To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places. – Wendell Phillips
Lawheads suffer from a sort of collective hubris; they honestly believe that a government can define reality by proclamation. If lawmakers define a particular object or substance as “evil”, Presto! It actually becomes evil in the minds of lawheads, even if it wasn’t the day before. Define teenagers as children, and Alakazam! They magically transform into helpless toddlers no matter what the lawhead’s senses and personal experience tell him. But this legislatorial thaumaturgy is not limited to mere transmogrification; lawheads even believe in the power of governments to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy by conjuring things and events out of thin air.
A recent example of lawhead belief in these miraculous powers can be found in this article from the Washington Times of April 28th:
More than 80 percent of the 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by law enforcement agencies between January 2008 and June 2010 involved adult prostitution or the exploitation and forced prostitution of children, a Justice Department report released Thursday says. The report, written by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), says 48 percent of the investigated incidents involved adults, while 40 percent uncovered the exploitation or forced prostitution of children. The remainder, about 350 cases, involved allegations of labor trafficking…Under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, according to the report, human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person to perform labor or a commercial sex act through force, fraud or coercion [but] any commercial sex act performed by a person under age 18 is considered human trafficking, regardless of whether force, fraud or coercion is involved…
I’m sure even the sleepiest reader caught the bit of legal legerdemain in the last line; though the crime of “human trafficking” is clearly (and sensibly, except for the weird and unnecessary singling out of sex work from other kinds of labor) defined in the first part of the sentence, legislators conjure “victims” out of thin air by defining ANY prostitution by someone under 18 – even a fully-cognizant and willful act of prostitution by one who looks much older – as “human trafficking”, despite the total absence of either force or anyone to apply that force! Long-time readers may remember that I was universally taken for “about 25” since I was 16, and that my first act of outright prostitution was an opportunistic one shortly after my 18th birthday; had this asinine law been in effect at that time, and had the opportunity arisen just three months earlier, I would have magically become a “victim” of “human trafficking” – and presumably, a “trafficker” would have obediently materialized to “exploit” me.
But the other sleight-of-hand here is a bit more subtle and appears in the first line. See it? “More than 80 percent of the…suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by law enforcement agencies…involved…prostitution…” That sounds like a serious problem until one realizes that the “authorities” choose which incidents to investigate, and just because 80% of those they pursued involved allegations of sex trafficking does NOT mean that 80% of all incidents (or even all reported incidents) involved it. Sex attracts the attention of cops just as it attracts the attention of anyone else, and one “teen prostitute” is vastly more likely to be reported and investigated than hundreds of sunburned guys picking vegetables. Furthermore, carefully compare the first two lines with the third; did you notice the missing word? In the reference to forced labor the word “allegation” is clearly stated , but it’s omitted in reference to prostitution in order to make those cases seem like proven ones when in fact they, too were mere allegations; according to the actual (conveniently not linked to the Times article) BJS report, only 30% of them were “proven” even by the lax standards of the Bureau of Justice.
Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr…[called] human trafficking… “modern-day slavery”…[and] said it was “an affront to human dignity,” adding that men, women and children were being exploited for sex and labor in “virtually every corner of our nation.”
Abracadabra! Having defined victims into existence, Holder then waves his magic wand and disperses them to “virtually every corner of our nation.” The word “virtually” is a bit ironic, since these victims are “virtual” in the computer science sense, in other words “nonexistent in physical reality”.
…According to the report, more than four-fifths of the confirmed victims of sex trafficking — about 83 percent — were U.S. citizens, while 95 percent of the confirmed victims of labor trafficking were either illegal immigrants or foreign nationals working legally in the U.S. The report also said the confirmed victims of human trafficking were predominantly female and that among the confirmed sex trafficking victims, they were “overwhelmingly female” at 94 percent and made up 68 percent of the labor trafficking victims as well. Most of the confirmed sex trafficking incidents involved the prostitution of children (about 60 percent) compared with adult prostitution (about 40 percent)…
Hocus-pocus! Since we define “victims” any way we find convenient, these “statistics” are worse than meaningless; they’re made to order from nothing. And considering that A) anyone under 18 is defined as a “child”; B) the definition of “sex trafficking” is ludicrously broad for those individuals; C) “child sex trafficking” is the witch hunt du jour; and D) “authorities” determine both which cases to investigate and the standard by which cases are “confirmed”, I’m actually amazed that only 60% of the “confirmed” cases involve “child prostitution”. Perhaps Holderini felt that pulling too many “child victims” out of his hat might attract undue scrutiny from the audience and thereby reveal that his performance relies entirely on smoke and mirrors.
Wow, you’ve got lawheads down pat. Imagine having to practise law legislated by people like that. Imagine these people are supported by people like sociologists, linguists and other paradigm-maintaining academics who think their field of study were the law of gravitation that kept the planets in their place. Is it any wonder that our world is going down the tubes?
Well, the irony is this:
George W. Bush is responsible for a good chunk of human sex trafficking during his tenure.
How? The Iraq War. That war caused millions of Iraqi refugees, both internal and external. Women and girls had a choice between selling their sex or starving to death (as well as the families they had to support).
Yet conveniently, nobody mentions this or cares. And I never heard a peep out of the neo-feminists about this. Phyllis Chestler and Donna Hughes actually called Bush a feminist!
Buncha fucking hypocrites.
Finally, someone notices this! I second this comment.
Just for grins (or rather for grimaces), google saipan ralph reed and see what you get. Real fucking Christian of you, Ralph.
This issue has been covered by at least 1 host of an alternative radio show (thank God for that!).
I’m particularly fascinated by the fact that it’s okay for a girl older than the age of consent, but under eighteen, to give it away, but it’s a crime if she gains anything materially by it.
It makes me wonder if that would change if the voting age were lowered to the age of consent.
Right. So if she’s a foolish ninny who thinks she’s “in love”, eschews protection because that’s for “bad girls”, gets pregnant and develops genital warts which lead to cervical cancer before she’s 30, that’s all OK. But let her start putting money aside for university and it’s a national crisis. 🙁
Isn’t the ideal: NONE of what you’re saying to be looked on as bad? If the women want to do things whatever way, they should have the right to? Women don’t have to take any part in stuff they hate in regards to sex (thank God!), but not order any of the others around who don’t do things the same way.
My post above was to Dave. I need to get better with “Dear ___” on here!
Absolutely right, Laura. I was simply interpreting what the law seems to imply. I’m a big fan of sarcasm. 🙂
Dear Dave, I’ve used sarcasm for years online to make points and defend myself against ###***. There was 1 real ###*** on a message board I used to be on that would always tell me to “shove my sarcasm”. He was a real “prize” who said I shouldn’t have reported the ###*** that stalked/harrassed me on the job a few years ago and all other kinds of sick insults and lies. I’m glad my sarcasm got to him as something needed to as I wasn’t the only 1 he attacked viciously. Anyway, sarcasm is a great thing to use as it isn’t on the level of ###*** who make vicious personal attacks online and off. I think 1 reason they hate it is because it takes some thought which insults, etc., don’t take as much thought to come up with.
I am sure our Westminster parliament only exists in order to make the American congress look sane.
We have separate legislation for sex trafficking and for other forms of trafficking. Our sex trafficking legislation omits the means element of the Palermo equation (ie use of force, coercion, deceipt, fraud etc) for adults as well as those under 18. Consequently anyone arranging transport for a voluntary adult sex worker to a brothel can be, and has been, prosecuted as a sex trafficker:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/ipswich-is-this-a-real-sex-slave-driver/
We have all sorts of wonderful exotic ways to be branded a sex trafficker in the UK, most of them not involving sex work at all. One could sex traffick someone to continue an incestuous relationship, or to indulge in a spot of voyeurism, or to have sex in a public toilet, the list goes on, and on….
That sounds like our Mann Act (c. 1910 but revised in the 1980s), which originally made it illegal to transport a woman across a state line for “immoral purposes” (totally undefined for over 70 years) and now makes it illegal to transport a woman across a state line for any purpose which would be illegal in the destination state. Therefore taking a married lover into Michigan (where adultery is illegal) is a major federal crime, but taking her into California (where adultery isn’t illegal) isn’t. I wrote about it a little in my columns of August 26th and November 18th.
The law is an ass.
This ^^ 😎