27 ms·

Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

224 points by vanusa 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Zak 7y ago
It doesn't seem to me that this result should have been difficult to predict. Some people did, of course, but neither politicians nor the mainstream press seemed to give the argument much consideration. There's even evidence suggesting that backpage.com was effectively railroaded, and actively aided law enforcement in identifying and prosecuting pimps and child abusers (this source has a known libertarian political bias): https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-government-has-been-lying-about-backpage/ https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
Iv 7y ago
What is sad is that there are a lot of real-size social experiments in various countries that have a variety of legislation and situation and a ton of literature to guide policy there. I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking. These policies should have a single, fact-based, evidence-based goal: fight sex slavery and human trafficking. If it leads to a system I don't like, so be it. Fighting slavery is the #1 goal there.
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  Then put everyone under 24 hour surveillance. That is the only logical choice given your goals. If you allow someone any amount of freedom, you can't be sure they won't used it this try and enslave someone else.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Balancing between freedom and safety is one thing. But if we have a bill that chips away from freedoms guaranteed by section 230, and it also doesn't make the people it's trying to help any safer... can't we agree that bill in specific should get thrown out? This isn't a problem of balancing freedom with protecting sex workers. This bill makes the Internet less free and makes sex workers less safe. Everyone loses with this bill, except a few Congresspeople who get to look good for cameras.
  - geofft 7y ago
    That's clearly not what the comment you're replying to was saying. It was saying, I might have my moral opinions in a vacuum about whether prostitution is good or bad, but the moral principle of trafficking being bad overrides that, and we should follow what the evidence says. If the evidence says that decriminalizing sex work reduces trafficking, then a moral opinion against sex work doesn't outweigh the evidence. It was clearly not about higher moral principle of fundamental liberty.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      The "higher moral principle of fundamental liberty" is choosing the more free/less restrictive path even when that leads to worse outcomes. That's literally the idea behind the entire liberty vs freedom discussion - that (for instance) even if giving the government access to all our communications would make us safer, it's still not what should be done.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    That's a silly argument. You could equally rightly say that we should just execute everybody because if they are breathing they can enslave someone. Clearly parent didn't mean trivial solutions are the "best" because they achieve the goal 100% but require destroying everything else.
- hnuser77 7y ago
  It seems reasonable to claim (and seems to be backed up by authorities on the issue) that most genuine sex trafficking originates from two sources: 1) visa fraud and/or human smuggling across the border and 2) domestically, broken homes. Trying to fix either of these root causes requires stepping on some political landmines.
- bluecalm 7y ago
  Human trafficking is not the only consideration. There is health and safety of sex workers, issue of tying public resources to police voluntary victimless acts as well as just freedom to make choices about your life. Prohibition makes all the above significantly worse. You would need a lot of compelling evidence it helps reducing trafficking to even get into a reasonable debate on it. I highly doubt it was ever about trafficking to begin with. It's about various groups (on both right and left) wanting to tell people what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies.
  - Iv 7y ago
    > It's about various groups (on both right and left) wanting to tell people what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies. Exactly. That's what makes me bitter about these questions. Legalization of prositution is actually an interesting question as you can find left-wing and right-wing arguments for and against. It has a potential of being very divisive or unifying across party lines. And about health issues, I agree it is an important one, but sorry, if the workers we are talking about are free of their career choices, I think it comes after the question of people who do not have a choice.
    - bluecalm 7y ago
      There are many other things you can do to reduce trafficking though. You can be more aggressive setting up honey pots and going after traffickers or make borders more secure or invest in social services to help people in rough life situation to name a few. I don't want the kind of thinking that sacrifices freedom and moral principles so the bad guys have less avenues to profit to dominate our world. For all we know if they can't do trafficking they will switch to other criminal activity and hurt people there. They are the problem not the people who exchange sex for money so let's go after the actual problem.
- pjc50 7y ago
  "Human trafficking" is a problem created by immigration law. Like the 39 dead Vietnamese in the UK recently, the "system" would prefer that they are dead than allow them to work in the UK. The same applies to sex trafficking. All the system offers people is deportation at best and indefinite detention with no legal rights at worst. Or death. We should not pretend that we are acting in the best interest of the trafficked.
- naasking 7y ago
  > My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking. "Any chance" is an absurd standard. Consider what a country would look like if you said that personal preferences should be dismissed if it had any chance of increasing murder. Get comfortable eating your steak with your teeth since the presence of knives has a non-zero chance of increasing murder!
par 7y ago
uhhh ya think?
jseliger 7y ago
I just wrote this, in reply to an essay about The Irishman https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to-unlearn-carbon-capture-and-storage-status-and-signaling-and-more https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to-unlearn-... : “The lonesome Irishman.” On the movie The Irishman; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I’ve seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there’s not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures. We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.
- np_tedious 7y ago
  Why shouldn't opiods be legal? Sure, they are bad. But so is tobacco. Most overdoses happen precisely because of unstable dosages or unexpected fentanyl.
  - jm__87 7y ago
    I think you need to balance the risks of addiction and negative health consequences against the cost of having gangs/cartels profiting off of the fact that the substance is controlled. With marijuana, it is neither very addictive nor are the health consequences of using marijuana very severe, at least in the short term. Legalization is a bit of a no brainer for marijuana. Opioids are at the other end of the spectrum - they are highly addictive and aside from the possibility of accidental overdose, even just using them at the correct dosage carries a lot of negative health consequences. It is not clear that you get a net win for society by legalizing opioids.
    - M2Ys4U 7y ago
istjohn 7y ago
https://archive.md/iTRDs https://archive.md/iTRDs
boomboomsubban 7y ago
The only part of this article that can be considered "news" is that two presidential candidates support doing a study on the bill's effects. Everything else is the same as the articles written before it passed. What prompted reprinting this article without actually doing any investigation into the ramifications?
- di4na 7y ago
  A law proposal to make a study of the impact.
viburnum 7y ago
Where prostitution has been completely legalized there’s been a huge increase in demand, and the market has responded not with an increase in wages for sex workers but with an increase in slavery. In practice the least-bad policy seems to be legal/decriminalized to sell but illegal to buy.
- 55555 7y ago
  Why should it be illegal for customers to pay for prostitution? Why do you feel prostitutes are entitled to above-market wages?
  - istjohn 7y ago
    Their contention is that legal sex work creates a market that incentivises sex trafficking, in which case it should be illegal to protect women from being victimized.
    - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
      Can male sex workers be legalized then?
- perilunar 7y ago
  > Where prostitution has been completely legalized there’s been a huge increase in demand... That was not the case in NSW (Australia) or in New Zealand, where decriminalisation led to NO increase in the size of the sex industry.
burnte 7y ago
Noooooo! When I ehard about backpage being shut down because it was the biggest place for child sex trafficking, I said it was the dumbest move they could make. You have a website with the vast majority of illegal sex traffickers COMING TO YOU, and you close it? Why? Make BP a deal, give the FBI an office to scan everything so they can go after child sex traffickers, and you can stay open. We'd have arrested thousands of them by now.
- kjeetgill 7y ago
  If I recall correctly, the owners of Backpage we're charged with taking money and working with the traffickers. It may not have been a matter of Backpage accidentally being an exploited market place. I suspect that changed their willingness to host agents within their walls.
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    Coverage of the case is here: https://frontpageconfidential.com/category/backpage/ https://frontpageconfidential.com/category/backpage/ The fed's argument is that there was so much illegal prostitution activity on Backpage that the owners must have been supporting it. The defense is currently occupied with getting access to the servers, presumably to show that the frequency of illegal postings was small compared to the rest of the site and that all reported postings were acted on immediately.
    - excalibur 7y ago
      Fun fact, prostitution isn't a federal offense.
      - jki275 7y ago
        There's a federal statute regarding trafficking persons across state lines as I recall. It's not specifically "prostitution" but meets the general description if there's an interstate nexus, which of course can be easily shown for an internet site in many cases.
rolltiide 7y ago
I prefer Germany, Austria and Switzerland's model. Its not a panacea in preventing trafficking but for the workers that want to be there it doesn't criminalize them, and the market for establishments are pretty competitive and great for patrons. Game of Thrones can't even compare, while many tourists corral themselves over to one street in Amsterdam due to its marketing campaign even though there are whole countries that are way more awesome. The std testing is the most attractive part of these systems. "Tolerant" and "Decriminalized" places do not have the capability of offering that. Let alone everywhere that outrights criminalizes workers and/or Johns. I think the population health should be a prong that is weighed heavier. Regulated systems do that. If there is any coercion of the sex workers then spend resources enforcing that and providing avenues just like anybody else in a domestic abuse relationship.
- k__ 7y ago
  As far as I know the problem here in Germany is legalization. They could simply have decriminalized prostitution and leave procuration illegal, but no, they had to throw around with laws to make the live of sex-workers harder.
  - 3131s 7y ago
    Why is that making sex workers lives harder?
    - k__ 7y ago
      If they have to follow more laws, their work gets harder. If prostitution was just decriminalized, their work would just have been easier, it would have been a normal job like every other job.
      - rolltiide 7y ago
        "Just decriminalized" means there is no confidence or way to assume that the sex workers are routinely tested. Pass. As a sidenote, this reminds me of another reason why criminalization is a waste of time as it only ensnares the poor or impatient, while an even distribution of the more privileged ones of us engage in the exact same behaviors but where it is legal, remaining upstanding citizens by every metric.
istjohn 7y ago
There is a debate as to whether or not legalizing prostitution exacerbates sex slavery by creating a market for prostitution that willing market participants are unable to fill. This author[1] points out that studies on this question use the term "sex trafficking" which can mean either illegal immigration of willing sex workers or sex slavery. That distinction seems important, but is often not clarified by investigators. I think this issue is vexing because there are so many groups with different compelling reasons to favor or oppose prohibition. The below list is obviously a gross over-simplification, but I think it captures the largest forces in the debate. FOR: Men. Men would benefit from legalization in the obvious way. AGAINST: Women. Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal prostitution. FOR: Sex workers. Sex workers would benefit in the obvious way. AGAINST: Religious groups. They lost the battle against pornography, but they're winning this one. AGAINST: Feminists. Not all feminists, but many feminists believe sex work is exploitation by definition. [2] Each group has powerful motivations completely independent from the effect of legalization on sex slavery. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-prostitution-and-sex-trafficking-from-the-annals-of-bad-economic-research/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-pr... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution
- jkaplowitz 7y ago
  This is a big simplification: There are male sex workers and female sex worker customers even if most of each population is the other way around. Additionally, voluntary sex workers themselves generally oppose the forced labour market (i.e. sex slavery) as much as the prohibitionists, even if they're understandably focusing more on decriminalizing themselves. And I don't think the sex-worker-exclusionary feminists are representative of most feminists, even if the overlap between their views on this topic and those of conservative and religious groups gives them a big megaphone. Regarding legal presence, many sex workers are in a country legally aside from their choice to do sex work, sometimes even with work permission for most jobs. (Canada has some relevant exclusions in their standard open work permit, for example.)
  - istjohn 7y ago
thrower123 7y ago
You'd think that we might have learned by now that if you try to vigorously suppress something that people want, this sort of thing happens.
a483838 7y ago
As someone who spent over a decade in the adult industry BackPage was extremely responsible. They had a staff of 70 people dedicated to reporting suspicious ads to police. They were the #1 source of trafficking tips. Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail.
- catalogia 7y ago
  > Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail. Was shutting it down somehow not an option? Better to shut it down than to give it to a gangster.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Parent says she didn't want to go to jail. Do you know her preferences better? ISTM most people don't want to go to jail.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      It seems to me that the legal trouble would have come from continuing to operate the site, and by selling the site instead of deleting the database and shutting it down, she sold out those women. But supposing she was being threatened with imprisonment unless she sold it, biting that bullet would have been the honorable thing to do. She owed that much to the people who trusted her with data of that nature.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        A person in the situation described above is dealing with corrupt and capricious police and prosecutors. Honest cops would have just charged her and asked the courts to shut her down, if they really felt she had broken laws.
dzonga 7y ago
the reason, backpage was shut down is that the gvt couldn't get a cut. and like all activities that are morally, grey. once the gvt stops getting their cut, they will scoop in. it's just the same, way the mafia is allowed to operate unions etc and once they ruffle feathers and stop contributing to politicians then all of a sudden the mafia is running a racket. Yet the gvt runs the biggest racket, protection scheme. so yeah, now all the SW are back on the streets or in the hands of pimps. Also the backpage era, due to supply and demand markets efficiencies, seems SW had become a safe sustainable, decent livelihood for many.
- technobum 7y ago
  Software has been a safe sustainable, decent livelihood for me at least
  - bigwavedave 7y ago
    I'm fairly sure the occurrences of 'SW' in the parent comment stand for "sex working" or something akin to that and not for "software".
    - technobum 7y ago
      this was a joke about ambiguities in terse language
- stevenicr 7y ago
  I believe it was shutdown not because they didn't get a cut, but because they were the perfect boogeyman to create a large cut of other pies. From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it.. from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money. Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - yet the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers. It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing. The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?
jrochkind1 7y ago
You mean exactly how sex workers said it would, but nobody listened to them, because it was never actually about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_n_5aa1924fe4b04c33cb6cecb2 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_... https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-daniels-a-bipartisan-bill-will-lead-to-further-victimization-of-sex-8e5ef184f5ef https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...
- paulgb 7y ago
  It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
  - hiram112 7y ago
    It isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists. Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view. Why? When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where the product / service carries less legal risk and societal stigmas than before. Thus, men are far less likely to pay large premiums for sex with non-prostitutes including 'courting', dating, marriage, etc.
    - avgeek23 7y ago
      Ah this comment sums up perfectly.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      You don’t need complex market forces. It is fairly common for people to disallow other people from doing things: * for their own good * for perceived externalities This is common enough for drugs, heavy metal, child employment, and contracting that it doesn’t surprise me they would apply it to prostitution. In fact, I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.
hiram112 7y ago
I think the most unmentioned facet regarding prostitution is that for many men, prostitution may be the only way for them to obtain sex, which I feel is just as much of a "right" as is the right for women to obtain an abortion. No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions. But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too. There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying). I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it. Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
- lurquer 7y ago
  Your fourth paragraph is insightful. Prostitution, however, worsens the situation. The detrimental aspect of harem-based societies is not bunches of horny men unable to get laid... rather, it's bunches of single men -- horny or not -- that are not part of a family, and who have no need to be productive. Prostitution lessens the desirability of men and decreases somewhat their desire to marry. This causes further declines in monogamy rates and hastens the societal damage you allude to.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    People like Andrew Yang are telling us that massive layoffs are coming anyway, because robots. Maybe you disapprove of lives of video-gaming and regular custom with prostitutes, but if it's inevitable maybe we should try to deal with it rather than grinding people up in our efforts to prevent it. Human lives can have meaning that is not related to work.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    > it's bunches of single men ... that are not part of a family, and who have no need to be productive That's actually argument for prostitution. You have to earn money for prostitutes. Granted not as much as for the family but still. Also I think there's way less colateral damage for everybody if less desirable men can just buy what they crave directly instead of attempting to compete with better men over women that don't want less desirable men and if they settle for them they'll regret it.
otabdeveloper4 7y ago
> "stamping out murder may have pushed it underground" Okay, and how is that a bad thing?
- praptak 7y ago
  If the end effect is greater body count then yes, it is a bad thing.
nullifidian 7y ago
It's important to note that whenever trafficking is discussed , in 95% of cases it's going to be about consensual prostitution between adults. Anti-sex activists have been successful at attacking the vocabulary. "But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use “sexual exploitation” to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents.” " https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has-become-meaningless-term https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has...
- pergadad 7y ago
  95% seems like an awfully wrong guess. There is a lot of forced prostitution, then a huge great area of those that for various reasons have no other option (from abusive boyfriend to immigration status to economic factors) and then a very small crust of voluntary sex workers, mostly at the high-end of the market. The ratio between these three will vary massively between country/region/city but in any case it is often difficult to identify who is victim and who is voluntary because the world is complex. (Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?)
  - olau 7y ago
    Could you cite sources for these claims? The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know. You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities. I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.
    - a483838 7y ago
0_____0 7y ago
Hah! No shit. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of steet prostitution. One night I was smoking a cigarette on my porch when a girl who was working that night popped out from behind a car, walked over and asked if I had a smoke, and I obliged her. Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reached for something, and she booked it. I asked her if she had seen changes since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which she wasn't aware of. She did tell me that the neighbors on the main drag wanted Backpage and the like back, because there had been a significant uptick in street prostitution.
- dmix 7y ago
  FOSTA didn't actually take down Backpage, it's a common myth they were connected. The investigation into Backpage stated well before FOSTA ever existed and they just used the timing of taking down Backpage to announce the release of FOSTA, which resulted in the public perception they were related. Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market. 95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities. The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls. There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole. Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away. The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria. One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.
aussieguy1234 7y ago
As the article says, lots of sites in a mad panic did a purge of sex and dating related content since SESTA/FOSTA was passed. I've launched Libr, which won't be doing any such purge. It was built as a replacement for Tumblr. I'm in Australia, SESTA/FOSTA is an American law. https://librapp.com https://librapp.com
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Will you have American customers? If so, how will they pay you?
  - aussieguy1234 7y ago
    There are already American users, but they're not paying anything for the service. I don't have ads yet.
paggle 7y ago
“Stamping out” anything moves it underground. The transaction volume almost always goes down and the risk for those remaining in the market almost always goes up.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  In the same way the war on drugs had a lot of casualties (and collateral damage) and did absolutely nothing to reduce drug usage. Prostitution is called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. It has always existed, in all countries, cultures, etc. IMHO legalized prostitution with some sane policies for health and safety combined with a threat of prosecution for 'customers' of victims of human trafficking (e.g. for rape, because that's what that is) would do wonders to clean that business up. A blanket ban just drives women in the hands of criminals.
bdhdbbdbdjdns 7y ago
As an occasional consumer of sex work, here is the reality: yes, It’s more dangerous now for both parties, but much more so for the women. The labor supply has gone down sharply because the economics went upside down. If you can’t count on as many clients per day the fixed cost of the hotel room becomes harder to risk so many girls exited the market. Prices have gone up sharply. The kind of girls that were charging $250-300 are now charging $400-500. “Trafficking” is an almost nonexistent issue at these price points where I dabble but as I understand is depressingly common on the low end of the market where people are picking up girls on the street for $20 blow jobs. Those girls are now more vulnerable than ever because with the smaller size of the marketplace they need pimps, madams, agencies, etc. to help them get enough work.
- overcast 7y ago
  Just to satisfy my own curiosity, what is your use case for paying for sex? Married? High powered executive? I can't imagine paying for something that is easily free on a million different dating apps.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Not to be too mean here, but perhaps the OP doesn't have an easy time finding willing partners in the traditional dating scene. Maybe they have the kind of look that makes women swipe left.
    - di4na 7y ago
      Or maybe they prefer to pay to not have to spend their time going through the whole pain to find someone, make them interested, etc etc all with the risk of being for nothing. If you have the money, it is a good way to cut on time spent.
    - overcast 7y ago
      It's possible, but in my experience, there is someone for everyone. I suppose if the goal is to hit way above your weight, paying makes sense. Money does seem to have that effect on women. But if you have that much, you should be able to pull it easily without prostitution?
seibelj 7y ago
Libertarians were way ahead of the curve on drug legalization, criminal justice reform, school choice, and police brutality to name recent victories. We have been banging the drum on legalizing sex work for decades, and I'm optimistic that true freedom for consenting adults will continue to win over the 'Controllers of Lives' that want to ban freedom. There is nothing wrong with two consenting adults choosing to have sexual relations for monetary exchange, and I care nothing about "downsides" that come from legalization. It's morally imperative that we allow freedom, then deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we should just ban alcohol, driving, having kids, or anything that can potentially have negative effects when we allow people to be free and make their own decisions.
abstractbarista 7y ago
Its so simple for me. Just like with weed.... Legalize it! Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting. Of course, have law enforcement root out the kiddie stuff, and have a legal framework to ensure safety (STI testing, etc) but my goodness, the efforts we currently go through to catch consenting adults in mutual benefit...
- throw_m239339 7y ago
  > Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting. Because "legalizing it" doesn't stop sex trafficking or sexual exploitation, in fact all evidences point to the contrary, it increases sex slavery. https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/12/17/the-child-sexual-abuse-hidden-behind-the-sex-work-facade/ https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/12/17/the-child-sexual-abuse...?
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - throw_m67657 7y ago
    The article paints a sad picture ...although your conclusion seems far fetched. Even marriage can be made into paid rape by the wordings of that article. AFAIK ... decriminalization allows for 1. The sex worker to approach authorities without any fear of prosecution. 2. To set up freelance sex work without pimps and brothels. There shouldn't be a debate about this. Criminalization makes things worse at the expense of moral tidiness. Regulated sex work allows for 1. Brothels 2. Strip clubs 3. Massage parlors 4. Sex Therapists If the regulators are corrupt or weak or there are no strong checks ... then the model will be as bad as an unregulated market and will actually be worse as it allows trafficked victims to work under quasi-legal protection. That's what the article implies. From what I know the nordic model has a large number of social services that help sex-workers quit the profession if they wish to and helps sex-workers unionise.
    - briandear 7y ago
notjtrig 7y ago
For real though, in my world, the other America, ‘online sex trafficking’ is alive and well. Apps are blowing up with whores, they literally offering subscription services now. E-Thot is the word of the year, all these money sending apps that came out recently are capitalizing on a new thriving market with blurred lines as to what is legal.
StuffedParrot 7y ago
You don’t pass conservative legislation like this to reduce fear of crime.
sqldevuser 7y ago
get a real job
- to-too-two 7y ago
  What? How does this contribute to the discussion?
yters 7y ago
Stamping out murder only has pushed it underground! Stamping out rape has only pushed it underground! Stamping out kidnapping has only pushed it underground! I long for the day all of these practices can be legalized and done safely and in the open!
- brutt 7y ago
  Murdering of idiots is beneficial for society! Let's make it legal. We can't stop wars anyway.
  - yters 7y ago
    While we are at if, why not get rid of all laws? Then everything is legal and crime will drop to zero!
- Woberto 7y ago
  These all seem like false equivalences. I think it should be "stamping out _online_ murder" etc. And this makes more sense - if people can no longer pursue illegal activities online, they may do so in person. Which I still think is an improvement, because I think it's harder to commit some of these crimes in person.
  - yters 7y ago
    Oh I didn't realize people were only having sex with kids in virtual reality. Then I agree, better to keep that virtual instead of having them do it real life. Thanks for clearing things up for me!
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Truly voluntary prostitution isn't the same as murder, rape, or kidnapping. People have to work to survive. Some people make so little at work that if they lost that job, they'd be homeless or suffer other harm. And, most people would rather not be at work. Companies often provide this work. Are workers slaves? Are companies exploiting workers? If that type of worker-company relationship is morally permissible, then on some level prostitution has to be as well.
ilaksh 7y ago
I hope people will consider the idea that UBI could factor into this type of discussion.
fallingfrog 7y ago
I mean that was the intention, was it not? A full discussion of our incoherent approach to work, sex, sex work, morality, patriarchal power dynamics, and so forth is out of scope here but it was never about making material improvements to anybody’s life.
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224 points by vanusa 7y ago

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Zak 7y ago

It doesn't seem to me that this result should have been difficult to predict. Some people did, of course, but neither politicians nor the mainstream press seemed to give the argument much consideration. There's even evidence suggesting that backpage.com was effectively railroaded, and actively aided law enforcement in identifying and prosecuting pimps and child abusers (this source has a known libertarian political bias): https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-government-has-been-lying-about-backpage/ https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...

Iv 7y ago

What is sad is that there are a lot of real-size social experiments in various countries that have a variety of legislation and situation and a ton of literature to guide policy there. I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking. These policies should have a single, fact-based, evidence-based goal: fight sex slavery and human trafficking. If it leads to a system I don't like, so be it. Fighting slavery is the #1 goal there.

boomboomsubban 7y ago
Then put everyone under 24 hour surveillance. That is the only logical choice given your goals. If you allow someone any amount of freedom, you can't be sure they won't used it this try and enslave someone else.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Balancing between freedom and safety is one thing. But if we have a bill that chips away from freedoms guaranteed by section 230, and it also doesn't make the people it's trying to help any safer... can't we agree that bill in specific should get thrown out? This isn't a problem of balancing freedom with protecting sex workers. This bill makes the Internet less free and makes sex workers less safe. Everyone loses with this bill, except a few Congresspeople who get to look good for cameras.
- geofft 7y ago
  That's clearly not what the comment you're replying to was saying. It was saying, I might have my moral opinions in a vacuum about whether prostitution is good or bad, but the moral principle of trafficking being bad overrides that, and we should follow what the evidence says. If the evidence says that decriminalizing sex work reduces trafficking, then a moral opinion against sex work doesn't outweigh the evidence. It was clearly not about higher moral principle of fundamental liberty.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    The "higher moral principle of fundamental liberty" is choosing the more free/less restrictive path even when that leads to worse outcomes. That's literally the idea behind the entire liberty vs freedom discussion - that (for instance) even if giving the government access to all our communications would make us safer, it's still not what should be done.
- scotty79 7y ago
  That's a silly argument. You could equally rightly say that we should just execute everybody because if they are breathing they can enslave someone. Clearly parent didn't mean trivial solutions are the "best" because they achieve the goal 100% but require destroying everything else.
hnuser77 7y ago
It seems reasonable to claim (and seems to be backed up by authorities on the issue) that most genuine sex trafficking originates from two sources: 1) visa fraud and/or human smuggling across the border and 2) domestically, broken homes. Trying to fix either of these root causes requires stepping on some political landmines.
bluecalm 7y ago
Human trafficking is not the only consideration. There is health and safety of sex workers, issue of tying public resources to police voluntary victimless acts as well as just freedom to make choices about your life. Prohibition makes all the above significantly worse. You would need a lot of compelling evidence it helps reducing trafficking to even get into a reasonable debate on it. I highly doubt it was ever about trafficking to begin with. It's about various groups (on both right and left) wanting to tell people what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies.
- Iv 7y ago
  > It's about various groups (on both right and left) wanting to tell people what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies. Exactly. That's what makes me bitter about these questions. Legalization of prositution is actually an interesting question as you can find left-wing and right-wing arguments for and against. It has a potential of being very divisive or unifying across party lines. And about health issues, I agree it is an important one, but sorry, if the workers we are talking about are free of their career choices, I think it comes after the question of people who do not have a choice.
  - bluecalm 7y ago
    There are many other things you can do to reduce trafficking though. You can be more aggressive setting up honey pots and going after traffickers or make borders more secure or invest in social services to help people in rough life situation to name a few. I don't want the kind of thinking that sacrifices freedom and moral principles so the bad guys have less avenues to profit to dominate our world. For all we know if they can't do trafficking they will switch to other criminal activity and hurt people there. They are the problem not the people who exchange sex for money so let's go after the actual problem.
pjc50 7y ago
"Human trafficking" is a problem created by immigration law. Like the 39 dead Vietnamese in the UK recently, the "system" would prefer that they are dead than allow them to work in the UK. The same applies to sex trafficking. All the system offers people is deportation at best and indefinite detention with no legal rights at worst. Or death. We should not pretend that we are acting in the best interest of the trafficked.
naasking 7y ago
> My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking. "Any chance" is an absurd standard. Consider what a country would look like if you said that personal preferences should be dismissed if it had any chance of increasing murder. Get comfortable eating your steak with your teeth since the presence of knives has a non-zero chance of increasing murder!

par 7y ago

uhhh ya think?

jseliger 7y ago

I just wrote this, in reply to an essay about The Irishman https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to-unlearn-carbon-capture-and-storage-status-and-signaling-and-more https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to-unlearn-... : “The lonesome Irishman.” On the movie The Irishman; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I’ve seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there’s not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures. We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.

np_tedious 7y ago
Why shouldn't opiods be legal? Sure, they are bad. But so is tobacco. Most overdoses happen precisely because of unstable dosages or unexpected fentanyl.
- jm__87 7y ago
  I think you need to balance the risks of addiction and negative health consequences against the cost of having gangs/cartels profiting off of the fact that the substance is controlled. With marijuana, it is neither very addictive nor are the health consequences of using marijuana very severe, at least in the short term. Legalization is a bit of a no brainer for marijuana. Opioids are at the other end of the spectrum - they are highly addictive and aside from the possibility of accidental overdose, even just using them at the correct dosage carries a lot of negative health consequences. It is not clear that you get a net win for society by legalizing opioids.
  - M2Ys4U 7y ago

istjohn 7y ago

https://archive.md/iTRDs https://archive.md/iTRDs

boomboomsubban 7y ago

The only part of this article that can be considered "news" is that two presidential candidates support doing a study on the bill's effects. Everything else is the same as the articles written before it passed. What prompted reprinting this article without actually doing any investigation into the ramifications?

di4na 7y ago
A law proposal to make a study of the impact.

viburnum 7y ago

Where prostitution has been completely legalized there’s been a huge increase in demand, and the market has responded not with an increase in wages for sex workers but with an increase in slavery. In practice the least-bad policy seems to be legal/decriminalized to sell but illegal to buy.

55555 7y ago
Why should it be illegal for customers to pay for prostitution? Why do you feel prostitutes are entitled to above-market wages?
- istjohn 7y ago
  Their contention is that legal sex work creates a market that incentivises sex trafficking, in which case it should be illegal to protect women from being victimized.
  - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
    Can male sex workers be legalized then?
perilunar 7y ago
> Where prostitution has been completely legalized there’s been a huge increase in demand... That was not the case in NSW (Australia) or in New Zealand, where decriminalisation led to NO increase in the size of the sex industry.

burnte 7y ago

Noooooo! When I ehard about backpage being shut down because it was the biggest place for child sex trafficking, I said it was the dumbest move they could make. You have a website with the vast majority of illegal sex traffickers COMING TO YOU, and you close it? Why? Make BP a deal, give the FBI an office to scan everything so they can go after child sex traffickers, and you can stay open. We'd have arrested thousands of them by now.

kjeetgill 7y ago
If I recall correctly, the owners of Backpage we're charged with taking money and working with the traffickers. It may not have been a matter of Backpage accidentally being an exploited market place. I suspect that changed their willingness to host agents within their walls.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  Coverage of the case is here: https://frontpageconfidential.com/category/backpage/ https://frontpageconfidential.com/category/backpage/ The fed's argument is that there was so much illegal prostitution activity on Backpage that the owners must have been supporting it. The defense is currently occupied with getting access to the servers, presumably to show that the frequency of illegal postings was small compared to the rest of the site and that all reported postings were acted on immediately.
  - excalibur 7y ago
    Fun fact, prostitution isn't a federal offense.
    - jki275 7y ago
      There's a federal statute regarding trafficking persons across state lines as I recall. It's not specifically "prostitution" but meets the general description if there's an interstate nexus, which of course can be easily shown for an internet site in many cases.

rolltiide 7y ago

I prefer Germany, Austria and Switzerland's model. Its not a panacea in preventing trafficking but for the workers that want to be there it doesn't criminalize them, and the market for establishments are pretty competitive and great for patrons. Game of Thrones can't even compare, while many tourists corral themselves over to one street in Amsterdam due to its marketing campaign even though there are whole countries that are way more awesome. The std testing is the most attractive part of these systems. "Tolerant" and "Decriminalized" places do not have the capability of offering that. Let alone everywhere that outrights criminalizes workers and/or Johns. I think the population health should be a prong that is weighed heavier. Regulated systems do that. If there is any coercion of the sex workers then spend resources enforcing that and providing avenues just like anybody else in a domestic abuse relationship.

k__ 7y ago
As far as I know the problem here in Germany is legalization. They could simply have decriminalized prostitution and leave procuration illegal, but no, they had to throw around with laws to make the live of sex-workers harder.
- 3131s 7y ago
  Why is that making sex workers lives harder?
  - k__ 7y ago
    If they have to follow more laws, their work gets harder. If prostitution was just decriminalized, their work would just have been easier, it would have been a normal job like every other job.
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      "Just decriminalized" means there is no confidence or way to assume that the sex workers are routinely tested. Pass. As a sidenote, this reminds me of another reason why criminalization is a waste of time as it only ensnares the poor or impatient, while an even distribution of the more privileged ones of us engage in the exact same behaviors but where it is legal, remaining upstanding citizens by every metric.

istjohn 7y ago

There is a debate as to whether or not legalizing prostitution exacerbates sex slavery by creating a market for prostitution that willing market participants are unable to fill. This author[1] points out that studies on this question use the term "sex trafficking" which can mean either illegal immigration of willing sex workers or sex slavery. That distinction seems important, but is often not clarified by investigators. I think this issue is vexing because there are so many groups with different compelling reasons to favor or oppose prohibition. The below list is obviously a gross over-simplification, but I think it captures the largest forces in the debate. FOR: Men. Men would benefit from legalization in the obvious way. AGAINST: Women. Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal prostitution. FOR: Sex workers. Sex workers would benefit in the obvious way. AGAINST: Religious groups. They lost the battle against pornography, but they're winning this one. AGAINST: Feminists. Not all feminists, but many feminists believe sex work is exploitation by definition. [2] Each group has powerful motivations completely independent from the effect of legalization on sex slavery. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-prostitution-and-sex-trafficking-from-the-annals-of-bad-economic-research/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-pr... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution

jkaplowitz 7y ago
This is a big simplification: There are male sex workers and female sex worker customers even if most of each population is the other way around. Additionally, voluntary sex workers themselves generally oppose the forced labour market (i.e. sex slavery) as much as the prohibitionists, even if they're understandably focusing more on decriminalizing themselves. And I don't think the sex-worker-exclusionary feminists are representative of most feminists, even if the overlap between their views on this topic and those of conservative and religious groups gives them a big megaphone. Regarding legal presence, many sex workers are in a country legally aside from their choice to do sex work, sometimes even with work permission for most jobs. (Canada has some relevant exclusions in their standard open work permit, for example.)
- istjohn 7y ago

thrower123 7y ago

You'd think that we might have learned by now that if you try to vigorously suppress something that people want, this sort of thing happens.

a483838 7y ago

As someone who spent over a decade in the adult industry BackPage was extremely responsible. They had a staff of 70 people dedicated to reporting suspicious ads to police. They were the #1 source of trafficking tips. Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail.

catalogia 7y ago
> Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail. Was shutting it down somehow not an option? Better to shut it down than to give it to a gangster.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Parent says she didn't want to go to jail. Do you know her preferences better? ISTM most people don't want to go to jail.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    It seems to me that the legal trouble would have come from continuing to operate the site, and by selling the site instead of deleting the database and shutting it down, she sold out those women. But supposing she was being threatened with imprisonment unless she sold it, biting that bullet would have been the honorable thing to do. She owed that much to the people who trusted her with data of that nature.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      A person in the situation described above is dealing with corrupt and capricious police and prosecutors. Honest cops would have just charged her and asked the courts to shut her down, if they really felt she had broken laws.

dzonga 7y ago

the reason, backpage was shut down is that the gvt couldn't get a cut. and like all activities that are morally, grey. once the gvt stops getting their cut, they will scoop in. it's just the same, way the mafia is allowed to operate unions etc and once they ruffle feathers and stop contributing to politicians then all of a sudden the mafia is running a racket. Yet the gvt runs the biggest racket, protection scheme. so yeah, now all the SW are back on the streets or in the hands of pimps. Also the backpage era, due to supply and demand markets efficiencies, seems SW had become a safe sustainable, decent livelihood for many.

technobum 7y ago
Software has been a safe sustainable, decent livelihood for me at least
- bigwavedave 7y ago
  I'm fairly sure the occurrences of 'SW' in the parent comment stand for "sex working" or something akin to that and not for "software".
  - technobum 7y ago
    this was a joke about ambiguities in terse language
stevenicr 7y ago
I believe it was shutdown not because they didn't get a cut, but because they were the perfect boogeyman to create a large cut of other pies. From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it.. from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money. Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - yet the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers. It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing. The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?

jrochkind1 7y ago

You mean exactly how sex workers said it would, but nobody listened to them, because it was never actually about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_n_5aa1924fe4b04c33cb6cecb2 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_... https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-daniels-a-bipartisan-bill-will-lead-to-further-victimization-of-sex-8e5ef184f5ef https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...

paulgb 7y ago
It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
- hiram112 7y ago
  It isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists. Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view. Why? When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where the product / service carries less legal risk and societal stigmas than before. Thus, men are far less likely to pay large premiums for sex with non-prostitutes including 'courting', dating, marriage, etc.
  - avgeek23 7y ago
    Ah this comment sums up perfectly.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    You don’t need complex market forces. It is fairly common for people to disallow other people from doing things: * for their own good * for perceived externalities This is common enough for drugs, heavy metal, child employment, and contracting that it doesn’t surprise me they would apply it to prostitution. In fact, I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.

hiram112 7y ago

I think the most unmentioned facet regarding prostitution is that for many men, prostitution may be the only way for them to obtain sex, which I feel is just as much of a "right" as is the right for women to obtain an abortion. No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions. But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too. There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying). I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it. Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).

lurquer 7y ago
Your fourth paragraph is insightful. Prostitution, however, worsens the situation. The detrimental aspect of harem-based societies is not bunches of horny men unable to get laid... rather, it's bunches of single men -- horny or not -- that are not part of a family, and who have no need to be productive. Prostitution lessens the desirability of men and decreases somewhat their desire to marry. This causes further declines in monogamy rates and hastens the societal damage you allude to.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  People like Andrew Yang are telling us that massive layoffs are coming anyway, because robots. Maybe you disapprove of lives of video-gaming and regular custom with prostitutes, but if it's inevitable maybe we should try to deal with it rather than grinding people up in our efforts to prevent it. Human lives can have meaning that is not related to work.
- scotty79 7y ago
  > it's bunches of single men ... that are not part of a family, and who have no need to be productive That's actually argument for prostitution. You have to earn money for prostitutes. Granted not as much as for the family but still. Also I think there's way less colateral damage for everybody if less desirable men can just buy what they crave directly instead of attempting to compete with better men over women that don't want less desirable men and if they settle for them they'll regret it.

otabdeveloper4 7y ago

> "stamping out murder may have pushed it underground" Okay, and how is that a bad thing?

praptak 7y ago
If the end effect is greater body count then yes, it is a bad thing.

nullifidian 7y ago

It's important to note that whenever trafficking is discussed , in 95% of cases it's going to be about consensual prostitution between adults. Anti-sex activists have been successful at attacking the vocabulary. "But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use “sexual exploitation” to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents.” " https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has-become-meaningless-term https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has...

pergadad 7y ago
95% seems like an awfully wrong guess. There is a lot of forced prostitution, then a huge great area of those that for various reasons have no other option (from abusive boyfriend to immigration status to economic factors) and then a very small crust of voluntary sex workers, mostly at the high-end of the market. The ratio between these three will vary massively between country/region/city but in any case it is often difficult to identify who is victim and who is voluntary because the world is complex. (Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?)
- olau 7y ago
  Could you cite sources for these claims? The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know. You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities. I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.
  - a483838 7y ago

0_____0 7y ago

Hah! No shit. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of steet prostitution. One night I was smoking a cigarette on my porch when a girl who was working that night popped out from behind a car, walked over and asked if I had a smoke, and I obliged her. Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reached for something, and she booked it. I asked her if she had seen changes since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which she wasn't aware of. She did tell me that the neighbors on the main drag wanted Backpage and the like back, because there had been a significant uptick in street prostitution.

dmix 7y ago
FOSTA didn't actually take down Backpage, it's a common myth they were connected. The investigation into Backpage stated well before FOSTA ever existed and they just used the timing of taking down Backpage to announce the release of FOSTA, which resulted in the public perception they were related. Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market. 95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities. The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls. There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole. Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away. The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria. One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.

aussieguy1234 7y ago

As the article says, lots of sites in a mad panic did a purge of sex and dating related content since SESTA/FOSTA was passed. I've launched Libr, which won't be doing any such purge. It was built as a replacement for Tumblr. I'm in Australia, SESTA/FOSTA is an American law. https://librapp.com https://librapp.com

jessaustin 7y ago
Will you have American customers? If so, how will they pay you?
- aussieguy1234 7y ago
  There are already American users, but they're not paying anything for the service. I don't have ads yet.

paggle 7y ago

“Stamping out” anything moves it underground. The transaction volume almost always goes down and the risk for those remaining in the market almost always goes up.

jillesvangurp 7y ago
In the same way the war on drugs had a lot of casualties (and collateral damage) and did absolutely nothing to reduce drug usage. Prostitution is called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. It has always existed, in all countries, cultures, etc. IMHO legalized prostitution with some sane policies for health and safety combined with a threat of prosecution for 'customers' of victims of human trafficking (e.g. for rape, because that's what that is) would do wonders to clean that business up. A blanket ban just drives women in the hands of criminals.

bdhdbbdbdjdns 7y ago

As an occasional consumer of sex work, here is the reality: yes, It’s more dangerous now for both parties, but much more so for the women. The labor supply has gone down sharply because the economics went upside down. If you can’t count on as many clients per day the fixed cost of the hotel room becomes harder to risk so many girls exited the market. Prices have gone up sharply. The kind of girls that were charging $250-300 are now charging $400-500. “Trafficking” is an almost nonexistent issue at these price points where I dabble but as I understand is depressingly common on the low end of the market where people are picking up girls on the street for $20 blow jobs. Those girls are now more vulnerable than ever because with the smaller size of the marketplace they need pimps, madams, agencies, etc. to help them get enough work.

overcast 7y ago
Just to satisfy my own curiosity, what is your use case for paying for sex? Married? High powered executive? I can't imagine paying for something that is easily free on a million different dating apps.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Not to be too mean here, but perhaps the OP doesn't have an easy time finding willing partners in the traditional dating scene. Maybe they have the kind of look that makes women swipe left.
  - di4na 7y ago
    Or maybe they prefer to pay to not have to spend their time going through the whole pain to find someone, make them interested, etc etc all with the risk of being for nothing. If you have the money, it is a good way to cut on time spent.
  - overcast 7y ago
    It's possible, but in my experience, there is someone for everyone. I suppose if the goal is to hit way above your weight, paying makes sense. Money does seem to have that effect on women. But if you have that much, you should be able to pull it easily without prostitution?

seibelj 7y ago

Libertarians were way ahead of the curve on drug legalization, criminal justice reform, school choice, and police brutality to name recent victories. We have been banging the drum on legalizing sex work for decades, and I'm optimistic that true freedom for consenting adults will continue to win over the 'Controllers of Lives' that want to ban freedom. There is nothing wrong with two consenting adults choosing to have sexual relations for monetary exchange, and I care nothing about "downsides" that come from legalization. It's morally imperative that we allow freedom, then deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we should just ban alcohol, driving, having kids, or anything that can potentially have negative effects when we allow people to be free and make their own decisions.

abstractbarista 7y ago

Its so simple for me. Just like with weed.... Legalize it! Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting. Of course, have law enforcement root out the kiddie stuff, and have a legal framework to ensure safety (STI testing, etc) but my goodness, the efforts we currently go through to catch consenting adults in mutual benefit...

throw_m239339 7y ago
> Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting. Because "legalizing it" doesn't stop sex trafficking or sexual exploitation, in fact all evidences point to the contrary, it increases sex slavery. https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/12/17/the-child-sexual-abuse-hidden-behind-the-sex-work-facade/ https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/12/17/the-child-sexual-abuse...?
- deleted 7y ago
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- throw_m67657 7y ago
  The article paints a sad picture ...although your conclusion seems far fetched. Even marriage can be made into paid rape by the wordings of that article. AFAIK ... decriminalization allows for 1. The sex worker to approach authorities without any fear of prosecution. 2. To set up freelance sex work without pimps and brothels. There shouldn't be a debate about this. Criminalization makes things worse at the expense of moral tidiness. Regulated sex work allows for 1. Brothels 2. Strip clubs 3. Massage parlors 4. Sex Therapists If the regulators are corrupt or weak or there are no strong checks ... then the model will be as bad as an unregulated market and will actually be worse as it allows trafficked victims to work under quasi-legal protection. That's what the article implies. From what I know the nordic model has a large number of social services that help sex-workers quit the profession if they wish to and helps sex-workers unionise.
  - briandear 7y ago

notjtrig 7y ago

For real though, in my world, the other America, ‘online sex trafficking’ is alive and well. Apps are blowing up with whores, they literally offering subscription services now. E-Thot is the word of the year, all these money sending apps that came out recently are capitalizing on a new thriving market with blurred lines as to what is legal.

StuffedParrot 7y ago

You don’t pass conservative legislation like this to reduce fear of crime.

sqldevuser 7y ago

get a real job

to-too-two 7y ago
What? How does this contribute to the discussion?

yters 7y ago

Stamping out murder only has pushed it underground! Stamping out rape has only pushed it underground! Stamping out kidnapping has only pushed it underground! I long for the day all of these practices can be legalized and done safely and in the open!

brutt 7y ago
Murdering of idiots is beneficial for society! Let's make it legal. We can't stop wars anyway.
- yters 7y ago
  While we are at if, why not get rid of all laws? Then everything is legal and crime will drop to zero!
Woberto 7y ago
These all seem like false equivalences. I think it should be "stamping out _online_ murder" etc. And this makes more sense - if people can no longer pursue illegal activities online, they may do so in person. Which I still think is an improvement, because I think it's harder to commit some of these crimes in person.
- yters 7y ago
  Oh I didn't realize people were only having sex with kids in virtual reality. Then I agree, better to keep that virtual instead of having them do it real life. Thanks for clearing things up for me!
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Truly voluntary prostitution isn't the same as murder, rape, or kidnapping. People have to work to survive. Some people make so little at work that if they lost that job, they'd be homeless or suffer other harm. And, most people would rather not be at work. Companies often provide this work. Are workers slaves? Are companies exploiting workers? If that type of worker-company relationship is morally permissible, then on some level prostitution has to be as well.

ilaksh 7y ago

I hope people will consider the idea that UBI could factor into this type of discussion.

fallingfrog 7y ago

I mean that was the intention, was it not? A full discussion of our incoherent approach to work, sex, sex work, morality, patriarchal power dynamics, and so forth is out of scope here but it was never about making material improvements to anybody’s life.

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