This house would criminalise the purchase of sex - poll result and moderator's report card

Dear debaters and readers, I would like to start by thanking you for a very interesting debate. The participants gave very interesting arguments and examples about the delicate question of the purchase of sex.

Proposers clearly won the vote with an unquestionable 68%. But allow me to detail the course of the debate to determine the winner of the debate.
 

The first clash point already appeared in the opening speeches, where MD told us that the issue was the suppression of prostitution itself whereas LK, though admitting that there was a problem about prostitution, said it was about the working conditions of the prostitute and not about the ‘job’ itself. A good point was that he gave a counter proposal to the bill through fully legalizing prostitution. He then went on saying that the bill would hurt prostitutes by reducing the number of their clients, would create hidden networks with worse conditions for the girls, and would condemn people who only responded to their sexual urges. Those arguments should have appeared later in the debate and he could have gone deeper into defining prostitution as a work, which proved to be a burning issue later on. MD did his part quite well since he gave us the situation in other countries and a better contextualization.
 

A lot of interesting arguments appeared in the rebuttal speeches, especially in GQ’s proposing one. Indeed, though his rebuttal about ‘sexual urges’ was quite unconvincing, he leaned on MD’s example of Scandinavia to back an interesting financial point to rebut LK’s argument about the diminution of the number of clients. He also said that the bill would reduce the number of clients thus the size of networks (which also leaned on his previous financial point), thus rebutting another of the opposition’s arguments. Finally, he luckily mentioned that this bill should be viewed as a first step, which kind of resolved the apparent contradiction that JB tried to point out between improving the working conditions and making the activity disappear, rendering JB’s point way weaker. JB’s major argument was about the freedom of the individual to choose his activity, which is denied by government ruling through such a bill. He also introduced the question of how to practically enforce such a law and the advantages (police and doctors versus thugs and Mafiosi) of legalization, which were potent arguments that might have deserved a little more development.
 

The closing speeches were unsettling, first because they both begun with doubtable arguments. MLF started by begging the question, saying that prostitution was not a work thus rendering void the question of working conditions, thus making prostitution the central issue and forbidding the question of legalizing prostitution as a work. And MM said that free-willing prostitutes were not such a minority without any figures whereas MLF was saying that 80% of them were forcefully brought from Eastern Europe. The opposer also said that there was a need to work on fighting forced prostitution before passing such a bill as the one discussed here when GQ explained how the bill would fight networks (MLF reminds us of that) and thus implicitly fight forced prostitution itself.
 

I will thus end by giving the victory to the proposers for their very good debate, especially since they rebutted the opposing arguments very well and they had a greater variety of arguments. Congratulations to both teams and especially to the proposers who won both the vote and the argument.

by JM