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Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

nytimes.com

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Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#131

Post by endymi0n »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #116
paulgb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems to be a universal phenomenon (I see similar trends in many European countries, including mine) and I wouldn't use the word "played". The left seems to be as keen on legislating morality as the right.

Especially if there would have been reasonable, well researched alternatives, like criminalizing the buyer, and not the seller:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Model_approach_to_prost...

> It has also been reported that 12,5 % of men used to solicit prostitutes before the implementation of the law in 1999 whereas in 2014 only 7,7 % of men purchased sexual services.[5]

As the top comment said, this was never about actually decreasing prostitution, but about victimizing and outcasting women.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#132

Post by wongarsu »

anigbrowl wrote: post #78
hiram112 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Some feminists surely do, but conflating some with all is a fallacy of composition that hinders discussion. Your reasoning in the rest of the comment seems rather questionable and veers into seeming even more like a generalization.

However GP didn't say "all feminists", only "feminists".

If I say "Germans eat bread for breakfast" that's generally understood to mean "In general Germans eat bread for breakfast" or "A majority of Germans eat bread for breakfast". Treating it as if I said "Every German eats bread for every breakfast" would be constructing a straw man. People generally understand that there is variation in every group, even if they don't explicitly put that disclaimer on every sentence.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#133

Post by antihero »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #22

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_... https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...

I have friends and ex-partners who are sex workers and seeing this stuff come into action, seeing them get denied at borders, seeing their lives become ever more dangerous has been utterly soul crushing.

Sex worker rights is a huge frontier that we need to fight harder on, sex trafficking and sex work are two different things, and spiting workers because you find them unsavoury or want to be their saviour under the veil of fighting sex trafficking is utterly abhorrent.

Fuck SESTA/FOSTA, fuck the Nordic model, and fuck any "feminist" that doesn't listen to sex workers and fight their corner as opposed to trying to rid the world of them.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#134

Post by jessaustin »

capitol_ wrote: post #129
Doxin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making murder illegal should be mainly about preventing people from being the victim of murder. Whether or not murder is moral or not shouldn't really be relevant. We've decided that people have a right to not be murdered for whatever reason. The only thing the law should then be concerned about is how to prevent murder. Using the same reasoning to outlaw prostitution is harder. Sure you could argue people have a rig…

> prevent people from being prostitutes against their will The important part here is if you include economic factors into "against their will" or not.

Do those factors have the same meaning when someone would rather not be e.g. a cleaner or an orderly at a nursing home? Those jobs are physical and not so pleasant. They pay much less than prostitution. Yet, many people are so employed.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#135

Post by antihero »

nullifidian wrote: post #74

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 c…

Well when you have an admittedly small but significant bunch of radical feminists who claim any PIV sex is a form of rape, it's not hard to see how more "moderate" radical feminists would see any form of sex work as a form of abuse.

Fuck the lot of them. I am a feminist and that means sticking up for the rights of all women, whatever their chosen career. You want people to stop doing sex work? Give them a better option.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#136

Post by jessaustin »

catalogia wrote: post #98
a483838 wrote: post #19

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#137

Post by jessaustin »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #81

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

Will you have American customers? If so, how will they pay you?

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#138

Post by gruturo »

jessaustin wrote: post #130
apatters wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not look at numbers rather than anecdotes? A poll by YouGov in 2016 found that Republicans were 7% more likely than Democrats to believe sex work should remain illegal: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me... But the real gap was between the genders. Women were 14% more likely to say sex work should be illegal than men. They were also 18% more likely to say it's immoral. Now what "feminist…

Your numbers confirm rather than refute parent's hypothesis. Prostitutes sell what men want more cheaply than other women sell it. Some other women disapprove. Some portion of those other women are feminists.

You could frame this a some kind of regulatory capture by the current monopolists.

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#139

Post by jessaustin »

istjohn wrote: post #53
roenxi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a particularly hard-core position. They aren't a major force in the debate but there will be a very substantial demographic who don't care one way or the other but are in principle happy to leave well enough alone. They'd probably have a mild preference for not arresting people for no reason. Prostitution has been legal in Australia since around the 90s. Nobody particularly cares^. The only people who it has…

I agree it's not a hard core libertarian position. I guess I just meant I don't think there are that many people who consult their libertarian principles to decide their views on an issue.

One might speculate that libertarian principles are only held by a small number of people, but why would such principles not play just as important role in decision-making as other principles, like e.g. judgmental moralism? Do freedom lovers feel less deeply than freedom haters?

Re: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground

#140

Post by draw_down »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #22

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_... https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...

Right. If only we could have somehow predicted this.
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