Over the last 30 years, the governments of various Western democracies have made significant changes in their approach to managing prostitution. However, little consensus exists on the most appropriate legislative response. In various countries, attempts to adopt a new legislative approach whether to enact or repeal criminal penalties have sparked fierce controversy.
Though the similarities between these legislative approaches are not always immediately apparent, all of them express the aims of both protecting the health and safety of sex workers, and preventing their exploitation by pimps or clients.
In Australia, most forms of prostitution have been decriminalized in the Australian Capital Territory, but some controls remain in place, such as registration requirements and a prohibition on street sex work. Meanwhile, a similar decriminalization approach is currently being adopted in the state of Victoria, replacing the previous regime of legalization with strict controls and regulations.
A fully decriminalized regime has been in place in New Zealand since Local governments are permitted to introduce their own regulations concerning certain activities, and some have done so, most of them striving to confine sex work to specified areas of cities. In the Netherlands in , the law prohibiting prostitution was replaced by a new system of legalization that tightly regulated sex work occurring in registered businesses.
However, an increasing proportion of sex work in the Netherlands occurs illegally. A similar situation prevails in some counties within the state of Nevada in the United States U. This exception sets it apart from prohibitionist jurisdictions that dominate in the U. The divergence of opinion in this country over prostitution and street solicitation is visible in the constitutional court challenges launched and the government and parliamentary reviews undertaken in the past several decades, culminating in a Supreme Court decision in which a number of criminal law prohibitions were struck down as unconstitutional.
