I just read an article that staggered my imagination about forced prostitution in Connecticut.
I know there have been at least two recent threads on this topic, but some responses deny the statistics, and some even take the opportunity to joke.
Can anyone read the cited article without agreeing that, however high pimping ranks on law enforcement’s priorities, it isn’t high enough?
I found it ironic that most of the ads surrounding that article were using sexy women to sell their products…
Ok, before I get started I am not saying that there are not pimps who use violence to extort prostitutes. I’m not saying that this isn’t horrible or that the police shouldn’t try to stop it. And no, minors should not be legally allowed to work as prostitutes.
That being said, this article is a sensationalist piece of shit. First of all, that fake photograph is tasteless. Trying to link prostitution to gangsta rap and video games is silly. I’m under the distinct impression that prostitution has existed a bit longer than either of those things.
The annoying thing about the article is that it never bothers to point out that the best way to combat the problems of violent pimps and underage girls working as prostitutes is to legalize prostitution. Violent pimps can only operate if prostitutes are unable to obtain police protection. If prostitution was licensed and regulated it would be more difficult for teenage runaways to work as prostitutes. Some men might specifically seek out a 16 year old illegal prostitute, but most would probably choose the legal 18 year old ones, for convenience if nothing else.
I would agree that I think the police would better serve society by targeting pimps rather than prostitutes and their customers. Many prostitution sting operations are little more than elaborate excuses to confiscate the cars of the johns they bust.
Haha, I know, me to!
Many people demonstrate an incredible lack of self awareness when they discuss prostitution. I’m reminded of a female poster in a previous thread who posted, without a trace of humor, something like “I can’t believe any guy would go to a prostitute when lots of women would put out for a guy who bought them a fancy dinner.” Statements like that sum up how ridiculous it is to outlaw prostitution pretty well.
I can’t. I mean read the article. It’s not coming up. If it’s another sensationalist article it’s harming the people it’s supposed to be helping. So many outrageous claims have been made about sex trafficking that people stop paying attention. I think police put forced prostitution high on the list, but making the cases is very difficult. The prostitutes, the customers, and the pimps just don’t cooperate. The police end up spending their time on the easy street prostitution and massage parlors where only minimal charges can be upheld.
The mechanisms of this message board (probably related to advertisement optimization) often foul these links. One workaround is to click Quote to see the text of a post, then use copy-and-paste to extract the actual URL.
In this particular case you can go to the magazine’s home page
http://www.vanityfair.com/
and click #1 under MOST POPULAR.
If by “sensationalist” you mean “untrue”, all I can say is that the article includes actual testimony from a criminal court trial in Connecticut.
I agree that prostitution should be legalized. I also become very annoyed when voluntary and forced prostitution are conflated.
But I also become very annoyed by attempts to minimize the problem of trafficking. Even if the numbers are closer to “tens of thousands” rather than “millions”, each crime is a tragedy far worse than rape or murder.
Maybe that’s how they are in your opinion. But that’s all it is.
Well, logically forced prostitution is a worse crime than rape for the simple reason that among other things, it is repeated rape. It’s worse for the same reason mass murder is worse than a single murder.
Worse than murder, though? That is pretty damn subjective.
There are many forced prostitutes who are effectively murdered by AIDS, but it’s a slow murder where the girl first earns much money for her owner.
When I read of pimps selling girls to each other for a few hundred dollars, giving them a “life” so abject suicide may seem the best option, it’s not hard to imagine this is a worse crime than murder.
While I can see that that point is arguable, since we’re already in the Pit let me say your focusing only on that particular detail (whether slow torture and killing by AIDS is legalistically “murder”) tells me something dreadful about you.
Hijacking my own thread, let me introduce a new topic. I’ll start my mentioning that the recent Pew study confirms that a large majority of the political fringe now hijacking American politics answers “Yes” to “Do you have enough savings?”
Combining 2 or 3 recent threads and paraphrasing we see:
What does this have to do with responses in this thread? I really wonder whether those in denial about forced prostitution are just thinking of their recent $1000 date with a Pretty Woman-style “happy hooker.” :smack:
But maybe not. In the article linked-to in OP, a victim testifying at her pimp’s trial had a “funny”:
After reading that I had tears in my eyes. The amount of suffering that the girls in these prostitution rings go through is just unimaginable. I think the pimps and johns involved in these things are more ghouls than humans.
I think the reason that people are so blaise about prostitution is that they have fallen for the central lie of the sex industry, that all woman are whores and love being objects for men to abuse. When it comes to legal prostitution or pornography or whatever there is always the assumption that people do these things willingly and that it is in their best interests to do it. However one of the things that the article mentions is that in many cases there is a very fine line between going into something willingly and being coerced into it through emotional manipulation or whatever.
I also think the answer to these problems is not legal prostitution. Experience shows that if anything legalising prostitution makes the problem worse as it creates demand for girls. More to the point if you pay attention to the article the johns that were sleeping with the girls were themselves abusing them terribly. This type of prostitution can only ever be illegal. As well as creating demand for girls to perform more extreme sex acts on, legal prostitution also can act as a gateway to move girls from legal to illegal prostitution. I think the laws mentioned in Sweden are a much better solution. Treat the johns and pimps as criminals and the girls as victims.
What is more is that empirical data shows that in terms of protecting women, that approach is significantly better than just legalising prostitution. The article mentions Sweden, but also Amsterdam, through liberal prostitution laws, has also become a hub of human trafficking. Even though prostitution is legal, not enough girls want to be prostitutes to supply demand created by liberal prostitution laws. Also, demand grows for sex acts that fall outside the normal range of prostitution. So girls are forced into prostitution to meet the demand, and many are abused horribly. Simply criminalising it (especially criminalising paying for sex) would reduce the acceptance of it, reduce demand, and mean that fewer girls fall prey to pimps.
Calculon.
Oh, I see. “You see things differently from me, so that makes you a bad person.” That’s a terrific way of looking at the world.
You are quite a “piece of work.” I’ve no idea if you see the world like, e.g. Adolf Hitler did, but if not, then he’s not a bad person? Wow.
I’ve heard from a few idiots here at SDMB, but you take the cake.
This puritanical bullshit of criminalizing one of the oldest (and most natural) professions on Earth needs to stop. Pimps are a creation of the oppressive laws, forcing women to ply their trade in a dark world alive with the vermin that prey on them, vermin that could be squelched tomorrow if prostitution were monitored and regulated.
From 0 to Godwin in only 14 posts.
Unfortunately reality disagrees with you. The available data shows that countries that have liberal prostitution laws are magnets for human trafficking. If you are interested in keeping women safe from sex slavery then the way to do it is to make prostitution illegal, especially for the pimps and Johns that prey on vunerable women.
All that legalising prostitution does is entrences in society the idea that women can be treated as cattle and bought, hired and sold by people with enough money. By legalising prostitution it makes it more acceptable to sleep with prostitutes, and therefore makes more men willing to do it. It also provides legal ways of introducing girls into the sex industry, and makes it harder to catch sex slaveholders. It does not really act to protect women as a whole in the sex industry, as it just makes the scale of the problem worse.
While there is a demand for prostitutes, there will be sex slave prostitutes. Sex slave prostitution can be far more lucrative than legal, because you don’t have to give the girls much of anything for their services. And you don’t have any government regulations that you have to fulfill. You can also let the Johns do whatever they like to the girls, so long as they pay enough. In legal brothels there is no way you will find girls willing to engage in some of the sex acts that are performed on sex slave prostitutes. There are men that just want to dominate and abuse women, and legal prostitution won’t allow for that. I don’t think any men that sleep with sex slaves are under any illusions as to the willingness of the girl. I think they just don’t care about the person that they are abusing. If you are willing to coerce someone into having sex with you by paying them, is it that much different to use violence to do it?
I think it is just naive to think that the illegality of prostitution is what keeps girls bound to pimps. The treatment that sex slaves recieve from pimps is orders of magnitude worse then they would recieve in any prison. What keeps the girls bound to pimps are combinations of drugs, low self esteem and threats of violence either against them or their friends or family if they leave the pimp. What we need to do is focus on protecting women who have been abused and prosecuting the men who abuse them. If women know they can escape sex slavery by talking to the authorities then that makes the job of the sex slaveholder all the much harder.
Calculon.
The real problem is legalization without societal integration and the subsequent removal of stigma. Legalization without a plan for doing so is like digging a big pit and filling it with rebar without a plan for putting the building on top; without said integration, without the underlying societal expectation that prostitutes can report abuses and be taken seriously by the authorities, legalization or its lack is not terribly meaningful. Consider the case of the brothels in Nevada who have literally lobbied to pay additional taxes but have been turned down by the legislators who don’t want roads and schools paid for with sex.
That’s not what I said, you pisser.
I never said that “slow torture and killing by AIDS is/is not legalistically murder.”
I’m saying that you can’t dogmatically declare that sex trafficking is worse than murder. You said, in your exact words: “each crime is a tragedy far worse than rape or murder.” This is a ridiculous statement. It’s possible to survive sex trafficking. It’s not possible to survive murder.
Why don’t you go watch Nancy Grace and leave us the fuck alone.
No data has been presented to back that up. The article merely asserts it, without defining what a “lucrative low-risk magnet” is. Also the article asserts:
which basically ignores that fact that Craigslist was first pressured into charging for ads in its adult services section by the Attorney general of Connecticut, among others, and then criticized for making money off of it. That section of the site was created in order to put all the ads for prostitution in one area, and could ahve been a tool for law enforcement. The fact that the article repeats the political grandstanding of a few politicians renders the remainder of its assertions suspect.