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Both sex worker anecdotes, and some larger studies, suggest the availability of such online services actually reduce violence, homicide, and sex trafficking. Se

by gojomo 9y ago

Both sex worker anecdotes, and some larger studies, suggest the availability of such online services actually reduce violence, homicide, and sex trafficking. See for example: https://thinkprogress.org/craigslist-erotic-services-platform-3eab46092717/ https://thinkprogress.org/craigslist-erotic-services-platfor...

troncjb 9y ago
This is important and most people don't realize this. This is the sex work equivalent of banning drug reagent kits.
- koolba 9y ago
  I think a better analogy is a safe injection site for heroin users.
  - sli 9y ago
    Eh, that seems a little too loaded, all things considered. But definitely accurate in this case.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I don't think that's a good analogy at all. People have been hiring prostitutes for centuries. These sites help sex workers take control of their industry and bodies, vs being depending on street walking and abusive pimps. The big danger in America is the equality between prostitute and sex trafficking. They are not the same thing, and yet we're being fed the line that they are (except in some counties in Nevada).
    - opportune 9y ago
      This is definitely true. These days it seems law enforcement and news agencies seem to use the terms synonymously. It's a very worrying trend because "sex trafficking" sounds much worse than just regular-ole prostitution.
      - kwillets 9y ago
        It's possible that moving it off the street has made it so much less visible that these kinds of myths have developed about it much more easily. When hookers were out on the street corner it was a nuisance, but people could see that it was mostly voluntary. Online anonymity has made it more frightening to some.
  - oneshot908 9y ago
    Safe injection sites are only effective apparently when combined with legalization and/or decriminalization of the drugs injected, source: http://chasingthescream.com/ http://chasingthescream.com/ TLDR: the criminal lifestyle one must pursue to obtain illegal supercharged versions of the drugs is vastly more harmful than the drugs themselves when legalized. I see a lot of parallels here in equating all sex work to sex trafficking. Both sides have their points, but what is the most effective strategy to minimize sex trafficking?
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  I think it's probably more accurate to say most people don't care. The average person isn't approaching policy discussions thinking about real-world effects; if one can't be bothered to spend ten seconds googling the effect of a policy before they talk about or vote on it, that pretty handily crosses the line from ignorance to agency (in the form of willful ignorance). The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    That's a bit disingenuous to say. A lot of policies are complex and a 10-second google search is unlikely to bring you anywhere near competence from willful ignorance. Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere. How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
    - mortehu 9y ago
      The first page I get when Googling "effects of minimum wage", [1], does not take a particularly simplistic view of the issue. The first paragraph says: > Recent research shows conflicting evidence on both sides of the issue. In general, the evidence suggests that it is appropriate to weigh the cost of potential job losses from a higher minimum wage against the benefits of wage increases for other workers. 1. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2015/december/effects-of-minimum-wage-on-employment/ https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      > A lot of policies are complex and a 10-second google search is unlikely to bring you anywhere near competence from willful ignorance. I'm not talking about competence. I'm talking about people not leaving or even attempting to leave the state of willful ignorance. > How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with. It's obvious that my comment wasn't a plea for universal omniscience. None of this is relevant to my complaint about people deprioritizing the effects of a policy, as if it's not close to the _only_ thing that's important. > Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere. This is a perfect example, thank you. Do you know what I would say if asked what I thought the effect of min wage changes are? _I would say I have no idea_, and anyone who tells you they do for sure is lying to you. Accepting that doesn't mean throwing up your hands in hopelessness, but it does suggest a different understanding of the effects of each policy than simply what feeling you get from hearing the one-line description. Policy, and the world in general, generally isn't as simple as people would like it to be. In democracies, one's insistence on pretending that things work the oversimplified way you want them to has concrete costs to those affected by those policies and is more than a little despicable.
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  It's like all the hiring of illegal immigrants, and then hounding them for coming here and doing the work. I'm not trying to claim any kind of parity between the two. I am saying, it's another form of persecuting the supply -- and putting it at increased risk -- in lieu of dealing with the demand or even being honest about it. It's also another excuse -- vehicle -- for the prescriptive moralists. Who, the more they complain about something, seemingly inevitably turn out to be engaged in it themselves. "I can't control myself. But, by God, I can control you!" Sex trafficking is a horrendous circumstance. Unfortunately, I'm left with no trust in our politicians being honest brokers with respect to the laws they introduce. Even if they honestly want to address the problem, they will -- heh -- not be able to "control themselves" with respect to how they use the expanded powers, going forward.
  - creaghpatr 9y ago
    Hopefully this will spur more constituencies to legalize regulated prostitution instead of having to excuse children being forced into slavery for the greater good of legitimate sex workers trying to make a living.
    - oneshot908 9y ago
      And note that nothing here is going to stop your duly elected congressperson from booking a 1st class flight to sex slave island. There are 20M+ victims of sex trafficking outside the United States. Some perspective: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worst-countries-for-modern-slavery/277037/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/a-...
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    It’s actually pretty similar. It is pretty easy to find the meat processing plants, agribusinesses, construction companies, etc who demand labor at prices not possible on the legal market. Likewise, it is very easy to find the johns soliciting prostitutes, even high end ones. (Recall former governor Eliot Spitzer)
  - iosDrone 9y ago
- zipwitch 9y ago
  Many if not most politicians (and those pulling their strings) passing the laws to enable this crackdown absolutely understand what they are doing. This is about control, at a very basic level. Access to sex and control of sex are a huge lever for shaping society. Moves like this aim to push society in a "traditional" or "reactionary" direction.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    And I might be more specific and say "control of women's sexuality". A lot of traditionalist mores are much more accepting of men's sexual liberty than women's.
  - shams93 9y ago
    Yes as normal relationships break down under the stress of social inequality sex becomes not a human right but something only for the wealthy. This has a huge impact on health. They're pushing the limit, once they cut off food stamps for many even food will be something only for the wealthy. But DC may have many enemies but none take more hatred from them than the very citizens they are supposedly tasked to protect and serve.
    - behringer 9y ago
      We can only hope the elite take our food and women, it's time for a good riot in the streets.
pjc50 9y ago
The cynical would say that's why they get taken down by law enforcement.
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  The extra-cynical might even say that taking down sites like this contributes to a power imbalance between police and sex workers which too many police officers take advantage of: https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/02/oakland-police-scandal-how-often-are-cops-having-sex-with-prostitutes/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/02/oakland-police-scanda... https://babe.net/2017/07/11/perfectly-legal-cops-trick-prostitutes-sex-heres-women-behind-fight-change-7778 https://babe.net/2017/07/11/perfectly-legal-cops-trick-prost... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in... I am not quite cynical enough to think that law enforcement pursues these sites for the purposes of maintaining that imbalance. There are many different attitudes towards sex work (and everything else) among law enforcement officers, and many of them probably really do believe they're doing it to keep kids safe.
empath75 9y ago
To be clear, people were pimping out children on backpage. We’re not taking about consenting adults in every case.
- colordrops 9y ago
  They are also using Gmail to do that. Do you agree with the SESTA/FOSTA legislation?
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    Make a case that someone at Google knows what accounts are involved in this activity and is letting it happen so they can profit from it and then you'll have a fair comparison.
    - troncjb 9y ago
      This is wrong. SESTA-FOSTA has dramatically lowered the bar. Some quotes: "The new bill holds website owners legally liable for criminal prosecution for any sex trafficking discussions that are viewable on their platform." "The legislation says a website is responsible if it “assists, supports, or facilitates” sex trafficking. Some of the vague wording opens up the bill for interpretation and has critics fearing frivolous lawsuits against platforms that didn’t know trafficking was happening on their site." The bar is not "knowingly aided". The bar is "built a platform that someone else used to sex-traffic".
      - jstarfish 9y ago
        This is not that vague. If I post a comment about prostitution on HN, HN is not liable (HN is clearly not a sex trafficking site), whereas the operator of The Erotic Review is definitely within scope of getting fucked. This is about eradicating purpose-driven websites related to prostitution. Backpage's C-team did some really, really bad stuff. No jury is going to convict the CEO of Reddit because someone somewhere posted a comment about prostitution on a subreddit. Section 230 still exists.
DanBC 9y ago
It's not being siezed because it was allowing adverts for sex. It's being siezed because it collaborated with criminal gangs who were kidnapping children and selling those children for sex. People who think Backpage was helping law enforcement keep track of child rapists should read what Backpage themselves admit. For the "they help law enforcement" argument to work Backpage needed to have kept the orginal ad text submitted by the criminal gangs and then either report that to law enforcement, or have it available to turn over when given a court order. What they actually did add a filter that removed words suggestive of illegal activity and then post the ad anyway. > At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication. The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “teen,” “fresh,” “innocent,” and “school girl.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex, thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.” Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including terms indicative of criminality Clearly, the "they help law enforcement" argument is fucking bogus. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report%202017.01.10%20FINAL.pdf https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
- baoha 9y ago
  I don't get it, why the criminal gangs want to get attention by including those words in their ads?
  - gowld 9y ago
    Obviously they wouldn't. But the terms are risque so they get censored.
- banku_brougham 9y ago
emodendroket 9y ago
There is confusion because there has been a seemingly deliberate effort to conflate sex work and human trafficking.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Well, it's also that human trafficking works under cover of these services hiding as legitimate sex work. But yeah, it's made a LOT worse by the lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding (not to mention puritanical notions) people have towards sex work.
  - oneshot908 9y ago
    Not to mention most of the abolitionists are flat out lying... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/?utm_term=.5230cb1d5293 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...
    - gowld 9y ago
      Are you flat out lying when you say "most"?
      - oneshot908 9y ago
        Let's consider the incident in Seattle a few years back wherein a "sex trafficking" ring run by tech people was busted by the cops. Except there were no actual sex trafficking charges brought against anyone and the whole sting operation seems to have been funded from out of state. https://www.thestranger.com/news/2018/03/24/25953235/king-county-took-money-from-an-anti-prostitution-organization-then-unprecedented-felony-prosecutions-of-sex-buyers-began https://www.thestranger.com/news/2018/03/24/25953235/king-co... Backpage was pretty sleazy. I don't think anyone's going to miss them, but are you not at all alarmed that there's a sudden onslaught of legislation that is claimed to target "sex trafficking", but which also apparently requires the deletion of the personals section from Craigslist, censoring of pornographic Google drive content, and even dirty words from Word documents? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/microsoft_services_agreement_bars_offensive_language/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/microsoft_services_... Where is this heading? And do you trust the motives of the people behind it?
ksk 9y ago
>and some larger studies, suggest the availability of such online services actually reduce violence, homicide, and sex trafficking. See for example: What study was this and how do we know its results are accurate and apply in this case? Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat. That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, they just prefer making conditions worse for those who don't have much to sell that is valued by anyone with the means to buy other than sex.
  - ksk 9y ago
    >That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. Yeah, we also don't allow child labor. I assume you don't have a problem with that? Capitalism doesn't work by itself. Human beings are social animals and all capitalist societies have a welfare component. >But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, That is ridiculous. "Many people" are certainly not happy to harm vulnerable sections of society. I have no clue who you're refering to. People are against prostitution for rational sane reasons.
- RangerScience 9y ago
  Sex work != objectification; although the correlation ("in today's society") is really substantial. In other words, this is not inherently a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat; even if today, many/most people in this trade are being sold like a piece of meat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2kJM9yQs9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2kJM9yQs9k Arguably, this is an attitude problem on the demand side - people who want to buy other people like they're pieces of meat - rather than something about the supply, or the trade itself. Here's a related interesting phenomenon: https://www.google.com/search?q=professional+cuddling https://www.google.com/search?q=professional+cuddling To end with a question: Would you consider professional dominatrixes to be in the trade [of selling themselves like meat]?
dragonwriter 9y ago
Basic neutral listing sites with links to resources like Backpage outwardly appeared probably are; to the extent that the allegations that the operators actively collaborated with and knowingly worked to conceal trafficking of minors, Backpage itself may not have been. While there is clearly a crusade against the former (as the aerlier attacks on CLs erotic/adult services listings made clear), and that's probably why Backpage got lots of attention in the first place, it's not clear that the reality of Backpage matched the surface appearance or the reality of the earlier targets.
himom 9y ago
Prohibition never works, except for for-profit prisons, Christians, politicians and police agency stats.
- spodek 9y ago
  It works for gangsters, organized crime, weapons merchants, and morticians.
- kofejnik 9y ago
  you forgot to mention feminists who really love to fight prostitution
itakedrugs 9y ago
Are you saying that they just want more work? I was thinking that they wanted it to be more hidden... so that they could ignore it.
ihsw2 9y ago
Reducing violence, homicide, and sex trafficking are not the intention -- the intention is enforcing the law. If sex workers want to do their work then they can get on the first flight to Amsterdam.
- Chyzwar 9y ago
  or Nevada
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- stickfigure 9y ago
  ...and if pre-1965 blacks wanted civil rights, they could get on the first flight to Africa. Sometimes the law is just shit.
downandout 9y ago
Agreed. The feds just destroyed what could have been their biggest ally against sex trafficking. Even if BackPage itself was not cooperative, the fact that the feds didn't have some sort of automated system that would scrape phone numbers/emails from this site, get warrants to monitor them, and then send humans to assist the girls and arrest the pimps, is unreal to me. They literally had a directory of sex trafficking victims and victimizers that has now been destroyed and pushed underground. This in no way fixed the problem, it just spread it out and made it orders of magnitude harder to deal with. The larger issues surround freedom of speech and the protections that online service providers have. I would have expected this kind of thing to happen after FOSTA was officially signed into law, which hasn't happened yet. Apparently Michael Lacey, a cofounder of Backpage, has been criminally charged [1]. I don't know all the issues involved, but overall it's a scary day if you own a website that has anything to do with personal ads. [1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investigations/2018/04/06/backpage-executive-michael-lacey-indicted-prostitution-charges/310430001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...
- edraferi 9y ago
  This is a common question in law enforcement: once you discover a facilitator or illegal activity, how long do you monitor it before attacking? You can learn a lot by watching, but eventually you have to Do Something or you become complicit. It’s a challenging strategic issue.
  - downandout 9y ago
    >how long do you monitor it before attacking Considering the large percentage of people in this space that were using BackPage, I think the answer to your question should have been whenever they had proven so effective at busting the pimps posting on there that usage had gone down significantly. As I said, I’d have automated the process, even the production of warrants to get text messages/emails associated with a given ad. Have software fill in the blanks on a template warrant with all the necessary legal language and details about BackPage, auto-email that template to an on-duty detective and have them review, print, sign, and submit it to a judge. Have the software record all the ads in a database and prioritize cases by the number of ads a given email/phone number appears in. One agency like the FBI could have created the system, then given it to all local law enforcement agencies across the country for free so that they could carry out the process locally. They could have nabbed thousands of pimps and sex traffickers this way.
gowld 9y ago
Until prostitution is legal, a nation will not be able to combat trafficking.
- kungtotte 9y ago
  Except there is data to support the fact that even where prostitution is legal, trafficking is still a problem... In fact, some studies suggest that legal prostitution actually enables trafficking to go unnoticed. If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter, so if the prostitute in question is a victim of trafficking they're now in contact with law enforcement and might be given a way out. With legal prostitution, the situation can go on much longer before law enforcement can step in and reach these victims.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    > If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter The police doesn't do this. If they did this, they'd have busted tons and tons of people via this Backpage website plus some warrants. They don't because they don't care.
  - belorn 9y ago
    You mean like studies like "Some anti-prostitution activists have tried to claim that Germany’s liberal form of legalization has encouraged sex trafficking. But they actually cite coercion among illegal sex workers (for example, those who are too young to legally work at a German brothel)". (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/?utm_term=.509196513aec https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...) Who would have guessed that those remaining in the illegal sector do not enjoy the benefit of decriminalization, almost like decriminalization create a bigger divide between what is legal and illegal. I would guess the same thing happened to smugglers after the prohibition, where those staying as a smuggler had to start transporting much more dangerous stuff like guns, explosives and heavy drugs. The lives of those smugglers surly got worse on the average, where the lives of those who went from illegal to legal got significant better. But let not look at those whose life got better since that would hurt the message of the study.
jmspring 9y ago
I’ve seen some of the studies and agree. That said, the senate report specific to backpage raises concerns. I’ve personally donated to St James Infirmary in SF and related to charities that provide related protections. Even in places where prostitution is legalized (Amsterdam), trafficking is an issue. When I was in Amsterdam 7 or so years ago, I recall stories of Russian and other traffickers.
Fnoord 9y ago
Cui bono? Lets face it: Donald "grab 'em by the pussy" Trump has zero respect for women. His goal isn't to protect women; it is to protect men. And I know this is a bit of a polarised statement, but that's what this law does: it protects all the people who benefit from sex workers (usually females) by putting the whole profession more into the underground. Its just ostrich politics at best. At worst, its a nefarious way to oppress [these] people who are, again, mostly (but not exclusively) women.
- needToSay 9y ago
  Lol fuck you diversity hire :)))

by gojomo 9y ago

troncjb 9y ago

This is important and most people don't realize this. This is the sex work equivalent of banning drug reagent kits.

koolba 9y ago
I think a better analogy is a safe injection site for heroin users.
- sli 9y ago
  Eh, that seems a little too loaded, all things considered. But definitely accurate in this case.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I don't think that's a good analogy at all. People have been hiring prostitutes for centuries. These sites help sex workers take control of their industry and bodies, vs being depending on street walking and abusive pimps. The big danger in America is the equality between prostitute and sex trafficking. They are not the same thing, and yet we're being fed the line that they are (except in some counties in Nevada).
  - opportune 9y ago
    This is definitely true. These days it seems law enforcement and news agencies seem to use the terms synonymously. It's a very worrying trend because "sex trafficking" sounds much worse than just regular-ole prostitution.
    - kwillets 9y ago
      It's possible that moving it off the street has made it so much less visible that these kinds of myths have developed about it much more easily. When hookers were out on the street corner it was a nuisance, but people could see that it was mostly voluntary. Online anonymity has made it more frightening to some.
- oneshot908 9y ago
  Safe injection sites are only effective apparently when combined with legalization and/or decriminalization of the drugs injected, source: http://chasingthescream.com/ http://chasingthescream.com/ TLDR: the criminal lifestyle one must pursue to obtain illegal supercharged versions of the drugs is vastly more harmful than the drugs themselves when legalized. I see a lot of parallels here in equating all sex work to sex trafficking. Both sides have their points, but what is the most effective strategy to minimize sex trafficking?
wutbrodo 9y ago
I think it's probably more accurate to say most people don't care. The average person isn't approaching policy discussions thinking about real-world effects; if one can't be bothered to spend ten seconds googling the effect of a policy before they talk about or vote on it, that pretty handily crosses the line from ignorance to agency (in the form of willful ignorance). The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.
- antisthenes 9y ago
  That's a bit disingenuous to say. A lot of policies are complex and a 10-second google search is unlikely to bring you anywhere near competence from willful ignorance. Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere. How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
  - mortehu 9y ago
    The first page I get when Googling "effects of minimum wage", [1], does not take a particularly simplistic view of the issue. The first paragraph says: > Recent research shows conflicting evidence on both sides of the issue. In general, the evidence suggests that it is appropriate to weigh the cost of potential job losses from a higher minimum wage against the benefits of wage increases for other workers. 1. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2015/december/effects-of-minimum-wage-on-employment/ https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    > A lot of policies are complex and a 10-second google search is unlikely to bring you anywhere near competence from willful ignorance. I'm not talking about competence. I'm talking about people not leaving or even attempting to leave the state of willful ignorance. > How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with. It's obvious that my comment wasn't a plea for universal omniscience. None of this is relevant to my complaint about people deprioritizing the effects of a policy, as if it's not close to the _only_ thing that's important. > Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere. This is a perfect example, thank you. Do you know what I would say if asked what I thought the effect of min wage changes are? _I would say I have no idea_, and anyone who tells you they do for sure is lying to you. Accepting that doesn't mean throwing up your hands in hopelessness, but it does suggest a different understanding of the effects of each policy than simply what feeling you get from hearing the one-line description. Policy, and the world in general, generally isn't as simple as people would like it to be. In democracies, one's insistence on pretending that things work the oversimplified way you want them to has concrete costs to those affected by those policies and is more than a little despicable.
pasbesoin 9y ago
It's like all the hiring of illegal immigrants, and then hounding them for coming here and doing the work. I'm not trying to claim any kind of parity between the two. I am saying, it's another form of persecuting the supply -- and putting it at increased risk -- in lieu of dealing with the demand or even being honest about it. It's also another excuse -- vehicle -- for the prescriptive moralists. Who, the more they complain about something, seemingly inevitably turn out to be engaged in it themselves. "I can't control myself. But, by God, I can control you!" Sex trafficking is a horrendous circumstance. Unfortunately, I'm left with no trust in our politicians being honest brokers with respect to the laws they introduce. Even if they honestly want to address the problem, they will -- heh -- not be able to "control themselves" with respect to how they use the expanded powers, going forward.
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  Hopefully this will spur more constituencies to legalize regulated prostitution instead of having to excuse children being forced into slavery for the greater good of legitimate sex workers trying to make a living.
  - oneshot908 9y ago
    And note that nothing here is going to stop your duly elected congressperson from booking a 1st class flight to sex slave island. There are 20M+ victims of sex trafficking outside the United States. Some perspective: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worst-countries-for-modern-slavery/277037/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/a-...
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It’s actually pretty similar. It is pretty easy to find the meat processing plants, agribusinesses, construction companies, etc who demand labor at prices not possible on the legal market. Likewise, it is very easy to find the johns soliciting prostitutes, even high end ones. (Recall former governor Eliot Spitzer)
- iosDrone 9y ago
zipwitch 9y ago
Many if not most politicians (and those pulling their strings) passing the laws to enable this crackdown absolutely understand what they are doing. This is about control, at a very basic level. Access to sex and control of sex are a huge lever for shaping society. Moves like this aim to push society in a "traditional" or "reactionary" direction.
- wpietri 9y ago
  And I might be more specific and say "control of women's sexuality". A lot of traditionalist mores are much more accepting of men's sexual liberty than women's.
- shams93 9y ago
  Yes as normal relationships break down under the stress of social inequality sex becomes not a human right but something only for the wealthy. This has a huge impact on health. They're pushing the limit, once they cut off food stamps for many even food will be something only for the wealthy. But DC may have many enemies but none take more hatred from them than the very citizens they are supposedly tasked to protect and serve.
  - behringer 9y ago
    We can only hope the elite take our food and women, it's time for a good riot in the streets.

pjc50 9y ago

The cynical would say that's why they get taken down by law enforcement.

thaumaturgy 9y ago
The extra-cynical might even say that taking down sites like this contributes to a power imbalance between police and sex workers which too many police officers take advantage of: https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/02/oakland-police-scandal-how-often-are-cops-having-sex-with-prostitutes/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/02/oakland-police-scanda... https://babe.net/2017/07/11/perfectly-legal-cops-trick-prostitutes-sex-heres-women-behind-fight-change-7778 https://babe.net/2017/07/11/perfectly-legal-cops-trick-prost... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in... I am not quite cynical enough to think that law enforcement pursues these sites for the purposes of maintaining that imbalance. There are many different attitudes towards sex work (and everything else) among law enforcement officers, and many of them probably really do believe they're doing it to keep kids safe.

empath75 9y ago

To be clear, people were pimping out children on backpage. We’re not taking about consenting adults in every case.

colordrops 9y ago
They are also using Gmail to do that. Do you agree with the SESTA/FOSTA legislation?
- jstarfish 9y ago
  Make a case that someone at Google knows what accounts are involved in this activity and is letting it happen so they can profit from it and then you'll have a fair comparison.
  - troncjb 9y ago
    This is wrong. SESTA-FOSTA has dramatically lowered the bar. Some quotes: "The new bill holds website owners legally liable for criminal prosecution for any sex trafficking discussions that are viewable on their platform." "The legislation says a website is responsible if it “assists, supports, or facilitates” sex trafficking. Some of the vague wording opens up the bill for interpretation and has critics fearing frivolous lawsuits against platforms that didn’t know trafficking was happening on their site." The bar is not "knowingly aided". The bar is "built a platform that someone else used to sex-traffic".
    - jstarfish 9y ago
      This is not that vague. If I post a comment about prostitution on HN, HN is not liable (HN is clearly not a sex trafficking site), whereas the operator of The Erotic Review is definitely within scope of getting fucked. This is about eradicating purpose-driven websites related to prostitution. Backpage's C-team did some really, really bad stuff. No jury is going to convict the CEO of Reddit because someone somewhere posted a comment about prostitution on a subreddit. Section 230 still exists.

DanBC 9y ago

It's not being siezed because it was allowing adverts for sex. It's being siezed because it collaborated with criminal gangs who were kidnapping children and selling those children for sex. People who think Backpage was helping law enforcement keep track of child rapists should read what Backpage themselves admit. For the "they help law enforcement" argument to work Backpage needed to have kept the orginal ad text submitted by the criminal gangs and then either report that to law enforcement, or have it available to turn over when given a court order. What they actually did add a filter that removed words suggestive of illegal activity and then post the ad anyway. > At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication. The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “teen,” “fresh,” “innocent,” and “school girl.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex, thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.” Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including terms indicative of criminality Clearly, the "they help law enforcement" argument is fucking bogus. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report%202017.01.10%20FINAL.pdf https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...

baoha 9y ago
I don't get it, why the criminal gangs want to get attention by including those words in their ads?
- gowld 9y ago
  Obviously they wouldn't. But the terms are risque so they get censored.
banku_brougham 9y ago

emodendroket 9y ago

There is confusion because there has been a seemingly deliberate effort to conflate sex work and human trafficking.

abritinthebay 9y ago
Well, it's also that human trafficking works under cover of these services hiding as legitimate sex work. But yeah, it's made a LOT worse by the lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding (not to mention puritanical notions) people have towards sex work.
- oneshot908 9y ago
  Not to mention most of the abolitionists are flat out lying... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/?utm_term=.5230cb1d5293 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...
  - gowld 9y ago
    Are you flat out lying when you say "most"?
    - oneshot908 9y ago
      Let's consider the incident in Seattle a few years back wherein a "sex trafficking" ring run by tech people was busted by the cops. Except there were no actual sex trafficking charges brought against anyone and the whole sting operation seems to have been funded from out of state. https://www.thestranger.com/news/2018/03/24/25953235/king-county-took-money-from-an-anti-prostitution-organization-then-unprecedented-felony-prosecutions-of-sex-buyers-began https://www.thestranger.com/news/2018/03/24/25953235/king-co... Backpage was pretty sleazy. I don't think anyone's going to miss them, but are you not at all alarmed that there's a sudden onslaught of legislation that is claimed to target "sex trafficking", but which also apparently requires the deletion of the personals section from Craigslist, censoring of pornographic Google drive content, and even dirty words from Word documents? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/microsoft_services_agreement_bars_offensive_language/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/microsoft_services_... Where is this heading? And do you trust the motives of the people behind it?

ksk 9y ago

>and some larger studies, suggest the availability of such online services actually reduce violence, homicide, and sex trafficking. See for example: What study was this and how do we know its results are accurate and apply in this case? Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat. That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, they just prefer making conditions worse for those who don't have much to sell that is valued by anyone with the means to buy other than sex.
- ksk 9y ago
  >That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. Yeah, we also don't allow child labor. I assume you don't have a problem with that? Capitalism doesn't work by itself. Human beings are social animals and all capitalist societies have a welfare component. >But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, That is ridiculous. "Many people" are certainly not happy to harm vulnerable sections of society. I have no clue who you're refering to. People are against prostitution for rational sane reasons.
RangerScience 9y ago
Sex work != objectification; although the correlation ("in today's society") is really substantial. In other words, this is not inherently a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat; even if today, many/most people in this trade are being sold like a piece of meat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2kJM9yQs9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2kJM9yQs9k Arguably, this is an attitude problem on the demand side - people who want to buy other people like they're pieces of meat - rather than something about the supply, or the trade itself. Here's a related interesting phenomenon: https://www.google.com/search?q=professional+cuddling https://www.google.com/search?q=professional+cuddling To end with a question: Would you consider professional dominatrixes to be in the trade [of selling themselves like meat]?

dragonwriter 9y ago

Basic neutral listing sites with links to resources like Backpage outwardly appeared probably are; to the extent that the allegations that the operators actively collaborated with and knowingly worked to conceal trafficking of minors, Backpage itself may not have been. While there is clearly a crusade against the former (as the aerlier attacks on CLs erotic/adult services listings made clear), and that's probably why Backpage got lots of attention in the first place, it's not clear that the reality of Backpage matched the surface appearance or the reality of the earlier targets.

himom 9y ago

Prohibition never works, except for for-profit prisons, Christians, politicians and police agency stats.

spodek 9y ago
It works for gangsters, organized crime, weapons merchants, and morticians.
kofejnik 9y ago
you forgot to mention feminists who really love to fight prostitution

itakedrugs 9y ago

Are you saying that they just want more work? I was thinking that they wanted it to be more hidden... so that they could ignore it.

ihsw2 9y ago

Reducing violence, homicide, and sex trafficking are not the intention -- the intention is enforcing the law. If sex workers want to do their work then they can get on the first flight to Amsterdam.

Chyzwar 9y ago
or Nevada
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 9y ago
...and if pre-1965 blacks wanted civil rights, they could get on the first flight to Africa. Sometimes the law is just shit.

downandout 9y ago

Agreed. The feds just destroyed what could have been their biggest ally against sex trafficking. Even if BackPage itself was not cooperative, the fact that the feds didn't have some sort of automated system that would scrape phone numbers/emails from this site, get warrants to monitor them, and then send humans to assist the girls and arrest the pimps, is unreal to me. They literally had a directory of sex trafficking victims and victimizers that has now been destroyed and pushed underground. This in no way fixed the problem, it just spread it out and made it orders of magnitude harder to deal with. The larger issues surround freedom of speech and the protections that online service providers have. I would have expected this kind of thing to happen after FOSTA was officially signed into law, which hasn't happened yet. Apparently Michael Lacey, a cofounder of Backpage, has been criminally charged [1]. I don't know all the issues involved, but overall it's a scary day if you own a website that has anything to do with personal ads. [1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investigations/2018/04/06/backpage-executive-michael-lacey-indicted-prostitution-charges/310430001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...

edraferi 9y ago
This is a common question in law enforcement: once you discover a facilitator or illegal activity, how long do you monitor it before attacking? You can learn a lot by watching, but eventually you have to Do Something or you become complicit. It’s a challenging strategic issue.
- downandout 9y ago
  >how long do you monitor it before attacking Considering the large percentage of people in this space that were using BackPage, I think the answer to your question should have been whenever they had proven so effective at busting the pimps posting on there that usage had gone down significantly. As I said, I’d have automated the process, even the production of warrants to get text messages/emails associated with a given ad. Have software fill in the blanks on a template warrant with all the necessary legal language and details about BackPage, auto-email that template to an on-duty detective and have them review, print, sign, and submit it to a judge. Have the software record all the ads in a database and prioritize cases by the number of ads a given email/phone number appears in. One agency like the FBI could have created the system, then given it to all local law enforcement agencies across the country for free so that they could carry out the process locally. They could have nabbed thousands of pimps and sex traffickers this way.

gowld 9y ago

Until prostitution is legal, a nation will not be able to combat trafficking.

kungtotte 9y ago
Except there is data to support the fact that even where prostitution is legal, trafficking is still a problem... In fact, some studies suggest that legal prostitution actually enables trafficking to go unnoticed. If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter, so if the prostitute in question is a victim of trafficking they're now in contact with law enforcement and might be given a way out. With legal prostitution, the situation can go on much longer before law enforcement can step in and reach these victims.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  > If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter The police doesn't do this. If they did this, they'd have busted tons and tons of people via this Backpage website plus some warrants. They don't because they don't care.
- belorn 9y ago
  You mean like studies like "Some anti-prostitution activists have tried to claim that Germany’s liberal form of legalization has encouraged sex trafficking. But they actually cite coercion among illegal sex workers (for example, those who are too young to legally work at a German brothel)". (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/?utm_term=.509196513aec https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...) Who would have guessed that those remaining in the illegal sector do not enjoy the benefit of decriminalization, almost like decriminalization create a bigger divide between what is legal and illegal. I would guess the same thing happened to smugglers after the prohibition, where those staying as a smuggler had to start transporting much more dangerous stuff like guns, explosives and heavy drugs. The lives of those smugglers surly got worse on the average, where the lives of those who went from illegal to legal got significant better. But let not look at those whose life got better since that would hurt the message of the study.

jmspring 9y ago

I’ve seen some of the studies and agree. That said, the senate report specific to backpage raises concerns. I’ve personally donated to St James Infirmary in SF and related to charities that provide related protections. Even in places where prostitution is legalized (Amsterdam), trafficking is an issue. When I was in Amsterdam 7 or so years ago, I recall stories of Russian and other traffickers.

Fnoord 9y ago

Cui bono? Lets face it: Donald "grab 'em by the pussy" Trump has zero respect for women. His goal isn't to protect women; it is to protect men. And I know this is a bit of a polarised statement, but that's what this law does: it protects all the people who benefit from sex workers (usually females) by putting the whole profession more into the underground. Its just ostrich politics at best. At worst, its a nefarious way to oppress [these] people who are, again, mostly (but not exclusively) women.

needToSay 9y ago
Lol fuck you diversity hire :)))