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Posts Tagged ‘Hawaii’

In…the trafficking framework…sex work becomes a kind of statutory crime, with women as legal children…and questions of consent rendered irrelevant.  –  Lisa Duggan

Coming and Going

Boo fucking hoo:

When Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk was a judge, the cases that upset her the most involved…prostitution.  Hawk said that feeling has carried over into her work as district attorney and her office focuses on “prosecuting…[people and doing anything to] make sure they go to prison”…Last year in Dallas, 62 underage sex trafficking victims were rescued from their pimps, [lied] Deputy Police Chief Vernon Hale.  Dallas County also has several diversion programs to [brainwash sex workers]…One program, dubbed STAR Court, [forces] women [wrongfully persecuted for consensual sex to] go through counseling and drug or alcohol rehabilitation [whether they need it or not].  The goal is to give women an alternative to a criminal lifestyle…The [rescue industry corporation] Mosaic recently released an app…called Operation Compass [which makes it]…convenient…to [rat people out to the pigs]…

In other words, if you have sadfeelz about someone else’s way of making a living you should inform on them so they can be locked up and subjected to psychological torture to “correct” their “criminality”.

Droit du Seigneur 

“Peacekeepers“.

The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently called them “a cancer in our system”…Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex…employees have been accused of 22 other incidents of alleged sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in the past 14 months.  The most recent accusations come in the wake of Ban’s efforts to implement a “zero tolerance” policy for such offenses.  The United Nations maintains nine peacekeeping operations in Africa, employing more than 100,000 people on the continent, and the abuses threaten to erode the organization’s legitimacy.  Other sex-crime cases have occurred in Mali, South Sudan, Liberia and Congo in recent years…

Counterfeit Comfort

That’ll teach them dirty “sex offenders”!

The government may start stamping “sex offender” on the passports of citizens who were convicted of a sex offense against a minor.  Yes, that would include high school seniors who slept with their freshman girlfriends.  The rationale behind the International Megan’s Law is that these people could be traveling for sex-trafficking purposes…There are almost 850,000 Americans on the Sex Offender Registry, up from 750,000 just a few years ago.  About a quarter of them got on the list when they were juveniles themselves, because young people have sex with other young people…The branding…will affect even Americans whose offenses aren’t crimes in the countries they’re trying to visit:  For instance, I have a friend who had sex, once, with a 14-year-old when he was 19.  If he had done this in Austria, Germany, Portugal or Italy, it wouldn’t have been a criminal act at all. The age of consent there is 14.  But here in America he went to prison — for nine years.  He spent his 20s in a cell for one act of consensual sex between two teens, and now that he’s out, he remains on the Sex Offender Registry for life…if my friend’s passport is stamped with “Sex Offender,” any country he approaches will assume he’s a monster trying to get in.  Oddly enough, that country won’t be alerted if a visitor has served time for, say, mugging old ladies…

Somehow, I Doubt She Thought This Through

If someone stole $100 from a convenience store, would the Times-Picayune refer to the crime as a “quibble”?

A Birmingham, Ala., woman called police after…a man who paid her $100 for a sexual rendezvous…stole back the cash…But Kenner [Louisiana] police wound up busting both for the illegal hookup…Montez Robinson…told [cops] he reached out to Rachel Burma…through her profile…on Backpage…

Forward and Backward

A pilot scheme in Leeds to allow sex workers to ply their trade on the streets without fear of arrest will continue indefinitely after the council announced it had improved the safety of prostitutes and made it easier for them to report crimes.  The scheme…allows prostitutes to work in a “managed area” between 7pm and 7am…The council says the scheme has improved community relations, the safety of sex workers and allowed prostitutes to report incidents of harassment without facing recrimination.  Police in the area will no longer issue cautions or make arrests for soliciting during the working hours specified…A female police officer has also been specially appointed to handle cases involving sex workers and to ensure their safety…

The Pygmalion Fallacy Gloria & robot

Unless they can bruise, heal, cry and exude a certain rare and as-yet-undiscovered pheromone, I’m not remotely interested:

…It wouldn’t take tech as advanced as Gigolo Joe [from the movie A.I.] to pique women’s interest in sexbots.  For one thing, women already use sex toys…women don’t really care whether the toy they’re using to orgasm even faintly resembles the anatomy of a human man…While toys for men, whether Fleshlights or RealDolls, conjure the appearance of an actual woman, women’s toys don’t…Women’s porn viewing habits…tend to be more varied than those of men…there’s a strong argument to be made that…women…are polymorphously perverse, being sexually aroused by far more configurations of bodies than men…a sexbot for women could be vaguely torso-shaped, equipped with vibrating pads and oscillating nubs, and furnished with outlets that would allow for multiple snap-on tools…Maybe make it’s voice-activated so that you could rotate between modes without the tiresome pressing of a button…No fuss.  No muss…And no uncanny valley…this bot could also sidestep the major controversy of sexbots: that of emotional connection…

On the Simultaneous Having and Eating of Cake 

Note that the main reason for the strippers’ plight is Washington’s idiotic prudishness:

…The owners of a collection of Washington strip clubs have sued state labor regulators, claiming they’ve been wrongly ordered to pay workers’ compensation to dancers hurt on the job…they claim regulators are trying to “financially break” their businesses.  At issue, in part, is the strippers’ status as club employees.  The women rent space from the clubs, which regard them as independent contractors.  The state Department of Labor & Industries has taken a different view, contending that, at times, dancers are entitled to workers’ comp if they’re injured at the clubs…The economics of Washington state strip clubs are particularly brutal, largely because the alcohol-free clubs draw their income almost exclusively from high-priced soft drinks and the fees paid by dancers.  Strippers pay a large portion of their earnings back to the clubs in a system previously decried by a U.S. attorney for Washington as abusive.  In Seattle, strip clubs have historically been subjected to extreme scrutiny from law enforcement and regulators…

Now They Notice

The case against Rentboy isn’t actually any weaker than any other website takedown case; they’re all this weak:

…law-enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors considered this a big, bold police action against a criminal organization.  They threw around phrases like “Internet brothel,” “international online prostitution ring,” and “global criminal enterprise”…This was the beginning of an important and high-profile win for the government in the fight against illegal commercial sex, or so [they]…must have thought.  But things started going badly for the government right away…the raid was vigorously condemned by sexual-freedom and sex-worker advocates…LGBT groups…human-rights and free-speech organizations…and even many media outlets, including The New York Times.  The ACLU and Lambda Legal later initiated a meeting with prosecutors to defend Rentboy’s positive role in the community, which included funding scholarships and other educational projects…After such widespread backlash, the prosecution stalled, so far requesting four delays in the 30-day deadline for indictment.  Though such extended delays are not unusual, as investigators search for further evidence and try to locate cooperating witnesses, no new charges have surfaced in this case…

Bread and Circuses (#573) 

Federal “authorities”, unsatisfied with merely hounding a hardworking woman’s husband to death, humiliate her and lock her in a cage for six months:

A woman who came from a poor family in Thailand became a prostitute in Hawaii through working in the massage industry…Judge Susan Oki Mollway [pretended] she took those circumstances — along with her husband’s suicide — into account when sentencing her to six months in federal prison.  In a deal with prosecutors, [Khemwika] Ernst pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and filing false tax returns…

She only made about $75,000 per year, but prosecutors pretended that’s some huge amount of money so as to paint her as a master criminal.

Still a Child (#574) 

Women are such fragile little flowers that, although men can choose to risk death at 18, it takes us three extra years to mature to the point where we can choose to take off our clothes:  “The New Orleans city council voted unanimously…to ban strip club employees younger than 21 from dancing nude…the new rules do not apply to employees under 21 who are already working as dancers…”

Above the Law (#587) 

Why I didn’t report being raped by cops:

For five years, Lindsay F. relived the night she was brutally raped by Jose Rigoberto Sanchez, then a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, over and over again.  She had to recall every detail…whenever investigators asked her to retell her story.  If Lindsay missed a detail or confused the timeline, even after years had passed, they accused her of lying…in her fight for the county to admit liability, Lindsay underwent a humiliating and interminably long process, one that experts in law enforcement misconduct litigation said is commonplace.  Even after Sanchez went to prison — not just for raping Lindsay, but for attempting to coerce another woman into sex under similar circumstances just two days later — the county’s lawyers…spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Lindsay as if she had falsely accused Sanchez…They asked Lindsay about her sexual history:  Had she ever had HPV?  They deposed her friends:  What had Lindsay been wearing the night Sanchez pulled her over?  They even went as far as to hire a gynecology medical expert witness to testify that Lindsay’s vagina had not shown significant signs of trauma…

The Widening Gyre (#597)

Another sign of peak panic: mere “sex trafficking” isn’t shocking enough any more, so fetishists are now claiming that “traffickers” are members of some other pariah-group besides being “pimps”:

…Katherine Svoi Symthe said…“All human traffickers are pedophiles, but not all pedophiles are traffickers”…Symthe’s [novel] Unbreakable, The Story of an Unrelenting Spirit, describes in shocking detail her [fantasized] story from the time she was smuggled into the U.S. as an infant to her rescue at age 17…Symthe said many pedophiles also get gratification by torturing their victims…

Too Close To Home

Feminist Whore debunks the King County sheriff’s press conference:

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You couldn’t tell me if Peyton contacted Santa Claus or a terrorist, can you?  Was it a bomb or a recipe for banana pudding?  –  Gibson Holladay

A taco restaurant decided to turn security camera footage of a robbery into a commercial, with hilarious results.  The first two links above the video are from  Nun Ya, the third from Jesse Walker and the fourth from Brooke Magnanti.  I apologize for the short list this week; as I explained in Friday’s column, I was rather busy.

From the Archives

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COME GET UR BITE.  –  “Officer” Keith Bush

Not quite a video, but in video format; this is the Philip K. Dick story “Impostor” adapted as a radio play.  And if you like that one, here are five more.  They were provided by Jesse Walker, who also gave us “Carmilla”; the other links were contributed by Cathy Reisenwitz (“protect”), Tushy Galore (“KKK”), Nun Ya  (“Christmas” and “18”), and Wendy Lyon (“limited”).

From the Archives

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All bathtubs should be banned. Just imagine it!  –  King Carl XVI Gustaf

On Thanksgiving night I was relaxing (yes, I’m starting to figure out how to do that) and listening to music on my Tubular Bells-based Pandora station, when I suddenly heard a piece of music whose identity has eluded me for 34 years.  It was the soundtrack for a sequence about gravitational wormholes in an episode of Cosmos, and I adored it; however, it wasn’t included on the soundtrack album and the internet didn’t exist in 1981.  Furthermore, when the series was released on video at the end of the decade, that sequence had a different score; clearly there had been a problem with the rights, so it had been replaced.  But I never forgot the tune, so when I heard it on Thursday night I practically leaped to my phone to discover its identity.  So here it is: Equinoxe, Part 4, by Jean-Michel Jarre.  The links above it were provided by Jesse Walker, Matt Welch, Wendy Lyon, Grace,  Popehat, Jillian Keenan, and Glenn Greenwald (in that order).

From the Archives

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[As a sex worker] you either have so much agency that you can never be raped or you’re raped, in the abstract, every night.  –  Melissa Petro

Well, At Least They’re Consistent

Any charge, no matter how ridiculous and outmoded, will be pressed into service in the War on Whores:

Two [Wisconsn]…women face criminal charges as part of what Oshkosh police call an online prostitution ring.  Bailey M. Feustel, 20…and…Michelle J. Wescher, 23, [are] charged with prostitution by engaging in non-marital sexual intercourse, which carries a maximum sentence of nine months in prison…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

In January…Joshua Grubbs of Case Western, published…powerful research showing that seeing oneself as a porn addict was predicted not by how much porn one views, but by the degree of religiosity and moral attitudes towards sex….believing oneself is addicted to porn actually causes pain and psychological problems, in contrast to the idea that identifying as a porn addict is a part of a road to recovery…seeing oneself as a porn addict was strongly correlated with depression, anxiety, anger and stress…

The Pygmalion Fallacygynoids

Some people just can’t stand the idea of others having sex on their own terms:

According to a new paper, having intercourse with sex robots — a technology that’s not quite there yet, but easy to imagine in the decades to come — is unethical.  “I started thinking, ‘Oh, no, something needs to be said about this,’” Kathleen Richardson…said of her early research into sex robots that recreated what she called the “prostitute-john” relationship. “This is not right…extending relations of prostitution into machines is neither ethical, nor is it safe…the development of sex robots will further reinforce relations of power that do not recognise both parties as human subjects”…Richardson — with Erik Billing of the University of Skövde in Sweden, the co-creator of the Campaign Against Sex Robots — [pretends] that she is not anti-sex…

First They Came for the Hookers…

If prohibitionists really want to “rescue” sex workers, why do they keep trying to stop us from getting other jobs?

A high school teacher in Ohio resigned…after her second life as an Internet porn star was exposed…Kristin Sundman worked as an assistant band teacher at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent.  But in her free time, the 31-year-old was better known online as “melodyXXXtune”…

Worse Than I Thought

I just love Elizabeth N. Brown:

Indiana’s attorney general…Greg Zoeller [pretends] that the demand for adult sex workers “fuels” child sexual exploitation somehow.  Nevermind the fact that most people seeking consensual sex with adults wouldn’t dream of raping children; they’re all deviants in Zoeller’s mind…”We need something that sends [a] message”…said Zoeller, who is proposing the creation of a mandatory minimum sentencing requirement for those who attempt to pay for sex in any way…the tougher penalties…may also include…[stealing the accused’s] cars…Expect to see more of this nonsense around the country, soon—the folks at the National Association of Attorneys General have been salivating at the chance to throw more people in our already-overcrowded jails…Florida last year became the first to stipulate a mandatory minimum sentencing requirement for solicitation.  Anyone convicted of a second solicitation offense must be sentenced to at least 10 days in jail and attend classes where they will receive counseling for sex addiction and be reeducated to see the evils of consensual commercial sex.

So Close and Yet So Far

Why must so many otherwise-decent pro-decriminalization essays contain asinine, insulting, female-agency-denying passages like this one?  “Beyond a doubt most women who enter into sex work are driven into it, either by desperation, coercion, or both…”  No, you asshole, that assertion is not “beyond a doubt”, as you’d know if you spent more time talking to sex workers than about us.

Checklist (#345)dumb trafficking app

I can’t help laughing at how seriously people take this drivel:

…The Lifeboat Project in Central Florida designed the ACT (Awareness Combats Trafficking) app.  It’s designed as a fun game directed mainly to 11 to 14 year olds.  But within the very interactive game lies a very serious message.  One part of the app asks the user to go through and identify potentially dangerous people in a mall…“For me as a survivor I was triggered so I had to leave the room while they were presenting it, because the examples were so real life,” said [“rescue” shill Katarina] Rosenblatt…State leaders like the app so much, they want to make it part of the curriculum in Florida schools…“I think it’s an excellent idea that very [sic] child should automatically have built into their phone,” said Rosenblatt…

Devil’s Advocate

It’s rare to see “authorities” admit that no actual crime was committed right in the official accusation: “A [California man] is scheduled to be arraigned today for using social media in pandering and attempted human trafficking and pimping of a fictitious minor girl…”

First They Came for the Hookers… (#420) 

Politicians can’t keep their hands off of golden geese:

…Jack Williams of Alabama, where it is technically illegal to sell sex toys except under special circumstances, is trying to do with a bill that would levy a whopping 40 percent tax on “sexually-oriented materials” restricted for sale to adults in the state…Williams [pretends] the legislation…could bring in as much as $20 million…

Bread and Circuses 

“Authorities” literally destroy a man’s life because his wife sent him money she earned via consensual business transactions:

A woman in Hawaii is pleading guilty to sending her husband in New Jersey more than half a million dollars she earned working as a prostitute.  Khemwika Ernst pleaded guilty…to…conspiracy…and filing false tax returns…Ernst and her husband were indicted in March…Michael Ernst shot and killed himself a month later…

False Witness

…Whether it’s a witness who wants to be helpful or one who has something to hide, the bottom line is that eyewitness statements are inherently unreliable and erratic.  Sometimes it depends on conditions …Other times, it comes…from police pressure.  We know that witnesses get it wrong, and that it convicts the innocent.  But once they are locked into a statement it’s even more difficult to get them admit any error.  In fact, they become more adamant about what they saw, heard, or said when none of it may be remotely true…while there are studies and experts on these innate problems, many courts won’t allow that testimony…because they have have determined that juries “should know” that eyewitnesses can be untrustworthy…Eyewitness testimony is outrageously inaccurate and biased, even under very controlled circumstances…

The Course of a Disease (#510)

Ireland is set to publish a bill…which will criminalise the purchase of sex, despite the recent vote by Amnesty International that sex work and prostitution should be decriminalised…The new legislation…has been described as a “huge step backwards” and likened to Ireland’s controversial blasphemy laws, which were enacted in 2009…

Rough Trade (#572) 

Melissa Petro on what some vile women refer to as “theft of services”:

…the man paid me what I was owed— $2,500—in bank checks.  I’d never even seen a bank check before.  I was so tired that I didn’t argue…Needless to say, the checks bounced…I felt humiliated that night, that morning—so I kept what had happened to myself…It took me four hours after reading Mitchell’s article to connect the disgust I felt to the fact that I’d experienced what she called “theft of services” …suddenly thinking of some random stranger who had ripped me off nearly a decade ago—someone I felt less strongly towards than I felt towards some random writer named Mary Mitchell, because I have always expected more from women than I have men…

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Why would a prostitute decide to be a witness and testify against a pimp if she’s only facing a violation?  – Keith Kaneshiro

As I explained a month ago, “Hawaii was the last American state to criminalize prostitution…and since then…[has] tried to make up for the late start by coming up with some of the most grotesque anti-whore shenanigans imaginable.”  I thought we had seen the worst last year, when Hawaiian cops brazenly petitioned to be allowed to keep the legal right to rape sex workers which had been enshrined for years in Hawaiian law until discovered by a justly-scandalized legislator.  But cops have the astounding ability of continually increasing their own level of barbarity, and a few weeks ago we heard that they had actually charged sex workers with sexual assaulting the cops who had in reality assaulted them:

…Lawyer Myles Breiner, who represented several of the women, told the Associated Press that in at least one instance an officer disrobed and then took the woman’s hand and physically placed it on his genitals. “They’re experimenting with the limits of the constitution,” said Breiner. “Sex assault in the fourth degree is a non-consensual touching of a sexual nature.  How can you say it’s not consensual when the officers are going into these establishments intending to be touched?”…

hero cops arrest dangerous womanNow, this should come as no shock to anyone who’s ever heard of any of the myriad instances in which cops charge their victims with “assaulting a police officer” for scratching a cop’s knuckles with their teeth while being punched in the mouth, bleeding on their assailant’s uniforms or falling on their feet after being pummeled to the ground.  What makes it especially revolting is that the cops blamed this odious stratagem on their being forced to give up the right to rape their victims:

…now that Hawaii cops can’t sleep with sex workers in order to make prostitution cases, they must rely on explicit conversation about the transaction.  But most massage parlor workers know not to be explicit in this way.  Instead, they may simply gauge the situation and then start in on sexual action without hashing out the details first—aka, without getting consent.  That’s what allows these enterprising cops to charge sex workers with sexual assault…

In other words, “let us sexually assault you or we’ll charge you with doing the same to us.”  Lovely.  Unfortunately for these disgusting thugs, most people won’t give sexual violence a free pass anymore, even when it’s cops perpetrating it; that’s one of the reasons prohibitionism has shifted to Swedish-flavored “rescue” nonsense and cops pretend to be targeting men (“pimps and johns”) when they are in actuality still mostly targeting women:

…Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro wrote that his office was dedicated to “maintain[ing] its focus on prosecuting those who profit from prostitution and has worked with prostituted persons to accomplish this goal”…In January…Kaneshiro boasted about how his office had increased prosecution of pimps and traffickers…[by] relying upon the state’s current prostitution statute to “give police the necessary leverage to influence a prostitute to testify against her pimp…If she’s facing a crime and if she might do jail time, she might have incentive to cooperate with law enforcement”…coercive criminal charging is…ineffective.  Most sex workers do not have pimps or traffickers…the popular conceit, that sex workers are lured into the industry as children and then forced to continue sleeping with men until they finally escape, is simply not borne out by empirical evidence…Massage parlor workers may simply have no pimp to “give up.”  And instead, when faced with considerable criminal charges, are being forced to name any friend who helped them, whether that person gave them a ride to work or babysat their children…

In other words, “going after the pimps” simply means arresting and charging more women.  When the tactics are too heavy-handed, as they are wont to be in Hawaii, a public outcry like the one that resulted in the repeal of the rape-right may result; that’s what happened again this time:

Sex assault charges were dismissed Wednesday against 16 women who were arrested…during a Honolulu police prostitution sting…The decision to drop the charges has many wondering if the Honolulu Police Department conducted the operation without consulting with the prosecutor’s office first.  One legal expert says media coverage may have led to the decision.  “They may have been on the same page as long as there were no news stories on it…” said…Law Professor Ken Lawson.  “Either way, based on the nature of the charges and the facts of the underlining case, it was going to be dismissed anyway”…”It seems that HPD keeps looking for opportunities to have sexual contact with [sex worker] targets”…said Defense Attorney Myles Breiner…[who] represents several of the women…

Lion & UnicornThe dropping of the charges doesn’t even end this ordeal for some of the women who “were in the country illegally. Deportation proceedings for these women are now underway…”  Of course, the “authorities” try to cast such deportation as “repatriation” instead; they pretend the women were “sex trafficking victims” who never wanted to come to the US in the first place, so that it’s a kindness to give them a free ride back to where they came from.  This is typical of the looking-glass logic of Prohibitionland, where choice is called “slavery”, persecuting women is “going after the men”, and a sleazy rapist is defined as the victim of his target.  And for whatever reason, Hawaii seems determined to embrace such insanity as its brand and standard.

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Police don’t take well to limits on their power.  –  Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Hawaii was the last American state to criminalize prostitution; our trade was tolerated there until 1944, when the police chief of Honolulu, William Gabrielson, closed the brothels in a fit of pique after the whores went on strike against the draconian rules he had imposed on them, and the military officials at Pearl Harbor sided with the whores.  A few years later prostitution was officially criminalized as part of the process of obeisance required for the territory to become a state, and since then Hawaii in general, and Honolulu in particular, have tried to make up for the late start by coming up with some of the most grotesque anti-whore shenanigans imaginable.

Hawaii flagOne example came to light in March of last year.  As longtime readers know, cops raping sex workers as part of a “sting” operation is standard operating procedure; it’s frowned upon in some places and tolerated in others, and in Pennsylvania, Indiana and  Florida it’s shamelessly defended in court every time a victim of this government-authorized rape complains about it (the usual excuse is that sex workers are “sophisticated” while simultaneously being pathetic, infantile victims).  But Hawaii had taken the unusual step of officially granting cops the right to rape sex workers by spelling the permission out in the text of the prostitution law.  When a legislator discovered this provision and rewrote the law to scrap it, the cops demanded that their decades-old droit du seigneur remain in place, and the politicians probably would’ve fallen over each other in their haste to lick the cops’ boots had not the media gotten hold of the story and a public outcry not ensued.  Of course, reporters misstated the new law as A) granting the cops a new right they hadn’t already enjoyed for a long time, and B) being unique to Hawaii (when in fact the only thing unusual about it was the clear delineation of the raping privilege).

Apparently, being unofficially allowed to rape isn’t enough for Hawaiian cops, though, so they had to come up with a new kind of sadism to inflict upon women.  On Monday we were treated to this scintillating example of local-TV journalism:

Honolulu police have arrested more than a dozen women at various massage parlors…It’s…a huge victory for a neighborhood fed up with illegal activity…Sixteen women were arrested ranging in age from 24 to 60…“I feel safer…It’s always good to get crime off the street,” said [a local badgelicker]…They were booked for sex assault, because, as former Honolulu prosecutor Peter Carlisle explained, “the person knowingly exposes themselves to another person under circumstances that is [sic] likely to cause alarm.”  This type of of sex assault is a misdemeanor, which could mean a year in jail for the women…

Though Hawaii is as invested in “sex trafficking” hysteria as most states, there’s virtually none of that here (except for an obligatory mention at the very end to justify Homeland Security funds being illegally diverted to enforce local vice laws); this is plain old “lock up the dirty criminals” talk, right down to the asinine characterization of a private room inside a business as a “street” and the warping of normal, peaceful behavior into something “criminal” in the sick minds of cops and prosecutors.  Fortunately, most others don’t subscribe to the twisted fantasies of these sociopathic deviants, and the uproar over the ridiculous charges has been considerable; SWOP has a petition asking that the charges be dropped, and attorneys representing the women had this to say:

…The assault charge is because the women allegedly groped the officers.  But attorney Myles Breiner, who represents several of the women, said his clients were forced to touch the men after they refused the officers’ solicitations for sex.  “To charge (the women) with sex assault in the fourth degree is so ludicrous it’s such an abuse of authority”…a prostitution arrest only requires an agreement on price…Legal experts said this new approach raises legal questions because a solicitation for sex implies consent.  “It’s not a sexual assault.  It perverts what the whole statute is about”…The charge…is…usually applied when someone is accused of groping another person.  [If convicted, the sex workers would]…have their green cards revoked [and would be forced to] register as sex offenders…

Python copSpeaking of “ludicrous”, take a look again at the prosecutor’s words in the first blockquote: “the person knowingly exposes themselves to another person under circumstances that is [sic] likely to cause alarm“.  The idea that a cop out to entrap a massage parlor worker would be “alarmed” at the sight of her genitals is too absurd even for a Monty Python sketch, but the charge takes on a darker (and larger) significance when one reads the rest of the sentence the prosecutor (mis)quotes, quoted (correctly) here by Elizabeth N. Brown: “…likely to alarm the other person or put the other person in fear of bodily injury.”  What’s that cops always claim when they murder a dog or human, or tase a 5-year-old, a pregnant woman or an old man in a wheelchair?  Oh yeah, “I was in fear for my life.”  Is this the next step in American cops’ unending escalation of force?  It’s only one step from a cop claiming a woman half his size put him “in fear of bodily injury” from the sight of her pussy, to tasing her or gunning her down using the same excuse.  “Aloha” can mean either “hello” or “goodbye”; though Hawaiian cops intend it to be the former for this new and horrifying anti-whore tactic, sex worker activists and our allies need to make absolutely sure it’s the latter.

 

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