The way to solve it (and everybody knows it but doing it would mean that a lot of people would get pissed, and I am talking about the mobs) is using old market principles.

Propstitution should be absolutely legal. Social security received and taxes payed. Everybody.

When enough people would freely take it as a job, taking slaves  and beating them and bringing them on the hands of the black market will be hardly be profitable. It is sad, but it is the only way out. Prostitution would need also an union organization. They will be the more interested ones in tracking illegal and slaved people. I bet a lot of people would gladly pay a little bit more knowing that the boy/girl is unionized.

Giving inmunity to prostitutes willing to declare against their masters, even when they have no papers to stay in a specific country, and even granting nationality, it is a good step, but not enough.
It is time to decriminalize completely prostitution, and if I sounded too materialistic then let me say that the change in the cultural-idea of prostitution would help more to fight this modern slave than anything else...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Recruitment  Brochure

So, a good question for every person considering this question is, "How much would I have to be paid to consider doing this kind of work?"  or "How much would my mother/wife/sister/daughter/son have to earn in this trade to make me feel good about her/him doing it?"  and then, "Why would I expect any other self-respecting human being to accept less than that, or to engage in it more willingly than I myself would?" The attitude of many bourgeois apologists for prostitution is rather like that of Dick Cheney towards military service -- it's a good and great thing for somebody else, or for somebody else's kids.

The central problem of prostitution as an institution is that the demand that is being supplied is not merely a demand for "sex", i.e. a simple orgasm or sensual experience, an objective benefit like a good dinner -- there is also a desire to see women (children, boys, girls) humiliated and/or hurt, to derive a fleeting sensation of superiority from watching another person being demeaned.  As long as this is considered a legitimate demand in a legitimate marketplace, then ways will be found of assuring a supply of women and kids who can be made to submit to pain, embarrassment, etc. for the entertainment of men with money.  If we make this abuse and humiliation illegal, the argument can immediately be made that this will "merely drive it underground."  But if we make it perfectly legal to abuse and humiliate prostitutes, up to some theoretical point of criminality, we find ourselves codifying barbarism in the same fashion as the current US regime splitting its Jesuitical hairs about the exact definition of torture.

Analogies with the drug trade are imho fundamentally flawed:  drugs are merchandise.  Women's and children's bodies are not, or should not be.  Drugs are inanimate substances, which have no opinions or feelings about being traded, bought, sold, and consumed.  The same cannot be said of the "merchandise" of the international convenience-sex industry, where much of the "consumption" involves hurting, insulting,  mocking, demeaning, shaming, injuring the merchandise.  In theory, prostitution could exist without this sadistic element; but actually-existing prostitution, like actually-existing Communism, does not live up to all of its proponents' fondest expectations.

For some less restrained commentary on this issue I refer the interested reader to the outspoken blog The Den of the Biting Beaver (that's a slightly scurrilous pun, for you non-native-English-speakers), where a man/woman team of bloggers comment on porn, prostitution, sex, capitalism and related issues.  BB (the female half of the team) comments on her own experiences as a female porn consumer, and she recently republished some memoir from an ex-hooker:

I remember one girl, I can't remember her real name, (a point that shames me) a tiny little thing, you know the type? The ones who still have to buy their clothing in the kids section? The kind of girl who always makes you feel like a clumsy giant when you're around them because you tower over them by several inches? I remember hearing her speak of her step-father raping her nightly for years. How she ran away and how she would tell all of us, how she tried to convince us and herself, that her boyfriend was a savior. That the man who had forced her to trade sex for a place to live was an angel, sent straight from heaven.

I remember her crestfallen face, though she tried so fucking hard to hide it, when she came in one night sore, her body aching, her vagina and rectum pained from the gang bang she had `participated' in with her boyfriend and 3 of his buddies. She asked us if any of us had something for the tenderness and then told us what had happened, she laughed about it, grinning and bobbing her head as she spoke, her blonde locks falling over her flawless face. Someone said something like, "Damnit hon, why the hell did you do it if it was so miserable?" her smile faltered and her eyes slipped to her pizza in contemplation, a small, half-hearted laugh escaped her lips and she said, "Well, you know, it's not like I could say no, I mean, he's giving me a place to stay, remember?"

I don't see how legalisation is going to change much about this story... except in a theoretical socialist paradise where no young woman ever runs away from home due to family abuse, no one is ever short of housing or food, full employment is guaranteed, medical care is guaranteed, illegal immigrants are treated with respect and kindness -- a world in which women will never be at the mercy of an exploitative or predatory man for survival.  In that world legalisation would make a lot of sense.  And in that world there would be, my guess, a darned sight fewer prostitutes to legalise.

Wal*Mart is legal.  McDonald's is legal.  Many predatory relations are perfectly legal.  Legalising a predatory relation doesn't imho magically remove the element of predation.  Why would we assume that -- in a "market-oriented" world where labour is under attack, unions are repressed or outlawed in many countries, wages are being driven down -- sex workers would by some miracle be singled out for special privileges, fully unionised with health benefits, decent wages, and full social support net?

Slavery was once legal.  It didn't notably improve the lot of slaves;  what improved their lot was making it illegal and providing reparations, even if inadequate and in some cases ephemeral.

All of this is not to say that criminalising prostitutes makes any sense.  The people who need to be criminalised are the pimps and the punters.  Just eliminating the pimps would be a start, as I doubt we could ever eliminate the punters.

Dim (the male half of BB blog, Dim Undercellar), comments here on the bust of the Balkan sex slavery ring:

Thanks, Britian, for busting the last and final sex slavery ring. We can now all rest easy with our Penthouse (and it's articles about "positive incest"), our FreeXXXpics.net (since we know that anyone not being paid HAS to be doing it for the love of the profession), our strip clubs (those bastions of empowerment where women can feel free to express their sexuality by grinding against Bubba's crotch for a dollar), and our escort services (which are just for getting dates to corporate parties anyway, right?). Because now we can be sure that while we're probably harming the women close to us and the women who have to live in a society in which all men want to call them nasty names and cum on their faces with two of their buddies (and they know it because they've seen your pornography), we're certainly not jacking off to slavery.

Isn't that a nice feeling, to see slavery eliminated in our time? It gives me warm fuzzies inside to know that all the men who say sexual slavery is not a big deal were absolutely right, and all the guys who said that sex slaves were too expensive to abuse (because dude, I wouldn't mess up a $2800 purchase!) now don't even have to worry about THAT.

(the whole rant is worth a read imho).

Anyway, I don't see legalisation as any panacea for the millions of women and girls and boys being used as the cannon-fodder of the transnat sex industry.  Not without far more pervasive and radical social and economic transformations.  If we really want to "do something about it," as with terrorism or hunger (to both of which prostitution is intimately linked in more than one sense), we need to start with fundamental social justice issues.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

quote To him, sex is a basic desire, even a need.  To a woman, it is something she will not do with him unless paid.

that to my ear had a very Edwardian ring to it -- sex is a basic drive for men, dear, the poor brutes, so you must just put up with it.  lie back and think of England, etc.  as if the desire for sexual pleasure never occurred in women -- that is, outside the dutiful attentions owed to a lawful hubby :-)  (or as the OT has it, "And thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.")

what is interesting I think is the persistent assumption that while it is women's or society's responsibility in some way to cater to men's sexual desires -- a kind of sexual welfare state? -- it is no one's responsibility to cater to women's... the Edwardian assumption is that this is just fine because women don't have any.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

What's puzzling is the coexistence of this frank admission that no one would want a young woman they cared for and loved to be selling sex to male strangers on a routine basis, with the assertion that, "there is nothing wrong with it, it is no different from any other kind of work, anonymous sex for money is not immoral, men have a right to buy sex, it should be perfectly legal, etc."  If it is really all that fine and moral and nonproblematic, then why is it that no one wants their own daughter doing it?  Why is it OK to get a blow job from someone else's daughter for $25 in a dark corner on a cold night, but not for one's own daughter to be in the same position with some stranger?

Because one's own daughter is private property and not to be "stolen" or sold at too low a value to other men?  Because one's own daughter is "a better class of woman" and hence deserving of respect which is not offered to hookers?  Or what?  Every prostituted woman and girl is someone's daughter -- a cliche to be sure, but quite true nonetheless.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...