For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. – H.L. Mencken
American politicians just love “feel good” laws, legislation grounded entirely in emotion and usually labeled with some vague designation including words like “safe”, “protect”, “victim”, “child” or the name of a dead little girl. Such laws usually result from moral panics or lurid news stories, accomplish little to nothing for actual victims of actual crimes, trample on civil rights and are impossible for legislators to oppose for fear of being labeled “soft on crime” or some equally meaningless adjectival phrase. And why do politicians love them? Because they require no research, debate, thinking or other actual work and allow those who support them to blend into the herd, mooing loudly while standing beneath the flag (cue patriotic music). If a news story reports that a law is passed unanimously or near-unanimously, if the chief executive signs it quickly and with great fanfare, if it’s promoted by a variety of special interest groups (especially “anti-crime” groups), and most notably if it was sponsored by one member of each half of the Big Government Party, you can bet the farm you’re looking at a feel-good law whose chief function is to misdirect public attention from whatever shenanigans the politicians are up to at the moment. Here’s a recent example from Illinois, reported on August 6th in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Gov. Pat Quinn on Saturday announced a new law that will give victims of sex trafficking who have been charged with prostitution an opportunity to clear their names through court. “Sex trafficking is a truly reprehensible crime that preys on the most vulnerable. Victims deserve a chance to clear their records and rebuild their lives,” Quinn said. Illinois previously passed the 2006 anti-trafficking law and 2010 Safe Children Act, which helps support victims who were forced into the sex trade and have criminal records as a direct result of being trafficked…Senate Bill 1037 allows defendants who are victims of human trafficking at the time of their prostitution convictions to file a motion to vacate the conviction if the defendant’s participation in the offense was the result of being a victim…Prostitution convictions limit victims’ abilities to access housing, employment education, immigration status and parental rights, according to the governor’s office. The bill also creates a new filing timeline for victims of sex trafficking because they often endure years of abuse at the hands of traffickers and customers before they are able to seek help.
“The most important thing about Senate Bill 1037 is that it makes sure that the judicial system has a mechanism to ensure that a person who has been the victim of a crime is not automatically considered a criminal,” [bill sponsor Toi] Hutchinson said. “It is good public policy to protect women and children who have been taken advantage of in this most heinous way. They can take the necessary steps to rebuild their lives and become functional members of society after suffering trauma of that magnitude.”
“Victims of human trafficking are often forced into prostitution and other crimes against their own will, and too many of them are being prosecuted as criminals,” [bill sponsor Karen] Yarbrough said. “When we have evidence that involuntary human trafficking was the cause of the crime, even though the victim may not have had the ability or representation to prove it during trial, we must do the right thing and reverse their conviction so they can move on with repairing their lives.” The bill takes effect Jan. 1 and was supported by a variety of institutions, leaders and anti-crime organizations…
There’s nothing wrong with the core concept in principle; obviously somebody forced to commit a crime should not have to suffer penalties for that crime. But as we have seen, coerced prostitution is extremely rare (roughly 1.5% of adult prostitutes and less than 16% of underage ones), and the majority of those are involved in coercive relationships rather than the true “sex slavery” the media, trafficking fetishists and politicians are so aroused by; I’d be very surprised if more than a hundred women in the entire state of Illinois (roughly one-tenth of the state’s statistical share of coerced prostitutes) could truly qualify as “trafficked” in any meaningful way. Even then, the victim would have to be first arrested and convicted of prostitution before being able to take advantage of this law, and that would require her being able to “prove” that she was “trafficked” by whatever criteria the law establishes (one of which is certainly fingering one or more men to take her place in jail). Furthermore, if the Illinois law is anything like New York’s “Safe Harbor Law”, it’s virtually impossible for the majority of prostitutes to take advantage of it:
The Safe Harbor Act, along with initiatives like it that [Rachel] Lloyd and others are promoting across the country, are NOT simple or solutions for most of us. First, they don’t stop arrests of young people for prostitution-related offenses, or the police abuses of young people in the sex trades, including police trading sex in exchange for promises of dropping charges. They also don’t stop arrests of young people in the sex trades that involve “charging up,” i.e. charging young people with weapons or drug-related offenses which may be easier to prove. Second, while they may stop criminal prosecutions of young people for prostitution-related offenses, these laws do not eliminate detention and punishment of young people involved in the sex trades, they just shift young people from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts to family court systems, where they can remain entangled until the age of 21. And, in the end, only a very narrow group of people can benefit from these laws.
For example, in order for the Safe Harbor Act to benefit a young person, they must be under 16 and arrested for the first time and must never have been in family court before. Young people between the ages of 16-18 continue to be charged in adult court. Even those under 16 who can meet the Act’s criteria must still convince a judge that they are a “victim” of a “severe form of trafficking” – a hurdle that…is almost impossible for young girls of color…When young people can’t respond to police and prosecutors’ pressure to give up a “pimp” they never had they get punished by law enforcement and service providers alike, and find themselves back on the delinquency and detention track. Even when…[the law] is found to apply to a young person, they must still follow the rules a family court judge sees fit, which can involve attending a court-mandated program…many of which enforce Christianity on participants…
And even if Illinois’ version of the law corrects the problems (which is highly unlikely considering that Lutheran Social Services of Illinois and the Sheriff of Cook County, Tom Dart, are among its supporters), it still leaves unquestioned the idea that the state has the power to regulate women’s sexuality and to punish women for the “crime” of having sex on their own terms, and that the only way for a woman to avoid state-sanctioned persecution is for her to “prove” to busybodies that she was the “victim” of a man or men, thus surrendering her adult agency to the court by admitting to an inability to manage her own sexual affairs.
One Year Ago Today
The conclusion of “Regulars”, in which I discuss those repeat clients who were, for one reason or another, more difficult to deal with.
Sometimes I think this nation will collapse under the weight of it’s own laws.
Over 200 years of lawmaking in this country – thousands of laws – you cannot be aware of them all.
I would vote for any man or woman who said … “Hey, make me President – and I will VETO any law that comes to my desk! NO NEW LAWS for … at least eight years whilst I’m in that position!”
We really don’t need any more laws. On anything.
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein proposed that there was no point in having a bicameral legislature if they are both going to do the same thing. He suggested the idea that the job of the upper house could be to constantly review all laws, bringing each up to a vote in turn with only a simple majority required to repeal them. Furthermore, he suggested that for the lower house to enact any new law require a two-thirds majority, on the grounds that if a third of the people think a law is bad, it probably is.
I was reading a book on Scottish culture and one of the interesting things about it was that in Scotland, if a law is ignored or flaunted for several years, it’s automatically considered repealed, a principle called Desuetude.
What a great concept! Think of how much better the world would be if every government were forced to do that; no more stupid, obscure laws being dredged up to harass people with, and even the politicians would be happy because they wouldn’t have to do anything except let nature take its course.
They’d be extra happy because, with so many laws automatically repealing, they’d have to repass the ones they keep. 😀
they = politicians
Oops!
Desuetude is indeed a wonderful idea. I’d never heard the term before, but that link (for which I thank you) makes it very clear.
It isn’t perfect, of course. Some laws are passed with sunset clauses, and yet are renewed when the time comes (Bush tax cuts, PATRIOT Act). But it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing at all.
I wish Heinlein would have lain off the politics and just stuck to telling great science fiction stories. It’s painfully obvious that his beef with democracy (direct or representative) was that it allowed a voice to those less wise than himself. IOW, the guy was a bit high on himself and it shows.
If you can say that,you haven’t read enough Heinlein.
Maybe not. I don’t claim to have read everything he wrote, and some of his more famous works have never passed before my eyes. I’ve read Stranger in a Strange Land but not Starship Troopers; I’ve read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Glory Road but not The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I could pair up other read/not-read couplets like that, so yeah.
Then again, whenever anybody quotes him on any political or governmental subject, it’s always something that would seem to support exactly the opinion I expressed above. Maybe the man is being quoted out of context, or maybe it’s some phase he went through.
Out of context. His main problem with “democracy” is the same as mine; tyranny by a mob is not automatically superior to tyranny by an elite merely because they’re the majority. So the powers of that mob to infringe the rights of the individual must be limited, but they’ll always find a way to overcome the limitations so Man must be free to expand outward if individual freedom is to be protected. That sort of thing.
I’d rather not be under any tyranny (duh 😉 ), but if I had to be I trust the average national populace over the average king.
But the rights of the individual are important, for a lot of reasons. In any kind of democracy (like our republic) it’s even more important because it lets majorities change over time. This can be seen in the US with things as big as voting rights or as small as the popularity of anime. Hardly anybody today thinks that voting rights should be restricted by race or sex (*), but if the right to vote hadn’t been protected when it was unpopular, it wouldn’t be so popular today. If otaku had been told they couldn’t have their conventions because “nobody likes that stuff,” it might never have gotten popular and then what would I sing at karaoke?
Really, one of the wisest things the Founders and Framers did was this dynamic tension between democracy and liberty.
(*) There are people who want to via voter ID laws and such because it helps their side win elections, but the idea that “that kind of people are too stupid to vote” is no longer popular in any racial demographic.
I’m pretty sure the first house only required a one third minority to strike down a law, symmetrically with the other house.
I read an article a while back about different groups of people who tried to count just the number of laws on the Federal books. None of them were sure that they had counted all of them and they all came up with different numbers.
I worry that this law is more insidious than that. If it is passed, it’s possible that hundreds or thousands of voluntary whores will claim they were trafficked to get their convictions removed. Few of these requests will be granted, of course. But you can bet that trafficking fetishists will be citing the number of whores claiming “I was trafficked!” as proof of how extensive the problem is. So it will provide no actual help (and certainly not what decriminalization would) but give the neofeminists their biased data. These laws often wind up being a “head-we-win; tails-you-lose” proposition.
YOU are exactly right – and it’s what I was thinking too. You get busted for prostitution, you’re now a sex offender for life. You’re constantly tracked by the cops and can’t live next to any schools …
Then along comes this law – to completely remove your pain – you just have to …
LIE.
It’s kind of the same choice that Maggie was forced to make when she got busted and the judge made her lie in court.
Yes, exactly; that’s what I was alluding to in the last paragraph. The “justice system’s” deal will probably be that the “victim” has to name men (preferably a large number of them) to be branded as felons in order to dismiss her misdemeanor, the trafficking mythology is supported, prostitutes’ agency is undermined, the neofeminists are happy because men are being victimized in women’s place, and we’re one step closer to imposition of the Swedish Model.
Noooo! Not the Swedish model!
I really hope that stays in Sweden. 😀
It hasn’t penetrated Denmark yet – where prostitution is completely legal, although there are some pols trying to push the Swedish model there. And Germany? I don’t see it ever catching on there – especially with there culture of FKK’s (speaking of which … MY GOD! Where were these FKK’s when I was a single man????!!)
Unfortunately, it hasn’t stayed in Sweden; it has infected Norway and Iceland and Ireland, France, Israel and several American jurisdictions (most notably Colorado and Maryland) have been exposed to the contagion.
Speaking of the Swedish model: this may be OT but I’m currently reading “The Girl Who Played With Fire”. I’m supposed to be getting all worked up about sex trafficking (Larsson seems to favor the Swedish model) but I find myself asking, “Well, are they really trafficked against their will? Maybe this problem would go away if the Swedish model weren’t in place.” Damn you, Maggie! You’re making me question assumptions! 🙂
(Larsson does inadvertently make two points against the Swedish model. First, that men in power will frequently bypass it — it only applies to us plebs. Second, that it creates a huge incentive to keep whores quiet, either by violence or threats.)
If you really want to start questioning “trafficking” mythology, you need to read Laura Agustín’s Sex At the Margins, available on her website. Among her more recent points made in her website essays: the vast majority (80%+) of those accused of being “illegal aliens” in Europe are male, but the vast majority (80%+) of those claimed to be “victims of human trafficking” are female. Agustín suggests that what we’re actually seeing is one phenomenon (undocumented migration) interpreted as voluntary for men and involuntary for (passive, incompetent) women.
I have always thought the most accurately descriptive scene of the human condition in ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’ was at the very end of the book. The residents of the Moon, having achieved their independence, have to create their own governing system. During the ‘let’s-all-get-together-and-legislate’ they immediately forget about their own oppressive past and turn into moralizing busybodies intent on controlling the behavior, of their neighbors, they never liked but could never stop before because they didn’t have . . . POWER.
It’s very depressing that, in the main, humans are so unreflective and will probably always remain so.
“…humans are so unreflective and will probably always remain so.”
Yep. Our duct-taped-evolved biology — being just good enough to ensure our species will reproduce and survive, but far from optimal or consistent and even intra-conflictive at so many points — leaves us as our own self-deluded enemy.