Illicit Trade webinar

Dr. Nicolle Zeegers: The effectiveness of prostitution policy in preventing Human Trafficking

National and international political actors highly contest whether legalization, client criminalization or decriminalization is the best approach to prostitution in the light of preventing forced working and exploitation in the sex industry.

In the presentation, Zeegers will focus on the licensing of sex business that is typically for the legalization approach (The Netherlands) and the treatment of sex services as any other work in the service sector that is typical for decriminalization (New Zealand).

Research into the impact of these different specific policies is desirable because policy choices in the field tend to be highly driven by ideology instead of facts and evidence. However, is it possible to do comparative research into such impact? How to identify what impact would be most relevant and how to measure it?

In the webinar, Zeegers will address the pitfalls of taking numbers on human trafficking as an indicator. Instead, Zeegers proposes to look at whether the mechanisms the regulators intended to implement with a particular policy indeed were activated.

You can sign up for the webinar by contacting sustainablesociety@rug.nl

About dr. Nicolle Zeegers

Nicolle Zeegers is assistant professor of political science at the department of Transboundary Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Groningen. She researches prostitution, assisted reproductive technologies and gender quota policies from a comparative law and politics perspective.

Zeegers co-edited a special issue of Regulation& Governance on ‘The Governance of Prostitution via Intermediaries’ and contributed with Eva-Maria Euchner (2022), ‘Indirect moral governance in prostitution policy: How regulators incorporate stigmatized actors in intermediation processes’, Regulation &Governance, 16, 801-817 .