W5 report: Canadian women caught in the sex trade

[Doc Holliday]

I watched this on Sunday and found it very interesting. Even though the stories center around Toronto-area women, this W5 episode will likely be of interest to anyone involved with the sex business:

W5 episode on Canadian women caught in the sex trade

 

[curious2012]

They say 90% of the women are there against their will. Do you guys (and girls) think this applies to most of the agencies and even indies in Mtl?

 

[Jay8964]

How the hell could they possibly get statistics on this stuff? They're only seeing the cases that go wrong or the few women that openly want to talk about it to the press. Obviously there's always gonna be some poor girl being exploited somewhere but comeon 90%??

 

[Jaxan]

I certainly hope not, my stomach turned after reading that article. I wouldn't partake in anything like that, if this was the case.

 

[alphonso]

I think the girl that was interviewed just fucked up the rest of her life.

 

[hungry101]

I know several girls in the USA that are Independants. The major problem they have is constant harassment of LE. We see all of this crap research/junk science on the TV in the USA like the article posted. For example, Just last year there was a claim by some muckraker on Fox that there were thousands of underage prostitutes working in the Atlanta area. They said they start out as dancers and then move onto prostitution. They even had a former sex worker come forward. She proclaimed to be a crusader against prostitution and the evil men that pay for sex come forward. She was some ugly fat black woman that none of us would be in the same room with. In this case it was just a publicity stunt. We all know a 14 year old girl when we see one and all the girls that dance in the Atlanta area bars are licensed. come on, a few girls fal through the cracks but thousands of 14 year old girls? The problem is that SPs and Johns cannot come forward and and try to counter these crap arguments. These people can report anything they want and it will go unchallenged. 90% are coerced they say? This is probably true. they are coerced by the designers and marketers that can sell an ordinary hand bag that should sell for 25$ but because it has some designer signature it now sells for 500$.

Prostitution needs to be legalized and brought out of the dark shadows everywhere.

 

[daydreamer41]

I think this video was already posted here, but it does not matter. I think the conversation is very worthwhile.

I don't think any of the advertised agencies here are forcing any of the women, because they readily switch between agencies.

The situation you have in this video is the small time pimp who lures girls who he may meet in a bar. He accumulates a small stable. His girls are either on the street or they are handled on backpage, but more likely the street.

I agree with hungry. Prostitution should be legalized, but regulated or zoned. Most LE investigations and arrests come from complaints by ordinary citizens living near an incall or massage place. A dangerous trend that I have read about is girls don't carry condoms because condoms are used as evidence. And some girls will allow guys to do bbfs if the guy doesn't have a condom. LE is making matters worse not better in that situation.

If prostitution was at least zoned and placed in an area where no residences or businesses who would not want to be in the zone, then there would be no complaints from citizens. Prostitution laws are counter-productive.

 

[Bat Crusader]

The 90% number comes from a 2003 "International study", so If you think of Amsterdam, Cambodia, the 90% might be closer than we think.

Even here, I go for indy's to make shure to stay away from this.

I always wonder about incall in cheap motels or when you see adds where a search for the phone number results in a different girl every couple of weeks or months

 

[Doc Holliday]

I doubt there's a precise way to figure out how many girls do this against their will. What we saw was simply a cop's personal assessment of the situation.

I also believe it depends on what the definition is for girls 'working against their will'. I've met many girls in the past (and present) who support a 'boyfriend' a.k.a. pimp. Sure, it appears that they work as escorts on their own free will, but many of them are pressured to do it by their so-called 'boyfriend'. Even 'independents' can be found caught up in this 'situation'.

I know several girls who've put themselves over their heads in debt (cars, trips abroad, nightlife, shopping, expensive restaurants, street drugs, etc) and feel they have no choice but to work as escorts in order to keep up with their debts (and lifestyle). They don't really enjoy fucking & sucking a guy's dick for money, but that's the easiest way they know to make a fast buck in order to pay their debts and maintain that lifestyle they've grown accustomed to.

 

[daydreamer41]

I know several girls who've put themselves over their heads in debt (cars, trips abroad, nightlife, shopping, expensive restaurants, street drugs, etc) and feel they have no choice but to work as escorts in order to keep up with their debts (and lifestyle). They don't really enjoy fucking & sucking a guy's dick for money, but that's the easiest way they know to make a fast buck in order to pay their debts and maintain that lifestyle they've grown accustomed to.

I think there is a big difference between a girl being held as a slave, not being paid, or just fed, while some dirt bag profits from the money she is paid or is paid for her for having sex with many different guys, and a girl trying to make a fast buck because she is in over her head in debt. A women doing prostitution who is in debt or supporting a high cost lifestyle is not a slave.

In the film you see the type of human trafficking where the traditional pimp who seduces and dominates women. I think the other type of trafficking is where organized crime actual promises girls non-sex work in another country, and she finds herself isolated in a country where she does not know the language and forced to be a prostitute. In Canada or the US, this situation is probably a minority, and if it exists, the women are either from Asia or Eastern Europe, and they know no or little English.

 

[gugu]

It is so amazing to see the USA give moral lessons on prostitution to countries all over the world while they are the ones having the highest rates of arrest of those who they themselves call victims.

We have good reasons, of course, to be concerned about women caught in this trade against their will. However, we have no reasons to believe that there is a growth of this phenomenon neither in Canada nor in the USA. There are no good statistics about it. The only group who may have any empirical basis to assess the criminality in prostitution countrywide is the RCMP. The last estimates of human trafficking by the RCMP were made in 2005 and, by the way, the report providing them was withdrawn from the RCMP Internet site since. My guess is that someone with a minimum scientific background has told them they look ridiculous putting out these numbers, nothing else then “educated guess” by some guy who was probably pushed by the USA State Department to provide Canadian estimates for their TIP Report.

Statistics on cases that went through courts have increased in both countries, but it is mainly due to law revisions. Human trafficking in the origins meant mainly cross border transportation of forced labour (the TIP reports, by the way, remains committed primarily to this concern). Internal trafficking became a big concern latter. It is not a big issue in Canada and USA, but we became very suspicious about South-East Asian countries, primarily Thailand, where huge sex sectors developed, fuelled by women coming from the countryside by the thousands. Our internal statistics were boosted otherwise to include the transportation of exotic dancers from one place to the other (it’s part of that specific job to go around clubs in area as the girls, or the human traffickers, decides it is). But even then, court cases do not convince us that human trafficking is on the rise.

I just simply do not believe that now a days, in my country, you abduct girls and that they go along. Loverboys exist, but they pray on the extreme of the spectrum: vulnerable young girls. To imagine that this is the bulk of sex workers in Canada is way beyond reason.

I see the sex industry the other way around. I think the ones having the high end in this business are the sex workers themselves and I am absolutely certain that no agency owner would tell the contrary.

It’s a quite different thing in Europe at the moment. All the west European countries are confronted the human trafficking problem since the Shengen Agreement in 1985 (introducing cross border work mobility) and the progressive inclusion of the Balt countries and Slovakia in the years 2000 and of non EU countries later, notably Romania and Bulgaria in the Shengen Area. Girls from these countries literally flooded the West European cities during those years. The prostitution scene was literally transformed. The migrants contributed to keep the prices still, even lowering them at the lower end. The older Paris Bois de Boulogne sex workers will tell you: many French women have quit sex working, some have upgraded to bawdy houses in Belgium and a few survived on the street scene with less revenue.


The big question is: what part of it is human trafficking and what part is independent economic mobility aspiration by those women often living in third world local conditions (same for urban work migration in South-East Asia btw)? No one questions that the Shengen Agreements have given opportunities to organized networks of human trafficking. It is a real concern. There is an obvious increase there. Inevitable. In basic economics terms, the supply side of prostitution increases with inequalities.

The American sociologist Howard Becker has carved a great concept in the sixties to describe those who take the initiative of labelling to persuade the public opinion on moral issues. He calls them the moral entrepreneurs. The don’t argue on statistics. That’s a losing ground for them. They argue on definitions, here labelling prostitution as human trafficking and more generally as violence.

The anti prostitution groups have literally high jacked the anti trafficking agenda in the last decade. The more it goes on, the more the anti trafficking movement gets upset about it. The problem for them is that they don’t necessarily want their work concentrated mainly on sex work issues. They are less and less able to push their concerns about other working conditions that are more convenient for transnational corporations. I suggest listening to Kiara Skrivankoya of Anti-trafficking International on that issue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H44IyOJgLnU at minute 45.

 

[curious2012]

It would be interesting to have some of our lady friends chime in on this subject from their perspective.

 

[Jaxan]

I concur with Curious, it would be enlightening.

 

[MTL Expos]

When TV programs want high rating, they will do stories on sex.

 

[Violet Blake]

I didn't watch this video, because I could probably already tell you what it says. The anti-prostitution agenda likes to regurgitate the same old "facts" (aka: total lies). CTV seems to have some odd obsession with the sex trade, always from the abolitionist view. In one video they did last year in Vancouver, they went undercover at a massage parlour and showed the faces of some of the women working there. Yeah, that makes me believe you really care about the women's well-being

This wasn't CTV, but I recall another "expose" in Saskatchewan where the police officer interviewed declared that "10 out of 10 women have pimps" and when the girls would tell her they didn't, she just didn't believe them.

People in the "rescue industry" (they like to think; in reality they do more harm than good, because they don't actually care about women, they are simply anti-prostitution) like to give you statistics like this, like the 90% are forced into it. You might've also heard that the average age women enter the sex trade is 13. All these are complete and total lies. Usually when they gather this "data" it's taken only from street based sex workers. Well it's a fact that street sex workers only make up 10-20% of the sex trade. Obviously taking a small sample from the minority of a population is just plain stupid. But it fits their agenda, and because ethical journalists don't seem to exist anymore, "reputable" news sources repeat these numbers.

Around the time of the Olympics in Vancouver, police did around 60 raids on massage parlours. Guess how many instances of human trafficking they found? One. And those were underage girls born in Canada. You might think, well what's the harm if they found that one? The harm is that arbitrarily raiding every massage parlour and subsequently closing it is dangerous. After that, many of the girls had to work back on the street, and I believe it was 3 of them who were killed. This is one of the many reasons the anti-prostitution/rescue industry is harmful, and videos like this are harmful.

There's one interesting study that shows just how far off alot of these supposed statistics are. It is of only underage street sex workers, but I bring it up because there's two interesting things found here; that almost half the underage sex workers are boys, and that only 10% of all the sex workers interviewed had a pimp. But again, this is only street sex workers and only underage. The study makes that quite clear, unlike these other people with an agenda who use one false fact to cover the entire sex trade.

http://www.westword.com/2011-11-03/news/child-sex-trafficking-stereotypes-demolished/

Legalization vs decriminalization:

A few people mentioned legalization, and how Germany is a model to follow. Actually, legalization has many problems. Decriminalization is the best method, and New Zealand is probably the best model to follow. The main problems with legalization is that allows the government to control everything you and I do. For example, they might demand that clients get regular STD testing, or that you need to provide ID to the sex worker/agency. And for sex workers, we would need to get licenses, which are exorbitant compared to any other comparable business, which means vulnerable sex workers won't be able to afford it, they'll be criminilzed, and we're back to the problems we have now. Not to mention licenses usually mean a sex worker's real name is attached to that license and publicly available.

Decriminilzation lets you and I have greater control on how the sex trade should be run. I mean we've been doing that forever, and we do it pretty well. It basically just means the government and police butt out, and if sex workers or clients need help they can come to them safely. The government obviously will still try and butt in, but at least the people who actually know how this industry works have more of a say of how to operate it.

Obviously sex trafficking exists, but so does human trafficking in other industries, and that get's absolutely no attention. Why? Because it doesn't involve sex, and that's what this comes down to. The rescue industry is anti-sex trade, they are not interested in helping sex workers. So take these kinds of videos and anything claiming massive hysteria around sex trafficking with a grain of salt. Because it doesn't help real victims of sex trafficking, nor does it help the majority of sex workers (ones who are doing it with a degree of choice), and it doesn't help you, the client, either.

 

[hungry101]

Well said Violet.

 

[lafayette]

I find the asian agencies in montreal a bit iffy. always posting that they got a new girl straight from china, korea, etc. and the girls dont seem to be there long but new ones are always popping up.

 

[BadChap]

At the other end of the spectrum, some sex workers are bragging about making $1 million a year!

http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/15/technology/silicon-valley-sex-workers/index.html

"I consider myself to be a small business owner," she says.

The Bay Area's high wages and concentration of young guys with disposable income have made it a magnet for sex workers -- a broad term that can refer to a number of services, including sexual massage, prostitution, and escort and dominatrix work. "It seems like a lot of out-of-town providers come into town to work in the Valley," says "Karen," who charges $500 an hour and caters to the area's tech executives. (To protect their privacy, CNNMoney agreed to use pseudonyms or the professional names of those we spoke with for this story.)


:smile::thumb::amen:
I'd say legalize sex work for adults, allowing supply and demand to reach equilibrium and thus human-trafficking and "forced" sex work will decline dramatically. Heck, governments can collect taxes on this trade! Use the tax revenues to protect both the workers and customers!

 

[oldbutartful]

Its probably true that a percentage of women are forced into the way of life. Most of the indies I have met do it for cash and are quite open about it. That said I have visted a couple of Massage Parlours where the service appeared "forced" and have not returned. I mainly use independents. ( when the pay master allows ) as the above two posts indicate an input from the Girls themselves would be probably more exact.

 

[Yme]

Wow. I'm floored. Beauty and brains. Such a turn on!!!