We had new laws made up about it, that made it an absolute offence for a man to have sex with a trafficked woman, mens rea or not, and if anyone has been prosecuted for it it will be in the single digits!
It genuinely is practically a myth in civil societies. I absolutely agree it is a much greater problem in developing countries, but it really has to be seen within the context of these countries being shit in so many other ways, that the sex workers are not getting a much worse deal than the rest of their populations.
It always boggles me in these discussions that people assume there’s this huge shortage of sane women who would be willing to make crazy amounts of money doing a job that doesn’t require much in the way of skills and isn’t particularly difficult. So the assumption is that therefore anyone would do it is already damaged, and you’re likely exploiting them.
Seems like a good gig to me. A lot of the exploitation comes from the illegality - you need pimps to protect your territory, keep you safe, it disincentivizes law abiding citizens from the work, etc. I don’t know why we couldn’t have an army of non-broken, non-exploited hookers if it were legal.
…well, the answer is, of course, it depends. For starters, what country are you talking about? How do you define exploited?
If you were to use a legal prostitute in New Zealand, for example, there is very little chance she is being “exploited” depending on your definition of the word. The industry is highly regulated and designed to prevent exploitation and make things safer and equitable between both prostitutes and their patrons.
Maybe it is a bad assumption to make but I don’t think most of us would not be swelling with pride (poor choice of words) to find that our mother, sister, wife, or daughter decided to become a prostitute even if it was legal. I don’t have children, but if my daughter started working in a brothel in Las Vegas I’d seriously try to figure out just where the hell I went wrong as a parent. I’m actually a proponent for the legalization of prostitution as I think it would go a lot further towards mitigating a lot of abuses that do occur because of it’s illegal and clandestine nature. The prostitutes I’ve seen/read being interviewed even in places like Amsterdam did it because they had few other options.
But that’s becuase by nature we are protective of our female relatives’ virtue.
However… We either surpress this instinct, or we have sexual inequality. I don’t really care which as either ends up with whores in the long run, but let’s please try to be consistent, ok?
Ok. I’m ready to accept any new information that you have to offer.
Please specify which of the following institutions referenced in my first link is/are supplying ridiculous figures:
US State Department
International Labor Organization
US Department of Justice
UN Office on Drugs and Crime
US Department of Health and Human Services
US Department of Homeland Security
US Agency for International Development
US Citizenship and Immigration Services
University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work
US Federal Bureau of Investigation Civil Rights unit
US Government Accountability Office
Also, the website you have offered as… refutation(?) appears not to list any research on sex trafficking. I’d appreciate it if you’d point me toward the relevant data. It appears to be a market for listings of available services. I have no way of evaluating, as you suggest, if any of the people offering their services through that website are exploited in any way. I also don’t know what that has to do with the topic at hand.
There are more sex workers in the world than there are trafficked persons and not all trafficked persons are sex workers. So, it is perfectly obvious that not all sex workers are trafficked. If that’s the point you want to make, try making it to someone who claimed otherwise.
There’s probably an element of selection bias in the things you’ve seen or read, though. I’ve certainly seen interviews with sex workers in Amsterdam saying they did it because it was great money for relatively short hours. A fairly extensive survey of sex workers in New Zealand following decriminalisation found it to be largely a myth that most of them do it because of a lack of other options.
I think it’s also useful to keep in mind that doing a particular job because you have to do it, rather than because it’s what you want to do, is a widespread phenomenon, hardly limited to the sex industry. Nobody grows up dreaming of scrubbing toilets or washing dishes. In recessionary times in particular, people will do all sorts of work they would ordinarily consider below them; there are master’s degree holders working in retail shops for example (indeed the government may effectively *coerce * them into doing so by denying them unemployment benefit if they refuse). But you never hear it said that you’re exploiting them by availing of the services they’re offering.
What are you trying to say here? I’m really scratching my head at how the severity of rape can be “ambiguous” in any particular country- let alone one where rape has become so common as the result of a fourteen civil war where violent gang rape was employed as a psychological weapon of war aimed specifically to humiliate and demoralize.
I think he’s trying to say that repeated rape, along with the repeated rape of most of the women you know, in the middle of a civil war, is somehow better than a one-off rape in the Western world where you will usually be offered support and counselling to help you deal with it.
I don’t know how he came to that conclusion, but it’s probably his special brand of common sense.
Yes this is a big problem. Many of the leading “anti-trafficking” organisations are, in reality, anti-prostitution organisations (e.g. the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women) and they have effectively redefined the global slave trade as a trade in women and children for sexual purposes. So policymakers’ solutions to trafficking have often tended to focus primarily on measures to eliminate prostitution. Whatever the effects these measures have on sex trafficking victims and non-trafficked sex workers - and there is considerable debate about that - they certainly do nothing for the millions of people in forced *non-*sexual labour.
Furthermore, there is a failure to recognise that traffickers are criminals first and foremost and even if you could eliminate sex trafficking through anti-prostitution measures, they would simply turn to other forms of trafficking. There is some evidence that this has happened in Sweden, for example, since the purchase of sex was outlawed there.
So if it happens more, it’s not that bad? Do you genuinely think that or do you just want to believe that because the alternative is pretty grim?
And you think the customer is going to get away with less in an exploitative country where women are routinely taken advantage of?
Not being snarky but are you genuinely trying to be the most misogynist poster on the boards? Between this, “snakes with tits,” and the whole passive aggressive females post, you’re not coming off well.
I think it’s in no way surprising that an organization called the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women would focus more effort on anti-sex trafficking than anything else, as the majority of women trafficked in the world are trafficked for sex.
Labor trafficking and particularly trafficking in men gets less attention even though it’s at least as insidious as sex trafficking. The OP asks specifically about trafficking and exploitation in the context of sex trade, so I don’t know that a discussion of labor trafficking is appropriate here.
It’s again relativism; same way that murder isn’t so severe over there either. Basically they have a culture at the moment that life is cheap and human rights are not respected.
I don’t think you can judge an act outside of its sociological, economic, historical, cultural context. YMMV.