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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

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.

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.