The fact that consenting adults aren't free to do whatever they please with their bodies is utterly bizarre.
I wish people were more willing to separate the act of "consenting adults doing a financial transaction" from all the surrounding "badness" but that rarely happens.
> radical liberties
Also, I wasn't insinuating that human trafficking is inconsequential, or that it's even rare, I don't know if it is or isn't. I was merely stating that it is a separate act/crime. Not all prostitutes are created as a result of human trafficking. I'm all for stopping sex that is not consensual.
Also, I see "muh freedoms" and personal responsibility as intertwined ideas, I'm not sure I see why you think they are opposed. If I'm free to fuck whoever I want, and another is also free to do the same (regardless of whether or not there is a financial transaction at the same time), then we are responsible for our own sex lives, yes? The state is not involved (I get "muh freedoms").
If we can't even agree that the phrase "[something] rarely happens" means to say that something is rare, then I don't think there's any hope for further debate.
My point is that prostitution and human trafficking are two separate activities. The frequency upon which either occurs in society is unknown to me.
I am attempting to convey that I think prostitution should be legal. Human trafficking should continue to be illegal. And society in a general sense seems to have trouble separating the two when discussing this topic.
I still think the problem is the trafficking and not the prostitution so much, and that all efforts should be put towards combatting trafficking by any means possible.
Even if protitution was legalized, I have no problems convicting johns for enabling or benefiting from human trafficking, if done so knowingly. This isn't much different from age of consent and could be solved in a similar way.
When prostitution is legalized, the distinction then exists for demand.
What has to happen for this to increase trafficking is that non-consensual demand must be bigger than the totality of demand beforehand.
However, I don't think it's that simple either. If lack of supply drives up the price significantly, I think it's possible some people will be convinced to visit cheaper illegal establishments on the promise that it's totally consensual, they just don't want to pay taxes etc.
It's a lot more difficult to ensure that people are there consensually when brothels are driven underground. How can we possibly police every single 'massage parlour'.
On the other hand, legal brothels could have an extra tax that paid for social workers that ensured the brothels were compliant - that sex workers weren't intimidated by their customers or bosses.
It will also lead to healthier outcomes - we can then test people to make sure diseases weren't being spread.
Unfortunately people learn nothing from sex-ed stats - 'abstinence only' makes thing worse.
Then why would an underground "massage parlour" want to go legal?
It wouldn't, but why would a person go to an underground "massage parlor" when there are cleaner, less skeevy, fully legal alternates? Just like legit legal music sources online cut back music sharing, legit brothels may cut back the demand for underground alternates.
We do have some problems with trafficked sex workers, but the police investigate them as crimes. The other prostitutes can cooperate with the police without fear.
Practically nobody knows what Aotearoa is.
I'd like to see a private members bill for a referendum to get rid of the name New Zealand much like how Australia got rid of New Holland. Probably to coincide with the country leaving the commonwealth and becoming a republic and getting a new flag.
However, on topic, legalising prostitution means that prostitutes operate from licensed facilities that must confirm to workplace safety and health codes, it means the prostitutes and clients both have protection under consumer law as well as regular law and can go to the disputes tribunal or police if there are any issues.
You control underage prostitution and human trafficking because people who operate must be licensed and audited. Most consumers would go to licensed facilities because they operate completely in the open (even as crass as having big neon signs with SEX written on them), and are easy to find, street prostitution is illegal as are unlicensed brothels and both seem to have disapeared.
What is consent? Early in my taxi driving career I had a passenger who was certainly a 'working girl', and she didn't seem to have enjoyed herself much... And she certainly wouldn't have spent the night at that hotel if she wasn't economically stressed.
Usually women who enter that profession do so because they
need the money - not always, but usually. I sent some non-verbal
compassion and understanding her way. Indeed, some of Jesus
of Nazareth's ("who became the Christ") best friends were
working girls.
In contrast, in countries which have legal bordellos the employment, management, taxation, and state governance of prostitution is much more transparent. If prostitution is legal and open it's more difficult to use it for human trafficking. Making prostitution illegal is like making rain illegal: there have always been and there will always be people who
Then, on the other hand, the cases where prostitution is abused for human trafficking we can actually ram down on the human trafficking issues directly as prostitution itself won't be another question.
Prostitutes that have been human trafficked risk arrest and/or deportation just for stepping forward and exposing the human traffickers. Guess whose interest that plays into?
would human trafficking be so prevalent if it were easy to sell your own body?
Or, put another way, do you really believe that human trafficking exists because child prostitution is illegal?
More like individuals should be empowered by the law to charge money in exchange for sex. That's the thesis, the whole thing. "Party X paid Party Y for sex" becomes not a crime.
> do you really believe that human trafficking exists because child prostitution is illegal? And that such a move would actually decrease the number of, say, young girls are forced into prostitution against their wills?
It doesn't matter, it's unrelated to the central thesis. It's possible to agree people should be free to charge for or pay for sex, while also condemning human trafficking and other forceful restrictions of personal agency more generally.
They did not say all prostitution is consensual (and certainly not all trafficking, since that's pretty much defined not to be consensual). And they said absolutely nothing about child prostitution.
Gut feeling: legality doesn't matter much - trafficking is used to fill supply.
Would be interesting to see numbers.
Note that I'm not myself in favour of legalised prostitution, I just think your argument is a bad one.
The law also specially names the author of the law (Michael Weinstein) and requires the state to pay for his legal bills in "enforcing" the law.
The reason this is even an issue is that Michael Weinstein (whom I liken to "Jenny McCarthy meets Martin Shkreli"[0]) was pissed that OSHA didn't rule his way in his lawsuit against porn studio Treasure Island Media[1][2], so he took this statewide as an act of vengeance.
[0] Aside from being virulently anti-science, he's also behind Prop 61, which ostensibly reduces the price of HIV drugs, but in actuality includes a special carve-out for the HMO he runs, locking in guaranteed profit for himself.
[1] OSHA basically said "okay, you didn't use condoms when filming, but that's only worth a $100 fine, just as if you didn't have a first-aid kit on-site".
[2] If you're at work right now, you Google that name at your own risk
After reading https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_60,_Condoms_i..., I found out that, yes, this proposition really is that terrible.
I was surprised by this, too, so I dug up the full text. The only places I can find Weinstein's name are in the letterhead and the signature on the cover letter. Search for yourself: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/15-0004%20%...
In other words, someone pirates an old (pre-prop60) video, uploads it to a sharing site, someone can use it to sue the producers and the producers have to prove the video was produced and released before Prop-60 was enacted.
Am I reading that right?
I don't know enough about CA law to interpret what the second rule means--it sounds like it should mean at most a year from the date the video is posted, but the wording makes it imply that there's effectively no statue of limitations. It truly is horrible if you read the actual text.
At first glance, it's presented as a way to reduce the price of HIV drugs. In reality, it's a way for Michael Weinstein to pad his pockets, at the expense of the VA. (He wrote the bill and included a special provision that guarantees his HMO a special exemption from the price cap).
Michael Weinstein, you may remember, is the same man who committed $20 million in Medicaid fraud in LA county a few years ago. He then claimed that the federal case against him had no legal standing because the federal government cannot prosecute for fraud against state-level agencies (Medicaid). Fortunately, the judge was not convinced by that reasoning.
Prop 1 is an initiative to "help educate the children of Olympia", using a little tax to help pay for college tuition. So noble!
Except: it proposes a levy on households of $200K or more (not constitutional in Washington), is an income tax, also not constitutional in Washington, requires the city of Olympia to fund the administration with no enforcement clauses, and multiple groups have already announced that they intend to sue the City if it's passed (which it will, because it's a 'think of the kids' measure), and the City knows it won't win but could not get the measure struck off so is already budgeting for constitutional lawyers. Hell, the City doesn't have the authority to see these people's tax statements, so it'd rely entirely on self-reporting. It's just a mess.
So you look a bit closer, and who is pushing this bill? A bunch of locals concerned about local education.
No. A bunch of multi-millionaires from Seattle who want to use this as a proving ground for their challenges to state taxation law. Of the top ten donors, not one has ever lived in the County, let alone the City, nor does any of them have any children who attended school in either. (Olympia, like most state capitals, is far smaller than the largest city in the state), which makes you wonder why they're not pushing this in Seattle/King County - probably because they don't want their own taxes going to fund the defense of a proposition that's very specifically unconstitutional.
"Think of the kids" at its worst.
Bear in mind, too, that the City did try to get it struck off on admin grounds as it was being proposed and I believe a court agreed that it was unconstitutional, but that the law didn't allow for a Proposition to be preemptively stuck down on those grounds.
Plenty of harmful stuff is legal. The solution isn't to make it illegal, but to do better at educating people about harm reduction.
It's one thing to say that pot should be legal, but ask a doctor about the thousand other drugs you don't know about. There are some scary things out there. The same is true of prostitution. There is a safe way of doing it, but there are some big areas that the general public doesn't think much about. That;s why those countries that do allow it, including a tiny part of the US, heavily regulate the trade. As with drugs, the end result of legalization shouldn't be the ability to pay anyone for anything.
Something to think about: Should prostitution be legalized, should people be able to settle debts with their bodies? Instead of paying rent, could a college girl just have sex with her landlord? Doesn't that create perverse intensives? The answer in many countries is to mandate brothels so that the girl is paid in money, not in relief of a debt held by the person having sex with her. That way you cannot suggest, or insist via contract, that anyone who owes you money might settle the debt via sex.
It would be indentured servitude if a court ordered it be done to satisfy a debt, which I believe is illegal.
Otherwise, it seems like it would be no worse than a glassworker being allowed to pay off his debts by making you a window. We do have reasonable bankruptcy laws and other tools for handling debt-related disputes.
I think that ignores many realities. Those deemed sexually attractive, mostly young women, will be the target of any number of scams meant to force them into a financial corner so that they work off their debts. That may happen often today, but we use words like blackmail or rape to describe it. Nobody should want to legalize the practice by saying it a perfectly acceptable way for a young women to satisfy a creditor.
You might think so, and yet my understanding is that people who are forced into prostitution by poverty find it a though choice that impacts their self-worth. I doubt any down-on-their-luck glassworkers would feel humiliated and degraded by accepting an offer to make a window.
Clearly your reductionist approach is losing vital differences.
In Cincinnati, Ohio, you can find many ordinary houses in working class neighborhoods with small stained glass windows. There was an influx of German stained glass artisans, and there were so many of them, that they sold to ordinary working people. Apparently, the whole Cincinnati scene died out because of the industry practice of the time -- preferring mercury containing solders -- caused so many mental health problems. There may have been such glassworkers in that environment.
I'm not the one who made the comparison. I'm just offering data.
Calling them both professions is an academic approach to a very non-academic industry.
https://www.ted.com/talks/toni_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers...