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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>if you need a local anaesthetic, it somewhat implies that you're doing dangerous stuff.

It explains why porn is mostly made in low income regions like Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. Lots of desperate people trying to get by who will get into dangerous activities trying to make ends meet.

Although the economy is now much better than it was in the 90's, even today in my Eastern European college town, the university campuses are full of adverts for "modelling agencies" that are basically fronts for bating young women into the porn industry.

Back in the 90's to the 00's, human trafficking here was rampant, with pimp gangs baiting young women from poor villages under the lie that they will work in hospitality in Western Europe to send money back home, but instead, taking their passports away, and sending them to forced prostitution in Western Europe, under punishments of beatings if they try to tell anyone or escape.

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Off Topic

I abhor this concept of "Passport Confiscation". In middle east countries, this practice is very much prevalent. They hire poor people from Asia to construct roads, Fifa stadium, etc. Also, the first thing these bloodsuckers do is confiscate their passport. How is this different than slavery in China? Shouldn't we sanction such a toxic place?

This happens all over the world, even in the Western countries.

Does it happen with same degree and prevalence rates as the west?

And it’s horrific anywhere it occurs. That’s not a valid criticism.

Why is it always assumed that comments are arguing against their parent comments?

Some (most?) Western countries explicitly have laws against this. Fun aside: I used to work at a student library and management was very clear about us not being allowed to retain government-issued personal ID cards as collateral (instead of the university-issued student ID cards) because doing so would be breaking the law.

Of course human traffickers don't care about the legality of the practice, but there's a difference between something being widespread among criminals and something being culturally (or legally) acceptable without having to buy off police or customs.

Western countries?

Pray give us some examples. Curious to know if this happens in Canada and USA.

Yes, that happens in western countries. Either on construction sites or for "household aides."

For the first the authorities in most western countries try to uncover it with raids on construction sites etc. The household situation is tough, as it is harder to see.

It does, but you won't know about it because they're frequently labeled as "unregistered illegal aliens".

This sounds like something a law could deal with quite swiftly?

"Jail time + huge fines for anyone other than law enforcement with a legal order or warrant denying access any document a person requires for travel."

Why not just scan all passports on arrival. Then if a passport is lost or stolen a fingerprint and biometric Id can just be used in place. The whole concept of a physical passport is so pre internet

Oh yes, but unfortunately the physical passport is enshrined in a ton of treaties that are very hard and slow to change.

There are also some nasty privacy and autonomy implications to digitizing the passport system.

This is not primarily a technical problem, but that doesn't mean it's not a very hard problem. Tech people tend to assume that every non-technical problem is easy. Often people, legal, ethical, and institutional problems are quite a bit harder than just making shit work at the tech level, and it is not just because people are lazy or inept. It's because there are loads of competing concerns and stakeholders.

Non technical problems are the worst. The type of problem would probably take tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in manpower to fix. The amount of meetings and negotiations is probably staggering

Here is a case of this exact thing occuring in one of the wealthiest counties in the US, right outside of Washington, DC. The police were actively assisting the traffickers as well.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/suit-fairfax-police-offi...

The difference is that when something like this is uncovered in the US or Canada, we get news stories and politicians publicly condemning the practice. When forced labor happens in China, their state media calls it Western propaganda.

Then why don’t the people rise up against their state? Why would it be the business of other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of another?

Notably, what is happening to Russia externally is different, because they first started a war by attacking Ukraine.

I guess not everyone is contented to sit and watch fellow humans suffer just because they’re on the other side of an imaginary line.

> Then why don’t the people rise up against their state?

Because the governments have taken away or undermined all ability for people to organize. When you have to fear every single friend of you being a potential informant of the Secret Service, how will you find someone willing to do anything that goes against the government? Rule by fear is incredibly effective, it was what held together the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the GDR and modern Russia and China.

> Why would it be the business of other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of another?

Because we as humanity should have learned something from what my ancestors did in 1933-1945 - namely, to not stand aside in the face of obvious inhumanity.

>Then why don’t the people rise up against their state? Why would it be the business of other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of another?

Because in general, from my experiencing interacting with Chinese nationals, the Chinese people either don't believe or don't care that their fellow countrymen are undergoing a systematic genocide.

Historical uprisings look obvious in hindsight, but in real time, it takes some real chutzpah and/or desperation to say, "Hey guys, I've got this great idea. Let's overthrow the state!"

Get to know people at nearest local Vietnamese coffee shops, or Korean nail salons, etc. and you'll likely get some eye opening.

Many hotels in Europe (and no doubt in other places) take possession of your passport.

A UK passport is the property of the UK government; as far as I'm aware, it's forbidden for a UK passport holder to voluntarily surrender it to a third party.

Citation needed. I have traveled a lot and I've never, anywhere in the world, had a hotel attempt to hold onto my passport longer than it takes them to photocopy it for ID purposes.

I haven't travelled internationally for a long time, so I withdraw my remark in deference to your greater experience.

I have, and I have had a motorbike rental place hold my passport as a deposit on the bike.

You are not crazy, I have experienced the same in many countries all over the world. Now I just say no

> It explains why porn is mostly made in low income regions like Eastern Europe and South-East Asia.

Citation needed. Your claim doesn't match commonly reported data.

---

The global leaders in porn are the U.S, taking a 60 per cent share of global internet pornography, Two thirds of all U.S porn sites are hosted in California with the country hosting a total of 4.2 million domains containing porn.

---

The porn he is mentioning are toxic porn, not the normal porn, so you can't compare it like this.

I don't see that conditional made in his claim. I'm asking for data to support his claim, if such data does not exist than it indicates the claim is unlikely to be valid.

Would you like to clarify your meaning of "normal porn" and "toxic porn", and what data exists to support your claim?

As with any social or morality based topic, people drift back and forth between wide and narrow scopes. People tend to use the most extreme and narrow scope to establish a point, and then casually shift to create the impression of that point applying to the wider scope.

Most of this thread boils down to "partial-birth abortion as an argument against the RU486 abortion pill" level reasoning.

I think you're focussing on the wrong metric. This would be like saying that phones aren't made with slave labour because the companies are in california.

There's a disconnect between where the models come from, and where the money goes.

It has been my impression that most actors are American, followed by Russian. I couldn't find any numbers to corroborate that though.

> I think you're focussing on the wrong metric.

I'm focussing on the claim made by OP which is contrary to what is commonly reported (I provided the paste from the news report). He stated "It explains why porn is mostly made in low income regions like Eastern Europe and South-East Asia."

Do you believe OP's claim to be accurate? Could you clarify what evidence you used to form that belief?

Geez, his metric is wonky - "made in $COUNTRY", but your rebuttal doesn't make sense either... you're looking at which country hosts the domain names of porn sites?!

Nevertheless, there are a lot of Eastern European porn actresses, and also a lot of videos filmed there, because well, that's where the actresses live! It seems like a combination of bad economies and attractive[1] people - there's presumably less Swedish porn because Swedes can get rich[2] by working a "normal" job, and there's less porn from (exercice for the reader: insert a country here) because the average porn viewer wouldn't find people from there arousing.

[1] Attractive for the average porn viewer.

[2] Rich in the sense of being able to afford a lifestyle, e.g. brand name stuff and the newest iPhone - an average Swede can probably afford those things with a few months' worth of savings, but an average Romanian would have to save a lot longer.

> Geez, his metric is wonky - "made in $COUNTRY", but your rebuttal doesn't make sense either..

I did not attempt a rebuttal. I merely pasted a paragraph from a news article to point out that his claim doesn't seem to match up with what is commonly reported. Is his claim based on data? Or how about your claims? Or are both based on what categories of pornography and porn actresses viewers watch?

Oh boy, I can see this debate will be fruitless for probably both of us (more importantly for me, it'll be useless for me), because it seems our dictionaries disagree on what "rebuttal" means.

How is "I merely pasted a paragraph from a news article to point out that his claim doesn't seem to match up with what is commonly reported." not an attempt of a rebuttal? And your counter-claim (which countries host domains) doesn't fit his claim of "in which countries are porn produced"?

It'd be like him saying iPhones are made in China and you quoting an article that says he's wrong because the majority of iPhones are sold in the US.

I don't look forward to be even more confused.

I'm saying his claim doesn't match up with the data that is frequently reported on and therefore requested what corroborating data he was basing his claim on. If I had attempted a rebuttal, I would have directly said his claim was wrong because here's data that directly opposes it. I don't have such data and thus was seeking clarification.

"global leaders in porn are the U.S, taking a 60 per cent share "

Where something is produced and where the money goes are two totally different questions

Porn is not made in South East Asia because local legislation is very hostile to it, as various producer wannabes in Pattaya find out the hard way.

The actual global epicenter of porn production is the San Fernando Valley near LA, where it's perfectly legal and there's a large industry offering everything you need.

I don't understand this "taking their passports away". It's not like you're a slave if you lost your passport. Also, you can travel pretty much everywhere within Western Europe without a passport, it's called the Schengen zone.

Except that the abused girls usually came from countries outside of Schengen (Albania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) Without their passport they couldn't go back home since their stay in the west was tied to some scam employer sponsored visa.

Also, you do realize that you still need your passport for identification for basically anything right? Living in Germany, the first thing you always hear when visiting any institution, police, hospital, pharmacy, etc. is 'Ausweis bitte!'. Without an ID, you will not be served unless you're in a life threatening emergency.

And the girls would be too afraid to go to the authorities for help, for the fear of beatings or the pimp gangs taking revenge out on their families back home, since they knew where they lived.

> And the girls would be too afraid to go to the authorities for help

In which western European countries are human trafficked girls afraid of going to the police? It's hard to imagine any western European country where authorities wouldn't take this extremely seriously, and where this wouldn't be front page news.

It's not about the country where this happens but in the home country where the girls' families are that they are not safe from the mob if their racket is threatened. The police from another country can't offer them protection.

I see yea that makes more sense.

You seem to be uninformed about basically the entire problem area. There is a large industry of human trafikking.

Spesifically in UK there was a scandal with local police basically ignoring the issue.

The girls are seen as illegal immigrants first, and any kind of victim second. Then there is the risk of blackmail, as in, if the girl's concervative family find out that she has been a sex slave, she would be disowned.

If none of the above issues apply, it is also important how the girls think the police will react, rather than how they will actually react.

And lastly, without your passport you are mostly stuck in an unfamiliar country, don't speak the language and probably you have no money either.

it is basically slavery.

> Spesifically in UK there was a scandal with local police basically ignoring the issue.

Source?

> without your passport you are mostly stuck in an unfamiliar country

Without your passport you just go to your country's embassy and get a new one. Or if that's not possible because your country doesn't have them, claim refugee status.

»In 2018, it emerged that under the "hostile environment" policy, victims of modern slavery and human trafficking in the U.K. had been jailed in breach of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and that several had been deported by the Home Office.«

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environm...

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