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Harriet Jacobs on Marginalization, Subsistence, and Denial in "Grey Area" Prostitution and Pimping Culture

Sat, 2010-02-06 01:44 — figleaf

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus again, this time on an extremely prickly subject I’ve discussed previously: the blurred boundary between subsistence and dependency at the real margins of society. In this case the difference between assistance and exploitation or… well… she puts it rather pithily (emphasis mine.)

I had a social worker friend who once described a conversation she’d had with a female client who was trying to get back on her feet. She had met a new guy that she was very excited about. Oh, sure, there were problems, but who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, he was so committed to her, so committed to working out everything. The woman brushed off the few times he’d encouraged her to have sex with his friends as times that they were all just sooooooo drunk, but it totally strengthened their relationship because they’re not even the jealous types. And, of course, there were all the times that she was just trying to “help him out” on a drug deal. And then those times that she had “cheated” when a friend of his came by and locked her in the bedroom. At the end of her description, the social worker had to try and explain that this woman didn’t have a relationship, or a boyfriend: she had a pimp.

She said it here.

You wouldn’t think this kind of denial could happen. It could.

What’s really harsh, by the way, is that since in circumstances like this the pimp “boyfriend” may be trading his partner for favors or status or cargo rather than cash he may not, strictly speaking, recognize that he’s being a pimp either. Although mostly I’m guessing he’s pretty clear about he’s doing he still might not think of it as pimping.

That would be another problem with stereotypes, especially for those living really marginal lives.

As I said in my own post a couple of years ago

speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or “crashing” at other people’s apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized I’d been homeless. And it wasn’t till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as “in some kind of hot water” probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I’m guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they’re not there but because there’s there’s so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it’s hard to tell even when you’re in it, let alone from the outside.

I said it here: Between Transience and Trafficking, a Personal Perspective

This isn’t by the way even remotely anything like an excuse. It’s a complication in any scheme to legalize prostitution, which I would still like to see. Or to keep it illegal, which many more people would evidently like to see. Which means, at least to me, that no matter how the pro/anti activism turns out this particular issue will probably need to be addressed by separate policy initiatives.

I don’t have much else to say about it. Except maybe that I think it could be distinguished pretty unambiguously in a page, or even a sidebar, in a comprehensive sex-education curriculum. And so if anyone’s listening I’d really like to lobby for its inclusion. Of course it would also be nice if we could count on students receiving comprehensive sex education in the first place…

I’ll just reiterate that I think Jacobs writes powerful stuff.

Incidentally she closes her post this way…

it’s impossible to ignore rape culture when it calls and makes an appointment, in a whisper and obviously hiding in a closet. When it arrives late on the bus, alone and lost. When it walks in the front door, comes over to your desk, and whispers on the verge of tears, “I need, um, I need, I need the thing.” It’s hard to ignore when it’s curled up in your lobby, unresponsive and unwilling to come back, to interact with you or any representative of the world. It’s hard to ignore when it’s made manifest in a real live girl, a real live girl who has been stripped of the right to disallow strangers access to everything from the waist down. I am acutely aware that many of these girls have been violated, and that I constitute a further violation; my presence announces to them that not only are they not allowed to choose when and with whom they have sex, but they are not allowed to choose how to deal with the consequences of being abused. All I did was pass a job interview, and I am temporarily LordGodKing of her uterus. All she did was own the uterus; why should she get to decide what to do with it? It’s not like she can type up the paperwork. She doesn’t even have a desk.

Again, she said it here.

Powerful stuff.

Misanthropy, Sociopathology, and Confusing the Personal and the Political

Tue, 2009-05-05 11:06 — figleaf

Sometimes it seems to me that if you announce to the world that you’re, say, a “self-admitted sociopath” or a misanthrope or a separatist, and you use the rhetoric of sociopathology or misanthropy or separatism to advance your causes of, say, sex-worker rights or recognition of women as human beings… that you’re going to encounter quite a bit of, um, resistance. Or resentment. Or misunderstanding. Or exclusion.

Which is fine. Sociopaths, misanthropes, and separatists expect and perhaps demand resistance, resentment, misunderstanding, or even exclusion. And so when they get it they’re happy. Indeed one gets the impression sometimes that when such individuals detect acceptance or adoption of their positions they flee extremeward… sometimes further than their own comfort zones… in order to re-establish the adversity their self-identity demands.

And that’s fine too. Just yesterday… somewhere on Twitter or a post or in a PDF or comments to someone else’s post or somewhere else… someone I wish I could identify raised the perfectly valid point that almost by definition change is not initiated by well-adjusted people. So thank goodness for misanthropes, sociopaths, and separatists!

The problem arises, I think, when one confuses rejection of one’s unpleasant or adversarial rhetoric or personality with rejection of one’s cause. Because after a certain point ones audience can begin to entertain the same confusion. With the result that in addition to closing their ears to one’s asshole behavior they close their ears to one’s perfectly legitimate cause.

Update: See also risk identified by Ezra Klein re: Sen. Inhofe as conservative id rather than crazy uncle.

"I Am a Sex Worker" PSA From Speak Up!

Wed, 2009-04-29 13:53 — figleaf

Found here and elsewhere.

From Audacia Ray’s “Speak Up! Media Skills for the Empowered Sex Worker” workshop.

It is not the case that all sex-workers are empowered. It is also not the case that this is either innate or unalterable.

I don’t know if we have to have sex workers, any more than I think we have to have image consultants or quantatative analysts. But since they’re here there’s no real benefit, and quite a lot of mischief, to encouraging them to keep shut just because folks want to Rorschach away about them as if they were random ink blots instead of human beings with own thoughts, words, and deeds. Not to mention personalities, hobbies, course-loads, pets, parents, reading habits, day jobs, and <coughcough>bacon<coughcough> dining preferences.

Alleged Craigslist/Hotel Killer Allegedly Arrested

Mon, 2009-04-20 21:38 — figleaf

Jessica Van Sack, O’Ryan Johnson and Edward Mason of The Boston Herald report that the so-called Craigslist killer who seemed to be preying on sex-workers, has been arrested.

A clean-cut Boston University medical student preparing to wed a blond beauty was charged last night as the notorious Craigslist killer, cops said, announcing a bombshell break in a case that has attracted national attention.

...

The Craigslist killer is believed to have preyed on women advertising erotic services on the popular Web site. Boston police say Markoff is responsible for the violent robbery of a Las Vegas hooker at the Westin Copley April 10, the brutal April 14 murder of masseuse Julissa Brisman, 26, of New York City, and Thursday’s attack on a lap-dancer in her room at the Holiday Inn Express in Warwick, R.I.

They said it here.

So late this morning I was trapped in front of cable television and some talking heads on Fox were discussing the case. One said the motive appeared to be robbery. Another asked why target sex workers? Another answered that there are the following considerations:

1) “Remember, sex work is illegal so [the robber] would know they’d probably be carrying cash.”

2) The robber appeared to be timing his attacks for late in the evening when, at least on average, the sex workers would have already seen multiple clients.

3) They’d probably have the cash on them because… something like… they can’t just go around making bank drops with all this unreported income.

And finally

4) He knew they couldn’t go to the cops.

I would add that if you were going to go that route you’d look for independent, non-escort-service, non-pimped sex workers. Booking agencies evidently take credit cards so I’m assuming escorts typically carry only tips. Pimps are allegedly a lot more attentive both about the customers they send their workers to and about collecting the cash.

So! We all just love keeping sex work illegal because, you know, prostitutes are victimized. And yet… and yet… as the talking head said, the only thing stopping the victims from taking cards themselves, from making frequent bank drops, from doing better vetting, from having more open presence with hotels is that the non-booked, non-pimped work they arrange through venues like Craigslist are illegal.

As I usually say, charming little system opponents have worked out for themselves: they help create the system of exploitation and then they click their tongues and shake their heads and say “told you so” when their system works.

%#_(*@!

Y'know, Being Murdered Doesn't *Have* To Be Part of the Job Description for Sex Workers

Fri, 2009-04-17 17:27 — figleaf

What Amber Rhea of Being Amber Rhea said

And you wonder why I’m so passionate about decriminalization of prostitution and destigmatization of all sex work? You wonder why I get such a stick up my ass about self-identified feminists who don’t support decrim? (Yes, there are plenty who don’t support it, and that fact absolutely boggles my mind.)

A sex worker who had advertised on Craigslist was murdered in Boston two days ago.

She said it here here.

The first reports to come out said the woman was a massage therapist doing outcalls to a local hotel. Which isn’t that uncommon for hotels, at least in resort towns and areas where licensed massage practitioners have an active presence. Often hotels have arrangements with massage therapists where they offer the service, the hotel books them, arranges the fees, often even automatically adding the fees to the guest’s bill. The hotel usually takes a cut… or, more accurately depending on the hotel, charges the customer extra. The hotel may also suggest an appropriate amount that the customer should tip their body worker.

And so it would be very unusual for a massage therapist to be attacked, let alone murdered, by a customer in a hotel. Not unheard of — it is a risk for LMTs who do either in- or out-call work. But in part because the work tends to be aboveboard the risks are pretty low.

Now it’s sounding more like the victim was a sex worker. Who may or may not have listed herself as a massage therapist. But sex work is illegal. And because hotels don’t book sex workers the way they book body workers, it sounds like the victim made her arrangements with her assailant independently. And because sex work is illegal her case is complicated because it would have been illegal for her, and her customer though less so, to record any details of her appointments. A fact her assailant must have known he (it’s almost certainly a he) could take advantage of. And did.

And in that respect he was just like every other predator who targets sex workers.

One bitter irony here, of course, is that because prostitution is illegal, sex workers who work with pimps are marginally safer than those who, as the victim appears to have been, work independently. The irony being that if sex work was like massage therapy, i.e. legal, there would be no need for secrecy or pimps to insure her safety.

Say what one will about sex work (and I’ll say I’m not crazy about the way it’s so often constructed as “paying her to leave” after sex), keeping it illegal exacts far more toll on those who do it than would legalizing it.

Drugs, Sex-work and Immigration: Actually *Not* Just the Economics

Wed, 2009-04-08 13:41 — figleaf

Late last week there was a list circulating in libertarian circles about illegal markets that would stimulate the economy if they were legalized. The items were… predictably libertarian: gambling, drugs, immigration, and the handful of sex-work tasks (gay prostitution in Nevada, prostitution everywhere else) that aren’t or aren’t yet legal. Matthew Yglesias says he might support some of the proposals but doesn’t think they’d have the effect economic-oriented advocates of legalization claim. (Emphasis his.)

With regard to things like drugs and prostitution, bringing some transactions that are already happening into the above-ground economy would certainly boost our GDP measurements. But these are transactions that are already happening. Shifting them from the illicit to the licit economy doesn’t actually change the fact that there are already people in America earning a living as prostitutes or pimps or drug dealers.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. In fact my instinct would be that given the extraordinary margin between the real cost of drug production and black-market prices, legalization would strongly contract their component of real GDP. (Ear nose and throat doctors pay $7/gram for cocaine; even eye-popping cannabis bud costs only dollars a pound to grow.) That’s actually a good thing: the biggest drug dealers on the planet are convenience-store clerks dispensing tobacco and alcohol but, surprisingly, none of them can afford Glock bullets let alone Glocks, few of them can afford car fresheners let alone cars, and as far as I know no child, anywhere, past maybe age 4 sees 7-11 clerks as glamorous, romantic, let alone emulatable role models. Drug-dealing themes are a major component of popular media. Convenience-store clerks have two movies Clerks and Clerks II. (But… but… even then the drug dealers in the two Clerks movies, Jay and Silent Bob have four movies about them!) But I digress…

I can’t be sure how much legalizing the rest of adult sex work would change the economics, but like Yglesias I think it would mostly shift numbers from the off-the-books ledger to on-the-books. Otherwise? On the one hand I’d imagine pimping would evaporate — legal bodyworkers like massage therapists and chiropractors somehow manage to stay healthy, wealthy and wise without them. And without the “opportunity cost” of arrest and jail time, not to mention the threats of unreportable rape, robbery, assault, murder, and police shakedowns sex workers could change when and how often such work was performed and therefore possibly what they would charge and/or what customers would be willing to pay. Again, though, it seems pointless to speculate without sounding like a bad case of Male Answer Syndrome.

But really, in the case of both drugs and sex work, my interest isn’t really in the direct economics at all but the potential for risk and harm reduction: if a drug habit cost only dollars a day instead of tens or hundreds the vast amounts of collateral losses of life, property, and security would be mitigated, and if a drug habit cost only dollars a day gangs would have very little incentive to have turf wars period let alone turf wars over schools and parks. Similarly if sex work was legitimized there would be diminished opportunities for pimps, serial killers, corrupt cops, and whatever fraction of customers are dishonest or violent to abuse sex workers. Oh yeah, and to put the two together, to the extent that pimps and traffickers actually do use addictive drugs to enthrall involuntary sex workers, the availability of legal drugs at dollars a day would undercut that little avenue as well.

And to touch briefly on the other mainstream libertarian issue, as researcher and author Laura Agustín says over and over international and national migrants often accept sex work when they might ordinarily not because a) social and economic opportunities at home are so bleak the work seems worth it compared to the alternative of staying home b) because they migrate without documentation they have few opportunities for other employment, also c) once they become illegal migrants they’re often at the mercy of the same pimps, criminal customers, corrupt cops, and twilight conditions that make life so perilous for illegal domestic sex workers.

My points being, then, that a) regardless of economic arguments drugs, sex work, and immigration are socially entangled and b) our decisions to keep them illegal keep increase that entanglement and keep the activities closeted in ways that obstruct use of social as opposed to law-enforcement policies.

Only $84,000 (U.S.) Per Rescue? Shucks, Why Bother With More Effective Alternatives?

Mon, 2009-03-02 20:09 — figleaf

Catherine Stephens, a sex-worker union organizer writing at OpenDemocracy.net discusses anti-trafficking policies in the U.K. and, sensibly, finds fault with law-enforcement-only “sweep and rescue” approach.

If you want to target trafficking, the first thing you need to do is increase reporting. You can’t rely on police raids to find the real victims – who do exist – in the sex industry. Pentameter 1, raiding 515 premises, found 88 victims of trafficking. This spectacularly fails to match the Turkish hotline for reporting anxieties about trafficking (in any field: hotel and catering, domestic service, agriculture…). Three quarters of the tip offs came from sex workers’ clients, and those calls resulted in the destruction of 10 trafficking networks and freedom of 100 women from coercion. And I bet that didn’t cost the £5 million reported cost of Pentameter 1.

And speaking of agriculture, to put trafficking for sexual exploitation in perspective, Pentameter’s 88 rescues over 7 months compares with 60 suspected trafficked labourers found in one day, on one farm in Lincolnshire.

Read the quote in context here.

Sensible problem #1 would be that five million pounds (at roughly $14,000 U.S. per raid) to identify very real 88 trafficked slaves in commercial sex is, um… pretty inefficient. (The report doesn’t say how many farms, factories, restaurants, hotels, and estates were raided while searching for slaves trafficked into U.K. agriculture, industry, and hospitality and domestic service.

Especially when sensible problem #2 is that hotlines and other forms of what computer hackers call “social engineering” appear to be very productive.

And gee, it might be even more effective if, as in industrial, agricultural, and domestic circumstances, clients and co-workers don’t have to worry about going to jail for tipping authorities off!

And speaking of tipping off authorities! From the same article (emphasis mine.)

Brothel keepers who have reported fears they’ve been offered trafficked women – that have been proven true, with victims rescued and traffickers imprisoned – have themselves been prosecuted, imprisoned, and their assets seized as a result of coming to the attention of the authorities.

Irrelevant, I’m sure, to those who (stupidly… sorry, it’s just bluntly stupid!) insist all sex work is coerced. But extremely relevant to actual, you know, slaves trafficked into commercial sex or elsewhere, who might like to, you know, not be trafficked slaves!

Oh, and furthermore, Stephens adds a bit about the main thing that drives my interest in an industry I think ought to be dumb and unnecessary rather than illegal. (Emphasis mine here too.)

British law already endangers sex workers by making it illegal for us to work together; criminal gangs know this, and knowingly target sex workers for robbery and rape.

Yeah, because I guess “take back the night” should only be available to good women while dirty women who try to organize or network for their own protection should be subject (in the states) to RICO and conspiracy statutes. And if there are people out there who think that’s just great? Well, they’ve got a lot of company. Gary Ridgeway thought it was great. Robert Picton? Thought it was great. Every “escort review” site user out there? Thinks it’s great. And every pimp, madame, stalker, predator, and crooked cop who benefits from the isolation and alienation of individual sex workers — coerced or no — oh yeah, they think it’s great too… for making what they’ve done, what they want to do, that much easier.

One last thing. I think Stephens is a little optimistic when she concludes with

Only inclusion within the law of people in the sex industry will produce real, effective, long-lasting positive change.

I think that’s probably overstating the case. Because legalizing prostitution probably isn’t a panacea. But keeping it illegal definitely maintains the status quo.

(Via Monica of $pread Blog.)

Uncontrolled Substances Acts

Thu, 2009-02-26 13:29 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user mazzle278. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hi, my name is figleaf and I am not an alcoholic.

However, recently a member of my extended family has moved to the area. And while that member isn’t an alcoholic, that member’s new partner... in a relationship that’s just far enough along to be too hard to for extended family member to just turn away from… turns out to be very, very, very much a verging-on-final-stage alcoholic.

This is turns out to be…

a) everything I’ve always heard even though a lot of what you hear about sounds incredible, hard to believe, stupid, and wrong, and
b) distracting, emotionally draining, time consuming, and
c) a serious challenge to my ideals about treating every human being on the level of a human being
d) even if the alcoholic partner-in-law-in-law-in-common-law sincerely, even desperately seems to want to dry out

Even though I don’t have the enzymes to properly metabolize alcohol, and even though I come from a long, long line of teetotaler temperance-leaguers, I’m not particularly concerned about moderate alcohol consumption. Heck, I used to work in bars. I’ve had perfectly pleasant relationships, including sexual relationships, with people who drank — some of whom drank heavily. But…

But…

But…

Wow, for being legal that stuff sure is astonishingly, deeply, lastingly, damagingly psychotropic. Both directly as in

The brain maintains neurochemical balance through inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters. The main inhibitory neurotransmitter is gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which acts through the GABA-alpha (GABA-A) neuroreceptor. One of the major excitatory neurotransmitters is glutamate, which acts through the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) neuroreceptor.

Alcohol enhances the effect of GABA on GABA-A neuroreceptors, resulting in decreased overall brain excitability. Chronic exposure to alcohol results in a compensatory decrease of GABA-A neuroreceptor response to GABA, evidenced by increasing tolerance of the effects of alcohol.

Alcohol inhibits NMDA neuroreceptors, and chronic alcohol exposure results in up-regulation of these receptors. Abrupt cessation of alcohol exposure results in brain hyperexcitability, because receptors previously inhibited by alcohol are no longer inhibited. Brain hyperexcitability manifests clinically as anxiety, irritability, agitation, and tremors. Severe manifestations include alcohol withdrawal seizures and delirium tremens.

Source: American Academy of Family Physicians

...and by reference as measured by the startling conniptions partners, friends, family members, and sometimes even random strangers can wind up tangled up in the alcohol-user’s problems.

Meanwhile adults can go to prison for smoking pot? A substance, by the way, I also stopped consuming when I turned 21. Meanwhile adults can go to prison for selling (or, but only very rarely, buying) sex. But drinking? Meanwhile questions about eight years with a dry… or possibly wet drunk President, and eight years with a Vice-President who evidently gets so hammered while “hunting” penned animals he can’t tell a 12 ounce quail from a 72-year-old companion turns out not to be “invasions of personal privacy?” What. Ever.

Oh yeah, and since this is at least nominally a blog about sex, relationships, gender, and politics, alcohol seems to have some fascinating properties with regards to, on the one hand, having sex when one otherwise wouldn’t or shouldn’t, and, on the other, being incapable of becoming sexually aroused, when one would very much enjoy it. (And no, I don’t know if that’s the case in the aforementioned situation. I’ve just talked to people in the past who’ve had to deal with it and I thought I’d mention it here.)

$%@!##

One Size Fits None

Wed, 2008-09-24 18:19 — figleaf

Sokari of The F-Word Blog in the U.K. says of the AND by failing to support those women who are real victims of crime, more women like Lara are put at risk by having to go underground and of loosing their children. What the Brothel Report doesn’t show is the hypocrisy of the British government towards trafficking victims who when found are in nearly all cases deported back to their home countries where they are once again vulnerable to be trafficked not just back to the UK but other countries across Europe and beyond.

She said it here.

It’s an incredible summary of what irks me about moves inspired by the coalition of evangelicals, neoconservatives, and their various fellow travelers to to divert policy and law-enforcement resources away from actual trafficking, which doesn’t seem to bother them much in favor of anti-prostitution enforcement, which — voluntary or coerced — bothers them quite a lot.

That last bit, about deporting (often summarily deporting) trafficked sex workers is a story told all across Europe. Although I oppose recently proposed amendments the otherwise generally laudable Wilberforce (a.k.a. “White Slavery”) Act in the U.S. is at least better engineered to forestall deportation. But the general deportation-centric approach for trafficking victims, along with casual attitudes towards the actual traffickers and their customers**, strongly betrays what motivates these sorts of initiatives.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but I was reflecting again today (especially after this post by Debauchette) on the by-definition not perfect analogy between sex work and agricultural labor: just as there can’t be a blanket policy that makes no distinctions between free farmers, skilled labor, substance/survival farming, migrant labor, and slave labor, a blanket policy that assumes all sex workers are trafficked, prostituted, or otherwise conscripted or coerced is going to leave the sort of substantial enforcement gaps Sokari points to. It’s why we can’t play either the blue-nose or the libertarian card but instead must to actually craft policy to fit cases. The first, obviously, between those who do what they do on purpose (however much we do or don’t approve)and those who have no say at all. (And anyone who approves of that isn’t just part of the problem, they’re the blood adversary!)

[** Remember johns of trafficking victims are the trafficker’s customers, not the victim’s. —fl]

Not Pretty Babies

Tue, 2008-07-22 16:25 — figleaf

Via Susie of Echidne of the Snakes and the current Carnival Against Sexual Violence here’s one of those “oh dear” statistics that goes around and around without much need for sourcing.

The average age of entry into prostitution today in the United States is 13 years old. Source: Fledgling Fund promo page for “Very Young Girls” documentary.

Let’s just assume it’s true for a minute, m’kay? Let’s go ahead and take it as given that the number of children who become prostitutes at or before age 13 is so vast that it overwhelms the collective ages of everybody who ever becomes a prostitute after age 13 — say ages 14 to 99 — such that the average prostitute becomes a prostitute at 13. In other words that the average prostitute begins her career in approximately 7th Grade (U.S.), or three years before she can get a driver’s license most places, five years before she can vote or sign contracts, and eight years before she can legally drink!

I gotta say that if that’s a correct statistic, that 13 is the average age of entry for all prostitutes in America, then that’s some kind of seriously fucked up situation.

So! Why stop with such frankly denial-inducing numbers? Why not magically translate the average age to, say 18? Would it change anything if a smaller fraction of people entered prostitution as children?

Why no! While it’s fine for adults to engage in affirmatively consensual commercial sex it’s not ok for children to. And certainly not for children to do so with the adults who make up the pronounced majority of customers. So it doesn’t really matter how many children wind up in prostitution, it’s just a bad idea for every reason you can imagine and a few maybe some people can’t.

Oh, and as long as we’re talking averages, a little Googling and a bit more Excel-ing indicates that a 13-year-old prostitute is also, based on an average of all states and territories, three and a half years shy of the age of consent.

Which in my mind should put offenders (i.e. customers and pimps) not only “John school” but also on sex-offender registries! (Because, seriously, “I didn’t know” just doesn’t cut it when you’ve gotten close enough to a barely-out-of-elementary-school-aged child to have sex with her.)

There’s a fly in the ointment, though, for those who’d prefer to push a pedophile rap on those who traffic in school children. As the Fledgling Fund page puts it

A man who has sex with an underage girl should be prosecuted as a criminal rapist. But there is a loophole: if the child accepts money in exchange for sex, the rapist is now a “john” and rarely is subjected to greater punishment than a fine. For the very same act, the girl is often prosecuted as a prostitute and sent into detention.

Charming how that works. A city-commissioned report by cultural anthropologist Debra Boyer called “Who Pays the Price? Assessment of Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle” (pdf) concurs:

The routine fine for those arrested for “patronizing” is $500 although the maximum that can be imposed is $1,000.

Just a fine for the hatful of customers who manage to get caught having sex with legal minors? Definitely not ok.

And not to be a stick about legalization or anything but, y’know, if

  • prostitution was legal for adults, and
  • (unlike the “Swedish” model) it wasn’t illegal in the first place for customers to hire prostitutes, and
  • paying for sex with minors didn’t magically reduce pedophilia to philandering, and
  • law enforcement officials and prosecutors credibly brought no-excuse sex-offender charges against those who have sex with underage prostitutes

Then I’m just guessing that prospective customers who didn’t want to have to worry about their names showing up on fliers every time they moved into a new neighborhood might not just ask for but closely inspect sex-worker’s documents before proceeding.

And just to break down my list a little, when prostitution is illegal under every circumstances and, especially, when being a customer is already illegal under every circumstance (as it is under the “Swedish” model that criminalizes only customers) then customers have no incentive to discriminate between services provided by adult or child, free or trafficked/pimped. To invert the already gruesome quip, “might as well be hung for a lamb as a sheep.”

Meanwhile if prostitution was legal for both customers and providers but purchasing sex with minors remained illegal and (gasp!) was actually enforced as the sex crimes it is then, again, customers would have every incentive to make sure they verified not just identification but also age…

Which, just to repeat till everyone’s as sick of me saying it, customers have no current incentive to do since a) there are currently penalties for hiring a prostitute no matter what their age but b) the penalties are identical regardless of age and c) they’re not really enforced anyway and d) probably won’t be because law enforcement doesn’t seem to distinguish between illegal adult prostitution and illegal minor prostitution anyway either. Whereas e) if only child and trafficked prostitution was illegal law enforcement, social services, and even legal prostitutes might pay more attention. (If for no other reason than legal prostitutes would have no incentive to tolerate the competition.)

And finally? Does this have any bearing on whether people should be able to decide at age 18 that they want to become sex workers? Even if we’d prefer they, not to mention their “no-sex” class, sexual-scarcity-blinkered customers made other choices? No reason why it should. What adults choose to do and what children are impressed into are unrelated.

So! Any thoughts?

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