8 ms·

Human trafficking.

sneak 6y ago
Kidnapping is already illegal. There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.
- austincheney 6y ago
  Human trafficking is different than kidnapping. The former is the forced distribution of persons for criminal acts while the later is the act of taking persons against their will.
  - sneak 6y ago
    "forced distribution" is the same thing.
    - austincheney 6y ago
      It’s not the same. Kidnapping is an illegal act but not a form of slavery while human trafficking is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres...
      - Ericson2314 6y ago
        This is not important. That sort of slavery is easy to deam legal without getting into what the forced work is. Sex work = trafficking is, best case, a misplaced utopianism that makes things worse here and now, and often a far worse patronizing moralistic sexism.
        austincheney 6y ago
        That is not what I said.
      - toolz 6y ago
        You can't traffick humans without kidnapping them and holding them against their will. The whole point is we already have laws on the books to prevent that regardless of whether prostitution is legal or not.
        austincheney 6y ago
        In the case of people most jurisdictions want more severe laws in place than possession of stole goods against those people who are holding others against their will but did not kidnap them, as in they received the victims from others who may or may not have taken them by force.
        toolz 6y ago
        aggravated kidnapping in the US often gets 20 years in jail. median sentence for murder is 13 years. I can imagine you might think the sentence would be lighter but there's nothing preventing heavy sentencing for kidnapping. edit: holding a human captive even if you aren't the original captor is still kidnapping so that detail doesn't really change anything
- jfoutz 6y ago
  Usually ambulances can speed, for example.
- rayiner 6y ago
  This is a thinner argument than I think people realize. That’s like saying “it’s already illegal to kill bald eagles, so it should be legal to sell bald eagle feathers.” Sometimes it’s very hard to prosecute some source wrongdoing after the product has entered the steam of commerce, so to speak. We routinely make things illegal at the point where it’s easiest to prosecute, even if doing so incidentally captures some distinguishable conduct.
  - sneak 6y ago
    It should be legal to sell bald eagle feathers, as well as have any arbitrary sequence of bytes stored in a file on one's disk. I don't see why everyone in society should have to have their liberty arbitrarily restricted just because cops are terrible at their ostensible jobs. It's not that enforcement is hard, it's that legal systems have decided that cops shouldn't have to be any good to do policing, and then they work backward from that. It's the wrong way around. Attacking the leaf nodes of a societal problem lets it look like something is being done by police, when it is actually a huge injustice and a complete waste of time and resources. You could spend billions to bust a million hookers and johns and never once make the tiniest dent in human trafficking.
    - dieortin 6y ago
      If selling bald eagle feathers is legal, the incentive to kill one is bigger. Now unless you’re caught in the act of killing a bald eagle, there’s nothing they can do.
      - sneak 6y ago
        There are lots of ways of enforcing laws against people who are not caught in the act. Most convicted of murder are not caught in the act, for example.
        tptacek 6y ago
        You're just kind of ignoring Rayiner's argument at this point. We already know that there are people who believe in principle that this stuff shouldn't be prosecuted at all. What's interesting is an argument that manages to engage with what Rayiner is saying; if you can't do that, you might as well just post at the top of the thread instead.
xenihn 6y ago
This brings up something I've never considered before. Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees?
- mc32 6y ago
  Yes. Women get trafficked to the Netherlands and Germany and prostitution is legal. Nevada too.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    It's far from the academic consensus that this is more trafficking than there would otherwise be. Legalization in more areas would also probably help, because an empty place (it's illegal in Vegas IIRC) going to have a harder tim serving sex tourism from the whole country.
    - austincheney 6y ago
      I have seen several comments suggest legalization as an ultimate cure for many things, even unrelated. Almost every time these suggestions are unfounded assumptions not connected to any research or data. Is this a bizarre California thing? Ask the people of Austin how legalization of homelessness went.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees? Things that are not typically legalized with prostitution still have a market which (absent successful constraints other than mere legalization of prostitution) will continue to be met by sex trafficking.
- Lazare 6y ago
  1) Yes, but less. 2) It's much easier to protect the victims when they are strictly victims, and not participants in an illegal act. In the US, crackdowns on human trafficking overwhelmingly result in the women being arrested. It's absolutely going to be the case that, at least sometimes, even with legal prostitution, someone is going to find a migrant who doesn't speak the local language well, steal their passport, and force them to engage in work, including sex work. (I mean, that already happens with crew on fishing vessels, kitchen staff in resteraunts, farm labourers...no reason sex work would be different right?) What you want is for that story to end "...so then the victim went to the local police, who arrested the perpetrator, prosecuted them, gave the victim their passport back, and offered them a suite of support services". What you don't want is "...but the victim was afraid they'd be arrested, so they didn't go to the cops" or "...but when the victim went to the cops, they were arrested and prosecuted; meanwhile the perpetrator was let go, because prosecuting trafficking is hard but prosecuting prostitution is easy, and the prosecutor wants to keep their stats up because they're running for the Senate next cycle".
silly-silly 6y ago
Pretty sure that this is putting the cart before the horse. Sex workers has been legal in Australia for some time and I'd be interested (and surprised) to see if "human trafficking" to Australia is higher.
- strken 6y ago
  Trafficking anything bulky into Australia is harder because it doesn't have land borders, so it's not necessarily a good case study.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    Then I guess it shows that legalizing prostitution in island nations is a good idea? I'll take that.
- selfishgene 6y ago
  There is plenty of trafficking out there even in countries where it is legal. Germany is an excellent case in point. This was just on hacker news today: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/trouble-in-paradise-rise-and-fall-of-germany-brothel-king-jurgen-rudloff https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/t...
- pyuser583 6y ago
  There is research that shows countries with legal prostitution have more trafficking. You can Google it if you want.
tartoran 6y ago
I'd say that human trafficking happens exactly because prostitution is illegal and pushed underground and that's where real cruel stuff happens. Prostitution should be heavily regulated and taxed, pimps are what needs to disappear from the whole equation. If that were to happen the underground shady prostitution would diminish greatly, not sure if it would disappear completely but customers would think twice about risking their health there since the regulated world would ensure healthier sex workers, up to date on STD tests and so on...
- sneak 6y ago
  > Prostitution should be heavily regulated and taxed I'm not sure why this always comes back up. Why would you want to stop violent oppression of prostitutes by police and criminals, and then replace it immediately with economic oppression? You have it backwards: There should be tax credits for sex workers; for centuries they plainly have not been getting the protection under the law that tax money is expected to pay for.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    It's very disingenuous to compare taxes to harassment from cops and organized crime alike. Also just restaurants probably tons of stuff will continue to be off the books anyways, heh.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    There should be tax credits for sex workers; for centuries they plainly have not been getting the protection under the law that tax money is expected to pay for. That’s a strange argument. What does a tax credit for a sex worker today do for a sex worker 150 years ago that paid taxes but didn’t get protection from the state?
    - sneak 6y ago
      Imagine the point I was making if I had said "a decade", and substitute that. Anything that's been happening for centuries has also been happing for decades, months, weeks, days, et c. Sex workers working today are not receiving the same services and protection under the law that non-sex workers receive; our society had failed them and they deserve a refund. (So do their predecessors but that ship has sailed.)
dkdk8283 6y ago
I have over a decade in the technical operation of escort ad sites. Laws like FOSTA/SESTA make it far worse. Very few sex workers are trafficked. Sites like backpage had a staff of many people who silently reviewed ads and reported trafficking tips. They were the #1 source of tips to the government. Backpage got shut due to a pissing contest between the owner and a AZ lawmaker IIRC. Legalizing is humane. The only trafficking I have witnessed is in California AAMPs. Gangs bring over women to work off “debt” and they move them to a new city every week or two to prevent them from making friends.
- zachrose 6y ago
  AAMP?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cko 6y ago
    I think it's sex work parlance for Asian (American?) massage parlors
  - geocrasher 6y ago
    https://www.aamp.com/ https://www.aamp.com/ American Association of Meat Processors
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  Turns out the organizations who tout prostitution as a problem because it's supposed sex trafficking are usually religiously motivated and just don't like prostitution that's why they don't call for changes to make prostitutes safer
  - austincheney 6y ago
    Like the UN? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres... Where did you get that from?
hedora 6y ago
Keeping prostitution illegal protects the human trafficking trade. I think that was your point, but it can be taken either way.

Human trafficking.

Kidnapping is already illegal. There's nothing about legal prostitution that prevents enforcement of the myriad of existing laws prohibiting kidnapping, battery, and robbery associated with human trafficking.

austincheney 6y ago
Human trafficking is different than kidnapping. The former is the forced distribution of persons for criminal acts while the later is the act of taking persons against their will.
- sneak 6y ago
  "forced distribution" is the same thing.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    It’s not the same. Kidnapping is an illegal act but not a form of slavery while human trafficking is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres...
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      This is not important. That sort of slavery is easy to deam legal without getting into what the forced work is. Sex work = trafficking is, best case, a misplaced utopianism that makes things worse here and now, and often a far worse patronizing moralistic sexism.
      - austincheney 6y ago
        That is not what I said.
    - toolz 6y ago
      You can't traffick humans without kidnapping them and holding them against their will. The whole point is we already have laws on the books to prevent that regardless of whether prostitution is legal or not.
      - austincheney 6y ago
        In the case of people most jurisdictions want more severe laws in place than possession of stole goods against those people who are holding others against their will but did not kidnap them, as in they received the victims from others who may or may not have taken them by force.
        toolz 6y ago
        aggravated kidnapping in the US often gets 20 years in jail. median sentence for murder is 13 years. I can imagine you might think the sentence would be lighter but there's nothing preventing heavy sentencing for kidnapping. edit: holding a human captive even if you aren't the original captor is still kidnapping so that detail doesn't really change anything
jfoutz 6y ago
Usually ambulances can speed, for example.
rayiner 6y ago
This is a thinner argument than I think people realize. That’s like saying “it’s already illegal to kill bald eagles, so it should be legal to sell bald eagle feathers.” Sometimes it’s very hard to prosecute some source wrongdoing after the product has entered the steam of commerce, so to speak. We routinely make things illegal at the point where it’s easiest to prosecute, even if doing so incidentally captures some distinguishable conduct.
- sneak 6y ago
  It should be legal to sell bald eagle feathers, as well as have any arbitrary sequence of bytes stored in a file on one's disk. I don't see why everyone in society should have to have their liberty arbitrarily restricted just because cops are terrible at their ostensible jobs. It's not that enforcement is hard, it's that legal systems have decided that cops shouldn't have to be any good to do policing, and then they work backward from that. It's the wrong way around. Attacking the leaf nodes of a societal problem lets it look like something is being done by police, when it is actually a huge injustice and a complete waste of time and resources. You could spend billions to bust a million hookers and johns and never once make the tiniest dent in human trafficking.
  - dieortin 6y ago
    If selling bald eagle feathers is legal, the incentive to kill one is bigger. Now unless you’re caught in the act of killing a bald eagle, there’s nothing they can do.
    - sneak 6y ago
      There are lots of ways of enforcing laws against people who are not caught in the act. Most convicted of murder are not caught in the act, for example.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        You're just kind of ignoring Rayiner's argument at this point. We already know that there are people who believe in principle that this stuff shouldn't be prosecuted at all. What's interesting is an argument that manages to engage with what Rayiner is saying; if you can't do that, you might as well just post at the top of the thread instead.

xenihn 6y ago

This brings up something I've never considered before. Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees?

mc32 6y ago
Yes. Women get trafficked to the Netherlands and Germany and prostitution is legal. Nevada too.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  It's far from the academic consensus that this is more trafficking than there would otherwise be. Legalization in more areas would also probably help, because an empty place (it's illegal in Vegas IIRC) going to have a harder tim serving sex tourism from the whole country.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    I have seen several comments suggest legalization as an ultimate cure for many things, even unrelated. Almost every time these suggestions are unfounded assumptions not connected to any research or data. Is this a bizarre California thing? Ask the people of Austin how legalization of homelessness went.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees? Things that are not typically legalized with prostitution still have a market which (absent successful constraints other than mere legalization of prostitution) will continue to be met by sex trafficking.
Lazare 6y ago
1) Yes, but less. 2) It's much easier to protect the victims when they are strictly victims, and not participants in an illegal act. In the US, crackdowns on human trafficking overwhelmingly result in the women being arrested. It's absolutely going to be the case that, at least sometimes, even with legal prostitution, someone is going to find a migrant who doesn't speak the local language well, steal their passport, and force them to engage in work, including sex work. (I mean, that already happens with crew on fishing vessels, kitchen staff in resteraunts, farm labourers...no reason sex work would be different right?) What you want is for that story to end "...so then the victim went to the local police, who arrested the perpetrator, prosecuted them, gave the victim their passport back, and offered them a suite of support services". What you don't want is "...but the victim was afraid they'd be arrested, so they didn't go to the cops" or "...but when the victim went to the cops, they were arrested and prosecuted; meanwhile the perpetrator was let go, because prosecuting trafficking is hard but prosecuting prostitution is easy, and the prosecutor wants to keep their stats up because they're running for the Senate next cycle".

silly-silly 6y ago

Pretty sure that this is putting the cart before the horse. Sex workers has been legal in Australia for some time and I'd be interested (and surprised) to see if "human trafficking" to Australia is higher.

strken 6y ago
Trafficking anything bulky into Australia is harder because it doesn't have land borders, so it's not necessarily a good case study.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  Then I guess it shows that legalizing prostitution in island nations is a good idea? I'll take that.
selfishgene 6y ago
There is plenty of trafficking out there even in countries where it is legal. Germany is an excellent case in point. This was just on hacker news today: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/trouble-in-paradise-rise-and-fall-of-germany-brothel-king-jurgen-rudloff https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/t...
pyuser583 6y ago
There is research that shows countries with legal prostitution have more trafficking. You can Google it if you want.

tartoran 6y ago

I'd say that human trafficking happens exactly because prostitution is illegal and pushed underground and that's where real cruel stuff happens. Prostitution should be heavily regulated and taxed, pimps are what needs to disappear from the whole equation. If that were to happen the underground shady prostitution would diminish greatly, not sure if it would disappear completely but customers would think twice about risking their health there since the regulated world would ensure healthier sex workers, up to date on STD tests and so on...

sneak 6y ago
> Prostitution should be heavily regulated and taxed I'm not sure why this always comes back up. Why would you want to stop violent oppression of prostitutes by police and criminals, and then replace it immediately with economic oppression? You have it backwards: There should be tax credits for sex workers; for centuries they plainly have not been getting the protection under the law that tax money is expected to pay for.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  It's very disingenuous to compare taxes to harassment from cops and organized crime alike. Also just restaurants probably tons of stuff will continue to be off the books anyways, heh.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  There should be tax credits for sex workers; for centuries they plainly have not been getting the protection under the law that tax money is expected to pay for. That’s a strange argument. What does a tax credit for a sex worker today do for a sex worker 150 years ago that paid taxes but didn’t get protection from the state?
  - sneak 6y ago
    Imagine the point I was making if I had said "a decade", and substitute that. Anything that's been happening for centuries has also been happing for decades, months, weeks, days, et c. Sex workers working today are not receiving the same services and protection under the law that non-sex workers receive; our society had failed them and they deserve a refund. (So do their predecessors but that ship has sailed.)

dkdk8283 6y ago

I have over a decade in the technical operation of escort ad sites. Laws like FOSTA/SESTA make it far worse. Very few sex workers are trafficked. Sites like backpage had a staff of many people who silently reviewed ads and reported trafficking tips. They were the #1 source of tips to the government. Backpage got shut due to a pissing contest between the owner and a AZ lawmaker IIRC. Legalizing is humane. The only trafficking I have witnessed is in California AAMPs. Gangs bring over women to work off “debt” and they move them to a new city every week or two to prevent them from making friends.

zachrose 6y ago
AAMP?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cko 6y ago
  I think it's sex work parlance for Asian (American?) massage parlors
- geocrasher 6y ago
  https://www.aamp.com/ https://www.aamp.com/ American Association of Meat Processors
ajmurmann 6y ago
Turns out the organizations who tout prostitution as a problem because it's supposed sex trafficking are usually religiously motivated and just don't like prostitution that's why they don't call for changes to make prostitutes safer
- austincheney 6y ago
  Like the UN? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppress_and_Punish_Trafficking_in_Persons,_Especially_Women_and_Children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_to_Prevent,_Suppres... Where did you get that from?

hedora 6y ago

Keeping prostitution illegal protects the human trafficking trade. I think that was your point, but it can be taken either way.