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Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

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Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#41

Post by clipsy »

themitigating wrote: post #37
myshpa wrote: post #5

“unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.” - DOJ "In short, contrary to the public narrative you may have heard, Backpage worked closely with federal law enforcement to actually stop sex trafficking (and not just take it down, but to track down the p…

But they refused to do the same for consensual sex work Isn't that also a crime in almost the entire US? It's also where sex trafficking comes into play. How would you know consent was given by a sex worker? People who are trafficked to work as prostitutes are often blackmailed and threatened. Right now there's massive paranoia about this because it's being used as an election tactic but prostitution and sex traffick…

> How would you know consent was given by a sex worker?

How would you know consent was given by a McDonald's cashier?

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#42

Post by pessimizer »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
myshpa wrote: post #5

“unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.” - DOJ "In short, contrary to the public narrative you may have heard, Backpage worked closely with federal law enforcement to actually stop sex trafficking (and not just take it down, but to track down the p…

From the Wired piece mentioned: > The government indictment that triggered Lacey and Larkin’s arrests, United States v. Lacey, et al., includes 17 “victim summaries”—stories of women who say they were sexually exploited through Backpage. Victim 5 first appeared in an ad on the platform when she was 14; her “customers” made her “perform sexual acts at gunpoint, choked her to the point of having seizures, and gang-rape…

This will always be an issue, but we don't run around shutting down and suing Monster.com because they allowed ads for unsafe construction jobs or financial firms that engaged in illegal activity.

You want to encourage this stuff to all run through the same site, and to give police carte blanche to poke around that site wherever they want (as long as their customers civil liberties are preserved, due process, etc.). A site that would keep good records (and inform their customers what records would be kept.) That sort of thing.

Instead, it just got driven back underground. Nobody is checking IDs underground.

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#43

Post by tekla »

clipsy wrote: post #41
themitigating wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they refused to do the same for consensual sex work Isn't that also a crime in almost the entire US? It's also where sex trafficking comes into play. How would you know consent was given by a sex worker? People who are trafficked to work as prostitutes are often blackmailed and threatened. Right now there's massive paranoia about this because it's being used as an election tactic but prostitution and sex traffick…

> How would you know consent was given by a sex worker? How would you know consent was given by a McDonald's cashier?

Last time I checked with some lefty people, you wouldn't, since the worker would be too scared to possibly lose job/pay over critiquing their employer, so they would be heavily incentivized to say anything keep the status quo.

So how DO you know consent was given by the sex worker?

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#44

Post by s1artibartfast »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #19
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Wired piece mentioned: > The government indictment that triggered Lacey and Larkin’s arrests, United States v. Lacey, et al., includes 17 “victim summaries”—stories of women who say they were sexually exploited through Backpage. Victim 5 first appeared in an ad on the platform when she was 14; her “customers” made her “perform sexual acts at gunpoint, choked her to the point of having seizures, and gang-rape…

> and legitimate consensual sex work What is legitimate consensual sex work? For those of us who don't transact with prostitutes, all we know about this is a stream of narratives we've seen on tv and in film. Julia Roberts falling for Richard Gere, or Maggie Gyllenhall refusing to have a pimp "manage" her. Yet, I remember reading one account of a porn actress, who despite signing all the paperwork, waivers and contra…

>On top of that we have to deal with ever-evolving ideas about what consent even means. That one cannot properly give consent if one party is more powerful than the other (and how could that ever not be the case, when one is a man and the other a woman... does not plain strength count as power in that scenario?)

This is essentially the problem. There is no positive definition of what consent is - only an arguments about what consent isn't.

People posit that consent cant co-exist with power imbalance. Because no two people are identical, nobody is perfect, and nobody is omnipotent, consent can not exist at all.

The term has been reduced to meaningless and eventually a new word will be coined for sober choices made free from threat of violence and deceit

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#45

Post by mkatx »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #36
worik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a jurisdiction where sex work is decriminalised. Trafficking does still occur. But it is a very small part of the scene. The difference it has made to workers is huge . Once they were at risk from pimps, clients, and cops. Now if pimps or clients bother them they go to the cops, and the cops protect them. As they should. As they do for shop keepers, plumbers, and computer programmers. Make no mistake: Havin…

> Make no mistake: Having a law against sex work encourages, and subsidises, trafficking. Super dark take: Hey, it worked to make drugs more profitable, why not sex work? I remember when it passed and pretty much every ordinary American was surprised and hadn't asked for it. It seemed to come out of nowhere with no news coverage that I was aware of and nobody was a fan.

Black markets are dangerous and people are going to do it anyway. Albeit unintuitive, legalization and regulation is the way to go!

As an average American, decriminalized drugs and sex work for the win!

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#46

Post by zer8k »

clipsy wrote: post #28
zer8k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't know how you can differentiate "consensual" from "non-consensual" sex work. 1. They say "no im not exploited" because they are afraid 2. They say "no im not exploited" because they are not exploited You gain no information from interviewing them. No vice unit has the resources to do a top secret clearance level check on them to confirm externally they are not exploited. To act like the two can simply be…

I know plenty of people who feel exploited by their (non-sex-)work, ranging from manual labor to retail to trades to high paying white collar jobs. Shall we ban all of that as well?

[flagged]

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#47

Post by zer8k »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
zer8k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't know how you can differentiate "consensual" from "non-consensual" sex work. 1. They say "no im not exploited" because they are afraid 2. They say "no im not exploited" because they are not exploited You gain no information from interviewing them. No vice unit has the resources to do a top secret clearance level check on them to confirm externally they are not exploited. To act like the two can simply be…

Slavery is even more illegal than pimping. How do you differentiate consensual work from non-consensual work?

[flagged]

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#48

Post by clipsy »

vorpalhex wrote: post #14
maxbond wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, it seems sex workers hold that they are safer online because they are able to directly manage their relationships with clients. This enables them to enforce vetting processes before they meet up in person (impossible in the street), and eliminate abusive middle men (pimps). We could do better than Backpage, we could probably make abuse of sex workers rare rather than a cliche, but it would requir…

Bluntly, we tried drug decriminalization in the theory that decriminalization meant people could seek help. Instead of more people getting help, fewer did because the stick had been removed. [0] We should ask, well, does sex trafficking happen more or less in areas where prostitution is legal? That'll give us a good indicator of the effects of decriminalization. We have a great study on this [1]. Decriminalization ma…

> We have a great study on this [1]. Decriminalization makes sex trafficking WORSE - full stop. Prostitution means more sex trafficking happens, and crackdowns on prostitution successfully reduce sex trafficking too.

From the article[0] (NB: not the linked article, the actual research paper): "Among the currently available sources, the aforementioned Report on Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns (UNODC, 2006) has also collected and presented data on incidences of human trafficking at the country level; therefore the utilization of this report best serves the purpose of our study. The UNODC Report provides cross-country information on the reported incidence of human trafficking in 161 countries, measuring trafficking flows on a six-point scale."

There's a fairly serious shortcoming here in my opinion which I did not see addressed while skimming the research design; part of the argument in favor of legalization/decriminalization is specifically that trafficking victims will be more likely to approach the police for help. As such, one would expect an increase in sex trafficking victims identified in countries that legalize/decriminalize -- not because there are more victims, but because the victims that were already present now feel more comfortable seeking help from the state. As a contrived thought experiment, if you have a city with 100 sex trafficking victims and 50 of them would go to the police if they weren't afraid of getting arrested, legalizing sex work would seemingly produce 50 sex trafficking victims virtually overnight! But of course, in reality, those victims were already present, silently suffering and unable to get help for fear of imprisonment.

[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#49

Post by thaumasiotes »

rayiner wrote: post #25
maxbond wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty silly, prohibition has been an obvious failure in both drugs and sex work. Firstly, it's a human rights issue, people ought to be able to engage in the commerce of their choosing with only reasonable restrictions. Prohibition is an unreasonable restriction, enforced according to a set of puritan morals that are no longer even popularly held. After all, alcohol is more addictive and more harmful than ma…

> Firstly, it's a human rights issue, people ought to be able to engage in the commerce of their choosing with only reasonable restrictions You’re starting with a libertarian premise most people don’t accept. The vast majority of the world accepts that it’s proper to restrict individual freedom even to protect people from themselves. Society has a role to play to help people make good choices and to make it hard for…

> Even in the US, women — who bear the lion’s share of the cost of prostitution — oppose legalizing by a large margin

That's not a surprise. Amazon bears the cost of Wal-mart's operations and would probably like to outlaw Wal-mart too.

Re: Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died

#50

Post by LexGray »

themitigating wrote: post #37
myshpa wrote: post #5

“unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.” - DOJ "In short, contrary to the public narrative you may have heard, Backpage worked closely with federal law enforcement to actually stop sex trafficking (and not just take it down, but to track down the p…

But they refused to do the same for consensual sex work Isn't that also a crime in almost the entire US? It's also where sex trafficking comes into play. How would you know consent was given by a sex worker? People who are trafficked to work as prostitutes are often blackmailed and threatened. Right now there's massive paranoia about this because it's being used as an election tactic but prostitution and sex traffick…

Presumably require a degree and certification for sex work. Need proof to advertise and any client who doesn’t check ID is current is guilty of facilitating trafficking.

If degree includes self-defense, financial literacy assistance, and a social worker. This would hopefully improve prospects of those that turn to sex work.

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