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The goal of the legislation in question is specifically to help individuals that have been coerced, against their free will, into sex trafficking. It is not ab

• valuearb 9y ago
  It’s completely limiting free choice and voluntary interactions between consenting adults. A huge personals section just got shut down. Unless you think 100% of personal ads are coerced sex trafficking, which would be rather crazy opinion. If you truly wanted to curb sex trafficking, you’d legalize prostitution, not drive it farther underground.
  • jacobush 9y ago
    How... does that follow? To reduce slavery, legalize prostitution? There must be some steps in between I am missing.
    • valuearb 9y ago
      Legal prostitutes can call the police for help from pimps or others trying to abuse or coerce them, without fear of arrest. Legal prostitutes are incentivized to work with the police to report others being coerced, it’s competition. Bringing things out into the open helps clean them up. Keeping them in the dark allows evil to multiply. The next time Prohibition helped the people it was trying to protect will also be the first time.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Also, and directly related to your Prohibition comment, and to war on drugs - it's a matter of economics. Supply and demand. There is strong demand that you can't really eliminate. If you keep supply illegal, then supply becomes handled by organized crime, and all proceeds from the sale of goods/services go into growing organized crime.
      • jacobush 9y ago
        Thanks for your comment, and the others in the thread too. I think I must be tinted by how it works in Sweden. First of all, the word "trafficking" there is most of all associated with the trade of minors. Also, soliciting sex ("prostitution") is not illegal for adults. Buying the service is. This has some interesting implications. It caters to the "conservative base" who does not want to see fully legalized prostitution. It also protects "workers" who can always go to the police. It also makes it very clear, that unfortunately, there is a market for sex slaves, especially for children. Some will apparantly make an extra effort to pay for abusing a child. Given human nature, I expect these low-lifes must exist in the US too. Which is why the Prohibition thing rings false with me, especially the alcohol one. Alcohol was pretty much enjoyed by everyone to various degrees. Buying sexual services, while popular, not as much. So it's an analogy, but not the greatest. (Also ignoring that most sexual services are bought by men, while alcohol was/is used to a much larger degree by both sexes.)
        • barry-cotter 9y ago
          Whores don’t go to the police in Norway not because they won’t help with assault and such but because the police will get them evicted from their flats. https://books.google.nl/books?id=RAXtCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT172&lpg=PT172&dq=operation+houseless&source=bl&ots=4tLg-sW90B&sig=V0tLYzswm_VluvNuxgAwpusVsQ8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifjpeSsYLaAhXMKFAKHRLyBWYQ6AEwBnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=operation%20houseless&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=RAXtCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT172&lpg=P...
          • jacobush 9y ago
            The same book says traffickers are less likely to operate in Sweden since the law was introduced.
            • barry-cotter 9y ago
              Traffickers would be even less likely to operate in Sweden if the penalty was death by crucifixion. Do you also support that? Forgive me if I’m not especially impressed by the think of the children rhetoric. Drawing a line from Lutherans to modern day Sweden isn’t exactly hard. The judgmental attitude hasn’t changed one iota.
    • bobthepanda 9y ago
      Right now prostitution is associated with sex trafficking because it is illegal. There is no legal way to do the world's oldest profession. If prostitution was legal and well-regulated like it is in many countries, then workers would have to be documented, they'd get workers' rights, etc. There are people willing to do sex work of their own free will, and if you create a normal market for it, then people will not resort to illicit, lower-quality secondary markets dependent on sex trafficking. Here's the analogy: to reduce drug violence, legalize drugs.
      • bouncetime 9y ago
        We have legal prostitution now. Every time you take your “gf to dinner, you buy her gifts as her sugar daddy u get her a ring as a fiancée . It’s perception . If you spend days flirting and spending money and call them your date or gf. Then it’s legal but to fast track the date is illegal - everything is a game and control. Illegal drugs are illegal - legal drugs that kill and addicts are addicted to are legal . Again it’s all a game. If it’s anti bible or u can’t tax it, it won’t be legal.
    • deelowe 9y ago
      You're missing the fact that virtually no one wants to have sex with slaves. If a legal, regulated industry existed for people to get what they wanted, the illegal market would go away. AFAIK Nevada doesn't have a huge issue with sex slaves.
      • thaumasiotes 9y ago
        True, Nevada doesn't, but neither do any of the other 49 states.
  • Buge 9y ago
    rpearl never claimed that it wasn't limiting free choice. rpearl claimed the intention wasn't to limit free choice. Intent and actual outcome are two completely different things.
    • disiplus 9y ago
      it's still limiting if you define it to broadly. if i defined a law that said every owner of a home will be punished if somebody in that home smoked weed or did drugs. and airbnb is gone, and so on.
      • Buge 9y ago
        Neither I nor rpearl claimed it wasn't limiting. The intent was to protect people who are being harmed against their will (held in sex slavery against their will). Of course the actual effect of the law is different than the intent. The actual effect is limiting.
        • kcanini 9y ago
          Do you think the actual intent is closer the stated intent, or to the actual results? We're talking about seasoned politicians, not naive dreamers.
          • noxToken 9y ago
            The actual intent probably is closer to the stated intent. The actual results just don't matter to them.
    • tajen 9y ago
      Intent and actual outcome are completely different things until you manage a country. Then you gotta be 1000% goddam sure you’re coercing others for the good reasons, and your responsibility can’t be levied for an “Oops I did it again”.
    • Bartweiss 9y ago
      Broadly speaking, I agree. But at a certain point, it's reasonable to start objecting that an outcome was so obvious that people claiming they didn't intend it are either dishonest or incompetent, and in either case unfit to make the decision. In this case, I suspect the answer is a little of each - a lot of anti-trafficking campaigns are run by people who openly oppose voluntary sex work, and also Congress is grossly incompetent at knowing which technology laws will limit free choice. Given all that - I agree that it's worth knowing whether this was intended, but I worry "not our intent" becomes a shield for Congress to hide behind when they do things with horrible outcomes they were warned about well in advance.
  • ksk 9y ago
    >If you truly wanted to curb sex trafficking, you’d legalize prostitution, not drive it farther underground. What does that mean? Countries where prostitution is legal have little to no sex trafficking? What are you basing this on? In any case, hopefully as a society we'd want to reduce or eliminate prostitution, not enable it. To me, it is quite sad that a person feels compelled (in many cases) to sell themselves as a piece of meat.
  • reaperducer 9y ago
    >If you truly wanted to curb sex trafficking, you’d legalize prostitution Yes, because legalized prostitution has totally curbed sex trafficking in places where it is legal like Nevada and Germany. Oh, except that it hasn't. Not even remotely.
• ryandrake 9y ago
  Laws should be evaluated by their effect, not the intentions behind them.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    I'd agree the former may carry more weight, but the latter remains consequential.
• quotemstr 9y ago
  The goal is immaterial. The effect is an unconscientable abridgement of the rights to free speech and free association, all in the name of dubious and ineffective effort to prevent "harm", where "harm" is apparently defined as acting in a way contrary to utopian social engineers.
• AFNobody 9y ago
  The intention is a lie. Much like the Patriot Act was a lie. The chilling effects are 100% intentional. The goal is to target any personal section that does not actively moderate content.
• Bud 9y ago
  This is an extraordinarily broad action to take in response to sex trafficking. It clearly reaches into all kinds of unintended areas.
• StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  >The goal of the legislation The goal isn't relevant. Nobody opposes the goal of ending sex trafficking. The issue is passing laws that restrict freedom and seek to regulate the interpersonal behavior of adults at the point of a gun. Laws should be judged and scrutinized based on their actual impact, not the goals and desires of the people who draft them.
• dahdum 9y ago
  It’s not misguided, it’s deliberate. Broad restrictions on prostitution and adult services were wanted by conservatives based on family values, liberals are favoring regulations on speech due to identity politics. I’m sure both groups honestly want to help the trafficked, and they came together to both get what they want, and pat themselves on the back at the same time.
  • saas_co_de 9y ago
    > Broad restrictions on prostitution and adult services were wanted by conservatives I severely doubt that conservatives want anything of the sort. What they do want is for internet companies to take responsibility for keeping kids off their sites which is not that big of an ask if they would just stop their whining and do it.
    • tgragnato 9y ago
      Isn't this specifically tailored to address human trafficking concerns? What makes you think this has something to do with kids on the internet? I always had the impression that exploiters are rarely kids. > which is not that big of an ask Giving false credentials during signups is a more common practice than what is believed, especially for digital natives. How can you truly ascertain the age of users without mass surveillance practices?
• golemotron 9y ago
  > The goal of the legislation in question is specifically to help individuals that have been coerced, against their free will The key is in the definition of coercion. Was violence threatened? Is a person physically restrained? If so, that's coercion. When the law starts to deal with "psychological coercion" it denies agency to adults.
• lopmotr 9y ago
  If they wanted to help victims of sex trafficking, they'd stop arresting and deporting them when they're found. That's the whole reason they can't just go to the police or run away or ask for help from their clients. They don't want to be sent back to where they came from with no money.
• threatofrain 9y ago
  Do you mean to lead discussion with what legislation intends or what legislation does? Because many things take on a life beyond what authors intend, and it's not like legislature, a contentious body, is one person with a single mind.
• criddell 9y ago
  I've often thought that legislation that is enacted with a specific outcome in mind should come with an initial expiration date. At that point we could evaluate the effectiveness and unintended consequences and decide if the law should be made permanent.