'My Airbnb flat was turned into a pop-up brothel'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
One of the biggest human rights insults around the world is making prostitution illegal.
1) It's not governments business what people do with their bodies.
2) People are going to do it anyway (even in countries where it is punished with a death penalty)
3) ...and therefore women and men working in this industry won't have access to unions, healthcare, safety etc.
I agree with your points, but consider reading TFA at least.
Given the enthusiastic response I got from my last host when my partner and I took the time to give the apartment a once-over when we left, I'm guessing that this is a persistent problem where guests just leave a place trashed. Some cleaning is obviously anticipated by the cleaning fees; you wash the linens, still give the place a good scrubbing between guests, etc., but I think it's fair to expect the guests to tidy up a little if you're upfront that this is part of the agreement on the listing.
Likewise, even hotels will charge for outrageous damage or messes to their properties. Security deposits in the US for even really cheap hotels are pretty common, usually requiring a credit card with a $100 charge that is cancelled/returned later.
It's not just about the initial money - really bad messes can affect more than just the host and cause problems you can't just solve with money. Too high of a deposit and no one will rent, but if someone's mess disrupts, then the deposit isn't enough to cover losses.
1) Hire a professional cleaner, set cleaning fee, lose some short-term customers.
2) Do not set the cleaning fee, expect to do cleaning yourself, complain loudly in public when this turns up to be the case.
Seems odd that they wouldn't have made an effort to clean-up since having a good profile is more or less essential to being able to rent another airbnb appt?
No. From the article:
> I found used condom wrappers under the bed, I found the bin was overflowing with tissues and condoms.
Not sure what "overflowing" means exactly in this context, but you can't read in the article that there were used condoms all over the apartment.
A condom wrapper is just a piece of clean plastic, very different from a used condom.
Also, what's the difference when people are having sex in your bed, whether they're married, friends, or engaged in pay-for-sex?
In the grand scheme of things there isn't but I suppose the plaintiff worried about being criminally associated with unlawful behaviour.
People aren't machines, they have feelings and sometimes they project those on their belongings. I consider it normal to feel something upon learning you have been deceived by people not coming upfront about what they really were going to use your home for.
I believe this has nothing to do with one's stance on prostitution.
This is a crime?
If a prostitute brings a john back to a hotel room, the police can arrest the hotel owner?
But you are misquoting me a little bit.
Probably best not to comment then?
This thread is already full of people making the inaccurate assumption that prostitution is illegal in the UK.
> Probably best not to comment then?
Quite the contrary.
Yes, most places where either prostitution or brothel-keeping is a crime, the owner of a property used in it is potentially (mental state is an issue) committing a crime as well.
> If a prostitute brings a john back to a hotel room, the police can arrest the hotel owner?
In the US, Aside from that risk (which is real but attenuated by the low probability of a conviction because of the high criminal burden of proof) prostitution-related offenses are second only to drug-related offenses in the eagerness of law enforcement to use civil asset forfeiture against properties, including real property, used in the offense.
For a regular commercial hotel, law enforcement would probably just use the possibility of such action as one among many tools to get the owner to actively cooperate with law enforcement, and it probably wouldn't get to actual seizure in a normal case.
Whether similar technically noncriminal consequences associated with criminal activity apply to this situation (in the UK), I'm not sure, though I wouldn't be surprised.
Why don't you throw them into the trash bin that every hotel room has?
The article says:
> I found the bin was overflowing with tissues and condoms. And basically what I had to do was pick all that up with my hands.
The sex workers probably have regular testing for STIs, but the clients may not have this testing.
Yes, and the article mentions that he was surprised by the mess, and that they would have had repeat bookings if they hadn't left a mess.
And it's perfectly rational and advisable for prostitutes to move from legal systems where prostitution is illegal (hence dangerous) to legal systems where it is legal (hence safe).
Elaborating: If there is sufficient /convenient/, legal, not over-priced, service for the clients that clearly do exist then underground (criminal) fulfillment is much less profitable. Making onerous (for no good reason) regulations are one form of increasing the price of legal services and thus making it more profitable for unwanted fulfillment to occur.
It's located at Harvard Kennedy School of Government which is basically an "elite factory" for the (re-)production of the US political elite -- just look at their alumni [2] and faculty [1]. The US's official policy is extremely anti legalisation of prostitution. In this context, "journalistsresource.org" looks like an instrument of projecting soft power [3], a mechanism to communicate US government policy, but obscuring the origin. I recommend being a little bit more reflective on the nature of your sources.
I also recommend to be suspicious of the term "trafficking" in this context. It's an attack term that is intended to appeal to your emotions, you are expected to think of 7 year old girls being 'stolen' from some destitute 3rd world country and being 'sold' into prostitution in a country where prostitution is legal (eg. Holland). However to a pretty good approximation this doesn't happen. Where prostitution is legal, essentially all (to a pretty good approximation) women who work in prostituion are adults and choose their job, in the same way that others become lorry drivers or carpenters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_School_of_Gove...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_School_of_Gove...
The problem is, just like with markets like room sharing and car sharing, is that you have pimps.
you have pimps.
1. What do you mean by "pimp"? Is it the same as a co-worker, or is it the same as "boss" or something else?
2. For your chosen concept of "pimp", could you explain which of the following you belive to be true, and what the credible, methodologically controlled evidence you have for your belief:
- All prostitutes in all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
- Some but not all prostitutes in all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
- All prostitutes in some but not all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
- Some but not all prostitutes in some but not all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
For all the "some"s, I'd appreciate quantitative data, are we talking about 99.9% or 0.1%. And: is there a systemic difference w.r.t. "pimping" between legal systems where prostitution is legal, and those where it is not?
Finally, I'd be interested to learn why -- for your chosen notion of "pimp", having one or more "pimps" is good/bad.
I've learned what I need to learn. Moving on.
The rhetorical device you've used in the last reply include "argumentum ad auctoritatem" and "non sequitur".
Whenever something can be done legally, someone will try to provide/supply the service/good illegally for his own profit.
The problem is that you can disagree with laws, yet refuse to be lured into infringing them. Personally there are plenty of laws I disagree with, yet I comply because I don't want to go to jail.
The legal issue is that his apartment became a brothel illegally, but it seems the fault is with the prostitutes, since he did not run the business himself.
Why would the government decide what job you can and can't accept ?
I definitely want to live in a world where someone's body can't be monetized for any reason. It's the buyer who should be punished though, not the seller.
I mean, could I rent an Airbnb for a month and run an auto repair shop out of the garage? It's in violation of the zoning.
So is renting your apartment by the day, in many places.
Freedom means turning any apartment anywhere into a brothel.
While the brothel example might not be distinguishable from a couple on vacation having a party, except for the money-changing-hands angle.
Lets admit, its the moral angle at issue. The rest is after-the-fact arguments pasted on to make it seem like an objective thing.
As to wear and tear... it's a brothel... and not in a movie; you might be surprised at the turnover.
Edit: I realize that "have no patience for" sounds pretty snotty... I've been a little sleep deprived lately and it isn't bringing out the best in me, sorry.
Edit 2: I also realize that the issue of the brothel, totally aside from the homeowner's feelings, might represent a property value issue, in the same way as a previous murder. It doesn't have to sensible for it to hit him in the pocket; obviously sex work doesn't leave some kind of "spiritual residue" anymore than violent death, but people are often irrational.
All the rest - the fact that people had sex in the apartment (not exactly out of the normal unless one rents exclusively to monastic orders) or that money may have been exchanged (totally not owner's business) - sounds completely irrelevant and an attempt to foment moral panic.
People run their homes like hotels and are shocked to find that people treat it as such.
Edit: Look at everybody pretending that cleaning up dozens of men's bodily ejections after they used your house as a brothel is just one of life's little chores. You've all spent too long on Reddit.
It's pretty safe actually. Or at least no more dangerous than other parts of Sydney. I've never heard of any crimes or violence related to sex workers in Sydney. I'm more worried about alcohol and drug related violence. If there are any unsavoury characters about they are much more likely to be at a night club. Ban night clubs (they kind of did that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_lockout_laws and it worked).
The physically disabled? Nervous silly college kids?
Cheaters? Low lifes? I've got news for you, they might visit the brothels, but they live out in the burbs near you :P They live near all of us.
Perhaps I'm just jaded/acclimatised from having worked in the suburb of Fyshwick in Canberra (where operating a brothel/in-home prostitution is quite common), knew there were prostitutes regularly working out of hotels/their own houses, and I'm pretty sure there's probably a couple of brothels around where I live.
Honestly, I can't say I keep track of them...I can't say they're even on my mental radar...
Don't misunderstand me, i know there are a significant number of people who wouldn't want to raise children in such an environment. But it doesn't bother me, nor the other families living here, and the general property prices around here suggest it doesn't sufficiently bother most of the people who live here :\
But I also knew prostitutes were working frequently out of suburban homes and hotels, so i'm a bit "you're not actually that far from prostitutes..." to all my suburban friends.
And why would anyone care if it is great environment for families ? Are US suburbs great environment for families where Ms. X who has 4 kids all from different people living with her boyfriend ? Is that a good environment ?
Not cleaning up after themselves is a valid complaint but doesn't seem something specific to prostitutes.
I'm all for legalization, but if you run a brothel out of my place I'm going to be seriously pissed off and not just get all libertarian about it. I will after all, have rented under non-commercial grounds anyway; I'd be pissed if you ran a pop-up restaurant there too.
Needless to say, when you don't intend to rent your home out as a business, it's equally unacceptable if someone decides to use it as one.
Edit: I... just realized how Freudian my analogy of "discharging firearms into the air" is. I really should get more sleep.
So... time to rethink your position; I'd be absolutely furious in this guy's position, and "The risk is incredibly low," would frankly piss me off even more. Your argument is about as weak as someone smoking a ton of pot in someone's house, then bitching about prohibition. I'm against prohibition, and also against you stinking up my house.
If you try to pigeonhole all of the people you disagree with, you will turn into a caricature no less absurd than the ones you're trying to create.
Plenty of people who think that prostitution should be legal still disapprove of it, by the way.
I wouldn't expect guests of AirBnB to not do anything they would do in a hotel - after all you are attracting the same audience.
Bottom line - if they left a mess, then call a cleaning company and charge the guests a cleaning fee. Pretty much every AirBnB has a cleaning fee in terms of rental.
Would the reaction here be any different if an actual couple left the host with a pile of condoms? If yes,why? If no, why?
Cleaning weird stuff is a regular thing in hotels and hostels; and condoms aren't even weird, they'd be probably the most common stuff found in hotel room trashcans.
Albeit, granted I'm sure the regulars weren't generally in the practice of wrecking the rooms... but cleaning up after the horrible things people do in their rooms is pretty stock standard for the hotel industry...
No one "likes" it, but no one likes cleaning toilets either, and that still needs getting done and people do it and its stock/standard of being a cleaner...
And if you're not hiring a cleaner to clean your rooms and doing it yourself, you can bet 100% you'll be cleaning up some pretty horrible stuff in the accommodation industry. If they leave the room in a bad state, that just makes them bad customers...
The state of the flat is unfortunate but goes with the territory for AirBnB / hotels etc.
I was not under the impression it was common for several clients to be booked during the one night.
I believe the girls would either use the hotel room for:
a) A place of work for regular specific bookings: it has the benefit of not being at a brothel/not at their home if they aren't comfortable with that, and it can become a familiar place and you'll be "reasonably" safer than going out to a clients house.
b) A way to work if you're in a different city/having another girl coming from another city.
Obviously, if you remember your freakonomics, there are levels to the prostitutions market. So there is the possibility of:
c) Its a place to drum up new business. I imagine places like hotels in Washington/Canberra where people are there on business, have money, and are away from their families, is, in the prostitution business, a place of relatively high demand. So the clients might have a room there that they're already paying for...
Now to be fair, this is at the relatively upper-end of the prostitution market.
Ironically, in the context of my other discussions in this thread, in this country at least, if there's a super low-end part of the prostitution market, i'd expect it to be operating out of illegal brothels...and probably out of unmarked houses out in the burbs...
A little of both, depending on the "class" involved, and the location.
You might be surprised to learn that a lot of prostitution happens during the day-time. In largish-hotels a bloke going up to a room, spending 30-60 minutes there, and coming down wouldn't stand out. Even if the same host entertained 5+ people in her day.
(Unless you get involved in high-end work you'll virtually never have an overnight booking. Average duration amongst the people I knew was 60-90 minutes.)
Surprise: not the escorts book the rooms, but the clients, and the most weird stuff is usually found within the wealthier client groups.
Management isn't a fan of it, but unless you can prove something concretely what are you going to do? The money is as good as any other and if the escorts are respectable to the property and rules, why not?
Personally I'm on good terms with a few of the local escorts, they always have great stories and are fairly personable. Not a fan of their line of work, but hey revenue!
There's a mild difference in that a couple means the risk of infected material is lower.
In England you can't give blood if you've ever received money for sex, and you must wait for at least 12 months if you've paid for sex.
These restrictions exist because there is a higher risk of infection.
BTW. I wonder what's the chance of getting infected when cleaning up used condoms after someone who's infected?
If we're talking about HIV, then it's roughly zero. In theory I guess it could happen if you had a cut on your hands, but then, it's easy enough to take the appropriate precautions if that's the case.
What do you mean by "infected material"? Handling used condoms is gross but perfectly safe (and of course you can just use gloves if you're paranoid).
Ahhh, lovely England. I spent about 9 months there, about 35 years ago. And now I can't give blood in the USA. Because of mad cow disease (the human name is too hard to remember).
So, either all the English are giving each other mad cow disease all the time by giving blood, or nobody in England who was alive 35 years ago can ever give blood, or the USA is over-reacting. Truth be told I'm happy I can't give any more, because it made me feel tired.
Because, not to be too snarky, yes, that actually does seem like a regular day in the operation of an accommodation business.
I've even heard it rumored guests might leave the toilet in a less than pristine state...
The horror!
/ok, that was a bit snarky, but my point stands.
At least you can track who they are. That's entirely different from a guest setting up a gang bang in an apartment rented on Airbnb.
If you rent your house to strangers then you're obviously okay with those people having sex at your place, in your bed, anywhere really where they fancy it.
What's different if it's prostitution or if it isn't??
(Personally I would really prefer not having anyone I don't know engaging in any normal activity in my home, and that's why I will probably never be an Airbnb host; but if you are then surely you have to accept the consequences?)
In this specific case it's not illegal for a woman to sell sex; it's not illegal for a woman to sell sex from a brothel; it is illegal to keep a brothel; or to let a property be used as a brothel.
The whole concept of "sharing economy" seems to be based in large parts on the idea that individuals who got unlucky take the damage for the herd and are somehow expected find solace in knowing that the fearsome zero star retaliation rating they gave will maybe help someone else. A bit like mixed cost calculation, where the easy customers subsidize the difficult case, but reversed: the happy path transactions reap the benefits.
Doing it in a more peer to peer fashion using a website improves the flow of information about these kinds of risks, but can't eliminate them. No reasonable person would think renting out their apartment overnight to strangers is risk-free; it's just a question of whether the risk is worth the reward.
They underhandedly used a person's house for illegal activity and left the owner to clean up afterwards. There's really no excusing it by trying to make it seem like a bunch of kids having a cool fun time.
And the criminalisation of prostitution isn't a grey area, it's the law in that jurisdiction.
No. Prostitution per se is not against the law in the UK (except in Northern Ireland).
As for the rest, that's why the OP said "grey area". It's not entirely clear that they were doing any of the other stuff.
See e.g. the 'legality' section in the following Wikipedia article. It's not black and white whether or not anything illegal was going on.
It's not a grey area at all. And paying for prostitutes is illegal full stop in NI and Ireland, and is illegal in the case that they have a pimp in Great Britain
We have no way of knowing that the prostitutes engaged in soliciting. “Soliciting” doesn’t just mean “finding someone to pay you for sex”, it has a specific meaning to do with advertising for sex in a public place. If the prostitutes met their clients by, e.g., chatting to guys online, then that would not count as soliciting.
Similarly, we have no way of knowing that more that more than one woman actually had sex on the premises, or that the prostitutes have a pimp.
So this is at worst a grey area in terms of legality. And it’s effectively straight-up legal, given that the police have made no attempt for decades to target this kind of prostitution via laws against pimping/soliciting/whatever, since it’s impossible for them to construct a prosecutable case.
And again, it IS illegal to pay prostitutes in the entire UK under certain circumstances (they have a pimp, they were trafficked, they're under duress).
He said there were two prostitutes listed as guests, and that they advertised their services and rates online, which can be classed as solicitation.
>He said there were two prostitutes listed as guests, and that they advertised their services and rates online, which can be classed as solicitation.
You have a kind of genius for spreading inaccurate information. Advertising yourself as a prostitute online is not illegal in Britain and is not classed as solicitation.
To prove that a crime was committed, the police would have to show, at minimum, that both of the women actually had sex with a client in the same property. That is obviously not going to be possible.
So you did, apologies
Running a brothel is illegal, which is what the property owner is worried about.
What?
Does anyone here know, what does Charlotte mean at the end with "I would never go on tour on my own to a new place that I've never been to before. No way. Because there is no safety agency or union out there that I can tell where I am or what I'm doing."
What are these unions or safety agencies, formal or informal? (And why can't Charlotte find one in a city she tours in?) If the reason they can't be found is that they're kind of operating outside of the law, like informal "protection" services then this would explain why she can only find it in a city she knows well - but that is not what "safety agency or union" means to me at all. So what are these things?
I would do exactly the same thing as her neighbor. Why? because even if I know that person , I don't know how fucked up the clients are and I wouldn't want to live in a building where people come and go to have sex with hookers, especially if there are kids around.
Because England has yet to get up to speed with surgical gloves or similar. They just cannot be found. At all. Sure.
The way this part is written:
Looking at both their ads, some of the rates were about £1,300 a night. So if they were fully booked for the two nights that's £2,600 each - £5,200 in total.
The feeling was a bit like when I had to rush home from work a couple of years ago because I thought I'd left a tea towel on the hob. It felt like the place was burning down.
This reads to me like he was basically horrified at the idea of two women making excellent money, probably a lot more than he makes. That is how that part reads to me.
They should have security for this Airbnb thing for situations like this.
There's also a slightly increased risk of infected material from sex workers rather than the general population.
The core activity (people exchanging sex for money) probably doesn't need to be illegal (and isn't under English law). But the English law is a mess, and criminalises a bunch of stuff around this activity, while still leaving vulnerable people unprotected.
Airbnb is pretty ideal.
This is probably the most ridiculous argument I've heard for the decriminalization of prostitution.
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/prostitution_and_exploita...
> the definition of a brothel in English law does not require that the premises are used for the purposes of prostitution since a brothel exists wherever more than one woman offers sexual intercourse, whether for payment or not.
This means that sex workers who want to charge people for money (a legal activity in England) can't do it by sharing a property (illegal), but have to do it on the street.
Whatever your views on sex work it should be clear that street sex work is more dangerous than that offered in a private residence.
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/prostitution_and_exploita...
> It is not illegal to sell sex at a brothel provided the sex worker is not involved in management or control of the brothel. A house occupied by one woman and used by her alone for prostitution, is not a brothel (Gorman v Standen, Palace Clarke v Standen (1964) 48 Cr App R 30).
Neither the owner of the apartment nor any of those two people need to be aware of that being a brothel, and the sex workers themselves are arguably not operating it either. Does the crime of operating a brothel not require mens rea?
The law in the UK discourages prostitutes from having anyone else nearby when they are with their clients. This makes them less safe.