human trafficking

So in doing our project, i obviously learned a lot about human trafficking but the presentation brought up some good questions that i hadn't really thought about on my own. The legalization of prostitution was not something that i considered that much because i didn't take it that seriously. Why would legalizing prostituion help in anyway with human trafficking? However numerous people in the class made good arguments- if it was legalized we could regulate it more strictly-define age limits, prices, who gets the money, mandatory health check-ups--things that would benefit the girls not their pimps. We could also tax it heavily and stand to make quite a killing of legal money instead of blackmarket underground money in the hands of 'bad' people. In an ideal world i think this would be the obvious solution. Clearly there is already a market for prostitutes so why not bring it into the open and regulate the hell out of it to hopefully improve standards for the girls and their customers? However, we do not live in an ideal world and i don't really think this is a viable solution. The only point that i really agree with about legalizing it would be that because its illegal we write it off all together, and if it were to be legalized maybe we could address issues of age and who gets paid what. In developed countries i think possibly that might work. however, we focused on trafficking being an issue in eastern europe and asia. In those countries i think its pretty ridiculous to assume that legalizing prostitution would help only because legalizing it requires subsequent regulations. Who in those countries would enforce those regulations? If they are already in such dire situations where selling your own children is a viable means of income, clearly there is not a reliable enough structure in place to ensure such regulations. If a structure like that was already in place, simply cracking down on trafficking would probably be easier. Also i dont think tihs would address the issue of forced prostitution or children at all because traffickers and brothel owners already have means of faking ages and coercing women to stay. Overall i think legalizing prostitution in a developed country might not be such a bad idea, but in developing countries i think it would simply fuel the problem of sex trafficking