Have we not learned by now that increased law enforcement is not the answer to social questions? – Mistress Matisse
Of course they were dropped; she was jut a whore, after all:
Charges have been dismissed against [Andrew Charles Ferrall]…on accusations that he raped, slapped and strangled a woman…[who] met up with Ferrall at the Devils Point strip club…they engaged in consensual sex…[and] Ferrall suddenly began to choke her…she told him to stop having sex with her, but he wouldn’t stop. The woman told police that Ferrall slapped her, bit her and pushed her down some stairs…
A [Kuala Lumpur] woman broke down in tears…and begged not to be jailed over prostitution as her seven-year-old child needed her…The woman, who suffers from asthma, pleaded to be punished with fine rather than jail time as she also had to look after her elderly parents…However, magistrate Ashraf Rezal Abdul Manan told her that a custodial sentence must be meted out as the welfare of society takes precedence over that of the individual. “I pray that your son be well taken care of by your neighbour,” Ashraf said before ordering the woman to serve her six-month jail term…
…solicitation of sex…“is…a disaster for decent families and children”…Councilor-At-Large Debora Coelho said…they are not distinguishable by the clothes they wear, but in how they walk and are “constantly looking at cars…It creates an environment where any woman walking in the neighborhoods will be looked at differently. I won’t tolerate it”…
Is there anything that isn’t “trafficking”?
As CEO of one of the world’s most famous model agencies, Katie Ford traveled the globe searching for fresh-faced young men and women and turning them into stars…Now she’s using the skills she developed…to help fight human trafficking and slavery…Ford admits she’d never even heard of trafficking until [a little after the moral panic began]…eight years ago. She was stunned to discover the similarities to her own industry…”How people are trafficked, it was parallel to how we scouted models around the world…the hope and the dream that a model has for a better life is the same thing as a field worker who comes here from Mexico…and then they get duped into situations that aren’t what they expected”…
They just won’t give up their sex doll fantasy:
…Dr Helen Driscoll said advances in technology mean the way in which humans interact with robots is set to change drastically in the coming years. Dr Driscoll, a leading authority on the psychology of sex and relationships [but not artificial intelligence], said “sex tech” was already advancing at a fast pace and by 2070, physical relationships will seem primitive…robotic, interactive, motion-sensing technology is likely to become more and more central to the sex industry in the next few years. “It could really start to enable mannequin partners to ‘come to life'”, according to Dr Driscoll…
…All gyms, spas, martial-arts schools, massage studios and health clubs looking to set up shop in New York City must get something called a physical culture establishment permit, which was created in the late 1970s to stem the rise of seedy massage parlors in Times Square…the process of obtaining [this] permit can take nearly six months and cost up to $50,000 in fees and payments to lawyers. Not only does the city’s Department of Investigation run a limited background check on the applicants, but the obscure city agency that processes the applications—called the Board of Standards and Appeals—also takes into account the opinions of neighbors. At several public hearings, they can inveigh against a company in a formal process few businesses outside of bars or liquor stores are subjected to…
You’ve got to love the way “human trafficking” is plainly used as a synonym for “prostitution” here:
West Homewood [Alabama] residents are taking it upon themselves to investigate the prostitution problem in the area…Victoria Dinges…is planning to go undercover this weekend to hopefully catch someone involved in the alleged prostitution…This…comes just off the heels of Homewood’s third community meeting about the issue of local sex trafficking…Residents also feel that human trafficking is leading to a slew of other crimes that have been littering the neighborhood lately…
Good article by Noah Berlatsky, but the consequences of these laws are not by any means “unintended”; they are intentionally designed to harm sex workers:
…Trafficking laws are used…not to arrest pimps and traffickers but to reclassify and police sex workers. The most high profile example is in New York, where new trafficking courts were established in 2013…“Anyone who is arrested for prostitution they call ‘trafficked,’ according to Alison Bass…author of the forthcoming book Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law. “The police are going after women and men who are selling sex by choice,” Bass told me. “It’s much easier [to arrest them]—because they’re out in the open, they’re advertising on the Internet, they’re on the street.” Traffickers, on the other hand, are very careful. And, Bass adds, there aren’t very many of them…
Notice the way “sex trafficking” cinema represents pure fantasy as faux reality?
Sande Alessi Casting is looking for East Indian men and women to work on the upcoming feature film Trafficked filming in Malibu, California….[it] is based on…Siddharth Kara’s best-selling book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Kara [pretends to be] one of the world’s foremost experts on human trafficking and contemporary slavery. Trafficked features Patrick Duffy, Anne Archer…and Ashley Judd…
Is the Swansea sports team called the Pearl Clutchers?
In the absence of any institutional policies on student sex work, some professional staff and students’ union staff interviewed by researchers from Swansea University and Kingston University said that they would take action against student sex workers in case they put the university’s reputation at risk…other staff interviewed for the study, published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management this month, said that they would take a more [patronizing] approach by referring student sex workers to their health, counselling or financial support teams…
I suspected the Amnesty position would embolden a few politicians:
D.C. Council member David Grosso said he is considering introducing legislation this fall that would decriminalize prostitution in the city and provide sex workers with resources to be safe and get out of the business if they want to. Grosso’s announcement comes on the heels of Amnesty International’s controversial recommendation…calling for “full decriminalization of all aspects of consensual sex work”…Grosso…said…“Once the Amnesty report came out, it validated a lot of the concerns that I have of how we handle this in the District”…Grosso similarly said this policy move would “respect the fact that sex workers are human beings, too”…
Something Rotten in Sweden (#563)
Mistress Matisse gives both barrels to prohibitionist Seattle politicians:
The Seattle Times recently ran an op-ed condemning Amnesty’s proposed policy changes…the piece is striking in its presentation of opinions as fact and its use of utterly bogus “statistics.” For example, it trots out the completely false statement that “The average age of entry (into sex work) is 12 to 14.” This statement has been debunked multiple times, and even Polaris Project…has publicly disclaimed it…It states, “Decriminalization and legalization are failed experiments”…This is in flat contradiction to detailed reports from two countries, Australia and New Zealand, that have decriminalized sex work successfully…statements about the “US sex economy”…are most likely drawn from a recent Urban Institute report, based on conversations with 73 men convicted as “pimps,” and only 36 incarcerated street workers. To even call such a limited examination a “study” does it far too much credit; it is a handpicked collection of anecdotes designed to support a previously-arrived-at conclusion. Researchers in fact-based studies of sex work have stated that there is no evidence to support the idea that forced sex work is a hugely ballooning problem…There is hardly a single sentence…that is factually true. It is manufactured moral-panic hysteria, designed to prop up the continuing arrest and incarceration of sex workers…
A local student was recently busted doing internet sex from a university library computer. The university was quick to assure students the computer and furniture had been ‘professionally cleaned’. Apparently you can catch sex work from an infected keyboard. The student “has been counseled”.
I guess the unis are between a rock and a hard place here. If they aren’t seen to be taking a hard line the media will go postal on them (“Get your Doctorate of Prostitution at the University of Newcastle”). But if they come down hard on students doing sex work they’re going to lose a lot of fee payers. And it’s not like it’s illegal in NSW.
Because of course sex workers are always *dripping* with the residue of their *constant, wanton* encounters.
I sometimes think Maggie hammers on a bit about the fetishes that prohibitionists inadvertently divulge, but then I see things like this, and, well…
cf. the guest article a couple of months ago about fetishization of creampies; looks terribly related to me.
Well, unless they were absolutely positive the student had a clean bill of health, I don’t necessarily think it was “OMG sexwork!” they were worrying about people being infected with.
Re: Amnesty at Last
While the irony of an actual, bona fide decriminalization law on a par with Canada’s recent action possibly taking hold in the place from which all federal prohibitionism springs is not lost on me (although the “provide resources to allow sex workers to get out” qualifier already gives me doubts about his sincerity), I hope Mr. Grosso is already lining up as many allies with money and clout as he can. If he isn’t, then he’s probably as good as voted out as soon as his term ends.
Further, this is D.C. we’re talking about, where residents still drive around with “Taxation Without Representation” on their license plates. Even if this law had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, I’m sure the federal government will find some excuse to nullify it, whether through the courts or some other method.
Look at his record. This is the guy who started the ball rolling on the Redskins renaming; he isn’t afraid of controversy. He’s part of a number of marijuana legalization measures, which suggests he’s broadly in favour of consensual activity being one’s own business. He was also behind the repeal of the abomination that was the Prostitution-Free Zone amendment. Standing against yet another tool for law enforcement to jack up whores definitely gives me a sincere vibe.
Now as you say, this doesn’t mean The Man can’t come down against his proposed law anyway, and he’s an indie so he’s working without big political backing. Even so, he’s been effective before and I prefer to hope he can be effective in this.
The University of Newcastle is my first alma mater and I can say with some confidence that if they really need to sterilise all the places students have had sex they’d have to burn the whole place down.
Re infection:
In that case, they should probably clean the keyboard and chair and things like door-knobs after every student. There are very, very few bad things you can catch from keyboards and most of those (think Ebola) you can catch far more readily in other ways. This is pure “ick”-factor and zero rationality at work.
”How people are trafficked, it was parallel to how we scouted models around the world…the hope and the dream that a model has for a better life is the same thing as a field worker who comes here from Mexico…and then they get duped into situations that aren’t what they expected”…”
HUH??? Katie Ford means, ALL those hopes ‘n dreams of even the MAJORITY of would-be models come to fruition, they ALL become household names, and NONE of them “get duped” into situations they were led to believe would be otherwise?
WOW. Heck, then MAKE ME A SUPERMODEL, Katie!
I read it the other way around. She’s claiming expertise on the grounds that people in her industry are duped in the same way trafficking victims allegedly are. The giveaway is the immediately preceding sentence “She was stunned to discover the similarities to her own industry…”.
Sometimes I’ve gotta wonder how much of the popular portrayal of trafficking relies on projection by the reader. At some level they know they are either exploiters or exploited and so try to draw attention – especially their own – onto an industry they believe to be even more ruthlessly exploitative than theirs.
Agreed, with your projection hypothesis. That’s what I’ve long assumed plays a large part in creating the trafficking myth, since projection seems to play such a large part in creating human perspectives generally.
I, too, got that Ford considers herself expert because of the parallels of methods of recruitment. However, I wonder if her alleged “stun” might just come from realizing, since she knows most model-hopefuls DON’T end up fulfilling the expectations the industry baits with, that she herself is guilty of exploitation. In a “it takes a serial killer to catch a serial killer” way, is this just Katie Ford doing penance to salve her guilty conscience?
The Pygmalion Fallacy:
This is what Richard Feynman called “cargo-cult science”, i.e. science driven by wishful thinking, not by understanding of how things work. While many people are not too smart, direct human interactions are complex and currently far beyond machines to emulate or fake convincingly.