Listen to what prostitutes have to say on the topic before you get all righteous about protecting them. Governments have been doing that since time immemorial, and the efforts to "protect" prostitutes tend to harm them. Arresting them is just awful. Arresting their johns is just as bad, because it forces it underground and establishes a black market complete with human trafficking, prevents prostitutes from conducting interviews in a safe way, from establishing brothels and hiring security guards, etc. We've been trying this "ban it 'til it dies" approach. It's never worked, there's no reason to think that it will tomorrow.
Your statement about "most prostitutes" can only be interpreted as factual if it is backed by good science with a significant and representative sample of prostitutes. Since prostitution is illegal, there's major problems in finding people to participate in a poll, so there is heavy sample bias in all of the social science done regarding prostitutes.
For example, such polls are often done when prostitutes are in the middle of an interaction with either the legal system or the health system. If you poll the prostitutes you find in a rape shelter, for example, you'll get very different statistics than you would in a legal brothel in Nevada.