Jim Larkin, Backpage exec, has died
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
"In short, contrary to the public narrative you may have heard, Backpage worked closely with federal law enforcement to actually stop sex trafficking (and not just take it down, but to track down the perpetrators). But they refused to do the same for consensual sex work and that is why the feds eventually came down on them like a ton of bricks, all while telling the media and politicians that it was for sex trafficking. But that was all bullshit."
> The government indictment that triggered Lacey and Larkin’s arrests, United States v. Lacey, et al., includes 17 “victim summaries”—stories of women who say they were sexually exploited through Backpage. Victim 5 first appeared in an ad on the platform when she was 14; her “customers” made her “perform sexual acts at gunpoint, choked her to the point of having seizures, and gang-raped her.” Victim 6 was stabbed to death. Victim 8’s uncle and his friends advertised her as “fetish friendly.” The indictment accuses Backpage of catering to sexual predators, of essentially helping pimps better reach their target audiences.
Tough issue overall balancing free speech and legitimate consensual sex work against flagrant exploitation. My understanding is that even in jurisdictions with legalization and formalization of the work trafficking still occurs. No solutions to provide, Larkin’s suicide is still tragic and unfortunate.
We could do better than Backpage, we could probably make abuse of sex workers rare rather than a cliche, but it would require decriminalization first. For instance, that would enable them to hire their own security, or to press charges against abusers (though that's is own can of worms of course). It's also usually the sex workers who are in a position to understand who is being trafficked and by whom, but they are unable to intervene effectively without institutional support.
We should ask, well, does sex trafficking happen more or less in areas where prostitution is legal? That'll give us a good indicator of the effects of decriminalization.
We have a great study on this [1]. Decriminalization makes sex trafficking WORSE - full stop. Prostitution means more sex trafficking happens, and crackdowns on prostitution successfully reduce sex trafficking too.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/07/oregon-...
[1]: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...
Firstly, it's a human rights issue, people ought to be able to engage in the commerce of their choosing with only reasonable restrictions. Prohibition is an unreasonable restriction, enforced according to a set of puritan morals that are no longer even popularly held. After all, alcohol is more addictive and more harmful than many schedule 1 drugs. We're not enforcing any kind of consistent moral principle here, we're hewing to the arbitrary views of people who are long dead. I personally do not find prostitution compatible with my moral sensibilities (I'm a prude, I'm just a libertarian prude), so I don't engage with it, but I'm not interested in prosecuting those that do any more than I'm interested in criminalizing pineapple on pizza.
Secondly, that study doesn't show that it made trafficking worse. It showed that it increased inflows of trafficking. Of course traffickers will prefer open markets to closed ones, that doesn't establish a causal relationship whereby increased openness lead to more net trafficking. What this shows is that prohibition makes trafficking happen in someone else's back yard.
Thirdly, you're linking to a 2014 article about a 2012 study, which is ancient as far as an academic paper goes. Is there really no more recent study? Browsing Google Scholar is evident that this is an active area off research.
Here's a 2021 one I skimmed to cherrypick an article that finds decriminalization more effective ("Although it seems that partial decriminalization has greater benefits with fewer disadvantages, it is not without defects."): https://brieflands.com/articles/ijhrba-106741.html
Why should I find your article more authoritative? (I'm looking for a survey article on the subject presently.)
Fourth, once you've prohibited something, it's next to impossible to intervene to make that market safer. If we want to find the traffickers, we're going to have an easier time in a lit market then a dark one.
Lastly, I'm just more inclined to listen to sex workers and trafficking victims about what they would help than to look at descriptive statistics. Statistics are cool and useful, but predictive mental models and lives experience is a better source of policy. Statistics is better able to tell us that something isn't working than what that something is, why it isn't working, and what should be done about it.
You’re starting with a libertarian premise most people don’t accept. The vast majority of the world accepts that it’s proper to restrict individual freedom even to protect people from themselves. Society has a role to play to help people make good choices and to make it hard for them to make bad or dangerous choices.
Also, you’re incorrect about the prevalent morals. Even in the US, women—who bear the lion’s share of the cost of prostitution—oppose legalizing by a large margin (50% to 30%): https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me.... And of course the overwhelming majority would still say it’s a bad or immoral choice, even if they agree someone should be allowed to make that choice.
As do I, and I said as much (I'm not a capital-L Libertarian, I meant it as an adjective). I argued this exceeded reasonable bounds.
I'm surprised to learn it's that unpopular, but I am comfortable arguing an unpopular position.
That's not a surprise. Amazon bears the cost of Wal-mart's operations and would probably like to outlaw Wal-mart too.
It's like saying "men, who bear the lion's share of the cost of the death penalty, support it more than women do." It's not the ones on death row who support it.
Similarly, sex workers don’t start out that way. All women are subject to the coercion and social pressure that pushes some into sex work. The daughter of that middle class suburban woman could be pressured into sex work by an abusive boyfriend, for example. They all have a stake in the situation.
Obviously the latter, because the former includes a majority of people who aren't subject to such coercion, e.g. because they perform skilled labor and have negotiating power. But who may be in favor of such rules for perfidious and selfish reasons (e.g. because they're in a position to benefit from destroying smaller competitors) or because they're so separated from the lives of the people actually affected by the rules that they support them out of ignorance.
You can see this because people will answer polling questions like "do you support a rule that improves worker safety even if it increases production costs" without asking a single question about the details, like how much it improves safety and how much it increases costs. Even though it's obvious that rules with a poor cost/benefit ratio hurt everyone by making things cost more, and hurt the people nearest to the cost increase most because it comes out of the revenue the business uses to pay their wages.
Which is how we get "worker protections" that harm workers. Because prohibiting lead and asbestos are good rules, but there are also bad rules that people with cushy jobs nevertheless support because they sound good and the negative consequences don't affect them personally. Why should we put weight on their misaligned and uninformed views?
Prostitutes bear the lion's share of the cost of prostitution.
Do they? The argument I always see is that it's to protect society from them e.g. imposing costs on the healthcare system.
What “cost of prostitution” do women who are not prostitutes bear?
The cost of criminalization of prostitution is clearly born primarily by prostitutes who are disproportionately women, but the vast majority of women are not prostitutes.
That is not a cost borne by women who are not prostitutes, but by a subset of those who are.
(It is a risk that other women might be exposed to, but being exposed to a risk and bearing a cost are different things, the former of which is often much less palpable than the latter.)
> https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11907/
That’s a very weird link to attach to your comment, since the story in that article does not refer to anything related to prostitution, coerced or otherwise, on its face. Certain people (Dworkin among them) might describe all prostitution as rape, but inverting that to turn a rape narrative that the victim who is also the only witness relating it does not attribute to prostitution of any kind into an illustration of a claim about forced prostitution is bizarre.
> The last critics would be that full decriminalization has not resulted in reduced trafficking victimization, but led to growth trafficking inflows
> Lastly, I'm just more inclined to listen to sex workers and trafficking victims about what they would help than to look at descriptive statistics.
Have you.. talked to any trafficking victims? Any sex workers? And, why do you think a sex worker has the ability to write prescriptive legal policy? Drug addicts would like drugs to be legal, oil barons would like there to be no natural protection laws, prostitutes would like prostitution to be legal.
And what do you think has changed about sex trafficking and prostitution in 11 years?
> Fourth, once you've prohibited something, it's next to impossible to intervene to make that market safer.
Right because you squash the market. Decriminalization of drugs failed because the count of addicts soared and so did ODs. You have less sex trafficking when it is riskier to engage in any prostitution. This isn't rocket science. Arguing your trafficking victims should get better health care is worse than just having meaningfully less trafficking victims.
Fair enough. (I intend to find a good & recent survey paper still but chores have come up, so it'll have to wait a few hours.)
> Have you.. talked to any trafficking victims? Any sex workers?
Not personally no, I only know what I've learned of their positions through articles I've read and documentaries I've seen. Why, have you?
> Drug addicts would like drugs to be legal, oil barons would like there to be no natural protection laws, prostitutes would like prostitution to be legal.
Why are you equating prostitutes with oil barons of all things? This seems like a list of people whom are often viewed poorly, and I can only infer the rhetorical function here is to tar prostitutes through association. Which makes me doubt the sincerity of your concern.
> And what do you think has changed about sex trafficking and prostitution in 11 years?
I'm sure the state of those things as they relate to the internet has shifted, but not importantly what I was suggesting was the understanding of this field of research has probably changed dramatically in 11 years.
> Right because you squash the market.
What market has ever been squashed by prohibition? Alcohol wasn't. Drugs haven't been. Prostitution hasn't been.
> Arguing your trafficking victims should get better health care is worse than just having meaningfully less trafficking victims.
There won't be fewer trafficking victims, or other sex workers who are victims of abuse, we'll just have disclaimed responsibility for them by declaring that it's illegal and excluding them from polite society. The abuse we'll continue, and the comfortable can pretend it doesn't exist because it's been brushed under the rug.
Additionally, it absolutely does matter if we can provide services. For the example of drug use, the appropriate healthcare (eg Narcan, needle exchanges, treatment for addiction) can make a night and day difference for survival. Sex workers would be safer if they weren't stigmatized and so more likely to be believed if they ask for help, if they were able to operate in the open with hired security and vetting processes, etc.
Sex workers are not safer if they are less stigmatized, they are more likely to have bad outcomes. You can't make a soldier safer by hugging them, you can't remove intrinsic risk by saying nice things to someone.
And yes, the drug market did get smaller under prohibition, as did alcohol under prohibition, as does prositution. That prohibition is not fully effective doesn't mean the inverse is effective.
Oregon tried decriminalization and their OD rate has grown 4x more than everyone elses. 4x more people have died because someone didn't want to follow research.
Has there been some new release of prostitution, like a 2.0 where they updated the security to prevent abuse?
Stupid joke but nothing has really changed in that realm of things where a study that isn't that old would be invalid.
This is the wrong question. A better one is, "has the way prostitution and sex trafficking relate to the internet changed?", but the correct one is "does a 2012 article reflect the current understanding in this field of research?"
over centuries consider cities and their populace. Those who practiced strict morality laws led to slum cities where there was nothing but vice, whereas mixed cities past a certain size that licensed bars or theater or taxi-dancing or whatever the action was.. might have different outcomes over time for the population. The character of the police force and others wielding turf-territory might be different over time as well.
As the population grows its hard to imagine purity as a real reaction to public health, whatever your moral compass might be.
From the article[0] (NB: not the linked article, the actual research paper): "Among the currently available sources, the aforementioned Report on Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns (UNODC, 2006) has also collected and presented data on incidences of human trafficking at the country level; therefore the utilization of this report best serves the purpose of our study. The UNODC Report provides cross-country information on the reported incidence of human trafficking in 161 countries, measuring trafficking flows on a six-point scale."
There's a fairly serious shortcoming here in my opinion which I did not see addressed while skimming the research design; part of the argument in favor of legalization/decriminalization is specifically that trafficking victims will be more likely to approach the police for help. As such, one would expect an increase in sex trafficking victims identified in countries that legalize/decriminalize -- not because there are more victims, but because the victims that were already present now feel more comfortable seeking help from the state. As a contrived thought experiment, if you have a city with 100 sex trafficking victims and 50 of them would go to the police if they weren't afraid of getting arrested, legalizing sex work would seemingly produce 50 sex trafficking victims virtually overnight! But of course, in reality, those victims were already present, silently suffering and unable to get help for fear of imprisonment.
[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065
Of course there will always be questions of induced demand, assuming that that's bad and may increase trafficking. That doesn't mean that there's not tools and policies that can combat trafficking in a legal system. For example, citizenship requirements for prostitutes and a death penalty for traffickers would probably go a long way
I don't mean in countries where every single person does the same short term, I mean when there is a war and we grab all the fit young men.
It's hardly any different. What really is being defended by all those draftees? Not our lives, just our way of life.
Everyone else agreed that those smaller number of people fed into a meat grinder was worth everyone else's ability to own a car and a house and elect their own mayor.
Unlike murder, we can just ask the victims.. which the UNODC does.
> More impunity, more victims: Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are convicting fewer traffickers and detecting fewer victims than rest of the world. At the same time, victims from these regions are identified in more destination countries than people from elsewhere
UNODC Human Trafficking report, 2022
What is legitimate consensual sex work? For those of us who don't transact with prostitutes, all we know about this is a stream of narratives we've seen on tv and in film. Julia Roberts falling for Richard Gere, or Maggie Gyllenhall refusing to have a pimp "manage" her.
Yet, I remember reading one account of a porn actress, who despite signing all the paperwork, waivers and contracts and such, later claimed that every single act felt like rape to her.
Even when there are no pimps or sex traffickers, many claim that they feel coerced by circumstances. Exploited by their clientele.
On top of that we have to deal with ever-evolving ideas about what consent even means. That one cannot properly give consent if one party is more powerful than the other (and how could that ever not be the case, when one is a man and the other a woman... does not plain strength count as power in that scenario?).
In one episode of Californication, Fox Mulder's sitting there mocking a man that showed up with the hooker, calling him a pimp, asking where's his feathered velvet hat, and the guy drolly explains "I'm just here to make sure creeps don't try to beat up the girls".
It's very unclear whether there is such a thing as legitimate consensual sex work, or that humans are even capable of formulating a reasonable definition of consent that would satisfy idiot frat boys and feminist activists both. To call this "tough" is world-class championship understatement. It looks absolutely intractable.
They are subject to the same coercive pressures, and their constraints are individual to them as everyone's are to themselves. Consent is simply the wrong framework for understanding decisions made under life and death consideration. In the same way a machinist's anger at their on the job maiming is righteous, a sex worker can consider any or all encounters to be rape. Just because they've chosen to be there doesn't mean they want to be.
This is essentially the problem. There is no positive definition of what consent is - only an arguments about what consent isn't.
People posit that consent cant co-exist with power imbalance. Because no two people are identical, nobody is perfect, and nobody is omnipotent, consent can not exist at all.
The term has been reduced to meaningless and eventually a new word will be coined for sober choices made free from threat of violence and deceit
Trafficking does still occur. But it is a very small part of the scene.
The difference it has made to workers is huge. Once they were at risk from pimps, clients, and cops. Now if pimps or clients bother them they go to the cops, and the cops protect them. As they should.
As they do for shop keepers, plumbers, and computer programmers.
Make no mistake: Having a law against sex work encourages, and subsidises, trafficking.
Super dark take: Hey, it worked to make drugs more profitable, why not sex work?
I remember when it passed and pretty much every ordinary American was surprised and hadn't asked for it. It seemed to come out of nowhere with no news coverage that I was aware of and nobody was a fan.
As an average American, decriminalized drugs and sex work for the win!
The legal system shouldn't be the single tool humans use to decide how to act. It should be a very High bar to prevent the most egregious and destructive Acts, not a tool for achieving optimal human behavior
The question to ask is, did the slavery stop without backpage?
Which means, (assuming the answer is no it didn't stop or even reduce at all) did the problem get better or worse by attacking backpage? Wherever the slaves are marketed now, is the owner working with police to discover and free them?
You want to encourage this stuff to all run through the same site, and to give police carte blanche to poke around that site wherever they want (as long as their customers civil liberties are preserved, due process, etc.). A site that would keep good records (and inform their customers what records would be kept.) That sort of thing.
Instead, it just got driven back underground. Nobody is checking IDs underground.
By legal definition they facilitated sex trafficking. Perhaps they could argue they are better than Average Joe Pimp, but Average Joe Pimp is also going to say he was kinder or more fair than Average Bob Pimp.
It seems like everyone accepts face value numbers of sex trafficking when trying to make a point about how widespread the issue is - but then except most forms of it from being "bad" or "actual sex trafficking".
I don't know what the best solution is. Legalizing is seems like it would solve most of the current issues, but ultimately I don't know how you get around issues of coercion with defenders (and backpage) would probably still consider "consensual". In places around the world where sex work is legal, its hard to point to many examples where there are no issues involving coercion.
1. They say "no im not exploited" because they are afraid
2. They say "no im not exploited" because they are not exploited
You gain no information from interviewing them. No vice unit has the resources to do a top secret clearance level check on them to confirm externally they are not exploited. To act like the two can simply be distinguished really is willfully ignoring the very real problem that you cannot verify the honesty of the person through any line of questioning. I suspect despite the foaming mouthed progressives claiming it's some puritanical hatred for women the reason for it still being illegal is because of this exact problem. There's no actual way to confirm this concept of "consent" in a legally rigid frame of reference because nearly every aspect of a sex workers job can be coerced.
EDIT: Somewhat hilarious I'm getting downvoted for an opinion. Groupthink HN truly the pinnacle of individualistic moral superiority.
1. You're probably being downvoted for saying people are "foam mouthed progressives" (and other such pejoratives) more than anything.
2. People often don't vote the way you would like. That is the nature of voting. You learn to live with it or you drive yourself crazy. (You'll probably be surprised how much your score goes up if you forego the inside insults though.)
3. There are plenty of people here who agree with you, but they aren't going to upvote, vouch your comments, or support your argument if you buck the norms of the community by being insulting. The community only survives by discouraging behavior like that.
For instance, I flagged a comment on this thread which was an insult to you personally, even though that person and I were aligned on this issue.
How's that?
Like, if McDonald's unknowingly sells a Big Mac to a hungry sex trafficker, have they facilitated sex trafficking? What if they do know he's a sex trafficker, but he's not currently dragging any women behind him with chains? Does he like have to be in flagrant possession of captive victims for it to be "facilitating"?
The legal definition, such as it is, is lame and rather loose. And besides, prosecutors routinely twist and stretch these definitions and judges rarely rebuke them for it, let alone shut it down (at least at the district level).
"Facilitating X" usually means that the defendant associated with the criminals, was vaguely aware that they committed crimes, and didn't refuse to do business with them (or in some cases, that they didn't become vigilante police themselves and investigate to be sure that the customers weren't criminals).
I'm reminded of a man prosecuted because he was selling little plastic vials with lids out of his dollar store. As he realized how popular they were, he ordered more... until at one point, he sought out a local manufacturer to make the things so he could reduce costs. The product was popular with crack dealers or something.
He was prosecuted on a "facilitation" charge of some sort. The idea of "facilitation" in regards to crime probably needs to be abandoned.
Isn't that also a crime in almost the entire US?
It's also where sex trafficking comes into play. How would you know consent was given by a sex worker? People who are trafficked to work as prostitutes are often blackmailed and threatened.
Right now there's massive paranoia about this because it's being used as an election tactic but prostitution and sex trafficking are somewhat linked
How would you know consent was given by a McDonald's cashier?
So how DO you know consent was given by the sex worker?
I also don't have a source but would you agree that the amount of people being forced to work against their will at Mcdonalds is much lower than prostitution?
Your comment was trying to say "what's the line?" right? Like why should one profession be banned but another allowed if X percentage of people are forced to do Y against their will in each.
The line is rape, multiple rapes day in and day out.
*I assuming both still get paid some amount even though they are forced.
No, being forced to work against your will at McDonald's is slavery.
> I also don't have a source but would you agree that the amount of people being forced to work against their will at Mcdonalds is much lower than prostitution?
Sorry, we've already agreed it's impossible to tell. If you'd like to admit that's a dumb belief, please proceed.
Why would you make an insulting comment when we are having a discussion?
This is about being forced against your will by another person or group of people not because you need money, a situation almost every person who works is in.
If degree includes self-defense, financial literacy assistance, and a social worker. This would hopefully improve prospects of those that turn to sex work.
It isn't relevant. Enforcement of law is the responsibility of that jurisdiction. Sex trafficking is criminalized in federal law; it is DoJ's responsibility.
Prostitution is criminalized under the laws of 49 states (and other municipalities) which makes it the responsibility of those jurisdictions.
Sex trafficking is defined as sex work. There isn't a legal difference. That's why they're saying it.
Sex trafficking is addressed in 18 U.S. Code §1591, where a sex trafficker is "a person who recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides, obtains or maintains a minor for a commercial sex act"
This is pretty distinct from prostitution, a service which is legal in Nevada (where federal laws apply).
There are a number of definitions in different legal codes, but I’d be surprised if this was accurate in any of them (its not, as another reply notes, in US federal law): sex traffickers and sex workers aren't, even approximately, the same thing.
It sounds like someone who took an enlightened and ethical stance who got railroaded.
I haven't followed the Backpage drama but this looks to me like a win for uptight, backwards people who want to pretend their hang ups are some form of "righteousness."
I'm very sad to see this article and the news that he apparently died by suicide.
It links to a story about it.
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-kama...
Here's an article by a former sex worker on this, and how decrim, Backpage, etc. are better for reducing the numbers of victims in sex work and the severity of what they deal with.
https://medium.com/@cathyreisenwitz/how-to-actually-fight-tr...
RIP