Unfortunately, legal sex work is often exploited as a safe haven for human trafficking. High end escorting is actually likely to be at the lower end of risk, but is ultimately too tiny of a niche for policymakers to care about preserving.
The reality is that despite being spun to a willing press as "human trafficking raids", these raids extremely rarely involve any human trafficking, and 99% of the woman being arrested, having their money confiscated, given criminal records, have their photos and names published online, lose their children etc. are in fact those same marginalized women who the state purports to want to help/save.
You misspelled 'illegal' - people being unable to go to the police is traffickers' preferred situation.
Legalisation, thereby making the same worker protections available as to everybody else, is precisely how to screw them over.
The messaging saying otherwise is largely from conservative and/or radfem organisations who're trying to get people to conflate prostitution and trafficking because they want to wipe out all prostitution, not just the coerced stuff.
There's a strong parallel to the war on drugs here - criminalisation largely benefits the criminals.
> There's a strong parallel to the war on drugs here - criminalisation largely benefits the criminals.
The obvious difference is that one can easily supply drugs in a legal market without engaging in other socially harmful behaviors. A closer analogy is trade in endangered animals. When you ban, e.g. the ivory trade and deprive it of a market, this has a direct effect on how many elephants get poached. Trying to regulate that trade more finely and preserve legal supply only makes things easier for those who engage in illegal activities, who can now misrepresent themselves as being part of a legal market.
Making it impossible for people who're being abused to go to the police without risking at least one of arrest, homelessness, or having their children taken away, is not a net win.
The idea that making it easier to contact the police about the genuinely coercive stuff would somehow make it easy for the people doing the coercion isn't logical.
You can see the process play out just the same with illegal immigrants - they're also massively more open to abuse from employers because they don't have full access to the criminal justice system.
So let's crack down harder on trafficking if the traffickers are doing illegal things. Your argument is like "online fraud is rampant" let's make purchasing items online illegal because we can't stop the fraud.
