Sex Work and the Law's Devaluation of Women's lives

This is a topic that's been on my mind for quite some time.  I spent half of my senior year of high school, 3 summers, and 2 winter breaks working in a liquor store.  Some of our regular customers were sex workers and except for when they where accompanied with Johns they were polite and friendly customers.  This summer I was working a day shift solo and this blond woman came in.  Her body language suggested she was experiencing some sort of hardcore drug withdrawal as that wasn't too uncommon among our customers.  When she reached the counter I started to ring her up I noticed that she immediately began flirting with me and that's when I realized she was a prostitute.  She was clearly trying to pull of a scam I have seen attempted on coworkers, were one will find a mark who is a naive looking man, try to convince him to that she want's to have casual sex and then after it's done demand a large sum of money with a pimp present.  I discreetly let on I wasn't interested so she left, but afterwords I could not stop thinking about how messed up she looked.  She was emaciated, her ID said mid 30's but she looked like she was in her early 50s, the way she talked suggested heroin addiction and her teeth backed up that claim, which is a common tool among pimps to keep their working girls prisoners as they control the access to the drug.  I could not stop thinking about how she ended up in that situation, who she used to be, and if anyone out there still cared about her.
 I thought about a good friend of mine who works in the legal side of the sex industry, about how she's told me that she is not ashamed of her profession, just the fact that she cant seem to be able to find work anywhere else, and I worried about her stalkers.
I'm going to avoid the debate over whether sex work is demeaning to women and just say in it's very dangerous in it's current form.  No one cares for them, most people don't even see them as human beings.  Regardless of where one stands on this issue, I think we can agree something needs to be done on that front because it's never going away.  The worst part is that law enforcement is often more dangerous.

http://www.vocativ.com/news/239316/national-blacklist-for-sex-workers/