Backpage Raided, CEO Arrested on Sex-Trafficking Charges
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
You know... the usual bullshit.
If some % of 267K people are not committing fraud, than I'd want to arrest the CEO for doing some terrible brainwashing.
[1] I've done internal investigations at megacorps. When something shady goes down with line employees they hire teams of lawyers just to tell management what the heck is going on inside their own company.
I'm sure that's the case, and I'm sure it's also the case for most CEOs of massive companies.
Wells Fargo has more than 250,000 employees and more than 6000 branches -- more branches than any other US bank. There is nobody who knows everything that is going on. It's just not possible.
The number of employees fired represents a tiny fraction of the total number of employees -- about 2% or less.
People had to open new accounts or lose their jobs. Some people opened fake accounts to accomplish this. When they were found out, they were fired. Sounds like a horrible place to work, but the firings were proof that management didn't want this to happen, not some bizarro proof that this is what they wanted all along.
You don't need coordination to figure out how to game a system.
Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that it had fired 5,300 employees over the last few years related to the shady behavior. Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-create...
And if you're being measured on how many accounts you create, and the system doesn't have checks to keep people from opening accounts without consent, it's not exactly hard for all the cheaters to figure out what to do. Again, think back to all the ways people cheated in school. You think they had to coordinate to figure out how to cheat?
You get what you measure. You measure account creation, you'll get account creation. You measure legitimate account creation, and it's a different ballgame.
Yes, but establishing the former (which is a crime) as opposed to the latter (which is an internal business matter for Wells Fargo) is the tricky part.
And there are also the companies that are convinced of fraud like Deutsche Bank, but it's the company that pays a huge fine when the executives who were overseeing all this go unscathed.
I have worked in a bank and I know a lot of people there have no clue what's going on, but the fact that it's true does not mean it's a valid excuse. If I kill a pedestrian with my car I can not claim it's not my fault because I had my eyes closed.
Actually, in the hearing Senator Warren tried to connect the fraudulent accounts to the stock price, which would have been a direct benefit for the bank:
> You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket. And when it all blew up, you kept your job, you kept your multimillion-dollar bonuses and you went on television to blame thousands of $12-an-hour employees.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/business/wells-fargo-tests...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/how-lendin...
They created two million new accounts, letting them go to the market and tout demand for their banking services.
Wells Fargo pushed its employees so hard to open accounts because there was a benefit to doing so.
Personally I think they could find out about a lot of wrongdoing if they wanted to.
If it cannot be proven that he knew about it or encouraged this behaviour then he cannot be held legally accountable. It's like demanding the US president should go to prison because some CIA team somewhere does some really shady stuff that he doesn't know about.
Shareholders might still choose to fire that guy, but it's a choice they have, they do not have to if they are satisfied with his performance.
How come that people today lose their ability to reason as soon as bankers are involved? It's similar to the National Socialists reasoning when they blamed the Jews for everything bad "because they had the all money and controlled the world"
But in general a CEO should have a duty to ask questions why a certain division seems to be doing well. Maybe it has to do with earnings targets that are simply unachievable? I see that in my own company. The top guys are setting shorter and shorter deadlines and in my view the quality of engineering suffers. Top management doesn't technically know when people are cutting corners but they could easily have listened to people that the demands are too high.
My opinion: Anyone who took part in it either knowing it is illegal or even if the person should have known it is illegal considering his/her position.
Same goes for persons that didn't necessarily know about it but acted negligent or ignored standard procedures that are in place to prevent such a thing.
> But in general a CEO should have a duty to ask questions why a certain division seems to be doing well
Could be negligence, I don't know the specifics here. If it was then he has to be held accountable. But his head might roll in the end regardlessly as people always need a scapegoat, no matter if it's his fault or not. Yet when the government takes action it should not do so just to punish a scapegoat, they should punish because the person broke a law. (if the shareholders fire him even though it's not his fault I couldn't care less, it's their investment and they do not have to act rationally if they want to)
As a general rule, we don't hold people criminally liable for simple negligence.
In normal people world, this is proof that Wells was taking the problem of fake accounts seriously. (It also sounds like a horrible place to work, but that's a separate issue.)
If that's the case they should be paid like the CEO of a small internet company. You take the money, you take the responsibility.
Once worked somewhere that management measured you by number of checkins. Engineers didn't need to talk with each other at all to get those numbers going way up. And they did, you betcha. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
I think it's made more concrete by thinking of how many times you've thought of an app, business, screenplay, etc. and realized later that a dozen others have had the same idea. I bet a dozen people in this thread independently sketched out an app like Uber/Homejoy/"AirBnb-for-X" at some point just based off having the common annoyance of taxi-finding or hiring help.
In standup comedy, this happens a lot because we're all living in 2016 so any joke about the election, Bradjelina, Game of Thrones or any other sufficiently public/widely-discussed topic will have dozens of people trying to make a joke off of it. I'd guess that the set of actions you can take in a 'corporate game' is more finite and structured, so it makes sense that thousands among tens/hundreds of thousands adopt the same strategy.
War on sex is new War on Drugs. By going after the CEO they are setting a precedent. They want to make sure no investor would invest into something that challenges government authority.
Wells Fargo CEO will not be touched for the same reason why big banks get bailouts, Hillary clinton is not in jail and Obama is still a president despite killing thousands of innocent people around earth. They are too close to powers.
Ugh not this again. Hillary is not in jail because her actions did not rise to the level of criminal prosecution. Look at General Petraeus. He willfully gave highly classified material to his mistress. He got a plea deal and didn't serve any time. So how is it that Clinton who did not intentionally divulge classified material nor put an authorized server on the classified network, now deserves to be punished more harshly than Petraeus? That doesn't make any sense.
Why not Bush? He's the fucking moron who started it all because he had daddy issues, and killed way more innocents ( > 300,000 ) than Obama??
So that's about 2.1 million fake deposit and credit-card accounts, of which about 100,000 -- fewer than 5 percent -- brought in any fee income to Wells Fargo. The total fee income was $2.4 million, or about $1.14 per fake account. And that overstates the profitability: Wells Fargo also enrolled people for debit cards and online banking, but the CFPB doesn't bother to count those incidents, or suggest that any of them led to any fees. Which makes sense: You'd expect online banking and debit cards to be free, if you never use them or even know about them. Meanwhile, all this dumb stuff seems to have occupied huge amounts of employee time that could have been spent on more productive activities. If you divide the $2.4 million among the 5,300 employees fired for setting up fake accounts, you get about $450 per employee. Presumably it cost Wells Fargo way more than that just to replace them.
It seems senior management set up a stupid employee incentive program, but were not intentionally involved in the fraud.
I don't know the banking industry well so maybe there is some way for the company to make money off fake cards but I can't think of one. And because of that, I tend to believe that upper management really did not intend it to happen.
And their managers, and their managers' managers, whose income depends on showing good numbers to the nth-managers.
That's the major sin here.
It says everything about what the people in the loop of those decisions wanted, perhaps, but those people (at least, those for whom there is a known paper trail of them being in the loop) are probably several steps removed from the CEO. They also probably also maintained enough of a paper trail of the notional reasons that they were firing the people involved that, while its a reasonable inference from the association between whistleblowing and firing that there was an ulterior motive, it would be far from certain that that could be established to the degree necessary for that to the basis of criminal culpability.
He can only create structures (e.g. internal audit team) that are powerful enough to detect it and report it to him.
Do you think forced prostitution and sex-traficking are equally harmful to society as fake accounts? I know I'm glad that authorities take this more seriously.
We need a Godwin's Law for random HackerNews threads that bring up alleged bank CEO crimes.
Probably because a corporation like Wells Fargo will have extensive documentation of procedures and training that establishes sufficient evidence that there were efforts to constrain employee behavior to lawful acts in pursuit of the metrics which they ended up maximizing through unlawful acts that it will take a lot of digging, at a minimum, to have a viable case of executive criminal culpability.
There's also a story from a young girl who was forced into sex work, which is certainly awful, and some stuff about studies and claims of sex trafficking, but there's a clickbait factor to the headline. There are a variety of new state and federal laws on sex trafficking which were passed in recent years, and nobody associated with Backpage has been charged under any of them, afaict.
> run-of-the-mill prostitution charges
I sincerely fucking hope that isn't "run of the mill".
> run-of-the-mill
> adj. Not special or outstanding; average.
I don't even want to know how you consider a child prostitution charge "average or not special".
Incorrect. Sex trafficking includes (among other commercial coerced sex) any instance of prostitution which involves anything other than free and full consent from someone with capacity to consent to sex; minors by definition lack capacity to consent, so pimping a minor is an offense which falls completely within the bounds of sex trafficking. (Unlike simple pimping, solicitation, etc., which may overlap with sex trafficking, but also include acts which are not sex trafficking.)
This stuff happens; just like murder, rape, arson, etc.
It's irrational to get upset about someone using a common idiom to convey that this isn't a typical instance of child prostitution.
Child sexual exploitation. The vast majority of children involved aren't there through free choice.
I didn't intend to imply otherwise.
Notably, in the UK some police forces were saying that children could chose to become prostitutes, and these children were promiscuous.
Why the anti-American sentiment?
Shielding people from reality doesn't change it, just makes it's ultimate realization more painful.
I've just been seeing a bit too much 'America is evil/bad' lately, consider me triggered :).
It is very rare that we find children who freely make that choice.
Protecting children from that harm --and it is very severe harm-- is important.
And I didn't say "never", I said in the vast majority.
And the child we're talking about here is 15, not 16 or 17.
Your comment was wrong on every point.
FWIW, you said 'Notably, in the UK some police forces were saying that children could chose to become prostitutes, and these children were promiscuous.', implying that what they said was incorrect, and children could never choose to become prostitutes.
If you only meant the 'vast majority' of children doesn't want to become prostitutes, then I don't know what the point of the quote was.
Similarly, nothing about your parent post mentions an age range more specific than 'children', which by default I take to mean anyone legally underage and thus not allowed to make decisions.
15, 16, 17, what's the difference? Somewhere between 12 and 18 both boys and girls become interested in sex; some of them will want to use it to gain higher status.
Bad backpage. Or maybe someone is trying to get headlines on how they are tough on crime. Because elections.
That's a bit disturbing to read, since sex workers use a lot of popular social networking sites to advertise their services. The effect of removing these venues is simply to push the trade further underground, thereby obstructing oversight and participant safety.
Prostitution with anything other than free and full consent by someone with full capacity to give consent is sex trafficking; pimping a minor, therefore, is a sex trafficking charge.
> There are a variety of new state and federal laws on sex trafficking
Yes, there are a number of new laws that cover aspects of sex trafficking that were not adequately covered (either because they weren't already illegal, or because the specific lack-of-consent related aspects didn't enhance the offense beyond some base non-trafficking offense), but that doesn't change the fact that pimping a minor is inherently a charge that is based on factors which meet the definition of sex trafficking, even if it was already both prohibited and enhanced beyond the equivalent non-trafficking charge (simple pimping) prior the recent round of additional trafficking-related legislation.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/business/16craigslist.html :
"The sex ads cost $10 and were on track to bring in $44 million in revenue this year, according to the AIM Group, a consulting firm that closely monitors the company. Craigslist also charges for some real estate and job ads, but most listings are free"
Since I started paying attention a few years ago, I've noticed that most commentary from law enforcement and politicians on the subject of prostitution frames it as "human trafficking" or just "trafficking", even when there were no non-consenting parties involved (and nearly all prostitution is between consenting adults). It is misleading, unethical, and actively harmful to the safety of the people they're claiming to help, but, they do it anyway. The implication that someone is being forced into sexual slavery makes them seem like the good guys in the story...when, in reality, they're mostly just harassing and imprisoning poor women who are making an honest living the best way they know how.
Of course no one wants to see children being sexually abused. No one wants to see children or otherwise at-risk people forced into prostitution. But, that's already illegal; they don't have to victimize all sex workers to pursue and prosecute those crimes.
The kicker here is that the police found these kids who had been forced into sexual slavery because of the ads on this site. Had it been completely underground, they wouldn't have found them, wouldn't have been able to set up a sting, and wouldn't have been able to get the girls out of a dangerous and abusive situation. Now, it goes further underground, where the risk is even higher.
I did a lot of research on that in college for some legalizing prostitution essays. The research I found, both scholarly and anecdotal, totally supported this. The worst thing I found is that there were many incidences of rape or abuse by clients, pimps, or even cops that were made easier to get away with via the stigma of prostitution. Just bringing up the details of the crime was enough to get themselves arrested. In some cases, judges tossed it out since they equated prostitution with asking for it.
So, taking action like this isn't just taking a stand against the act of prostitution: it's also supporting worse crimes to happen to prostitutes and others around them. Not even necessarily people participating. It can be just a caring person that runs afoul of the pimps that want the status quo to remain for specific women.
""In some instances, you can only get high marks on performance if you perform" without using condoms or other protection, Graham said."
Back then, I didn't think about the effect recommendation systems would have outside filtering bad clients. This negative effect on positive reviews is totally believable after all the stories I've seen about people extorting eBay or Amazon store owners for good reviews. This needs further research to figure out how to reduce its effect. It's essentially a form of subversion in practice where prostitutes get positive reviews the more dangerous (i.e. STD's) they are for their more honest clients. On top of pregnancy risks.
I have to further speculate that the same type of 'impact' we see from legalizing 'recreational use' would also be mirrored with this topic; possibly to an even more positive degree.
On one hand, there are those who believe that conducting these arrangements in the open is safer for all involved parties.
On the other hand, there are those who believe that sex work can never truly be consensual, because even if consent is given, a sex worker may have felt pressured to seek this life because all other choices available to them to make a living and attain food and shelter were sub-par or nonexistent. This argument supposes that given a different, idealized circumstances free of such pressures, few people would choose sex work.
I find this argument very similar to the idea of age of consent, in which society declares that people below a certain age are incapable of informed consent, and similarly, the widespread societal taboo against suicide, which implicitly suggests that no rational person free of undue pressures would consent to ending their own life, therefore anyone who commits suicide was pushed to do so by serious factors that impaired their ability to properly consent.
Finally, there are those who just want to be 'tough on crime', and actions like this fit the bill at first blush, while letting it operate would be construed by the same population as inaction.
In idealized circumstances free of economic pressures many of us would spent all day at the beach. It's great many found their dream career and are getting paid to do what they love. But for most what work is just work, a means to an end. Not sure why sex workers should be especially singled out and stigmatized. Would the janitor who cleaned the toilets in your office be doing that if they weren't getting paid to? Would you even be in said office if you weren't getting paid to be there?
Everyone should feel shame at coercing a person who would otherwise not have sex with them into having sex with them. Buying someone's labor is different than buying their bodily autonomy and consent to sex.
This isnt rape, it's just paying for an exchange. If a person doesn't want to use their body, they're free not to. Manual labor also involves using your body with wear and tear, it's not that different or special.
Regulated prostitution may be bad in your eyes but unregulated prostitution is even worse for those who are already in this industry.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
And there are thousands of former sex workers that will give you an earful about what you think you know about prostitution and what prostitutes think.
Don't go thinking there is a silver bullet here, all solutions somewhat suck.
Sorry to break the news to you: all clients are ugly clients, since they're all just fine with the idea that people's bodies are something to be bought and sold.
Also, I assume you don't actually mean bodies, as that would imply you're similarly against non-sexual modelling, acting, etc etc, where people employ people directly for their bodies, to varying degrees.
This isn't germane to the issue, which is that purchasing sex is a reprehensible act. However, there is indeed a strong strain of anti-capitalist thought in radical feminism; it surprises me that you don't know this.
> Also, I assume you don't actually mean bodies, as that would imply you're similarly against non-sexual modelling, acting, etc etc, where people employ people directly for their bodies, to varying degrees.
I meant literally their bodies, not images of their bodies, or actions that their bodies perform. I meant direct access to their mouths, rectums, vaginas for the purpose of sexual gratification. I suppose if purchasing that kind of access had other purposes besides sexual gratification, "sex" wouldn't seem like such a special case.
I moderate a handful of self-titled "social justice warrior" chatrooms, which are full of everyone from libertarian socialists to anarcho-communists. I'm reasonably aware of various strands of feminism. I've been having a discussion on the morality of sex work for much of today.
Sex work is immoral for the same reasons other work is immoral. It's not a special case, and shouldn't really be treated much differently. If you want to protect the sex worker from the necessity of performing their work, you should be similarly protecting the minimum wage retail clerk from the necessity of performing their work. Neither is worse than the other, and they have similar solutions.
Even under capitalism, purchasing e.g. food for your family that was somehow acquired under coercive circumstances is still less shameful than purchasing e.g. diamonds that were somehow acquired under coercive circumstances. What you're purchasing matters; it's not all the same.
The solution is to get rid of the system which is coercive. It's not to tell everybody who ever wanted to buy a television not to within the context of capitalism.
The purchase of sex inherently demeans and degrades another human being because it places one's own sexual gratification over another person's bodily autonomy.
I'm a contractor, and I get to choose my clients. If I don't want to work with someone, I don't. Why would it be "inherently" demeaning in sex work, if they got to choose their clients and there were better protection and regulation?
Why is it an implementation issue with your TV purchase, and an inherent issue with sex work? I don't follow the logic.
TL;DR no prostitute can "choose" a john that isn't going to sexually exploit her (and thus violate her human rights) because that's the nature of purchasing sex.
A direct quote TL;DR
Does the 'right to prostitute' exist?' Clearly prostitution cannot exist as a right because it usurps and negates already established human rights of the prostitute woman to human dignity, bodily integrity, physical and mental well-being...Human rights are universal and inalienable. They cannot be reduced to the instrumentality of individual choice alone because individual choice can and does include the right to harm or propagate harm on others or inflict harm on oneself.
There are people in the sex industry who enjoy their industry. There were no people on the receiving end of the holocaust who enjoyed that.
If you can't grasp the difference you should not try to discuss anything.
You think prostitution is not a violation of human rights. I do. It's pretty much that simple. But clearly what specific individuals used to think about freedom from slavery, or the right of Jewish people to exist, or the right to basic dignity and access to food and livelihood, has no bearing on whether or not these things are human rights. They just are.
It's morally acceptable to sell a service but not to purchase it? That's asinine.
The "economic transaction" model is in almost all cases a fig leaf for the abuse of women, even in jurisdictions where prostitution has been legalized or decriminalized.
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/i-clutche...
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdf/Prostitutionin9Count...
"Just-so stories," k bud. Tell yourself whatever lies you need to in order to condone johns and pimps; I can't stop you.
A while ago I spent quite some time researching the prostitution thing, trying to make up my mind about it. I remember the UN report on global trafficking[1] being specially enlightening. The conclusions I took from it:
-Prohibition doesn't work. It just drives the prostitution underground, and as the pimps are already doing something illegal they don't mind going the extra mile, make it straightforward slavery and abuse the women so much than they are too terrified to escape. A small country (like Sweden) can offload the prostitution to nearby countries, but if all Europe were to do that the consequences would probably be really dire for a lot of women.
-Full legality increases human trafficking. As there is a lot of legal prostitution going on, it's easier to get away with the trafficking. In Europe usually takes the shape of organized crime importing awful lot of women from western Europe to Holland and Germany. Long term, it's thought to increase the well being of prostitutes, both imported and local, but we still have to grok how to do it without make it without the traffic.
-Not legal nor illegal. This is the situation in most countries, and the implementations vary wildly. In some countries the police does not intervene at all and it's a cesspool of mafias fighting for control, others make it a tourist attraction, while others haven't made it legal but don't prosecute the prostitutes. Curiously enough, this last approach is the one that gets the best results at stopping exploitative human trafficking as long as pimping is really prosecuted, don't remember anyone really explaining why. My guess is that in this situation large scale trafficking operations stand out much more, but who knows.
TL;DR; It's hard. Swedes are a tiny bit hypocrites in this one.
[1] http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-repor...
Yes, because people who purchase sex are a scourge to women everywhere.
It's extremely difficult to stop gangsters from trafficking because they operate in the trafficked persons home country as well, so if you run to the police in Germany or Canada they can seek retribution on your family members back home in Ukraine, Vietnam ect. Thus the not legal nor illegal does a good balance of preventing super brothels opening up full of imported sex workers while at the same time being able to arrest pimps without relying on the testimony of the sex workers.
Defending pimps and johns while calling anti-prostitution activists "sleazy slimeballs." I love it.
That is basically making things up.
They also have a tendency to wish that people who didn't want to be in their line of work didn't have to be in their line of work. So why not actually try to solve that problem - reach out to individuals, listen to them, and help them achieve their goals - instead of trying to tell people what they want and don't want? The only reason I can think of is that that doesn't allow you to force your morality on people.
I do. I reach out to would-be purchasers of sex and those who would defend them, and point out the dire consequences of their approach. Economic transfer doesn't suddenly make rape something one should aspire to or tolerate.
Edit: Specifically, if the goal is to help sex workers who want help, the solution is... to help sex workers who want help. It's to perform research into the barriers to seeking help, and try to remove those barriers. It's not to prevent consensual trade between a person who has few issues with their job, and someone seeking their services.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to eradicate sex work against the wishes of those sex workers for reasons of morality, punishing people who participate in it is a wonderful idea.
Which rights does consensual sex work curtail?
This isn't really an opt-out right; surely there are people who would "consent" to situations of slavery or apartheid. This doesn't mean we should make those things legal.
If you want to disambiguate it from sex, consider whether someone should be able to sell (and thus another person to buy) an organ.
Then consider that the demand for purchasing sex massively outstrips the demand for purchasing organs.
Selling sex doesn't imply the loss of anything.
Literally thousands upon thousands of current and former prostitutes disagree.
The solution is not to make sex work illegal, or to make seeking it illegal. It's to help the people who don't want to be performing sex work. It's to give them food, and shelter, and training to re-enter the job market. But that's expensive, and it's difficult to explain to people with Christian moralities about sex why you'd allow people to perform sex work if they wanted to.
The conclusion is that it is an immoral act to visit a prostitute. And that's all you need to know really.
Oh and here's another dirty little secret for you: a good percentage of the customers do it exactly because they LIKE the rapey aspect of it. The world is a darker place than you may prefer to believe.
I'm sure the owners would be happy to provide background checks for all employees, if it gets the police out of their business.
And wouldn't autonomy include the freedom to do with your body as you see fit?
If it were about freedom, you would see people of all economic conditions choosing to prostitute themselves. But you don't.
"People who see prostitution as something which exists on a number of different, exclusive and distinct class-related levels are people who do not understand the interrelated nature of it, and some of the people ignorant of the shifting nature of prostitution are actually prostitutes and prostitutors themselves."
Sounds awful paternalistic. Have you considered the possibility that people who make choices you disagree with have agency?
Once again, if only for the peanut gallery: you are asserting that no sex workers have agency in the matter of their employment. Yes or no?
Coerced sex is rape, however. It is qualitatively different from coerced labor. As Dworkin wrote a long time ago, "in prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after."
I think the actual moral problem with commercial sex is that it commodifies something that some people see as sacred. I think it turns on one's view of government as moral guardian vs individual liberty. Governments aren't usually very good moral actors, which is why we usually limit their moral policing.
But don't take my word for it, take former sex workers' word for it: http://www.educating-voices.com
This is feminism 101 stuff; even if you want to take the "choice feminism" side of the debate, you need to learn the basics of radical feminist critiques and positions on the issue.
This means that monetary exchange precludes free choice. This is independent of what is being exchanged, as you say it.
Instead of trying to wordplay this in HN comments, why don't you take a look at https://www.demandabolition.org/resources/evidence-against-l... -- they've done a far better job than I ever could on lining up the different arguments -- and there are many! -- against blithely skipping into legalized or even decriminalized prostitution. If none stick, then certainly nothing I say in this discussion will have any effect.
This sentence has structurally the same form. If you think it's ridiculous, it can only be because you think there is something special about sex - i.e. it is sacred in some way. And thus your position actually doesn't relate to free will.
I think you're very confused. Your statements aren't logically consistent and I have to make guesses and leaps of dodgy inference to make any sense of them at all.
I believe you have a prior position on the morality of prostitution and are using arguments you don't understand to defend the position. I think a different tack would be wiser.
> As Dworkin wrote a long time ago, "in prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after."
I feel like the Dworkin quote is more the basis of their argument, that the human body itself is different to other external objects, and selling your own body is different to selling something external.
In that context, comparing selling fruit to selling your own body doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
That said, I know a couple of people in this industry, none of them are particularly fond of their work, but they don't seem any more unhappy than anyone else in a job they don't particularly like. shrug
And in the end there's a qualitative difference between purchasing access to a person's time and labor, and purchasing access to their mouth, vagina, and anus.
The authors at http://www.feministcurrent.com/?s=prostitution would universally guffaw at your misdirection towards religion. This is about patriarchal oppression of women, all gussied up in the same neoliberal language that has proven itself unmeritorious in other public spheres.
So as a gay man, it would be highly immoral for me to have sex with a prostitute whom is a bottom, but renting the services of a top for the night would be totally fine. Am I interpreting you correctly (not that I have, or plan on, engaging the services of sex workers. Not really my scene.)?
I currently hold very different views from you on this issue, but some of your arguments are certainly giving me some things to think about. They all seem to assume the above point, which I have a really hard time accepting.
Not at all, it's also immoral to purchase assassinations and many other things both illegal and legal. They're not germane to the question of prostitution though.
Prostitution is qualitatively different than other "services" or even non-prostitution sex work (phone sex operator, erotic fiction writer, even some pornography) because it involves purchasing direct access to and use of the prostituted person's body. That is the problem with prostitution, not the fact that it's about sex per se.
It's simply a matter of the human condition that the (male) sex drive is the most common thing that, when left unexamined and unchecked, results in such a system where people's bodies are reduced to the objects of economic transaction.
I've probably burned enough internet points on this thread, but if you want to read far better-researched and better-stated writing on this subject than mine, http://www.feministcurrent.com/category/prostitution-2/ is a good place to start. It's a shame that religious and social conservative voices are often the only ones being represented and considered on this subject. It's a shame that men on the left and atheist men should feel deeply.
By this argument, paid work is slavery.
I suppose in a society where women were free of patriarchy and rape culture, and had full reproductive and sexual autonomy, then Dworkin's statement wouldn't even apply to women.
But that society is a fantasy, and I doubt any capitalist society could ever free women from economic exploitation of their bodies by others.
If someone only consents to cleaning a house if they're paid enough money to do it that isn't "without their consent" by any definition of the word I'm aware of. It's unclear to me why sex workers should be specially called out and stigmatized.
What really matters is the safety of the person(s) involved. And yet, there are plenty of occupations where safety is in question.
The question is whether or not we want to be a society that views people's bodies and sexual access to them as a commodity to be bought and sold. I find it baffling that anyone would laud this condition after giving it a few moments of compassionate reflection.
It's all well and good to say that it's against your own morals, but as soon as you start defending that on the basis of the consequences, you're conceding the "but it's just morally wrong!" argument. And in general, we (okay, at least I, as I can believe that you wouldn't necessarily agree here) laud societies that have transitioned from deontological to consequentialist ethics.
And all the more if it's a billion prostitutes in an eternity of misery supported by a malevolent AI!
Alternatively, Alice could consider the possibility that Bob is not, in fact, an idiot.
If you want to get all academic about it, I am coming from a position of virtue ethics, which is why I am focused on the vicious men who purchase sex, and to a lesser extent other people who are explicitly or implicitly defending those men's actions.
What about marriage between a very rich and a very poor person, or between a citizen and a non-citizen?
What about being paid for doing drug trials? Isn't that coercion of poor people? Should this be legal?
Marriages usually involve many other things than sex-for-resources; it is certainly possible for economic coercion to be an aspect of marriage. It is not the defining feature of the institution, however.
Drug trials are not a more socially tolerated form of rape so they are not really relevant here.
How are drug trial not a form of "rape"? They are not sexual, but you are exposing your body to potential damage in exchange for money. I really don't see how that's different than prostitution, in fact I'll argue that it is worse (we can make prostition less risky, we cannot eliminate risk from drug trial).
Some people absolutely have been getting married to be able to get out of poverty, and in my book this is worse than prostitution in the sense that not only do those people have to have sex with their " client", but they also have to live with them and probably do other work such has cleaning and cooking. At least with prostitution, the contract is clearer, there are negotiated limits on what is provided for the money. I'll argue that if society had less hangups about prostitution, they'd be less of those economical marriages.
If you think that drug trial for money is more acceptable than sex for money, I think you should have a little introspection about your attitude towards sex.
I think that very much like dangerous drugs and cigarette smoking, attacking the demand side of this issue will be more effective than outright prohibition.
> How are drug trial not a form of "rape"? They are not sexual...
... that's how they're not a form of "rape," then.
> Some people absolutely have been getting married to be able to get out of poverty, and in my book this is worse than prostitution in the sense that not only do those people have to have sex with their " client", but they also have to live with them and probably do other work such has cleaning and cooking.
Yes, that's a terrible situation as well, but it has nothing to do with how reprehensible it is to purchase sex from a prostitute.
> At least with prostitution, the contract is clearer, there are negotiated limits on what is provided for the money. I'll argue that if society had less hangups about prostitution, they'd be less of those economical marriages.
I'd argue that if a person--OK, let's call a spade a spade, a man--didn't think that their own personal and sexual gratification was more important than someone else's--OK, another spade a spade, a woman's--bodily autonomy, then there'd be both less prostitution and fewer of those marriages. And less rape, and less domestic violence, and less misery overall. But this involves convincing men to introspect about their own privilege vis-a-vis personal and sexual gratification, so it won't happen.
> If you think that drug trial for money is more acceptable than sex for money, I think you should have a little introspection about your attitude towards sex.
The danger to people participating in drug trials is far, far less than the danger to people participating in prostitution. One merely needs to look at the comparative mortality rates to ascertain that.
If you take "morality" out of the picture, there is no difference, one is selling a one time sexual act for a negotiated amount, the other is selling a lifetime of sex + work for food and shelter. Both are economical deals. The difference is purely the spin one's willing to put on them, in other word, opinions, we obviously disagree, no point arguing further.
> if a man didn't think that their own personal and sexual gratification was more important than a woman's bodily autonomy
What you describe is rape, where there is no consent. If two adults agree to have sex, society should not be concerned on why, and not interfere.
Different people have different level of hormones and sexual needs. Saying things like "people should be less sexual" is not going to solve any problem.
> The danger to people participating in drug trials is far, far less than the danger to people participating in prostitution.
Because society has made prostitution illegal and is not giving the same level of protection to prostitutes as to other citizens. Prostitution should be regulated and made safe.
Who said anything like that? All I'm saying is that people should not exploit other people for sex. If they do, then they should feel ashamed. The rest of us should not feel impelled to defend people that do exploit other people for sex, whether they use violence or economic disadvantage to do so.
> Because society has made prostitution illegal and is not giving the same level of protection to prostitutes as to other citizens. Prostitution should be regulated and made safe.
That's just not true; even in countries which have decriminalized or legalized prostitution, a prostitute's life is much more fraught with peril than people participating in drug trials.
Discussion about sex work is always interesting. Sex workers are so often left out of the discussion about their own lives. How about we listen to what the sex workers want?
Here in Australia, sex workers are completely on the side of decriminalisation.
It is really quite infuriating -- to me personally much more so than the conservative opponents position, which while equally repugnant in terms of actions implied, at least leaves some scope for respectfully disagreeing: it does not bother me to be called sinful, or evil, or immoral by someone else's moral code (surely all of us are quite immoral by /someone's/ moral code), but I would consider it deeply offensive to have my opinion about my own life dismissed out of hand.
Oh no, those poor people, the best option they have is sex work!
I know, let's make their best option illegal! That will certainly improve their lives!
/s
The problem is that reality isn't black and white. Trafficking is very real, especially in Chinese communities, where victims are shuffled all over the place on cheap intercity busses.
These are complex problems, and the typical HN lazze faire approach doesn't address that complexity.
Chinatown busses are a snake pit of all sorts of crime. Here's an article that scratches the surface. There are numerous sources in the news and academic publications about the links to sex and other human trafficking to these busses.
http://news.wgbh.org/post/human-trafficking-modern-day-slave...
If anything, having a common platform would make it easier to focus on such things, and I suspect platform owners would gladly cooperate (as they probably would on weeding out underage ads, etc.) -- but in practice, the alternative we see is either going for low-hanging fruit (which these relatively complex operations aren't), or just a blanket effort, like in this case.
All of these hurt legitimate workers far more than the operations you describe.
Newmark made the same case as the parent commend, but that was the last thing the last thing the law wanted to hear since they are prosecutors, not social workers.
Backpages seemed like a good police tool in that they could entrap politically connected people with fake prostitution ads, and they could identify organized prositution more easily. For example here it was simple to find the gangster listings running microbrothels, these are condos rented by street gangs who import girls from Asia, seize their passports and pimp them out. These gangs were also well known to rob each other's micros, and there are plenty of stories on all those escort review forums of armed gangsters kicking down the door and jacking the place since police won't be called.
Selective law enforcement again happening here so the Backpages CEO guy must have made political statements advocating for legalization or was politically active in some other way. It's my main theory why Redbook was shutdown, because they entertained very loud activists in their forums calling for legalization who often called out city and state politicians directly. Reminder if you want to run an illegal business don't be politically active and you can operate under the radar like Fetlife with it's thousands of escort ads.
Is this case legally similar, or do the specific crimes of human trafficking make it different? You know, sort of like how contracts are ordinarily enforceable, but if I agree to marry off my 12-year-old daughter to you, that "contract" is not enforceable.
And is it consistent for the different kinds of platform?
This reads horribly: the feds took down multiple sites and knew about this 15-year-old, but didn't manage to reach her in the process?
I'd be interested to know if there is something similar and legal in countries that allow prostitution (Netherlands?). Seems like they were making a lot of revenue for what is basically illegal ads - so a legal version would do even better I would imagine. Though I suppose the pricing would drop if it were legal.
http://gawker.com/5630687/your-post-craigslist-guide-to-buyi...
Edit: Newmark has had to deal with it. Check here for more; http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2...
A congressional investigation this year found that the website changed some of its adult classifieds to conceal the fact that the advertisements were for sex acts with minors. Mr. Ferrer was subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee last fall to answer questions about reported child sex-trafficking ads, but he did not show up.
Found to be covering up child sex trafficking by Congress and you just blow them off and don't change anything? That's the point where getting arrested shouldn't be much of a surprise.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/us/carl-ferrer-backpage-ce... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12658053
Link to full complaint: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press_releases/F...
Of note, it also seems that Backpage did report suspected child sex trafficking to the NCMEC, based on a statement by the NCMEC to Congress in 2015.[1] This appears to have been one of the things used against them, with the congressional reports mentioning the large proportion of reports that involved Backpage as proof that they were a child sex trafficking ring while omitting that they were the ones doing the reporting.
[1] http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/?id=B087F957-02BD-4F58-...
> Our investigation showed that Backpage “edits” advertisements before posting them, by removing certain words, phrases, or images. For instance, they might remove a word or image that makes clear that sexual services are being offered for money. And then they would post this “sanitized” version of the ad. While this editing changes nothing about the underlying transaction, it tends to conceal the evidence of illegality. In other words, Backpage’s editing procedures, far from being an effective anti-trafficking measure, only served to sanitize the ads of illegal content to an outside viewer.
Turns out NCMEC showed up for the hearing that Backpage skipped, and didn't have many nice things to say about Backpage.
> “You see, it is sometimes hard to square Backpage’s public statements about its business practices with the reality on the ground. For example, the National Center recently was searching for a child who went missing – and is still missing – and found that she appeared in a sex advertisement on Backpage. That is sadly common. But what made this case even more incredible was that the Backpage ad actually contained a missing child poster of that same child. That poster had the child’s real name, real age, real picture, and the date she went missing. The other pictures in the ad included topless photos. We’d certainly like to know what supposedly market-leading screening and moderation procedures missed that one.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/me...
I don't think there's a bright line, but craigslist is a many-faceted business that has a small percentage of revenue from prostitution. Backpages is just a prostitution marketplace.
http://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/nov/29/craigslist-works-beh...
The short term memory is strong in this thread
http://www.startribune.com/feds-to-announce-bust-of-global-s...
Neither article mentions specific coordination, but considering the arrests happened on the same day, I'm imagining that there must have been some coordination in the investigations.
1: See https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/238796.pdf
In Australia, our welfare system pays around $250/week and it's about the right amount to live on without starving or being kicked out of your house. We have 24 million people. To pay them all $250/week we'd have to spend $312B/year.
Our entire current federal budget is $450B/year.
I don't see how this works. Not in the slightest. Even if we used all the current allocation for welfare (~120B) and cut out all the administrative overhead that's only ~$100/week. Nowhere near enough to live on.
I can't speak for America or elsewhere, but a UBI here would be enough to stop anyone from taking up prostitution to support themselves. Not even close.