I thought the message board had died.
Apparently that was not the case.
“reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated”
So, now that you’re back: did your bananas ever get ripe?
Which is, to a large extent, a result of prostitution being illegal. If it were legalised, working conditions for prostitutes would become much safer.
I keep seeing that residents in locales like this thread have more legitimate potentials. On one reservation near me they’ve just opened a state college and another nearby reservation opened an Amazon processing place. I don’t otherwise live in an elite area but regional business environments can foster themselves to an extent.
Also a side effect of working streets in evenings and getting into cars or going to random motel rooms with strangers and other risky behaviours - because, as said, the work is illegal.
I don’t know of anecdotal statistics for brothels but I assume they would be a lot safer - for one thing, a lot less anonymity for the clients. However, agaiin because it’s generally illegal, there tend to be few functioning houses of ill repute. There was a time when some cities “looked the other way” because that was easy - Big Easy.
Even in nations with legal brothels, there are still brutal pimps and human trafficking. Maybe safer.
I recall an article - maybe 10 years ago - that Amsterdam was having problems with their red light district. What used to be a local industry was being taken over by organized crime from the east, with a lot of eastern Europe women being trafficked into the businesses. The problem with a setup like that (and the reason it’s generally illegal) is that it attracts the worst of organized crime and coercion. I don’t know how well it works in Nevada, but I assume some serious oversight is necessary. Logically, coercion is the simplest recruitment tool for such establishments, and women who are captive don’t need to be paid, more lucrative for the management.
Being a Native American isn’t illegal, yet they are disproportionately victims of homicide. They’re already targets. Until whatever is causing that is fixed, it seems very risky to inject prosecution into the mix.
I have to take issue with the underlying assumption of this thread, that Native Americans are implicitly ready to engage in any kind of morally questionable activity simply because they have different laws. Just because they tolerate casinos doesn’t mean they’re ready to open up shop for whatever white people feel like crossing state lines to seek out.
Would they have a rule that all brothel workers, whether there for sex or anything else, would have to be Native American?
I don’t think that’s the underlying assumption of this thread at all. In fact, the OP’s question already hypothesised that a potential reason for the absence of prostitution on NA territory might be moral opposition from within the community itself.
There are, but the presence of legal prostitution makes it easier for the police to distinguish between brothels that don’t exploit their sex workers versus those that do, and focus their investigations on the latter. That’s because the police don’t have to waste resources on investigating the former. It also makes it easier for the non-exploitative brothels to cooperate with the police because they don’t have to hide.
I live in a city where prostitution is legal and rather openly practiced; in fact, I can see the neon lights of several legally operating brothels just two blocks from my house, where a veritable red light districts starts. The police are around a lot in the neighbourhood and occasionally inspect a brothel (or to bus drug dealers, who have a tendency to congregate in the same areas as prostitution). But they never bother about the brothels as such.
Read more closely. OP assumes the tribe is ready to let anyone do any harmful or sketchy thing on their territory in exchange for a cut of the action, albeit maybe shielding their own women while allowing other minority women from being exposed to it, which in a way is an even more gross assumption:
Though maybe this is more obvious to the dwindling few of us who recall the posting history of this particular user.
If that’s the attitude that the police take, then the “legal” brothels will soon be completely awash in sex trafficking. It’s like charter schools: They’re legally required to follow all of the same regulations as public schools, except nobody ever actually checks, so they don’t, and so they can run with much lower costs and make big profits for their owners.
Yeah. I’m gonna trust police to police this.
Anyway don’t reservations have a sorta police force of their own?
Who is gonna police it? Feds, local, state troopers? Or what amounts to county deputies? Constables?
I see potential problems…
Reservations don’t have a “sorta police force”. They have police forces, period. Though jurisdictional issues can get weird, especially in cases where non-tribal-citizens are also involved. For instance, when a non-tribal-citizen commits a crime on tribal land, that’s always US federal jurisdiction. Which is one of the reasons for the high rate of violence against native women, because the feds don’t put a very high priority on those cases.
Ahh. Thx. I never knew what Reservation Police were about.
My first thought was, “The reason most reservations don’t want to legalize prostitution is for the same reason most states don’t want to legalize prostitution.”
Good answer.
If anything, violence against indigenous women is worse in Canada, without all these mixed up jurisdictions - and especially in western Canada. It seems to be a problem of poverty and lack of opportunity often for those with poor education. People from small communities with a different culture and language being unfamiliar with the predatory nature of some in big cities. Prostitution becomes one of the means of making money for the bottom of the social ladder, which makes them prey to exploitative pimps and vulnerable to their customers too. There is also an inherent drug and alcohol problem at the bottom of the social strata, making them even more vulnerable and desperate for money. The problem is worst in the west (Nnorhtern Ontario to BC) where communities have a much shorter history of access to and interaction with the greater society.
Add to that the problem of residential schools - the USA had some of a similar system, but it was worst in Canada. The noble goal was to make the natives into productive members of white society. It was flawed in design and failed miserably. Children were essentially kidnapped from their homes, taken to boarding schools. “Learn English” translated into beatings if they spoke native languages, and the schools were often run by abusive clergy. The lack of concern was evident that many who died (in the days before vaccines) the system could not manage to track and notify parents. Meanwhile, generations grew up educated but lacking exposure to parental skills.
There is an entire social movement, not unlike Black Lives Matter, concerned with the large number of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.(MMIWG)
To some extent, these aggravating factors are present in the USA too, and logically, women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are most at risk of exploitation.