Even on merb there is some discussion of street prostitution, so internet is not completely irrelevant. What I see as the biggest flaw is that their sample (of 50 guys) all went to john schools. Not only are they street clients, they are not even representative of that group. Those are the most likely clients to either buy the bullshit or to just say what authorities want to hear.
Bill C-36 Media Watchlist - you can help!
- Thread starter escapefromstress
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Even on merb there is some discussion of street prostitution, so internet is not completely irrelevant. What I see as the biggest flaw is that their sample (of 50 guys) all went to john schools. Not only are they street clients, they are not even representative of that group. Those are the most likely clients to either buy the bullshit or to just say what authorities want to hear.
Oh come on now! Is there anyone in Canada who never looked at pornography? If Microsoft is trying to go against online porn they might as well get out of the computer business now.
Chris Hedges on prostitution (too long to copy). http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_whoredom_of_the_left_20150308
I usually like Hedges. This article, however, is biased beyond limits, right from the first sentence: "Prostitution is the quintessential expression of global capitalism."
I usually like Hedges. This article, however, is biased beyond limits, right from the first sentence: "Prostitution is the quintessential expression of global capitalism."
PIVOT's response to Chris Hedges
Speak with sex workers, not for them
Written by Brenda Belak on March 18, 2015
http://www.pivotlegal.org/speak_with_sex_workers_not_for_them
A walk through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside can be an overwhelming experience for anyone unfamiliar with the neighbourhood or the myriad social issues that intersect in this community.
The poverty and results of that poverty are easily visible. And if you were to walk through the streets of this community without speaking with any of its residents, you might well come to conclusions based on the preconceptions and assumptions you carried with you about what it means to be poor.
That seems to be precisely what happened when veteran journalist Chris Hedges recently visited the Downtown Eastside. He describes the neighbourhood as “filled with addicts, the broken, the homeless, the old and the mentally ill, all callously tossed into the street.”
He also portrays it as filled with “desperate street prostitutes.” It’s clear that Hedges isn’t really interested in the Downtown Eastside, though, or the experiences of the people who live and work there. His target is the global sex trade, and the people he passed by in the Downtown Eastside are little more than rhetorical objects he uses to attack an entire industry he wants to bring down.
Hedges uses Downtown Eastside sex workers as props to support his treatise that sex work is part of the imperialist, racist capitalist machine. “The wretched of the earth…” he writes, “are imported to serve the desires and fetishes of those in the industrialized world.”
Hedges champions the Swedish approach of criminalizing the purchase of sex as a means to end prostitution and trafficking. It’s an approach that has been adopted here in Canada under Bill C-36, the federal Conservatives’ Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, enacted in December 2014. The new law also makes it illegal to advertise sexual services, work collectively with other sex workers, and communicate in public for the purpose of prostitution.
Like the Harper Conservatives who drafted C-36, Hedges conflates all sex work with trafficking. This confusion can have harmful results for sex workers and migrants alike. He relies heavily on (and misquotes) a report by the ILO concerning international human trafficking. He claims that child trafficking has exploded in Germany and the Netherlands, while Sweden, which the criminalizes purchase of sex, has “cut street prostitution by half.”
However, a recently released report says that sex work has not necessarily diminished in Sweden -- it’s simply become less visible. The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (agreeing with a 2014 report by the Stockholm County Administrative Board) found the decrease in street-based sex work may have more to do with the use of cell phones and the internet to connect buyers and sellers than the law. What the law has actually done is increase stigma for sex workers, cutting them off from health and other services and limiting their abilities to negotiate with and refuse clients. The Association stated that the law is putting those who sell sex “in an even more precarious position” and that it should be changed to better protect sex workers’ rights.
Despite these findings and similar research, Hedges concludes that criminalization is the most effective way to protect the “aboriginal women” he saw working in the Downtown Eastside. Had he bothered to speak with sex workers instead of only abolitionist organizations, he would have heard calls for decriminalization, an approach that prioritizes sex worker safety and recognizes sex workers as people making choices about their lives. The decriminalization of sex work is also supported by recent evidence from research conducted both here in B.C. and around the world.
In Vancouver, evaluations of the actual experiences of sex workers revealed that targeting clients still exposes sex workers to “significant safety and health risks, including: displacement to isolated spaces; inability to screen clients or safely negotiate terms of transactions; and inability to access police protection.”
Criminalizing clients has the same negative impacts on sex workers’ safety as criminalizing sex workers. That’s why sex workers’ organizations such as Sex Workers United Against Violence argue that decriminalization is a more effective way to ensure their safety and improve the conditions under which they work.
Hedges comes to the opposite conclusion. He decided what he wanted to find before he came looking. When you go searching for the answers you want, you get the answers you want.
Hedges is scheduled to give the keynote address at “The State of Extraction” conference, hosted by Simon Fraser University from March 27-29.
Speak with sex workers, not for them
Written by Brenda Belak on March 18, 2015
http://www.pivotlegal.org/speak_with_sex_workers_not_for_them
A walk through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside can be an overwhelming experience for anyone unfamiliar with the neighbourhood or the myriad social issues that intersect in this community.
The poverty and results of that poverty are easily visible. And if you were to walk through the streets of this community without speaking with any of its residents, you might well come to conclusions based on the preconceptions and assumptions you carried with you about what it means to be poor.
That seems to be precisely what happened when veteran journalist Chris Hedges recently visited the Downtown Eastside. He describes the neighbourhood as “filled with addicts, the broken, the homeless, the old and the mentally ill, all callously tossed into the street.”
He also portrays it as filled with “desperate street prostitutes.” It’s clear that Hedges isn’t really interested in the Downtown Eastside, though, or the experiences of the people who live and work there. His target is the global sex trade, and the people he passed by in the Downtown Eastside are little more than rhetorical objects he uses to attack an entire industry he wants to bring down.
Hedges uses Downtown Eastside sex workers as props to support his treatise that sex work is part of the imperialist, racist capitalist machine. “The wretched of the earth…” he writes, “are imported to serve the desires and fetishes of those in the industrialized world.”
Hedges champions the Swedish approach of criminalizing the purchase of sex as a means to end prostitution and trafficking. It’s an approach that has been adopted here in Canada under Bill C-36, the federal Conservatives’ Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, enacted in December 2014. The new law also makes it illegal to advertise sexual services, work collectively with other sex workers, and communicate in public for the purpose of prostitution.
Like the Harper Conservatives who drafted C-36, Hedges conflates all sex work with trafficking. This confusion can have harmful results for sex workers and migrants alike. He relies heavily on (and misquotes) a report by the ILO concerning international human trafficking. He claims that child trafficking has exploded in Germany and the Netherlands, while Sweden, which the criminalizes purchase of sex, has “cut street prostitution by half.”
However, a recently released report says that sex work has not necessarily diminished in Sweden -- it’s simply become less visible. The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (agreeing with a 2014 report by the Stockholm County Administrative Board) found the decrease in street-based sex work may have more to do with the use of cell phones and the internet to connect buyers and sellers than the law. What the law has actually done is increase stigma for sex workers, cutting them off from health and other services and limiting their abilities to negotiate with and refuse clients. The Association stated that the law is putting those who sell sex “in an even more precarious position” and that it should be changed to better protect sex workers’ rights.
Despite these findings and similar research, Hedges concludes that criminalization is the most effective way to protect the “aboriginal women” he saw working in the Downtown Eastside. Had he bothered to speak with sex workers instead of only abolitionist organizations, he would have heard calls for decriminalization, an approach that prioritizes sex worker safety and recognizes sex workers as people making choices about their lives. The decriminalization of sex work is also supported by recent evidence from research conducted both here in B.C. and around the world.
In Vancouver, evaluations of the actual experiences of sex workers revealed that targeting clients still exposes sex workers to “significant safety and health risks, including: displacement to isolated spaces; inability to screen clients or safely negotiate terms of transactions; and inability to access police protection.”
Criminalizing clients has the same negative impacts on sex workers’ safety as criminalizing sex workers. That’s why sex workers’ organizations such as Sex Workers United Against Violence argue that decriminalization is a more effective way to ensure their safety and improve the conditions under which they work.
Hedges comes to the opposite conclusion. He decided what he wanted to find before he came looking. When you go searching for the answers you want, you get the answers you want.
Hedges is scheduled to give the keynote address at “The State of Extraction” conference, hosted by Simon Fraser University from March 27-29.
I found these two articles also worth to read
http://journalmetro.com/actualites/...ntation-sur-les-salons-de-massage-a-lautomne/
http://w5.montreal.com/mtlweblog/?p=39216
http://journalmetro.com/actualites/...ntation-sur-les-salons-de-massage-a-lautomne/
http://w5.montreal.com/mtlweblog/?p=39216
Anybody familiar with strip clubs know how they are doing in Montreal? It's true that with the internet it's now much easier to either see free striptease videos or to find affordable providers of real sex.
Strip clubs closing due to lack of demand across Canada, says industry insider
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/strip-clubs-closing-due-to-lack-of-demand-across-canada-says-industry-insider-1.3003202
Strip clubs, with flashy signs advertising nude dancers, once had a strong footing in downtown centres across Canada.
But as Cheetah's Show Lounge in Kelowna, B.C. closes its doors, an adult industry insider says strip clubs are an endangered species being killed off by lack of demand.
"The market demand for adult entertainment clubs is a male around a certain age," Tim Lambrinos, director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada, told Daybreak South's Chris Walker.
de dancers. (Chris Walker/CBC)
"It seems that young Canadian males are more distracted with other types of interests — Game Boys, plugging in things and so on and it's almost as if the young women are the ones bringing them out to the clubs now."
Cheetah's closure leaves only one strip club in the city of more than 100,000 residents. According to the association, that trend is the same in other big cities — Toronto had 63 strip clubs a decade ago, now it only has 14.
Lambrinos admits licensed clubs are plagued with the perception they are tied to crime and unsavoury characters, but claims that doesn't match with the reality.
"In terms of crime, even public complaints, the licensed adult entertainment clubs were the bottom of the list when it came to public complaints.
"There were nail salons and hair salons and barber shops, restaurants that got far more complaints."
A spokesperson for the City of Kelowna said Cheetah's received three noise complaints and four requests to clean up graffiti since 2011, which he said is "pretty typical" for an after-hours business.
RCMP in Kelowna told the CBC they don't have any particular concerns with strip clubs in the city.
Strip clubs closing due to lack of demand across Canada, says industry insider
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/strip-clubs-closing-due-to-lack-of-demand-across-canada-says-industry-insider-1.3003202
Strip clubs, with flashy signs advertising nude dancers, once had a strong footing in downtown centres across Canada.
But as Cheetah's Show Lounge in Kelowna, B.C. closes its doors, an adult industry insider says strip clubs are an endangered species being killed off by lack of demand.
"The market demand for adult entertainment clubs is a male around a certain age," Tim Lambrinos, director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada, told Daybreak South's Chris Walker.
de dancers. (Chris Walker/CBC)
"It seems that young Canadian males are more distracted with other types of interests — Game Boys, plugging in things and so on and it's almost as if the young women are the ones bringing them out to the clubs now."
Cheetah's closure leaves only one strip club in the city of more than 100,000 residents. According to the association, that trend is the same in other big cities — Toronto had 63 strip clubs a decade ago, now it only has 14.
Lambrinos admits licensed clubs are plagued with the perception they are tied to crime and unsavoury characters, but claims that doesn't match with the reality.
"In terms of crime, even public complaints, the licensed adult entertainment clubs were the bottom of the list when it came to public complaints.
"There were nail salons and hair salons and barber shops, restaurants that got far more complaints."
A spokesperson for the City of Kelowna said Cheetah's received three noise complaints and four requests to clean up graffiti since 2011, which he said is "pretty typical" for an after-hours business.
RCMP in Kelowna told the CBC they don't have any particular concerns with strip clubs in the city.
Please correct me if 'm wrong, but I think this will be the first court challenge to a client penalization law. The case could get to the European Court of Human Rights and have consequences even for Sweden. I'm a big fan of Laura Lee btw.
Sex worker to launch legal challenge against NI prostitution ban
Laura Lee says new legislation that criminalises the payment of sex among consenting adults is a breach of European human rights law
Laura Lee plans to fund the case partly via crowdfunding and from sex worker campaign groups across the world. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
Henry McDonald Ireland correspondent
Sunday 22 March 2015 12.25 GMT Last modified on Sunday 22 March 2015 15.46 GMT
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...h-legal-challenge-against-ni-prostitution-ban
A sex worker is using European human rights legislation to try to overturn a new law in Northern Ireland that makes it illegal to pay for prostitutes.
Dublin-born law graduate Laura Lee is launching an unprecedented legal challenge that could go all the way to Strasbourg, against a human trafficking bill which includes banning the payment for sex among consenting adults.
The region is the only part of the UK where people can be convicted of paying for sex. The law, which was championed by Democratic Unionist peer and Stormont assembly member Lord Morrow, comes into effect on 1 June.
Lee told the Guardian she will launch her case at the high court in Belfast in the same month as the law comes into effect.
The justice minister, David Ford, has already warned that the Police Service of Northern Ireland may not be able to convict men contacting prostitutes for sex because intercept evidence from clients’ mobile phones would be inadmissible in the courts.
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Lee, 37, said: “I am doing this because I believe that when two consenting adults have sex behind closed doors and if money changes hands then that is none of the state’s business. The law they have introduced has nothing to do with people being trafficked but simply on their, the DUP’s, moral abhorrence of paid sex.
“I believe that after June 1st, sex workers’ lives in Northern Ireland will actually be harder and the industry will be pushed underground.”
Lee, who lives in Edinburgh but travels to Belfast and Dublin to see clients, said her legal team would be referencing several articles of the European convention on human rights to challenge and overturn Morrow’s law.
“First of all we will need to exhaust domestic remedies starting in the Belfast high court, possibly going to the supreme court, the House of Lords and eventually the European court of human rights.
“There are several articles that we can look starting with article 8 that governs the right to privacy. We will also focus on article 2 that concerns the right to life and we will argue that this law puts sex workers’ safety by the fact the legislation will drive the trade further and further underground.
“And then article 3 is about protection from degrading treatment, which is very relevant because in Scotland police have been subjecting sex workers to terrible things such as strip searching on women working in Edinburgh saunas. Our legal team will also refer to the right to earn a living enshrined in the European social charter.”
Advertisement
Lee said she will fund the case partly via crowdfunding on social media networks and from sex worker campaign groups across the world.
Lee, an Irish psychology graduate whose range of services include S&M and bondage, said she was also taking the legal challenge to thwart an attempt to introduce a similar law criminalising the consumers of sex in the Irish Republic.
An alliance of radical feminist groups and a number of nuns from Catholic religious orders are lobbying southern Irish political parties to pass a Nordic-style law outlawing the purchase of sex.
“This case hopefully will put a big dent in the campaign to bring in this law across the border in the Republic. There is a massive propaganda campaign to claim that north and south in Ireland sex workers are women who are trafficked into the country. This is total nonsense. In 2014 there wasn’t a single arrest in connection with sex trafficking in Northern Ireland. The majority of sex workers like myself are independent and 70% are single mothers trying to earn a living in these hard times. No one has the right to take that option away from them,” she said.
Morrow defended his bill and criticised any move via the courts to overturn the legislation.
“If Europe or any other court did this they would be ignoring the will of the people and the overwhelming majority of those in the Northern Ireland Assembly,” he said.
In October the Stormont assembly voted by 81 votes to 10 which in article 6 of Morrow’s anti-trafficking bill banned payment for sex.
Sex worker to launch legal challenge against NI prostitution ban
Laura Lee says new legislation that criminalises the payment of sex among consenting adults is a breach of European human rights law
Laura Lee plans to fund the case partly via crowdfunding and from sex worker campaign groups across the world. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
Henry McDonald Ireland correspondent
Sunday 22 March 2015 12.25 GMT Last modified on Sunday 22 March 2015 15.46 GMT
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...h-legal-challenge-against-ni-prostitution-ban
A sex worker is using European human rights legislation to try to overturn a new law in Northern Ireland that makes it illegal to pay for prostitutes.
Dublin-born law graduate Laura Lee is launching an unprecedented legal challenge that could go all the way to Strasbourg, against a human trafficking bill which includes banning the payment for sex among consenting adults.
The region is the only part of the UK where people can be convicted of paying for sex. The law, which was championed by Democratic Unionist peer and Stormont assembly member Lord Morrow, comes into effect on 1 June.
Lee told the Guardian she will launch her case at the high court in Belfast in the same month as the law comes into effect.
The justice minister, David Ford, has already warned that the Police Service of Northern Ireland may not be able to convict men contacting prostitutes for sex because intercept evidence from clients’ mobile phones would be inadmissible in the courts.
Advertisement
Lee, 37, said: “I am doing this because I believe that when two consenting adults have sex behind closed doors and if money changes hands then that is none of the state’s business. The law they have introduced has nothing to do with people being trafficked but simply on their, the DUP’s, moral abhorrence of paid sex.
“I believe that after June 1st, sex workers’ lives in Northern Ireland will actually be harder and the industry will be pushed underground.”
Lee, who lives in Edinburgh but travels to Belfast and Dublin to see clients, said her legal team would be referencing several articles of the European convention on human rights to challenge and overturn Morrow’s law.
“First of all we will need to exhaust domestic remedies starting in the Belfast high court, possibly going to the supreme court, the House of Lords and eventually the European court of human rights.
“There are several articles that we can look starting with article 8 that governs the right to privacy. We will also focus on article 2 that concerns the right to life and we will argue that this law puts sex workers’ safety by the fact the legislation will drive the trade further and further underground.
“And then article 3 is about protection from degrading treatment, which is very relevant because in Scotland police have been subjecting sex workers to terrible things such as strip searching on women working in Edinburgh saunas. Our legal team will also refer to the right to earn a living enshrined in the European social charter.”
Advertisement
Lee said she will fund the case partly via crowdfunding on social media networks and from sex worker campaign groups across the world.
Lee, an Irish psychology graduate whose range of services include S&M and bondage, said she was also taking the legal challenge to thwart an attempt to introduce a similar law criminalising the consumers of sex in the Irish Republic.
An alliance of radical feminist groups and a number of nuns from Catholic religious orders are lobbying southern Irish political parties to pass a Nordic-style law outlawing the purchase of sex.
“This case hopefully will put a big dent in the campaign to bring in this law across the border in the Republic. There is a massive propaganda campaign to claim that north and south in Ireland sex workers are women who are trafficked into the country. This is total nonsense. In 2014 there wasn’t a single arrest in connection with sex trafficking in Northern Ireland. The majority of sex workers like myself are independent and 70% are single mothers trying to earn a living in these hard times. No one has the right to take that option away from them,” she said.
Morrow defended his bill and criticised any move via the courts to overturn the legislation.
“If Europe or any other court did this they would be ignoring the will of the people and the overwhelming majority of those in the Northern Ireland Assembly,” he said.
In October the Stormont assembly voted by 81 votes to 10 which in article 6 of Morrow’s anti-trafficking bill banned payment for sex.
Margaret Wente strikes again.
(It should be noted that the "report" supposedly published last week was actually published in 2010 (here it is: http://www.government.se/content/1/c6/15/14/88/6dfbbdbd.pdf). It indeed points to a 50% reduction, but finds that prostitution "increased dramatically" in Norway and Denmark, therefore criminalization of prostitution reduces prostitution...)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/swedens-prostitution-solution/article23482528/
Sweden’s prostitution solution
Here in Canada, most progressive people hold an enlightened view of prostitution. Since fighting it is futile, we ought to legalize and regulate it. Legalizing prostitution would destigmatize sex-trade workers and increase their safety. Hey, maybe they’ll even start signing up for dental plans!
Sweden went another way. In 1999, it passed a law to criminalize the buyers of sex, but not the sellers. Sex-trade workers were encouraged to report abusive clients to police, and given assistance to help them find other lines of work. (Or, in the case of migrant women who’d been trafficked, to return home.) The law is not unlike Canada’s new law, which has been widely derided as unworkable, unconstitutional, dangerous to women and hopelessly reactionary. But then nobody ever accused the Harper government of being progressive.
So how are things going in Sweden? Pretty well, it turns out. Last week, a thick report published by a government agency in Stockholm found that street prostitution has been cut by more than half since 1995. Other studies also indicate that the sex trade has shrunk substantially.
In Stockholm’s red-light district, “there’s hardly anyone there,” says political science professor Max Waltman, an expert in prostitution policy at the University of Stockholm who spoke to me by telephone. Nor is it true that the street trade has simply moved indoors. Prof. Waltman estimates that the total number of sex workers in the country has dropped from 3,000 in the mid-1990s to about 600 in recent years.
At first, public opinion over the new law was sharply divided. Its biggest support came from the greens, the feminists and others in the left-left wing. But today, it has overwhelming public support. Many Swedes view prostitution not as a choice or a moral offence, but a form of male violence against women. They compare it to serial rape and slavery. Last year, when Amnesty International said it planned to lobby for legalization, Swedish women’s rights organizations were outraged.
Nadine Bergquist is a volunteer with Rosenlundstodet, a small group of women who help get prostitutes off the streets. “We think it’s a great law, very necessary, crucial,” she told me. “The women who’ve left prostitution say that without this law, it would have been very much harder for them.” She dismisses the notion that the law stigmatizes them. “They were stigmatized already.”
Across the bridge from southern Sweden is Denmark, which chose to go the other way and decriminalize prostitution. The two countries form a sort of natural policy experiment. By 2007, according to Prof. Waltman, Denmark had about 15 times more prostitutes per capita than Sweden did – many of them migrant women trafficked from Romania and Nigeria. Now that Sweden is a hostile climate for traffickers, they tend to stick to more lucrative countries.
Iceland and Norway – two other progressive, feminist, northern countries – have adopted the Swedish model. But in Canada, the ideologies are flipped. Here, conservatives applaud the Swedish model, while progressives, academics, feminists and the media overwhelmingly ridicule it.
Prof. Waltman, who has been following Canada’s debate closely, thinks these people are seriously wrong. Decriminalization is a failed experiment, he argues. “When the German parliament decided at the end of the nineties to decriminalize, the idea was to make prostitution safer. Women would sign onto social security, and they would be destigmatized, and they would work in brothels and be safe.”
But no one signed up for social security, the sex trade was not destigmatized and brothels, he says, are not particularly safe. Worst of all, prostitution has exploded. “Most women are obviously not doing it by choice,” he says. “Most of them have been profoundly traumatized and want to get out. If you legalize it, it’s legalizing slavery, because they have no real choice.”
That’s the argument that sticks with me. I honestly don’t care if Terri-Jean Bedford operates her house of pain out of her nice suburban bungalow. Most sex workers aren’t her. Nor are they strapped co-eds working toward their masters’ degrees. They’re women at the bottom of the heap, too often aboriginal, who’ve been badly damaged and believe they have no other options.
As Ms. Bergquist says, “Anyone who believes there is such a thing as a happy prostitute should walk down the street with us one night and look these women in the eye. And then I’d like to see if they still believe that’s true.”
(It should be noted that the "report" supposedly published last week was actually published in 2010 (here it is: http://www.government.se/content/1/c6/15/14/88/6dfbbdbd.pdf). It indeed points to a 50% reduction, but finds that prostitution "increased dramatically" in Norway and Denmark, therefore criminalization of prostitution reduces prostitution...)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/swedens-prostitution-solution/article23482528/
Sweden’s prostitution solution
Here in Canada, most progressive people hold an enlightened view of prostitution. Since fighting it is futile, we ought to legalize and regulate it. Legalizing prostitution would destigmatize sex-trade workers and increase their safety. Hey, maybe they’ll even start signing up for dental plans!
Sweden went another way. In 1999, it passed a law to criminalize the buyers of sex, but not the sellers. Sex-trade workers were encouraged to report abusive clients to police, and given assistance to help them find other lines of work. (Or, in the case of migrant women who’d been trafficked, to return home.) The law is not unlike Canada’s new law, which has been widely derided as unworkable, unconstitutional, dangerous to women and hopelessly reactionary. But then nobody ever accused the Harper government of being progressive.
So how are things going in Sweden? Pretty well, it turns out. Last week, a thick report published by a government agency in Stockholm found that street prostitution has been cut by more than half since 1995. Other studies also indicate that the sex trade has shrunk substantially.
In Stockholm’s red-light district, “there’s hardly anyone there,” says political science professor Max Waltman, an expert in prostitution policy at the University of Stockholm who spoke to me by telephone. Nor is it true that the street trade has simply moved indoors. Prof. Waltman estimates that the total number of sex workers in the country has dropped from 3,000 in the mid-1990s to about 600 in recent years.
At first, public opinion over the new law was sharply divided. Its biggest support came from the greens, the feminists and others in the left-left wing. But today, it has overwhelming public support. Many Swedes view prostitution not as a choice or a moral offence, but a form of male violence against women. They compare it to serial rape and slavery. Last year, when Amnesty International said it planned to lobby for legalization, Swedish women’s rights organizations were outraged.
Nadine Bergquist is a volunteer with Rosenlundstodet, a small group of women who help get prostitutes off the streets. “We think it’s a great law, very necessary, crucial,” she told me. “The women who’ve left prostitution say that without this law, it would have been very much harder for them.” She dismisses the notion that the law stigmatizes them. “They were stigmatized already.”
Across the bridge from southern Sweden is Denmark, which chose to go the other way and decriminalize prostitution. The two countries form a sort of natural policy experiment. By 2007, according to Prof. Waltman, Denmark had about 15 times more prostitutes per capita than Sweden did – many of them migrant women trafficked from Romania and Nigeria. Now that Sweden is a hostile climate for traffickers, they tend to stick to more lucrative countries.
Iceland and Norway – two other progressive, feminist, northern countries – have adopted the Swedish model. But in Canada, the ideologies are flipped. Here, conservatives applaud the Swedish model, while progressives, academics, feminists and the media overwhelmingly ridicule it.
Prof. Waltman, who has been following Canada’s debate closely, thinks these people are seriously wrong. Decriminalization is a failed experiment, he argues. “When the German parliament decided at the end of the nineties to decriminalize, the idea was to make prostitution safer. Women would sign onto social security, and they would be destigmatized, and they would work in brothels and be safe.”
But no one signed up for social security, the sex trade was not destigmatized and brothels, he says, are not particularly safe. Worst of all, prostitution has exploded. “Most women are obviously not doing it by choice,” he says. “Most of them have been profoundly traumatized and want to get out. If you legalize it, it’s legalizing slavery, because they have no real choice.”
That’s the argument that sticks with me. I honestly don’t care if Terri-Jean Bedford operates her house of pain out of her nice suburban bungalow. Most sex workers aren’t her. Nor are they strapped co-eds working toward their masters’ degrees. They’re women at the bottom of the heap, too often aboriginal, who’ve been badly damaged and believe they have no other options.
As Ms. Bergquist says, “Anyone who believes there is such a thing as a happy prostitute should walk down the street with us one night and look these women in the eye. And then I’d like to see if they still believe that’s true.”
The 50% reduction is at the street levels only and is more likely due to the rise of the internet than any change in the law. Meanwhile the number of massage parlors in Stockholm increased by something like three-fold. The effects of the Swedish law has been discussed so much already that there is no more excuse for these journalists not to know that.
I think the 50% is besides the point on several levels:
First, the report is based on 1999 to 2008 data;
Second, the authors seem completely oblivious to the concept of prostitution displacement;
Third, if you're going to write a report claiming women are now better off as a result of a law, you might want to include some socio-economic data as opposed to reaching that conclusion based on the single indicator of reduced prevalence of prostitution.
Just because there is less prostitution on the streets in no way signifies that the women who used to work the streets a) didn't just pick up and leave (perhaps to Norway and Denmark) or b) score higher on well-being indicators.
I posted it because I got the sense from reading this thread that you were trying to put together a list of articles portraying the general tone (good, bad and stupid) regarding prostitution post-C36 in the media. The woman is indeed a quack. I have no idea how she continues to write for the G&M.
Saskatchewan to make stripping illegal in bars again
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/saskatchew...162751566.html
After making stripping in bars legal last year, Premier Brad Wall says he wants to reverse course.
Wall announced Wednesday the Saskatchewan Party government will amend the liquor laws, again, to make stripping illegal in bars.
It was only in January 2014, that Saskatchewan ended a decades-long ban on nude dancing in places that serve alcohol. Under those amended rules, total nudity was still outlawed, but dancers could strip down to pasties.
Now, that change is going to be reversed. The concern is over the exploitation of women in such establishments.
Wall said the government made a mistake allowing partial stripping. He says the links to human trafficking and organized crime are too serious to turn a blind eye. Wall said the change can be made in a matter of weeks.
Regina City Council recently rejected a proposal for a strip bar in an industrial area after establishing zoning rules. A Christian group applauded the move, although others thought the city had no right to reject a legal business that followed all the rules.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/saskatchew...162751566.html
After making stripping in bars legal last year, Premier Brad Wall says he wants to reverse course.
Wall announced Wednesday the Saskatchewan Party government will amend the liquor laws, again, to make stripping illegal in bars.
It was only in January 2014, that Saskatchewan ended a decades-long ban on nude dancing in places that serve alcohol. Under those amended rules, total nudity was still outlawed, but dancers could strip down to pasties.
Now, that change is going to be reversed. The concern is over the exploitation of women in such establishments.
Wall said the government made a mistake allowing partial stripping. He says the links to human trafficking and organized crime are too serious to turn a blind eye. Wall said the change can be made in a matter of weeks.
Regina City Council recently rejected a proposal for a strip bar in an industrial area after establishing zoning rules. A Christian group applauded the move, although others thought the city had no right to reject a legal business that followed all the rules.
My understanding is that stripping itself will not be illegal. It will be just illegal to do it in a place that serves alcohol. How does that address any ''traficking'' issue? Is it the presence of alcohol that attracts crime and traffickers?
Sask. stripping law nixed - with video
BY EMMA GRANEY, THE LEADER-POST MARCH 25, 2015 9:54 PM
http://www.leaderpost.com/life/Sask+stripping+nixed/10919822/story.html
REGINA — Government “made a mistake” when it allowed licensed strip clubs to open in the province last year.
Before the weekly cabinet meeting Wednesday, Premier Brad Wall admitted that, and told reporters that the legislation will be repealed “in a matter of weeks.”
It was a decision that seemed to come out of nowhere; it was two months ago that Regina’s city council turned down an application to open a strip club on Park Street.
The change means no more striptease performances or wet clothing competitions will be permitted in licensed premises, though strip clubs themselves will still be allowed.
Wall denied the decision is his government playing the role of moral police, saying “nobody elected us to be the moralizers for the people of Saskatchewan.”
Rather, he said, it’s about protecting “those who are most vulnerable” when it comes to human trafficking.
If there is even a small chance of seeing “human trafficking or the sexual exploitation of young women increase,” Wall said, “that’s not a moral issue, that’s simply something we should be about (stopping).”
He said the same is true for the presence of organized crime in the province.
Wall referenced conversations with police, who he said indicated “that close to 100 per cent of the clubs in Central Canada would be operated by the Hells Angels.”
“If this was a decision just based on, ‘Does the government think someone should go to a strip club or not,’ we probably have no business being involved in that. But, if we believe that any of those consequences are likely, even if only to a small degree, then government should act, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The organized crime angle was an interesting one, particularly given the history of the regulation changes.
In November 2012, when the overhaul was first announced, government made it clear that full nudity would not be permitted in licensed venues.
Then-minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority, Donna Harpauer, said the avoidance of full nudity at strip clubs should be enough to keep out the organized crime organizations linked to stripping in other jurisdictions.
On Wednesday, Wall admitted the decision is unlikely to have a “huge impact” on the “potential for increased human trafficking or organized crime” in Saskatchewan, but said, “Why would we risk it?”
Why indeed said Savelia Curniski, president and founder of NASHI, an organization which campaigns against human trafficking.
She was “delighted” when she heard the news Wednesday, adding that “strip clubs absolutely open the door to human trafficking.”
Locally, NASHI tries “to make people aware of human trafficking and that it’s happening in Regina and Saskatoon and throughout the world.”
Just this weekend the group hosted a fundraiser attended by MLA Rob Norris, in which it discussed the issue of human trafficking.
Also “very pleased” with the news was Harold Lutzer, who was a vocal opponent of the proposed strip club in Regina.
“My concerns were about human trafficking and prostitution and protecting our women, so I’m glad (Wall) has reversed his decision.”
BY EMMA GRANEY, THE LEADER-POST MARCH 25, 2015 9:54 PM
http://www.leaderpost.com/life/Sask+stripping+nixed/10919822/story.html
REGINA — Government “made a mistake” when it allowed licensed strip clubs to open in the province last year.
Before the weekly cabinet meeting Wednesday, Premier Brad Wall admitted that, and told reporters that the legislation will be repealed “in a matter of weeks.”
It was a decision that seemed to come out of nowhere; it was two months ago that Regina’s city council turned down an application to open a strip club on Park Street.
The change means no more striptease performances or wet clothing competitions will be permitted in licensed premises, though strip clubs themselves will still be allowed.
Wall denied the decision is his government playing the role of moral police, saying “nobody elected us to be the moralizers for the people of Saskatchewan.”
Rather, he said, it’s about protecting “those who are most vulnerable” when it comes to human trafficking.
If there is even a small chance of seeing “human trafficking or the sexual exploitation of young women increase,” Wall said, “that’s not a moral issue, that’s simply something we should be about (stopping).”
He said the same is true for the presence of organized crime in the province.
Wall referenced conversations with police, who he said indicated “that close to 100 per cent of the clubs in Central Canada would be operated by the Hells Angels.”
“If this was a decision just based on, ‘Does the government think someone should go to a strip club or not,’ we probably have no business being involved in that. But, if we believe that any of those consequences are likely, even if only to a small degree, then government should act, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The organized crime angle was an interesting one, particularly given the history of the regulation changes.
In November 2012, when the overhaul was first announced, government made it clear that full nudity would not be permitted in licensed venues.
Then-minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority, Donna Harpauer, said the avoidance of full nudity at strip clubs should be enough to keep out the organized crime organizations linked to stripping in other jurisdictions.
On Wednesday, Wall admitted the decision is unlikely to have a “huge impact” on the “potential for increased human trafficking or organized crime” in Saskatchewan, but said, “Why would we risk it?”
Why indeed said Savelia Curniski, president and founder of NASHI, an organization which campaigns against human trafficking.
She was “delighted” when she heard the news Wednesday, adding that “strip clubs absolutely open the door to human trafficking.”
Locally, NASHI tries “to make people aware of human trafficking and that it’s happening in Regina and Saskatoon and throughout the world.”
Just this weekend the group hosted a fundraiser attended by MLA Rob Norris, in which it discussed the issue of human trafficking.
Also “very pleased” with the news was Harold Lutzer, who was a vocal opponent of the proposed strip club in Regina.
“My concerns were about human trafficking and prostitution and protecting our women, so I’m glad (Wall) has reversed his decision.”
No massage parlour laws on the way
BY EMMA GRANEY, THE STARPHOENIX MARCH 27, 2015 7:48 AM
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/life/massage+parlour+laws/10924511/story.html
The provincial government has changed the laws regarding strip clubs in Saskatchewan, but it won't wade into the debate about massage parlours any time soon.
Justice Minister Gordon Wyant said Thursday he will leave that ball squarely in the court of individual municipalities - though he would "encourage municipalities" to look at specific bylaws.
That seems to fly in the face of the reasoning behind the strip club regulation changes - which was partially to avoid the potential for human trafficking - but Wyant said any claims of "criminal activity happening in massage parlours" would be investigated.
He said there are "integrated law enforcement" initiatives between local police forces and the RCMP, "so that where human trafficking is taking place, there are appropriate steps being taken to prevent it."
Reiterating Wednesday's message from Premier Brad Wall, Wyant said changes to strip club legislation were made because "any time there's the opportunity ... to prevent exploitation, we should do that."
Wall said Wednesday that the government already supports community-based organizations that "assist women who are vulnerable" to exploitation, adding "I think you're going to see a government that wants to focus on what other opportunities exist."
Perhaps those opportunities will include supporting "other faith-based or community-based organizations" that are "on the front lines of the issues," he said.
But it seems as though that won't extend to regulating massage parlours. In Saskatoon, such establishments have to be licensed; the city restricts where they can be located, and all employees must be registered.
In Regina, even with the proliferation of massage parlours along Victoria Avenue, that's not the case. "I would certainly encourage the City of Regina, if they're not already doing it, to work on it and look at other models in other cities where that is happening," Wyant said.
The province's capital city is currently conducting a "comprehensive review" into adult entertainment, said planning manager Fred Searle.
However, that report is not due until the end of the year, so when changes might be made is anyone's guess.
Searle said the review will look at "all kinds" of adult entertainment, including burlesque, and it will now also have to take into account the changes made to provincial and federal laws.
"I think at this stage we're looking at all possibilities," he said.
BY EMMA GRANEY, THE STARPHOENIX MARCH 27, 2015 7:48 AM
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/life/massage+parlour+laws/10924511/story.html
The provincial government has changed the laws regarding strip clubs in Saskatchewan, but it won't wade into the debate about massage parlours any time soon.
Justice Minister Gordon Wyant said Thursday he will leave that ball squarely in the court of individual municipalities - though he would "encourage municipalities" to look at specific bylaws.
That seems to fly in the face of the reasoning behind the strip club regulation changes - which was partially to avoid the potential for human trafficking - but Wyant said any claims of "criminal activity happening in massage parlours" would be investigated.
He said there are "integrated law enforcement" initiatives between local police forces and the RCMP, "so that where human trafficking is taking place, there are appropriate steps being taken to prevent it."
Reiterating Wednesday's message from Premier Brad Wall, Wyant said changes to strip club legislation were made because "any time there's the opportunity ... to prevent exploitation, we should do that."
Wall said Wednesday that the government already supports community-based organizations that "assist women who are vulnerable" to exploitation, adding "I think you're going to see a government that wants to focus on what other opportunities exist."
Perhaps those opportunities will include supporting "other faith-based or community-based organizations" that are "on the front lines of the issues," he said.
But it seems as though that won't extend to regulating massage parlours. In Saskatoon, such establishments have to be licensed; the city restricts where they can be located, and all employees must be registered.
In Regina, even with the proliferation of massage parlours along Victoria Avenue, that's not the case. "I would certainly encourage the City of Regina, if they're not already doing it, to work on it and look at other models in other cities where that is happening," Wyant said.
The province's capital city is currently conducting a "comprehensive review" into adult entertainment, said planning manager Fred Searle.
However, that report is not due until the end of the year, so when changes might be made is anyone's guess.
Searle said the review will look at "all kinds" of adult entertainment, including burlesque, and it will now also have to take into account the changes made to provincial and federal laws.
"I think at this stage we're looking at all possibilities," he said.
Snuff Films, White Slavery and Trafficking: America's History of Hysterical Sex Fear and Fantasies
Pernicious myths and propaganda distort reality and endanger sex workers.
By Chris Hall / AlterNet March 22, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-rel...fficking-americas-history-hysterical-sex-fear
Of all the myths about porn, sex and crime to get a footing in popular culture, the belief in snuff films is one of the most improbable, yet enduringly resilient. For decades, journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials, and anti-porn crusaders talked about snuff films as if their reality had been as firmly documented as the address of the White House.
Forty years after the idea of snuff films was sold to America via a cheap marketing gimmick by filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay, the facts are easily accessible: unless you count a few videos made by serial killers for their own enjoyment or terrorist groups who post the decapitations of journalists to the Internet, no actual snuff films have ever been found. But the idea was easily sold to Americans because it told them their deepest fears were true—their widespread anxieties caused by radical changes in sexuality and gender roles in the post-1960s era and even deeper fears driven by racism.
The Findlay's 1976 film Snuff was originally a cheap horror film from Argentina called Slaughter. The two spliced a new ending into the original movie that ostensibly showed the film crew murdering a woman. Later, they sold the whole thing with the tagline: "The film that could only be made in South America—where life is CHEAP!"
The Findlays did not invent the idea of the snuff film, but they certainly breathed life into it. The rumors had been there for years, but their film appeared to bring snuff out of the realm of speculation and into the light of proof. Snuff films became a horror with actual breadth and depth. Even if that solidity was transformed into vapor as soon as it was examined, it was substantial enough to help fuel decades of anti-porn political activism and anti-sex work law enforcement.
The idea of snuff films may have been terrifying, but as marketed by the Findlays, it was also strangely comforting, particularly to white, middle- to upper-class Americans. It validated everything they suspected about the foreign cultures outside their own borders: they valued life less; they were sexual predators with no respect for women; and the well-being of American society demanded vigilance against them.
The story of snuff movie hysteria is just a single link in a very long chain of moral panics around sex and sex work which stretches back centuries. In 1910, the same sexualized racism that would later make it so easy to believe in snuff films culminated in the passage of the White Slave Traffic Act, more infamously known as the Mann Act. Just as the snuff film craze demanded that Americans be vigilant against South American culture and other “Third-World” areas where "life was cheap," the white slavery hysteria of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fed on fear of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia. Chicago reformer Ernest A. Bell saw a particular threat in the ownership of ice-cream parlors by foreigners:
One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement…The only safe rule is to keep away from places of this kind, whether in a big city like Chicago or in a large country town. I believe that there are good grounds for the suspicion that the ice cream parlor, kept by the foreigner in the large country town, is often a recruiting station, and a feeder for the ‘white slave’ traffic.
Like many others, Bell saw the fight against trafficking as not merely as a problem for law enforcement, but as an existential clash of cultures:
Unless we make energetic and successful war upon the red light districts and all that pertains to them, we shall have Oriental brothel slavery thrust upon us from China and Japan, and Parisian white slavery, with all its unnatural and abominable practices, established among us by the French traders. Jew traders, too, will people our [red light districts] with Polish Jewesses and any others who will make money for them.
The crusades against white slavery are an excellent example of how conservative impulses can nestle at the heart of liberal movements. Bell and his contemporaries who pushed for the passage of the Mann Act weren't the latter-day equivalents of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter; they were part of the so-called "Progressive Era," which laid the groundwork for the labor protections which the GOP has spent the last 30 years assiduously dismantling. Melinda Chateauvert, author of Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk, describes the movement against white slavery as being led in part by "proto-feminists" who wanted increased economic opportunities and suffrage for women.
Or some women, at least. The movements of the Progressive Era were notorious for excluding – and sometimes scapegoating – people of color, and the anti-traffic movement was no different. Framing the problem as "white slavery" erased not only women of color who were doing sex work, but the entire black American experience of slavery.
"[T]hey lifted the idea of slavery as African-Americans had experienced it, and claimed it was analogous to what ‘white women’ or ‘white girls’ were experiencing in becoming part of the sex industry," Chateauvert said when I talked to her. "So there's also a racial element to it in the sense that they were denying the realities of antebellum slavery in the United States. Which…continues to haunt us in the idea that we keep using the term 'modern slavery' as though, again, [sex work] is analogous to what was going on then."
But the problem, as Chateauvert says, is that there is no analogy to be made between antebellum slavery and the realities of sex work, now or in the Progressive Era. "You cannot analogize the two at all," she says. "There's not an entire government and citizenship that is bound and determined to enforce [sex work]. So, to analogize that is a very racialized understanding and cynical use of what the word slavery really means."
The legacy of the Mann Act was also highly racialized. While it may have been penned to quell nativist fears about predatory Italians, Jews and Chinese, it primarily turned out to be a weapon against African-American men, especially those who had relationships with white women. Jack Johnson, the first African-American boxer to hold the U.S. heavyweight championship, was convicted in 1913 of violating the Mann Act for driving a white woman he was involved with across state lines. In 1959, rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry was sentenced to five years in prison for driving an underage Apache girl across state lines; she was arrested for prostitution several weeks after they parted company.
The Mann Act remains law to this day, and its scope has expanded. Amendments to the law have made it gender-neutral and added clauses addressing child pornography. Its persistence and its origins in the mythology of white slavery show something important about how laws against sex work are made. Despite the compassionate rhetoric surrounding them, and the pleas of reformers that society has a duty to the vulnerable, they are more often than not shaped by something entirely different: The status quo's need to defend their own privilege against populations that they see as alien, strange and growing in power.
One thing that made the myths of white slavery and snuff films seem so fearsome was that they weren't just stories about bad people doing bad things. They depicted vast networks of deliberate, organized evil preying on society's most innocent. There are actual videos of murders by serial killers or terrorists, but things like that are distinct from what made the idea of snuff films so horrifying. A true snuff film would be one where the victim is specifically kidnapped and murdered in order to make the film and distribute it through a vast, secret criminal network. Similarly, white slavery would necessarily involve a nightmarish web of kidnappers and pimps working cohesively in a well-organized criminal subculture. Far more than mere fear of violent crime, the existence of snuff films and white slavery would reveal a shadowy, near-omnipotent “other” infiltrating respectable society.
The case of Monica Jones is an example of that same fear at work in the modern world. A black transgender woman attending Arizona State University in Phoenix, Jones was arrested in May 2013 on the nebulous charge of "manifesting prostitution." According to the city of Phoenix, that can include repeatedly trying to talk to passerby, gesturing to passing cars, or trying to determine whether someone is a police officer. In Jones's case, she allegedly “manifested prostitution” when she accepted a ride home from a bar. The person offering the ride was an undercover officer, and she was handcuffed as soon as she got into the car.
Jones was arrested as part of a sting operation called "Project ROSE" which sends more than 100 officers to sweep the streets of Phoenix for suspected prostitutes five weekends a year. Her arrest is a prime example of the issues around criminalizing sex work. First, trans women of color are disproportionately targeted in sweeps like Project ROSE. Enforcement of local vice laws relies heavily on profiling, and as in the early days of the Mann Act, some bodies and genders are more likely to be criminalized than others. Many cities even now continue to consider condoms to be valid evidence of intent to engage in sex work. In some areas, the combination of being trans, a person of color, and carrying condoms can add up to a criminal act in itself.
A 2012 study of the LGBTQ community in Jackson Heights, Queens, found that 59 percent of transgender respondents had ben randomly stopped by police. In contrast, only 28 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents said they had. According to the study:
Many transgender interviewees reported being profiled as sex workers when they were conducting routine daily tasks in the neighborhood. They commonly reported stops that seem to be without basis but in which the police officers involved later justified the stop by charging the person with prostitution-related offenses because condoms were found in their possession. These arrests were frequently accompanied by verbal and physical abuse.
Second, operations like Project ROSE rarely present themselves to the public as punitive law enforcement. Instead, their mission is to "rescue" sex workers. In Jones's case, she wasn't taken to jail. The officers led her, in handcuffs, to a local church where she was assessed for the Dignity Diversion Program, run by Catholic Charities. Her cell phone was taken from her. And she was not allowed legal counsel while she was questioned by a Project ROSE volunteer and a city prosecutor.
Technically, the Phoenix police department claims that people who are swept up by Project ROSE aren't arrested. Instead, it's called "contact." Those caught in the sting are given the (notably limited) choice between arrest and a six-month diversion program. Like most law enforcement toward sex work, the philosophy behind Project ROSE seems to be that sex workers need to be rescued – whether they want to be or not. Oddly, "rescue” in this context – from local operations like Project ROSE to federal programs like the FBI's annual Operation Cross-Country – almost always involves some form of arrest and prosecution.
Last year, I interviewed the late Shannon Williams, a member of the Bay Area Sex Work Outreach Project (SWOP-Bay). According to her, such operations are more likely to endanger sex workers. "Every study ever done asking sex workers about violence they've experienced, the majority of the violence they experience is from the police," she said. "The majority of the violence that sex workers experience is directly related to the fact that they are criminalized. So, if you're really worried about the violence that sex workers experience, decriminalize sex work, and that will solve two major problems. One, the police will no longer see us as criminals that they can abuse and treat like crap. And two, when other people abuse us, the police will take it seriously because they won't see us as criminals involved in our own abuse."
Trafficking is the latter-day equivalent to white slavery hysteria. Sex workers like Monica Jones are, by default, seen as people who have been trafficked and have no agency of their own. Once again, the media and certain activists have constructed a narrative of Eastern European and Asian countries engaging in a massive, illicit trade of sex slaves in the United States. As in the early 1900s, the threat of trafficking seems to make it imperative that Americans protect themselves against an existential threat from outside cultures.
It would be ignorant and irresponsible to claim that trafficking, sexual or otherwise, doesn't exist. However, the term is used so broadly that it's difficult to disentangle it from the mass of sexual and nativist fears that it's become associated with in popular culture. Trafficking is now an all-too-convenient excuse to tighten immigration laws and crack down on sex work of all kinds.
"My standard line is that if you're concerned about trafficking, change the immigration laws," Chateauvert says. "If you're concerned about people who work on the streets and do sex trade, why don't you work [to ensure] a living wage. The problem is not the sex industry per se. The problem is the laws that create the situations that enable coercion. We don't want to approach it that way, because that's too big a systemic addressing of the problem."
In their own way, her words are also reminiscent of the Progressive Era. In her 1910 essay The Traffic in Women, Emma Goldman critiqued the way that white slavery was used to ignore talking about the costs of more mundane forms of exploitation:
The procurer is no doubt a poor specimen of the human family, but in what manner is he more despicable than the policeman who takes the last cent from the street walker, and then locks her up in the station house? Why is the cadet [an archaic term for pimp] more criminal, or a greater menace to society, than the owners of department stores and factories, who grow fat on the sweat of their victims, only to drive them to the streets? I make no plea for the cadet, but I fail to see why he should be mercilessly hounded, while the real perpetrators of all social iniquity enjoy immunity and respect.
Last par on next post
Pernicious myths and propaganda distort reality and endanger sex workers.
By Chris Hall / AlterNet March 22, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-rel...fficking-americas-history-hysterical-sex-fear
Of all the myths about porn, sex and crime to get a footing in popular culture, the belief in snuff films is one of the most improbable, yet enduringly resilient. For decades, journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials, and anti-porn crusaders talked about snuff films as if their reality had been as firmly documented as the address of the White House.
Forty years after the idea of snuff films was sold to America via a cheap marketing gimmick by filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay, the facts are easily accessible: unless you count a few videos made by serial killers for their own enjoyment or terrorist groups who post the decapitations of journalists to the Internet, no actual snuff films have ever been found. But the idea was easily sold to Americans because it told them their deepest fears were true—their widespread anxieties caused by radical changes in sexuality and gender roles in the post-1960s era and even deeper fears driven by racism.
The Findlay's 1976 film Snuff was originally a cheap horror film from Argentina called Slaughter. The two spliced a new ending into the original movie that ostensibly showed the film crew murdering a woman. Later, they sold the whole thing with the tagline: "The film that could only be made in South America—where life is CHEAP!"
The Findlays did not invent the idea of the snuff film, but they certainly breathed life into it. The rumors had been there for years, but their film appeared to bring snuff out of the realm of speculation and into the light of proof. Snuff films became a horror with actual breadth and depth. Even if that solidity was transformed into vapor as soon as it was examined, it was substantial enough to help fuel decades of anti-porn political activism and anti-sex work law enforcement.
The idea of snuff films may have been terrifying, but as marketed by the Findlays, it was also strangely comforting, particularly to white, middle- to upper-class Americans. It validated everything they suspected about the foreign cultures outside their own borders: they valued life less; they were sexual predators with no respect for women; and the well-being of American society demanded vigilance against them.
The story of snuff movie hysteria is just a single link in a very long chain of moral panics around sex and sex work which stretches back centuries. In 1910, the same sexualized racism that would later make it so easy to believe in snuff films culminated in the passage of the White Slave Traffic Act, more infamously known as the Mann Act. Just as the snuff film craze demanded that Americans be vigilant against South American culture and other “Third-World” areas where "life was cheap," the white slavery hysteria of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fed on fear of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia. Chicago reformer Ernest A. Bell saw a particular threat in the ownership of ice-cream parlors by foreigners:
One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement…The only safe rule is to keep away from places of this kind, whether in a big city like Chicago or in a large country town. I believe that there are good grounds for the suspicion that the ice cream parlor, kept by the foreigner in the large country town, is often a recruiting station, and a feeder for the ‘white slave’ traffic.
Like many others, Bell saw the fight against trafficking as not merely as a problem for law enforcement, but as an existential clash of cultures:
Unless we make energetic and successful war upon the red light districts and all that pertains to them, we shall have Oriental brothel slavery thrust upon us from China and Japan, and Parisian white slavery, with all its unnatural and abominable practices, established among us by the French traders. Jew traders, too, will people our [red light districts] with Polish Jewesses and any others who will make money for them.
The crusades against white slavery are an excellent example of how conservative impulses can nestle at the heart of liberal movements. Bell and his contemporaries who pushed for the passage of the Mann Act weren't the latter-day equivalents of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter; they were part of the so-called "Progressive Era," which laid the groundwork for the labor protections which the GOP has spent the last 30 years assiduously dismantling. Melinda Chateauvert, author of Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk, describes the movement against white slavery as being led in part by "proto-feminists" who wanted increased economic opportunities and suffrage for women.
Or some women, at least. The movements of the Progressive Era were notorious for excluding – and sometimes scapegoating – people of color, and the anti-traffic movement was no different. Framing the problem as "white slavery" erased not only women of color who were doing sex work, but the entire black American experience of slavery.
"[T]hey lifted the idea of slavery as African-Americans had experienced it, and claimed it was analogous to what ‘white women’ or ‘white girls’ were experiencing in becoming part of the sex industry," Chateauvert said when I talked to her. "So there's also a racial element to it in the sense that they were denying the realities of antebellum slavery in the United States. Which…continues to haunt us in the idea that we keep using the term 'modern slavery' as though, again, [sex work] is analogous to what was going on then."
But the problem, as Chateauvert says, is that there is no analogy to be made between antebellum slavery and the realities of sex work, now or in the Progressive Era. "You cannot analogize the two at all," she says. "There's not an entire government and citizenship that is bound and determined to enforce [sex work]. So, to analogize that is a very racialized understanding and cynical use of what the word slavery really means."
The legacy of the Mann Act was also highly racialized. While it may have been penned to quell nativist fears about predatory Italians, Jews and Chinese, it primarily turned out to be a weapon against African-American men, especially those who had relationships with white women. Jack Johnson, the first African-American boxer to hold the U.S. heavyweight championship, was convicted in 1913 of violating the Mann Act for driving a white woman he was involved with across state lines. In 1959, rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry was sentenced to five years in prison for driving an underage Apache girl across state lines; she was arrested for prostitution several weeks after they parted company.
The Mann Act remains law to this day, and its scope has expanded. Amendments to the law have made it gender-neutral and added clauses addressing child pornography. Its persistence and its origins in the mythology of white slavery show something important about how laws against sex work are made. Despite the compassionate rhetoric surrounding them, and the pleas of reformers that society has a duty to the vulnerable, they are more often than not shaped by something entirely different: The status quo's need to defend their own privilege against populations that they see as alien, strange and growing in power.
One thing that made the myths of white slavery and snuff films seem so fearsome was that they weren't just stories about bad people doing bad things. They depicted vast networks of deliberate, organized evil preying on society's most innocent. There are actual videos of murders by serial killers or terrorists, but things like that are distinct from what made the idea of snuff films so horrifying. A true snuff film would be one where the victim is specifically kidnapped and murdered in order to make the film and distribute it through a vast, secret criminal network. Similarly, white slavery would necessarily involve a nightmarish web of kidnappers and pimps working cohesively in a well-organized criminal subculture. Far more than mere fear of violent crime, the existence of snuff films and white slavery would reveal a shadowy, near-omnipotent “other” infiltrating respectable society.
The case of Monica Jones is an example of that same fear at work in the modern world. A black transgender woman attending Arizona State University in Phoenix, Jones was arrested in May 2013 on the nebulous charge of "manifesting prostitution." According to the city of Phoenix, that can include repeatedly trying to talk to passerby, gesturing to passing cars, or trying to determine whether someone is a police officer. In Jones's case, she allegedly “manifested prostitution” when she accepted a ride home from a bar. The person offering the ride was an undercover officer, and she was handcuffed as soon as she got into the car.
Jones was arrested as part of a sting operation called "Project ROSE" which sends more than 100 officers to sweep the streets of Phoenix for suspected prostitutes five weekends a year. Her arrest is a prime example of the issues around criminalizing sex work. First, trans women of color are disproportionately targeted in sweeps like Project ROSE. Enforcement of local vice laws relies heavily on profiling, and as in the early days of the Mann Act, some bodies and genders are more likely to be criminalized than others. Many cities even now continue to consider condoms to be valid evidence of intent to engage in sex work. In some areas, the combination of being trans, a person of color, and carrying condoms can add up to a criminal act in itself.
A 2012 study of the LGBTQ community in Jackson Heights, Queens, found that 59 percent of transgender respondents had ben randomly stopped by police. In contrast, only 28 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents said they had. According to the study:
Many transgender interviewees reported being profiled as sex workers when they were conducting routine daily tasks in the neighborhood. They commonly reported stops that seem to be without basis but in which the police officers involved later justified the stop by charging the person with prostitution-related offenses because condoms were found in their possession. These arrests were frequently accompanied by verbal and physical abuse.
Second, operations like Project ROSE rarely present themselves to the public as punitive law enforcement. Instead, their mission is to "rescue" sex workers. In Jones's case, she wasn't taken to jail. The officers led her, in handcuffs, to a local church where she was assessed for the Dignity Diversion Program, run by Catholic Charities. Her cell phone was taken from her. And she was not allowed legal counsel while she was questioned by a Project ROSE volunteer and a city prosecutor.
Technically, the Phoenix police department claims that people who are swept up by Project ROSE aren't arrested. Instead, it's called "contact." Those caught in the sting are given the (notably limited) choice between arrest and a six-month diversion program. Like most law enforcement toward sex work, the philosophy behind Project ROSE seems to be that sex workers need to be rescued – whether they want to be or not. Oddly, "rescue” in this context – from local operations like Project ROSE to federal programs like the FBI's annual Operation Cross-Country – almost always involves some form of arrest and prosecution.
Last year, I interviewed the late Shannon Williams, a member of the Bay Area Sex Work Outreach Project (SWOP-Bay). According to her, such operations are more likely to endanger sex workers. "Every study ever done asking sex workers about violence they've experienced, the majority of the violence they experience is from the police," she said. "The majority of the violence that sex workers experience is directly related to the fact that they are criminalized. So, if you're really worried about the violence that sex workers experience, decriminalize sex work, and that will solve two major problems. One, the police will no longer see us as criminals that they can abuse and treat like crap. And two, when other people abuse us, the police will take it seriously because they won't see us as criminals involved in our own abuse."
Trafficking is the latter-day equivalent to white slavery hysteria. Sex workers like Monica Jones are, by default, seen as people who have been trafficked and have no agency of their own. Once again, the media and certain activists have constructed a narrative of Eastern European and Asian countries engaging in a massive, illicit trade of sex slaves in the United States. As in the early 1900s, the threat of trafficking seems to make it imperative that Americans protect themselves against an existential threat from outside cultures.
It would be ignorant and irresponsible to claim that trafficking, sexual or otherwise, doesn't exist. However, the term is used so broadly that it's difficult to disentangle it from the mass of sexual and nativist fears that it's become associated with in popular culture. Trafficking is now an all-too-convenient excuse to tighten immigration laws and crack down on sex work of all kinds.
"My standard line is that if you're concerned about trafficking, change the immigration laws," Chateauvert says. "If you're concerned about people who work on the streets and do sex trade, why don't you work [to ensure] a living wage. The problem is not the sex industry per se. The problem is the laws that create the situations that enable coercion. We don't want to approach it that way, because that's too big a systemic addressing of the problem."
In their own way, her words are also reminiscent of the Progressive Era. In her 1910 essay The Traffic in Women, Emma Goldman critiqued the way that white slavery was used to ignore talking about the costs of more mundane forms of exploitation:
The procurer is no doubt a poor specimen of the human family, but in what manner is he more despicable than the policeman who takes the last cent from the street walker, and then locks her up in the station house? Why is the cadet [an archaic term for pimp] more criminal, or a greater menace to society, than the owners of department stores and factories, who grow fat on the sweat of their victims, only to drive them to the streets? I make no plea for the cadet, but I fail to see why he should be mercilessly hounded, while the real perpetrators of all social iniquity enjoy immunity and respect.
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end of previous article
History does tend to repeat itself, but it doesn't have to. Whole libraries of sex work laws have been written and enforced because lawmakers listened to nothing other than their own fears and paternalism. The result is a system that, while purporting to protect and “save” sex workers, actually makes them more vulnerable in myriad ways. Our lawmakers should instead try listening to the wants and needs of the workers themselves. Perhaps then sex workers will get real protection, and justice.
History does tend to repeat itself, but it doesn't have to. Whole libraries of sex work laws have been written and enforced because lawmakers listened to nothing other than their own fears and paternalism. The result is a system that, while purporting to protect and “save” sex workers, actually makes them more vulnerable in myriad ways. Our lawmakers should instead try listening to the wants and needs of the workers themselves. Perhaps then sex workers will get real protection, and justice.
43 charges laid in Toronto human trafficking case
http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/43-charges-laid-in-toronto-human-trafficking-case-1.2305698
A second teenage victim has come forward in a Toronto human trafficking case in which three people were charged last month.
Two young men and a young woman were arrested at the end of February when a hotel noise complaint led to the discovery of a teen who said she was being forced into prostitution.
On Feb. 27, a security guard responded to a noise complaint at a hotel in the Bay Street and Dundas Street West area, where he found a 14-year-old girl. The girl told police she was "invited" to the hotel by three people, who then allegedly forced her to provide sexual services over the course of a week.
She earned a large sum of money after meeting with clients who responded to online ads, but was forced to turn over all the money to the suspects, police said. She was also confined to the room.
Following media coverage, Toronto police said a second victim came forward with a similar story.
A 16-year-old told police she had been picked up somewhere outside of the city, and driven to a Toronto hotel. She was confined in a hotel room for two days, forced to perform sexual services, before she managed to escape, police said at a news conference Tuesday.
As a result, the same suspects in the 14-year-old's case are facing further charges, Insp. Joanna Beaven-Desjardins said.
Sage Finestone, 21, Nicholas Faria, 19, and Natasha Robataille, 18, face a combined 43 charges relating to human trafficking. All three have been released on bail, Beaven-Desjardins said.
Police believe there may be more victims.
"It is further alleged that these three accused prey on vulnerable individuals, lure them away from friends and family and control their every move. They are led to believe they're entering a world of glamour and riches, which in reality they enter into a world of severe abuse," Beaven-Desjardins said.
Dawn Harvard, vice-president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, called human trafficking a "crisis" facing girls and women, especially those in the Aboriginal community.
"Our girls are not just missing, like somebody's wallet or somebody's keys. Our girls are being stolen from our communities, from our families and from our nations."
Harvard and Covenant House team leader Michelle Anderson spoke at the conference, reminding anyone who may be in a similar situation that there are resources set up to provide support, health care and housing.
"If you reach out to us, we will be there for you."
http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/43-charges-laid-in-toronto-human-trafficking-case-1.2305698
A second teenage victim has come forward in a Toronto human trafficking case in which three people were charged last month.
Two young men and a young woman were arrested at the end of February when a hotel noise complaint led to the discovery of a teen who said she was being forced into prostitution.
On Feb. 27, a security guard responded to a noise complaint at a hotel in the Bay Street and Dundas Street West area, where he found a 14-year-old girl. The girl told police she was "invited" to the hotel by three people, who then allegedly forced her to provide sexual services over the course of a week.
She earned a large sum of money after meeting with clients who responded to online ads, but was forced to turn over all the money to the suspects, police said. She was also confined to the room.
Following media coverage, Toronto police said a second victim came forward with a similar story.
A 16-year-old told police she had been picked up somewhere outside of the city, and driven to a Toronto hotel. She was confined in a hotel room for two days, forced to perform sexual services, before she managed to escape, police said at a news conference Tuesday.
As a result, the same suspects in the 14-year-old's case are facing further charges, Insp. Joanna Beaven-Desjardins said.
Sage Finestone, 21, Nicholas Faria, 19, and Natasha Robataille, 18, face a combined 43 charges relating to human trafficking. All three have been released on bail, Beaven-Desjardins said.
Police believe there may be more victims.
"It is further alleged that these three accused prey on vulnerable individuals, lure them away from friends and family and control their every move. They are led to believe they're entering a world of glamour and riches, which in reality they enter into a world of severe abuse," Beaven-Desjardins said.
Dawn Harvard, vice-president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, called human trafficking a "crisis" facing girls and women, especially those in the Aboriginal community.
"Our girls are not just missing, like somebody's wallet or somebody's keys. Our girls are being stolen from our communities, from our families and from our nations."
Harvard and Covenant House team leader Michelle Anderson spoke at the conference, reminding anyone who may be in a similar situation that there are resources set up to provide support, health care and housing.
"If you reach out to us, we will be there for you."
Pimps target teens at Montreal malls
Montreal police warning parents to watch for warning signs
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/pimps-target-teens-at-montreal-malls-1.3017126
Montreal police are warning parents that pimps are hanging around Montreal-area shopping centres, trying to lure teens into prostitution.
Police say pimps are using strategies that manipulate victims into thinking it's their own choice, then trapping those victims into a cycle of violence. Pimps are targeting malls, schools, youth centres, metro stations and bus terminals, said Montreal police officer Josée Mensales, who co-created the Survivors program, focused on sexual exploitation.
Mensales said a pimp will often approach teen after teen, using flattery and offering his phone number and eventually someone responds.
Teen recruited over several months
"Jennifer" — a woman whose identity CBC has agreed to protect — was at a Montreal-area mall when she met a person she thought was becoming a friend but instead turned out to be a pimp.
Jennifer says they were friends for several months before he convinced her to try working at a strip joint. Throughout those months, he gradually introduced her to a life of luxury, buying her expensive meals and thousands of dollars' worth of clothes and shoes. She says he took her to strip joints to make her feel more comfortable in that environment.
"I think a lot of teenagers are attracted to money and fame and luxurious things....quick money. So basically (after seeing) all of this for months and months I was telling myself, 'oh it's not that bad, maybe I could try. I'll try one night and see if I like it,'" she said.
Jennifer says she realized she was in trouble when the man demanded she hand over the money after her first shift. The situation became violent and he would threaten to expose her life in the sex industry to her family. "I didn't want my family to know so I was so scared and... there was a lot of stuff I was doing just for him not to go back to my family and tell them," she said.
Mensales says pimps often present the idea of stripping as temporary, when in reality, it is their way of forcing women into a life of sexual exploitation. "The victim doesn't feel like she's being exploited at first. She feels like she's actually working for a common plan — buying a condo, buying a car, within a couple of months it's paid for, that's what these traffickers, these pimps are presenting to their victims," Mensales said.
Signs of Trouble
Signs of trouble include a change in behaviour, sudden access to expensive clothes and jewelry, new tattoos (pimps often "brand" their victims), and friends your teen seems to know by nickname only, said Montreal police officer Diane Veillette, who co-founded the Survivors program.
Montreal police advise that if you see signs of trouble, seek help but be careful about what you say to your teen.
"Never say anything negative about the pimps because the victim will reject (you) as a parent because she will think you are judging her. They will close the door," Veillette said.
Mensales and Veillette say parents needing help can contact their local police station to get in touch with the Survivors program, which can put them in touch with various resources that can provide support.
Talk to your teens
They also highly recommend keeping communication lines open with teens before a problem ever arises. Discuss possible intentions strangers could have when they approach, possible ways the teen could answer, be clear that they can walk away if they do not feel safe, Mensales said. Also let them know they can call you at any time without judgment, she said.
Mensales also suggested to try to listen to the songs they're listening to, read out the lyrics, find out your teen's opinions about the messages in the music.
Jennifer says she's convinced her connection to her family — which she describes as a middle-class suburban family — helped her escape her situation.
When the violence got so bad that she feared for her life, Jennifer contacted police and filed a domestic abuse complaint. Her pimp eventually went to prison. Now she is back in school and moving on with her life.
The fact that Jennifer came from a happy home, with two loving parents — both professionals — does not surprise Mensales. "It doesnt mean because you're a professional... your child does very well at school — that means nothing. They potentially could be trapped into a situation like this one." she said.
Montreal police warning parents to watch for warning signs
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/pimps-target-teens-at-montreal-malls-1.3017126
Montreal police are warning parents that pimps are hanging around Montreal-area shopping centres, trying to lure teens into prostitution.
Police say pimps are using strategies that manipulate victims into thinking it's their own choice, then trapping those victims into a cycle of violence. Pimps are targeting malls, schools, youth centres, metro stations and bus terminals, said Montreal police officer Josée Mensales, who co-created the Survivors program, focused on sexual exploitation.
Mensales said a pimp will often approach teen after teen, using flattery and offering his phone number and eventually someone responds.
Teen recruited over several months
"Jennifer" — a woman whose identity CBC has agreed to protect — was at a Montreal-area mall when she met a person she thought was becoming a friend but instead turned out to be a pimp.
Jennifer says they were friends for several months before he convinced her to try working at a strip joint. Throughout those months, he gradually introduced her to a life of luxury, buying her expensive meals and thousands of dollars' worth of clothes and shoes. She says he took her to strip joints to make her feel more comfortable in that environment.
"I think a lot of teenagers are attracted to money and fame and luxurious things....quick money. So basically (after seeing) all of this for months and months I was telling myself, 'oh it's not that bad, maybe I could try. I'll try one night and see if I like it,'" she said.
Jennifer says she realized she was in trouble when the man demanded she hand over the money after her first shift. The situation became violent and he would threaten to expose her life in the sex industry to her family. "I didn't want my family to know so I was so scared and... there was a lot of stuff I was doing just for him not to go back to my family and tell them," she said.
Mensales says pimps often present the idea of stripping as temporary, when in reality, it is their way of forcing women into a life of sexual exploitation. "The victim doesn't feel like she's being exploited at first. She feels like she's actually working for a common plan — buying a condo, buying a car, within a couple of months it's paid for, that's what these traffickers, these pimps are presenting to their victims," Mensales said.
Signs of Trouble
Signs of trouble include a change in behaviour, sudden access to expensive clothes and jewelry, new tattoos (pimps often "brand" their victims), and friends your teen seems to know by nickname only, said Montreal police officer Diane Veillette, who co-founded the Survivors program.
Montreal police advise that if you see signs of trouble, seek help but be careful about what you say to your teen.
"Never say anything negative about the pimps because the victim will reject (you) as a parent because she will think you are judging her. They will close the door," Veillette said.
Mensales and Veillette say parents needing help can contact their local police station to get in touch with the Survivors program, which can put them in touch with various resources that can provide support.
Talk to your teens
They also highly recommend keeping communication lines open with teens before a problem ever arises. Discuss possible intentions strangers could have when they approach, possible ways the teen could answer, be clear that they can walk away if they do not feel safe, Mensales said. Also let them know they can call you at any time without judgment, she said.
Mensales also suggested to try to listen to the songs they're listening to, read out the lyrics, find out your teen's opinions about the messages in the music.
Jennifer says she's convinced her connection to her family — which she describes as a middle-class suburban family — helped her escape her situation.
When the violence got so bad that she feared for her life, Jennifer contacted police and filed a domestic abuse complaint. Her pimp eventually went to prison. Now she is back in school and moving on with her life.
The fact that Jennifer came from a happy home, with two loving parents — both professionals — does not surprise Mensales. "It doesnt mean because you're a professional... your child does very well at school — that means nothing. They potentially could be trapped into a situation like this one." she said.
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