Crimes against Morality: Unintended Consequences of Criminalizing Sex Work

The regulation of sex work is a hotly debated issue in both low‐ and high‐​income countries, and sex work persists with varying degrees of legality around the world. In 2015, Amnesty International brought this debate into the spotlight by passing a resolution calling for the decriminalization of sex work, arguing that decriminalization is the best way to defend sex workers’ human rights against violations such as exclusion from health care. A Lancet series claims that decriminalizing sex work would greatly affect the course of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemics across all settings, averting 33–46 percent of HIV infections in the next decade.