Human trafficking is what we call it when women make choices that make us uncomfortable. – Cathy Reisenwitz
In 1913, former California Gov. Hiram Johnson signed the California Red-Light Abatement Act, outlawing bordellos…advocates promised the law would stymie the “scattering of the evil throughout the residence district…[and wipe] out the unclean profits of those who prey upon fallen women.” Voters approved the measure by a 53.3 percent majority. As for those “fallen women,” their jobs became more treacherous. You see, the Abatement Act…just made it so they could no longer operate indoors without breaking the law. As bad and exploitative as some bordellos were before the Act passed, the street only magnified these dangers and presented new ones…More than a century later, an escalating campaign to crack down on online classified portals is fanning a similar migration…activists say…
An Orpington dominatrix has defended her secret fetish dungeon…after neighbours complained to police…From the outside it is a large, detached home on a quiet, leafy street but inside is a thriving fetish establishment…Neighbours…[claim] to have heard “whipping” and “screaming” coming from the address. But the dungeon’s operator…”Mistress Evilyne”, said the business is legal, she is registered with the HMRC and no sexual services are offered…A tennis club spokesman [said]…”We host Crofton School for coaching and we are concerned the children might be exposed to something that they shouldn’t see at their age”…the police have not found any evidence of illegal activity…
Out of Control (The Camel’s Nose)
An NYPD sergeant with the Organized Crime Control Bureau has been suspended, but not arrested, after throwing semen at a co-worker…Sergeant Michael Iscenko, 54, had previously told the victim, a civilian administrative aide in her 60s, that he liked her…[she] had just left the ladies restroom and was heading back to her office when Iscenko crept up behind her and threw something on the woman’s leg and her shoe…The woman…immediately filed a complaint with her supervisors, who sent a sample of the substance out to be tested, it turned out to be semen…people who know the sergeant…[said] they wouldn’t have pegged him as a pervert, because of the way he dresses…
“Justice system” destroys woman’s life for giving a friend a ride:
[An Ohio] woman convicted of promoting prostitution and labeled a sex offender after she drove a friend to what turned out to be a prostitution sting was granted judicial release after serving about seven months of an 18-month sentence. But Aimee Hart…is continuing with an appeal of her…conviction because she doesn’t believe she should have to register as a sex offender…“I personally feel that they perverted the intention of the law to fit my circumstances,” Hart said…
Yeah, they do that.
Cathy Reisenwitz on the psychology behind support for prohibition:
…you’re at brunch with a pretty normal person. But better educated and smarter than normal, smarter than you, in fact. But they’ve not heard that a conservative estimate for the average age at which women enter the trade is 25. They don’t know that even underage prostitutes start at an average of 15-16, and only 15% of teen hookers (themselves a small minority of all sex workers) enter at an age below 13. They’ve never had Maggie McNeill in their living room. In fact they’ve never talked to a person they knew was a sex worker. So why do smart, well-educated people buy into the sex trafficking moral panic? And the larger question, why do we condescend to sex workers by assuming they can’t consent to sex work?…
Of course Reuters is too mired in American carceral thinking to see any of this as a problem, but this report on police responses to “human trafficking” in Thailand gives a few clues as to what an unholy mess the attempt to stop people from migrating to work has created.
Canada has a problem. Her highest court ruled in 2013 that prostitutes have a constitutional right to work, but federal officials still do all they can to impose prohibition…This ad hoc law is likely unconstitutional as well…prohibitionists are driven by moralism, as opposed to policy outcomes and concern for the wishes of prostitutes. This becomes apparent as they frame all prostitution as coercive and parrot the [myth] that Canadians enter the industry on average between the ages of 12 and 14…when it comes to practical enforcement, prohibition efforts in the United States have seen prostitutes more likely to have “freebie” sex with officers than get arrested. Further, sites such as SugarDaddie.com...beg the question as to when dating ends and prostitution begins (as pointed out on the Bob Zadek Show with Maggie McNeill, a call girl turned blogger…
Readers over 40: in your youth, could you have imagined living in a country where statements like this were made with a straight face?
Just a few years ago, Tennessee was scrambling to combat sex trafficking. Now…there have been 36 new laws in the past four years, including…money for more special agents assigned to investigate sex traffickers for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. And for the first time, TBI will have the power to conduct electronic wiretapping…Until now, that kind of surveillance has only been allowed for the most serious murders, drug dealing, and gang crimes…Margie Quin…says…“With the advent of websites that are strictly geared toward selling women and children for sex, being able to combat that through electronic authority will be, I think, very beneficial”…
This article on the Backpage credit card issue doesn’t break any ground readers will find unfamiliar, but the more mainstream articles on the topic the better. And besides, it quotes me!
Hell no!
Back in my day authorities didn’t worry about legality before engaging in massive surveillance operations (think Nixon or COINTELPRO) and few journos would have tried to claim “until now, that kind of surveillance has only been allowed for the most serious murders, drug dealing, and gang crimes”.
I don’t recall anyone claiming websites sold people for sex in the 1960s and 70s either.
I read Orwell’s 1984 when I was 17, and since then I have known that the most serious crime of them all is to not go along with the official version of “right and wrong”. Laws and law enforcement have always been driven primarily by that, everything else is a cover story to make their job easier by giving the appearance to work for the public.
A current achievement is that there are some limits to what the state is allowed to do to its population, although even the Romans had that to some degree. But this is not a permanent state of affairs and those that want to control everybody and everything need to be fought and kept under control, or things revert to that abysmally bad default state.
This is, incidentally, why any secret laws and courts and collaborations between secret agencies and law enforcement is so bad: These people are not able to police themselves, and without public oversight they always slowly drift towards the deepest fascism they can imagine. Secrecy kills that oversight and the outcome is inevitable.
Childish Things:
I think I have finally figured it out: They actually mean to say that the average age of those entering prostitution below 13 years of age is below 13! This is all a big misunderstanding!
This is of course an absolute shocking insight, equally shocking as, say, that the average age of politicians above 60 working as prostitutes is above 60.
They start at 13, and they age so fast in that industry that they all die at age 34, about 7 years on average after their entry. 300 000 underage prostitutes per year is such a large number, it litterally distorts the space-time continuum. That’s why we must stop the pimps before they gather enough prostitutes to reach a critical mass that will cause time to collapse.
I’ll bite: How come they age at triple speed during those 7 years?
I guess turning 100 tricks a night takes it out of you.
Because it’s sex and sex does not follow mundane logic. I don’t pretend to understand it myself, but we know for sure that they start at 13, last 7 years on average and die around 34. Abolitionist facts are never wrong, therefore reality is inaccurate.
“it turned out to be semen…people who know the sergeant…[said] they wouldn’t have pegged him as a pervert, because of the way he dresses…”
I hope that those “people who know the sergeant” aren’t NYPD investigators ….. do they use more reliable ways to determine if people are suspects than their dress sense?
Mind you it fits with “they are a female ‘dressed provocatively’, so we must bust them as a hooker” !
It’s because he dresses in a police uniform.
Pegging someone wearing one of those as a pervert can get you arrested or shot.
OMG, I ccan’t believe what a beehive I’ve inadvertently ywandered into. Not this blog, but rather this place where I recently moved to. I *used* to be a sex worker about a decade ago. Then, about 4 months ago, I commented on something a big person in the anti-trafficking movement wrote online, not hiding my identity, now, and for the past 4 months, I have been harassed by my neighbor. I moved very far away from the last place I was being harassed and now in the new place it is the same kind of harassment. Not only that but my closest family members either don’t believe me or do not want to believe me, and now I’m a long way from what I consider my home. Just wanted to vent. It has been a rough 4 months, with very little sleep at night, being kept up my this kind of rather invisible weapon (like standing too close to a broken microwave oven, ugh) and being noticeably spied on. And I am so over it. I had a lot to share with people I wanted to help with my experience about why I went into sex work and how it collides with taking care of my mental health, and how I know not all sex workers are people with mental health or trauma issues, but that I was, and being that there is no comprehensive autonomous way for people with dire issues to take care of themselves in this country, sex work works fine. Its the stigma that is brutal, and getting worse by the day, recently apparently. I finally figured out how to set up an anonymous email but I don’t know if I did it right and am scared. I dont even get to have en independent income yet people think I am a sex worker and justify this harassment because of that. This harassment and abuse is preventing me from being able to take action on work and income, thus “endangering” me to be forced to do sex work again. I’d rather not, it really isn’t for me anymore. But I am so glad I did it before and that other people do this work now. This really does not resemble to USA I grew up in. Thanks for listening.