Well prostitution is not a crime, solicitation is the crimeand running brothels that is a law that should be changed. Brothels would keep the women off the streets ,safe and make sure the instance of desease was much lower. Rape is a heinous crime which I feel you are wrong when you say that the Police ignore , it is difficult in the fact that in a lot of cases the person raped will not give evidence. The penalties for rape in Britain are much too light. A life sentence should be imposed

First I don't think that you can group voluntary prostitution with rape. Although when women are forced to prostitue I consider that rape. 2nd at least where I live I don't think that the justice system ignores sexually battery type crimes. Like others have said they are sometimes hard to prosecute but I don't think they are ignored. 3rd If you do belive that these crimes are ignored why would the answer be to repeal the laws. Wouldn't a better answer be to educate police officers on proper investigation skills and evidence collecting.

My answer only applies to the United States, I don't know enough about other countries to speak more broadly. 1. Rape / sexual assault is taken seriously here. In the 1970's and 1980's, rape laws were expanded to cover rape of a wife, rape of men and boys, and rape with fingers or an object (because so many rapists cannot use their penis -- this way, they can be prosecuted anyhow). "Rape" was changed to "sexual assault" to include assaults that didn't involve intercourse -- forced fellatio or anal sodomy, for example. Those laws are enforced -- unfortunately, there's not enough funding to do DNA testing on all rape evidence taken -- but we're working on that. 2. Rape laws were also revised in most states at that time to put a "slider" into the statutory rape (age of consent) laws. Say your state has a three-year slider and an age of consent of 16. A girl who is 17 cannot be accused of statutory rape for having sex with her 15 year old boyfriend, because they fit within the three year slide. However, if the boy is fifteen and she is 19, she can be arrested. If a boy, aged 15, has sex with a girl aged 11, he can be arrested. It is as if the age of consent has been put on a sliding scale and makes much more sense than treating a 30 year old man and a 17 year old man the same for having sex with a 14 year old girl. These are sometimes called "Romeo and Juliet" laws, because Romeo and Juliet were both teenagers. 3. Prostitution laws vary from state to state, sometimes from county to county. So does their enforcement. I believe that we should change the laws to acknowledge that prostitution will ALWAYS exist, and to ---try to make it safer for the prostitutes,in terms of health, protection from violent or cheating customers, extortion by law enforcement, violent or thieving pimps, etc. ---AND safer for the general public (in terms of diseases spreading into the non-prostitute community; or danger to women who live near where prostitutes work; or danger to prostitutes' customers from violent pimp/robbers, etc.) 4. In the U.S., prostitution laws are based on what is politically acceptable, not what is practical -- so women and boys continue to be abused, men continue to get infected and robbed, neighborhoods continue to get blighted, runaways and immigrants continue to get kidnapped, and HIV & Hepatitis C spread into the non-prostitution community. The police & justice system would love to enforce sensible laws, if we had any, but in general, we don't, so they do what they can with the poorly-fitting laws that they've got. 5. The worst situation is when a law enforcement officer uses these laws to extort sex for free from prostitutes in exchange for not arresting them. This has led to scandals in nearly every major city I can think of, and plenty of smaller jurisdictions, too. I do not have statistics on how many vice officers do this. I doubt such statistics exist.

I really don't think it is helpful or makes sense to link these two areas together in a question like this as they are very different and so are the laws concerning them. Rape laws used to be poorly enforced and one heard horror stories of women being ignored when they reported rape, or even in some cases being raped again by the police. This is largely now a thing of the past. Police forces in Britain have specialised and trained officers who respond to cases like this, and I believe the crime is taken far more seriously now, both by the police and by society. If anything it has now swung over to a situation where a woman can waken up the morning after an ill-advised sexual encounter and accuse someone of rape after the fact. I don't think this happens often, but I know of a few cases where it has. Prostitution is far simpler. It should be legal and licensed, like in the Netherlands or Edinburgh's saunas (which are quasi-legal; maybe "tolerated" is a better word). In general the law should be about protecting society and individuals, and if a woman (or man) wants to sell sex for money, I don't see any victim there. Of course drug addiction and people-smuggling are linked with prostitution, but I would argue we should tackle these problems separately. Legalising prostitution would be a good first step.

Rape and prostitution are two completely different things. I do think that the laws governing prostitution should be revised, and updated in order to make prostitutes safer and healthier. Rapists should be castrated.

I have been in the sex trade for many years,I have raised my children and have had a wounderful life.So the question is is prostitution Rape NO,Rape is Rape and that is that it dose not matter if you a sex trade worker or not.If a women or a man is raped who ever did it should be charged with rape. It is small minded people that think this way.Like a cop who shows up at a rape seen and then finds out the women is a sex trade worker and then NO charges or pressed for the sad sad fact for what she dose for a living. The old words oh honey you know what you were doing here and you were only asking for it.GRRRRRRR