An Accident of Virtue: When Rhode Island Briefly Misplaced Its Morals and Found Its Humanity

Sunday, October 12, 2025.

Some years ago, while I lived there, Rhode Island didn’t legalize sex work. It just sorta forgot to make it illegal.

In 1980, some lawmaker deleted a clause, and for nearly thirty years no one even freaking noticed.

The state simply drifted along, blissfully unaware that the world’s oldest profession had just become a tax-free side hustle.

It wasn’t until 2003 that a court finally said it out loud: yes, indoor sex for money is legal here.

There was no fanfare. No protest. No parade of libertarians in nautical stripes. Just a quiet, bureaucratic shrug—followed by six years of unexpected social benefits.

When Doing Nothing Worked Worked So Much Better

Here are some hard facts. Economists Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah (2014) later ran the data and discovered that during those 6 years, reported rapes In Rhode Island dropped by about 30%, and new gonorrhea rates among Rhode Island women fell by around 40%. WOW!

No moral sermon, no red-light chaos—just fewer crimes and cleaner STD test results.

It turned out that when women could screen clients, insist on condoms, and call the police without being arrested themselves, their world got a tad less sexually feral.

Sex work didn’t end. But sexual violence and disease simply lost some market share.

(Cunningham & Shah, 2014, NBER Working Paper No. 20281.)

The Panic That Pretended to Protect

Then the headlines came: Human Trafficking in Providence Massage Parlors! The stories were written in a tone that implied slavery had set up shop behind every curtain.

By 2009, legislators rushed to “close the loophole.”

They said they were saving women—usually a bad omen. The same week the new law passed, police went back to arresting the very women they claimed to be rescuing.

It was, once again, illegal for these women to survive as they best knew how.

The Fine Print of Liberation

Here’s what the data couldn’t show: who was still unsafe.

Decriminalization helped women who already had some leverage—citizenship, language skills, the right kind of clientele. It didn’t fix their poverty or immigration status. It just stopped adding jail time to the list of things already stacked against them.

So yes, rape fell and infections dropped, but structural inequality stayed put—like a stain that the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations couldn’t scrub out.

America’s Moral Math

America treats paradox like a national sport. We buy purity rings in bulk and spend billions on pornography.

We call it empowerment when a woman sells her image online, and exploitation when she sells her body offline.

Rhode Island’s real sin wasn’t moral collapse. It was actually a kind of inadvertent moral clarity.

For six years, the state accidentally proved that decriminalization makes life less dangerous—and then, predictably, restored their moral outrage.

The Real Indecency

Every panic about sex work starts with “safety” and ends with punishment.

What happened in Rhode Island should have been a policy lesson. Instead, it became a parable no one wanted to tell:
When women stop being criminalized, their world gets safer.

The real indecency isn’t sex for money. It’s pretending that punishing women ever protected them in the first place.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Abel, G. M., Fitzgerald, L., & Brunton, C. (2009). The impact of the Prostitution Reform Act on the health and safety practices of sex workers. University of Otago.

Cunningham, S., & Shah, M. (2014). Decriminalizing indoor prostitution: Implications for sexual violence and public health. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 20281.

Rhode Island General Assembly. (2009). An act relating to criminal offenses—Prostitution and lewdness.

Washington Post. (2014, July 17). When Rhode Island accidentally legalized prostitution.