couple of options, one of course is to delete it. If you consider the 'Prostitution in continent' articles are parent articles to 'Prostitution in country', then this article could be a parent to the continent articles. Following that logic then it could be divided into continents (much as it is currently). There's no need to list countries as we have templates for that, so the Africa section may look like:

Africa

---

Main article: Prostitution in Africa

  Prostitution legal and regulated

  Prostitution (the exchange of sex for money) legal, but brothels are illegal; prostitution is not regulated

  Prostitution illegal

  No data

Prostitution is illegal in the majority of African countries. HIV/AIDS infection rates are particularly high among African sex workers.

Nevertheless, it is common, driven by the widespread poverty in many sub-Saharan African countries, and is one of the drivers for the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Social breakdown and poverty caused by civil war in several African countries has caused further increases in the rate of prostitution in those countries. For these reasons, some African countries have also become destinations for sex tourism.

Long distance truck drivers have been identified as a group with the high-risk behaviour of sleeping with prostitutes and a tendency to spread the infection along trade routes in the region. Infection rates of up to 33% were observed in this group in the late 1980s in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Prostitution in African areas

Sovereign states

Algeria - Angola - Benin - Botswana - Burkina Faso - Burundi - Cameroon - Cape Verde - Central African Republic - Chad - Comoros - Democratic Republic of the Congo - Republic of the Congo - Djibouti - Egypt - Equatorial Guinea Eritrea - Ethiopia - Gabon - The Gambia - Ghana - Guinea - Guinea-Bissau - Ivory Coast - Kenya - Lesotho - Liberia - Libya - Madagascar - Malawi - Mali - Mauritania - Mauritius - Morocco - Mozambique - Namibia - Niger - Nigeria - Rwanda - São Tomé and Príncipe - Senegal - Seychelles - Sierra Leone - Somalia - South Africa - South Sudan - Sudan - Swaziland - Tanzania - Togo - Tunisia - Uganda - Zambia - Zimbabwe

States with limited recognition

Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic - Somaliland

Dependencies and other territories

Ascension Island - Canary Islands - Ceuta - Madeira - Mayotte - Melilla - Réunion - Saint Helena - Tristan da Cunha - Western Sahara

This also gets rid of the acres of white space on the page. The 'Country details' section could be deleted (after checking the info is included in the individual country's articles). The 'Numbers of prostitutes per country' could be moved to its own article, say List of countries by number of prostitutes.

Looking at the bigger picture, The list of 'Prostitution in ...' articles could possibly be called List of prostitution by area articles, possibly less ambiguous than List of prostitution-related articles by country? I prefer 'area' rather than 'country' as there are a few, such as Prostitution in Nevada, than aren't countries. My thoughts were a hierarchical list divided by continent. e.g.:

• Prostitution in the Americas

• Prostitution in Argentina

- - - (omitted other countries) - - -

• Prostitution in the United States
  • Prostitution in Hawaii
  • Prostitution in Nevada
  • Prostitution in Rhode Island

An WP:OUTLINE article would also be good, or perhaps a list of lists, similar to Lists of philosophers? John B123 (talk) 17:52, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

@John B123: There are lots of ideas here:

1. I notice that pornography articles (which wrestle with the same sort of national organisation issues) have a Pornography by region article but no Pornography by country article (that just redirects to Pornography by region). The motivation for the creation of Pornography by region appears to be the same as was the case here: national entries too small for their own articles. This article could probably be re-titled Prostitution by region. As I understand it, the inclusion of Prostitution in Oceania (a region rather than a continent) would stop us using the title Prostitution by continent. The pruning you suggest sounds good. My main query concerns the regional templates. I assume you are proposing to group these together at the bottom of the article, as is conventional?
2. There are other "List of countries by number of..." articles, so a new List of countries by number of prostitutes would make good home for the table. This article's Prostitution by country#Numbers of prostitutes per country section could be tagged for a potential WP:SPLIT.
3. With regard to the possibility of an article which is a list of national prostitution articles, replacing "country" with "area" sounds like a good idea to allow the inclusion of sub-national articles. (Of course, some people would argue that such sub-national articles should be merged into their national articles). The hierarchical list you suggest should work fine. I like to try and get article titles that sound as natural as possible, and so I'd prefer to use the words by area at the end, as in List of prostitution-related articles by area. However, list article titles ending with by X are often understood to indicate how entries in the list are ranked, as in List of United States cities by area. The title List of prostitution-related articles by area could imply that we were going to include things like Soapland along with Prostitution in Japan under a Japan subheading. By this measure even a List of articles about prostitution by area, which reads quite smoothly, could be confusing. In the end I can't think of anything better than using prostitution-by-area as a noun phrase acting as a compound modifier, so we'll probably need to include those hyphens per MOS:HYPHEN. The most conventional form for a list article title, List of X-related articles, produces the ungainly List of prostitution-by-area-related articles. So overall I really can't think of a better title than List of prostitution-by-area articles.
4. An Outline of Prostitution (or perhaps a broader Outline of Sex Work) article would be great if you're interested in putting one together. I'm not sure how to do a WP:LISTOFLISTS as we don't yet have many list articles on this subject to make a list of.

There's certainly a lot of work to do here, but it all sounds worthwhile if you've got the time to undertake some of it. I can, of course, help as my own time permits. - Polly Tunnel (talk) 15:10, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

@Polly Tunnel: Taking you points in order:

1. Prostitution by region for this article sound good to me, (far better than on the Italian WP equivalent of this page it:Prostituzione nel mondo - Prostitution in the world!). I did intend the relevant regional template to be in each section rather than all at the bottom. Although conventionally go at the bottom, I think there are several reasons to put them in the sections. Normally they perform a 'related articles' function so the bottom is the most appropriate place for them in terms of importance on the page. On this page we are using them to replace the existing list of links to articles within that region so they are performing a menu function rather than a related items function. By default, if you have more than one of these templates on a page, they are collapsed. Some readers wont realise that they can be expanded and the purpose of the template is lost. If you set them all to be open by default to counteract that, the 5 templates open all together is a bit overwhelming and people may just skip over that part of the page. Putting the template in the section gives a 'bite size chunk' that's more readable than all 5 templates together. It seems logical to have all the information on a section together on the page. As the graphics are longer than the text in each section, we end up with lots of white space on the page. Putting the template under the text and beside the bottom of the graphic improves the look of the page and reduces the amount of scrolling needed to get from top to bottom of the page.
2. List of countries by number of prostitutes also sounds good, I'll add the WP:SPLIT tag.
3. I agree List of prostitution-by-area articles is accurate without being unwieldy.
4. Looking at the examples on WP:OUTLINE, they seem to be suffering from WP:CHOKING. Outline of chess looks really good, but by a third of the way through I'd lost interest. If I were designing a web page to do this I'd have collapsible sections so you just clicked on a heading to see more about that topic rather than wade through the whole page, but I don't think that's possible on WP? A WP:LISTOFLISTS would be more user friendly but obviously we need to create the lists. I'm happy to spend some time on this.

John B123 (talk) 20:02, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi @John B123:

I think this article can probably be boldly WP:MOVED to Prostitution by region (I suspect it's an uncontroversial move) on the basis that the scope of the article has changed, requiring its descriptive name to change too. This will be easier to justify if we've already removed the country-link lists, so we probably ought to do that first.

According to WP:NAV, regional templates that are navboxes (like the ones we have here) are "designed to sit at the very bottom of articles" and "placed at the very bottom of articles". I don't have a personal objection to your proposal, but it's quite possible that someone else may. Unfortunately sidebars don't make a particularly useful alternative. Although they are the type of navigational template designed to be used further up the article, it says they are "useful for smaller amounts of directly relevant links" and "few articles have more than one sidebar". I guess the easiest way to find out if anyone objects to the unorthodox use of regional templates you propose is to boldly do it, as no one else appears to be interested in this discussion. It's worth noting that in WP:TMPG it says "templates should not normally be used to store article text" so we need to make sure that anything on the templates can also be accessed by a different route, such as the Main article links.

As regards the possibility of collapsible sections, I believe that technically they can be coded if you know how to use CSS. However, this is also very non-standard approach to page layout and likely to accrue objections. MOS:COLLAPSE indicates that content collapsed by default should be avoided for accessibility reasons.

Polly Tunnel (talk) 12:32, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree that it makes sense to move this to Prostitution by region considering its current format. I think List of countries by number of prostitutes is kinda awkward: these sources are of wildly different quality, many countries have multiple and clashing sources that could be used, and some are so poorly cited I can't even work out where they came from, so trying to create a numbered list in its own article is inherently a mess of WP:OR. (I have no problem with an article that isn't numbered list, but it doesn't fit at that title.) I think List of prostitution-by-area articles is a mess: a summary-style breakout from this page to the regions to the countries, as well as a good category system, deals with the problem of finding those articles just fine. The Drover's Wife (talk) 21:32, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

@Polly Tunnel: Hi. I agree moving the page is probably not controversial. Also agree we should get the page as we want it before moving. Looking at Template:Navbox (which the regional templates are based on), they don't display on mobiles. If we remove the existing country links then the page becomes a dead end on mobiles. I've added a 'navbox' that doesn't use a template to the Africa demo above so it displays on mobiles. You can make a collapsible list or section just with css, but unfortunately it only works on desktops. (It uses the hover function, which as you have no cursor on a touch screen you can never hover). On a mobile you need to use css and javascript. As far as I'm aware you can't add javascript to a WP page. I've started a discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sexology and sexuality/Sex work task force about Outline of Prostitution John B123 (talk) 21:53, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

@The Drover's Wife: I agree totally that statistics on number of sex workers in a country differs wildly dependant on the source. Often they are biased towards whatever the organisation doing the research wants the results to be. In other cases, or sometimes as well as, the methodology used to extrapolate the result from a small sample is questionable. The figures in the table at Prostitution by country#Numbers of prostitutes per country are mainly from UNAIDS 2016 Country Factsheets. I chose to use UNAIDS figures as they are neutral on their views on prostitution, and by using the same source it gives some consistency. Whilst UNAIDS figures may not be totally accurate in absolute terms, any errors in methodology are likely to be repeated over different countries so relative numbers between countries is probably more accurate. e.g country A has twice as many sex workers than country B is likely to be acceptably close. The proposal was to move the table as is to its own page rather than a number list ordered by number of prostitutes per country. John B123 (talk) 22:21, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Split off Prostitution by country#Numbers of prostitutes per country to List of countries by number of prostitutes. Moved this article to Prostitution by region John B123 (talk) 20:47, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Legality map

@The Drover's Wife: I notice you have removed the map with the comment this map is ridiculously incorrect. What parts are incorrect? John B123 (talk) 22:44, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Many of these maps which purport to show legality really struggle with anything that isn't unambiguously "illegal" and get utterly confused about the differences between jurisdictions, in turn misleading the hell out of most readers. The "legal and regulated" "legal but organised activities are banned and prostitution is not regulated" categories in particular mangle all sorts of different jurisdictions. They assume common understandings of concepts like "regulated" in this context that just don't exist. Completely decriminalised New South Wales and New Zealand are thrown into the same category as extraordinarily strictly regulated Nevada, effectively-criminalised South Australia is thrown in the same category as completely-legal-but-brothels-are-banned Northern Territory, etc. New Zealand, Nevada, Mexico and Queensland are given the same category, even though none of these approaches have anything in common: hell, Mexico has laws that differ by state but is totally lost on the author of this. These distinctions are completely meaningless: the only things jurisdictions within the categories actually have in common are the legal status of brothels, but the map attempts to draw them out as much broader categories that are just nonsense. The Drover's Wife (talk) 22:55, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I've been intending to look at these maps for a while now but have never got around to it. There have been a few Prostitution in ... articles that have been inaccurate and also the tables in the Prostitution in regions have had inaccuracies. I've suspected that these inaccuracies have been carried over to the maps. However these are different issues to the ones you've raised. One of the problems with WP is who do you aim the pages at. Some people just want an overview, other people want as much detail as they can get. For example say an article on car brakes. Some people just want to know there are two types of brakes, drum or disc. To them how may pistons a caliper has, or if it's floating are trivial differences. To others those differences are hugely important. Putting that into the context of the map, 'regulated' may be as much as some people need to know, but to others regulation, as you've pointed out, is far too broad a category. Looking at academic studies, NGO reports, government discussions on prostitution on prostitution policy etc, prostitution legality seems to be divided into 5 types: Prohibition, Abolitionism, Neo-Abolitionism. Legalisation and Decriminalisation. These roughly correspond to the categorises on the map. I agree that these categories are very broad and are far from ideal, but they seem to be the accepted way of categorising the types of legislation. John B123 (talk) 00:52, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

The problem is that the overview it had is not just simplified, it's wrong. It's portraying vastly different systems as if they're one and the same - and it has extremely serious consequences for public policy if people can't tell the difference between (to use a particularly extreme example) Nevada and New Zealand when they try to understand the concept of legal sex work (but at the same time having another category referring to legal sex work with different countries picked out quasi-randomly). We're not doing our readers any favours if we feed them nonsense in the name of...having a pretty map: even as an overview, it tells them precisely nothing useful. Even "regulated" - it's not just broad, it means vastly different things in different contexts - it literally tells the reader nothing rather than that it's not completely illegal. If the article is going to have categories, the ones you used actually have meaning: sex workers internationally use "criminalisation", "legalisation" and "decriminalisation" as well as something to refer to the Nordic model since it's neither strictly legalisation nor criminalisation (not sure I understand your difference between "abolitionism" and "neo-abolitionism", never heard that before), but apart from that we're on the same track.

So there's a potential solution there, if people really want a map and if someone wants to draw one up. But the second problem is that it's really, really hard to get your head around the various jurisdictions, because you need to actually understand the law in each individual country - and any states/provinces if they have control over prostitution law. This is much easier if we use your categories - because basically everything that isn't criminalisation, decriminalisation or Nordic model is legalisation - but you still have to understand what's going on to be able to do it. Too often it involves someone skim-reading stuff they don't understand (often off Wikipedia articles that are questionable in the first place) and turning up a result that feels right to them but is so full of holes it's half-fiction. If people want the pretty map, they need to do the hard groundwork of (for example) ensuring they've actually understood what the law is in places like Mexico with its state-level laws. Too often, it falls so short that (as happened here) even the fairly well-known legal jurisdictions (like Australia) are pretty wrong. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:26, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

The term neo-abolitionism seems to have replaced the terms Nordic or Swedish model. This Canadian Government article gives an overview of the different legislation models. It's worth noting they categorise New Zealand as decriminalised, but Nevada as Legalization. As I've been going through expanding or creating Prostitution in .. articles, I have noticed some are wrong after taking the time to find out what the legal situation was. (Articles on African countries seem to be particularly poor in this area.) I did have an intention of updating the maps once I'd finished going through the individual prostitution in articles (and was confident that the articles were correct).

If we are going to use these 5 different models as the 'standard' (which I think would be hard to argue against as they have international recognition at high level, both political and academic), then perhaps we need to make that consistent across WP. Updating Prostitution law would be one of the first steps. John B123 (talk) 10:40, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the Canadian Parliament link - that's really interesting, and I'd never heard of the distinction before. I'm a bit iffy on the concept of "abolitionism" (meaning the British approach) because I've never heard of it (especially given the impact on Australian law) - I think I'd want to see some more evidence that people other than the Canadian Parliament call it that before we adopted it here. Using "neo-abolitionism" over "Nordic model" makes sense though: the term Nordic model is a bit of a misnomer these days because there are numerous quite different takes on the idea, so it's good to have a broader term for those regimes. Apart from that, no objections here - I think that would be a massive improvement and would be totally on board. The Drover's Wife (talk) 22:34, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Here's a couple from the Council of Europe Prostitution – which stance to take? see Appendix 1 (although they use "regulationist" rather than "Legalization") and Documents WORKING PAPERS see section 5 Page 83. Going back to your point about people not understanding in depth prostitution laws and making statements based on a brief overview, this book seems to suggest Britain has adopted a watered down version of the Swedish model. In reality, the basic principles of British prostitution law predate the Swedish model by a century. John B123 (talk) 00:43, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for that. The Drover's Wife (talk) 03:41, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@The Drover's Wife: - I've finally got to a position where I can start updating the maps. As well as the 5 different models we discussed above, I've also added 'Legality varies with local laws' to cover Nevada, Mexico etc. Looking at Australia, I was thinking of:

• Decriminalisation: New South Wales
• Legislation: Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory, Queensland,
• Abolitionism: South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia

The divisions between different models are not clear cut at times. For example. wasn't sure about Northern Territory, but added it to Legislation as agencies are regulated, but equally it could be argued to add to Abolitionism as brothels are illegal. With your greater local knowledge, your thoughts would be appreciated. Cheers John B123 (talk) 19:56, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

I'd describe Victoria as legalisation (I'm Victorian these days) - it's just a more Nevada-style legalisation than most places. I'd also describe Tasmania as legalisation. I'd also agree with your initial judgment about the Northern Territory. I'm a bit conflicted about how to describe South Australia: because the concept of "abolitionism" as a regulatory approach isn't really used much here (which is why I'd never heard of it, though it makes sense), people generally describe it as criminalisation, but I think it meets your definition of abolitionism. That one could go either way, but I think abolitionism is fine. Everything else I think is pretty apt. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:30, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

While we're here, thanks so much for your work on these maps. There are so many terrible maps purporting to depict sex work regulation around the world out there and they're nearly all very wrong because the original authors don't understand the actual models of regulation and/or actual national laws, so it's great to see Wikipedia trying to get it right. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:32, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, and thanks too for your insight into the situation in Australia, I'll update the Oceania map accordingly. "Abolitionism" is a quite recent term initially used by academics, but now seems to be filtering down to more common use, although slowly. I've noticed it used a few times in the press over the past year. John B123 (talk) 21:53, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Hey, one thought I had after this conversation - how are you defining abolitionism here? The Drover's Wife (talk) 19:18, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Hi. "Whilst prostitution itself is legal, 3rd party involvement is generally prohibited. Solicitation is also often prohibited. " John B123 (talk) 19:28, 18 May 2018 (UTC)