https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-_sex_workers...
> Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a “preventative policing” approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences as “stress methods” to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how police sources “in Oslo often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market”. One example of this approach is “Operation Homeless”: an initiative that saw increased enforcement of the law on “promotion” of sex work – which makes it an offence to “let premises ... for prostitution”. “Operation Homeless” ran for four years between 2007 and 2011 and initiated the systematic and rapid eviction of many sex workers from their places of work and/or homes.
I can only hope this action os ilegal in someway
> They don't have
The ones where I live aren't like that.
This sort of stereotyping is problematic, because you can’t fix problems if you can’t differentiate between dysfunctional and functional. You can’t make changes if you alienate the good with the bad. And you can’t make things better if you’re making global changes without understanding local context.
There's a tiny but really interesting museum in Amsterdam set up by a former sex worker that explains exactly this. The safety regulations they're looking for really aren't all that different from how cities regulate taxis.
Like driving a taxi, sex work can be a dangerous job because they're alone with a client, often at night, and with a fair bit of cash on them. A lot of time the clients are drunk, which makes them more likely to be violent. And, because many of the workers are immigrants, there's a risk they're being exploited by someone taking a significant portion of their earnings.
Allowing credit card transactions, issuing taxi medallions, requiring worker background checks, and, most importantly, having police who actually investigate crimes reported by workers, has gone a long way to make driving a cab a much safer occupation than it was two decades ago.
I'm not sure about credit cards in de Wallen but they have a medallion-like system with the booth rentals.
It’s not something we care about in 2019 but medallion owners are required to provide a radio to drivers. That’s really important from a safety perspective before we all had cellphones. Without the medallion system a radio in a taxi would have been a safety luxury that most drivers couldn’t afford.
Medallion owners are also required to install the machines to accept credit cards. That helps the drivers not carry too much cash and again is a bigger investment than what a typical driver would be able to make on their own. Knocking down this barrier to entry is basically the only way Uber was able to exist. How many people would sign up to pick up strangers from the internet while carrying hundreds of dollars of cash? Not many, unless they really needed the money. But sex workers have to do that all the time because banking regulations make it almost impossible for them to even get a bank account let alone process a transaction for sex work.
There are also maximum lease rates that medallion holders are allowed to rent the taxis out to drivers. That goes a long way towards stopping the financial exploitation of a taxi driver who might be struggling to get out of a difficult financial situation or sending money back home to their family in another country. It’s also enforceable. So if a medallion owner is taking too much of a driver’s money the driver has recourse. When a pimp is stealing money from a sex worker they don’t have any recourse to stop it.
Another way that people in difficult financial situations are often exploited is through insane work schedules. It’s hard to say no to an extra shift when you need the cash. Medallions come with a limit on the number of hours in a row one driver can operate the vehicle.
Medallions also set prices, so the odds of getting into a dispute over the cost are pretty low. There’s no “he said she said” about the price after the fact. And if a customer doesn’t pay its easy for the driver to tell the police exactly what they’re owed.
And (at least until Uber came along) the cost of a medallion was so high that it wasn’t worth the risk of having it suspended or revoked.
When I talked to a taxi driver in Canada about his situation for example, he told me he has to pay $3000 at the start of the month, like house lease, and therefore he is $3k in hole. It basically forces him to work non stop doesn't let him do things like take one week off, because he couldn't rent the car for 3 weeks for example. It's one month or not effectively. At least with something like uber he said, he had flexibility, and I get the impression he would of made a similar amount anyway.
Also similarly, a lot of drivers prefer cash and pretend their card machine is broken. The laws say one thing, the reality is often another.
Enforce Zelle/Square/CashApp/WePay only rules :)
Ex: " I went to endless meetings on refugee shelter and nobody ever invited a single refugee. I only ever saw one refugee at a meeting about refugee shelter, it was a doctor from Canada who had grown up in a refugee camp in Africa. She had become quite a senior doctor and when she came in it was like an axe murder. She was unbelievably angry, and she literally just called out every single thing the speaker said that wasn’t true."
"the boss lady from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) come around to inspect the shelters refuse to set foot inside of it. She was fucking furious that one had been built there. The fear that they had was the the Hexayurts were too cheap and they lasted too long. They were afraid that what was going to happen was that every place that they built them the locals were going to look at them and say That’s actually pretty good, and start building them themselves. And I’m just like, Does that not solve the fucking problem? Is that not what we want—local resilience? The more you find out about how these systems run the worse the expectation gets. It’s very messy. "
Their policy is both simple and logical once you know it: The main challenge with refugee camps is not an engineering issue; the challenge is getting nearby countries to agree to host camps. Countries will agree much more easily to host a temporary camp - which means it has to visibly be a temporary camp.
It turns out, once you know about this constraint (and the obvious facts about cost, logistics, and that camps have large amounts of manual labour available) it's extremely difficult to improve on 10,000 year old canvas tent technology.
My own theory is that people that genuine want to protect workers for exploitation usually end up working on general labor rights.
If you want the government to protect sex workers you, almost by definition, need to make sex work legal. In reality, you might not need to go that far. The effectivness immigration policy of sancuary cities and safe harbor laws for reporting drug overdoses show that it is possibly to provide services (including law enforcement) to criminals; but building and maintaing the nessesary trust with the community is very difficult.
A charitable read of that paper, particularly p. 25, would suggest that trafficking dropped from 19,740 cases to 12,350 cases when prostitution was liberalised.
I've done enough statistics to say that I don't think the paper conclusively shows evidence of a problem; particularly given how hard it must be to gather data on illegal things. Need more rigour to be used for this sort of discussion although it does show that there is a risk to be considered.
But this argument is the strongest I've seen for the opposing view. It basically says that legalization/decriminalization does make things better for existing sex workers, but since it increases trafficking, the whole thing is net negative, since a lot of people are now made to suffer to supply this new market.
The best defense I have against that is that then you haven't enforced the legal landscape properly. It should be possible for local police to protect legal sex workers and treat them with dignity and respect, and crack down hard on trafficking. But I also realize how naive that makes me sound.
And it's just not true: https://sarahditum.com/2014/02/24/who-do-you-listen-to/
This is what was I was responding to. The article I linked talks more on this sentiment, which generally ends up doing the same as Amazon warehouse workers chiming in on Twitter about how much they love their jobs: defending exploitation by appealing to the convenient ideologies of individuals.
And this is what I responded to.
Also a) implying that prostitution is exploitation per se and b) implying every sex worker who said something positive about their work is a somehow rewarded astroturf shill is at the very least problematic.
There are happy sex workers, there are unhappy sex workers (who still do it with the same level of voluntary participation as a "data entry specialist" in some cubicle or a worker gutting fish in a factory do their jobs; to make ends meet) and there are exploited/coerced/forced sex workers.
The latter is a problem and a big one, and there were and are many proposed solutions to tackle it, and nobody found a really well working one yet, but putting those victims in a spot where they themselves are criminals is something that I would think cannot be helpful.
The article also provided examples of people helping people get out of sex work, and actually being good at it.
And the article also talks about the very thing you're protesting, there are two big narratives in the debate: "The happy hooker is a myth!" and "Sex workers who speak out are empowered feminist icons!"
Both those narratives are extremes, and the article points out that reality is a lot more bland and boring and grey than that. The author talks about instances where a porn shoot was a great experience, but that mostly it was a boring shit job.
Of course there are sex workers who hate their job and want to get out, but can't for numerous reasons, and need help getting out.
Of course there are sex workers who hate their job, but would rather keep it, than take another shit job.
Of course there are sex workers who occasionally hate their job, and occasionally love their job.
Of course there are sex workers who like their job and would never want any other job.
Of course there are sex workers who do it to finance a drug addiction.
Of course there are sex workers who do it to finance their university education.
Of course there are sex workers who have been abused and traumatized and hurt and beaten and killed in their work.
Of course there are sex workers who have never experienced abuse in their work.
And when I say "listen to actual sex workers", this is what I mean you have to listen to. All the good, and all the bad. All the different experiences that different people have. You can't just listen to all the bad, and immediately want to crack down and forbid it and try to stamp it out "for their own good", and assume it will magically disappear. You can't just listen to all the good, and immediately want to decriminalize it and assume it will all work out magically in the end either.
This line of reasoning makes very little sense to me. Let's just consider another profession. It's pretty undeniable the demand for skilled software engineers currently outstrips the supply. Especially for certain in-demand specialists.
Yet we don't see machine learning PhDs being kidnapped and enslaved to work in a dank basement tuning Netflix's recommendation algorithm for hours on end with Reed Hastings and his goons threatening to kill their families. The simpler solution is for Netflix to just pay enough money to attract qualified people for the job.
Every single other market in the world has a simple mechanism to deal with the scenario where demand outstrips supply. And that is simply to let prices rises to the point where the two reach equilibrium.
There's absolutely zero reason why the market for prostitution should be any different. To the extent that it isn't it's only because law enforcement either is incapable of or refuses to investigate the complaints of crimes committed against sex workers.
The simple supply/demand argument you see in economics class works in very few cases that feature in internet debates. It works well on eBay when you're selling a used iPhone, but not on labor, healthcare, or housing as those markets are all heavily regulated in comparison.
The decriminalization actually helped weed out most of the small "street pimps" and violent or non-paying Johns/Janes are now a lot more regularly reported and prosecuted, especially since prostitutes can now actually go to the police without fear of being charged for prostitution.
Legal prostitution also means brothels are now registered as legal businesses a lot more often, which in turn means they have to follow health and safety regulations and are subject to inspections. Before, the state only ever could raid a brothel (illegal by definition) and shut it down, at which point it often popped up again in some new place. This also means brothel operators can invest in their properties, thereby usually improving the physical working conditions as well.
But admittedly it hardly put a dent into the larger criminal enterprises which have an entire "supply chain" incl human trafficking and (illegal) brothels with sex slaves. Those criminal organizations just continued as usual, maybe even profiting from generally increased demand in prostitution now that it is legal, keeping their enslaved people in check with fear and outright violence, but are helped by trafficked sex workers nowadays originating from non-EU states which means those people would have to worry about deportation (aside from violent retribution by the criminal enterprises) if they went to the police.
Now that the state has freed up some resources it previously spent on prosecuting sex workers and their customers, I'd like to see those resources go towards fighting those larger criminal enterprises, but that didn't really happen yet as far as I can tell. There have been some high profile busts, but not more than it used to be.
Like protection from unwanted and unsolicited sexual attention in the work space?
It's something that's pretty common in labour protections - but also highlights how prostitution is different from other forms of "wage slavery".
> "how to avoid the director when he’s trying to get you to blow him between takes and your jaw needs a rest"
It quite clear that the author consider the sex in the shooting and the unwanted sexual attention by the director to be two very different things. One of the two they agreed to before hand and is getting paid to do, the other is unwanted.
It seems identical to the problem that has been on the news regarding directors in the movie industry in general.
So, both are examples of an unpleasantly sexualized work place with an unequal power balance?
I don't know exactly how employment law applies to the armed services, but I expect the upshot is something like this: the army has an obligation to do things in a way that e.g. doesn't make accidents needlessly likely, but if you are a soldier fighting a war then you might get shot and that's just part of what they pay you for.
Employment laws may or may not already be drafted in a way that makes them suitable for applying to sex workers, but in principle the situation seems to me very similar to the one I just described. If you are (say) a pornographic actor or a prostitute, then you are going to be having some sex that you wouldn't otherwise have chosen to have, and that's just part of what they pay you for; but your employers are still obliged to protect you from (for instance) being sexually harrassed by your boss.
So, sure, it's a special case and the laws might need to be written carefully to deal with it, but that's not unprecedented. (In particular, if your intended subtext was something like "... so sex work should be illegal because it's fundamentally abusive" then I think you need to explain why we don't have to outlaw the military, police, and other groups that are necessarily exposed to substantial physical danger in the course of their work.)
Now for fire and police work - I would argue the difference is one of necessity - even the most fundamental libertarians would probably agree that sex work is a luxury good or service - not something fundamental for survival or law and order; it is closer to working at a restaurant: providing a convenient, but ultimately redundant service (people can and do buy food and prepare it at home).
We don't expect restaurant workers to risk their life; while we accept that firefighters sometimes do (although, they try very hard not to).
As for the more fundamental aspect; should we allow prostitution - or; is there a difference between other uncomfortable jobs and the sex industry - I suppose I land on the side that the idea that prostitution is OK derives from the fact that we live in a society that's not equal.
It may be puritan of me to say that I'd never (unless circumstances changed significantly for worse, I suppose) consider making a living sucking cocks - and I don't think it's a reasonable expectation. But if we do say that prostitution is just work - I don't see why we'd pay social security to people who refuse sex work?
I just think there's a fundamental difference between say, cleaning floors and having sex for money.
If we look at the top 10 most dangerous jobs we also see a fairly common pattern where safety is a balance between costs and efficiency. Most of those jobs could be made relative safe, but then the cost would go up. While we don't expect restaurant workers to risk their life, we do expect that the roofer to not spend more money on safety that is strictly necessary, making roofers one of the most dangerous jobs.
That said, fishing can never be entirely safe - a storm is a storm, and the ocean is cold and deep (off the Norwegian coast, for example).
Still,while I wildly disagree on the premise that fishing and prostitution could be compared (that is, mostly on an emotional level) - I think I'll have to concede that in some ways it might make for a an interesting comparison point.
I'd guess coal mining could fit too.
But in the context of a sound and well regulated job market, I don't think fishing in general is a luxury goods provider. Neither is mining (in general).
Any regulation that tries to go the route and forbid jobs based on health risk would need to make a larger portion of the worked force in order to also cover legal prostitution.
We could also take a stand against wage slavery. The article articulate quite well how much of her life was punctuated on the need to raise money for rent and food. Countries like Norway and Sweden have social safety nets in place to prevent that, but even here people will accept risky jobs that they do not want to do in order to escape bare minimum living standard.
No. Unwanted implies against her will. She agreed to have sex in exchange for money, and knew before that the job she was applying to was to perform sex for money.
She might not really enjoy the sex she is paid to perform, but that's not different to somebody who cleans toilets in exchange for money might not enjoy cleaning toilets.
Would you consider cleaning toilets and prostitution for supporting yourself as "no different"?
If entered voluntarily, I do not see a moral difference.
I do however recognize that there still is a societal stigmatization when it comes to sex work (there is also stigmatization when it comes to "menial" jobs such as cleaning toilets, but less so). This stigmatization to me doesn't appear to have a rational footing, but either comes from "traditional" and/or "religious" values (same as opposition to homosexuality), or from confusing voluntary sex work with involuntary sex work (as I often see in self-proclaimed "feminist" perspectives).
All in all, a lot of societies seem to be in a state of cognitive dissonance, where voluntarily selling your body for sexual gratification of others is illegal... unless you make a movie out of it, or do not actually perform outright sexual intercourse (strippers, dominatrixes).
But that wasn't really what I asked. I asked if you consider prostituting yourself to be equivalent to taking a cleaning job?
If I was in a situation where I could either prostitute myself (legally, in a safe-enough environment like a legal club with a bouncer) or clean toilets (legally, in a safe-enough enviroment), I'd probably end up with prostitution.
Then again, I live in a country where the welfare system is good enough that I always have a third option...
PS: Let me explain this a little further. I know only one prostitute loosely (old friend; I did not ever use her services; or the services of any prostitute for that matter) and while I am sure she did not tell me all the shit she encounters in her current job, she actually worked as a "cleaning lady" in a hospital before becoming a prostitute full time. She says she will never go back to being a cleaner. She'd like to get a better accepted job with better job security that she can still work when she gets older, so when we last spoke she was looking into taking classes to become an accountant, but for now she says she is happy with the life prostitution affords her relatively easily. "It's better than begging the state for money, and I can still afford nice things and go on vacations"
I actually know a lot more such "cleaning ladies" from the same hospital (who probably still work there). Every cleaner ranted about how the job ruins their backs, their joints, etc, and that old age will not be fun for them and that they saw a ton of co-workers retire early because their bodies gave out and they ended up on welfare because their early-retirement money was not sufficient.
She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better.
She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal.
Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).
But when I've searched, different sources use decriminalization to mean what you and she called legalization, iirc. So I have really been given a lot of nonsense over the years by people seemingly affronted by a woman and former homemaker who is for decriminalization as the term was used by Dolores French. If they understand the term differently from how I use it, they pounce on this as evidence that I'm an idiot rather than acknowledging that it gets used differently in different sources and it was simply a misunderstanding.
Yes, I think this is about the gut reaction many people have that sex work is flat out immoral and should not be done. Period.
"Identity politics" -- ie details about who I happen to be -- seems to just make it a real hot button for a lot of people that I am willing to go on public record as being for the decriminalization of sex work. As a former homemaker, devoted military wife and full-time mom of special needs kids, I'm supposed to be some symbol of conservative goodness or something, it seems.
I've gotten more careful about how I talk about it. But my views remain the same.
Also, it was mentioned in the article, but the porn industry's STD situation should be harold by free market conservatives as a triumph of self regulation.
(the US is kind of an outlier in legalization of prostitution anyway)
So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women.
But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished.
So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias.
In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point.
In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.
An awful lot of feminist stuff seems to grow out of the poison seed of an idea that the cure for the way the world hates on women is to replace policies that hate on women with policies that actively and intentionally hate on men.
It is a fundamentally broken mental model that I cannot support. It is a variation of what so many activists do where they decry the injustice of the current system and how it mandates that Group A is allowed to shit on Group B, but their proposed solution is "As a member of Group B, I want a mandate that Group B gets to shit on Group A instead."
If all you are doing is rearranging the pieces on the gameboard without fundamentally changing the rules, you are merely reassigning which parties get unjust treatment. You aren't actually creating a more just world.
Given that this often boils down to saying to privileged people in power "I would like to stop being the world's toilet and I would like you to virtuously volunteer to take my place as a toilet," it's really not surprising that so much activism gets aggressive pushback from those currently in power.
The path forward is to find a rule set which states "Shitting on people is bad and forbidden. We don't care who they are, don't shit on them. Please and thank you (and backed up with a big stick if polite requests don't work on you)."
A source on the eventual impact on trafficking would also be of interest. (I am Swedish and this, if true, I'd news to me).
The same is true for people who have medical needs in excess of that covered by UBI, but no (or insufficient) health insurance.
IOW, you're absolutely better off with UBI and massive debt than you are with no UBI and no debt.
This does not mean workers do not get exploited, or that people won't take jobs they don't want to do in order to escape bare minimum of living.