Social policies do not have to be so dumb. – Laura Agustín
This article is so stupidly evil it’s almost fascinating:
A plan to publicly shame those who solicit sex with minors moved forward…with a draft ordinance covering Los Angeles County expected next week…Don Knabe has been pushing for a “shame campaign” since late last year…the…ordinance that would provide for the publication of names and booking photos of those convicted of soliciting prostitution or loitering with intent to solicit prostitution…Sheila Kuehl…questioned the practice of arresting people for loitering with intent, saying she thought the allegation amounted to “mind reading”…The Los Angeles Times editorial board, when Knabe first made his proposal, called the plan “anachronistic” and said it amounted to “sensationalism”…
Noah Berlatsky with another analogy for the absurdity of prohibition:
Should young women be allowed to enter the music industry? That seems like a preposterous question. But consider: Kesha…filed a lawsuit against her former producer Dr. Luke…alleging that he had sexually, physically, and mentally abused her for a decade…Kesha’s lawsuit also alleges that Sony music refused to take steps to stop the abuse, and even covered up for it…The situation is not rare; producers and managers like Phil Spector and Ike Turner have physically and mentally abused their artists for years…Shouldn’t there be laws in place to prevent women from entering an industry such as this where they can be abused and harmed? It should be clear why this is a bad idea. Heavy-handed restrictions on women would hurt women, not protect them. To make it illegal for women to be musicians and pop stars would be abusive and unfair in itself…And yet, when it comes to sex work, restricting women’s options in the name of “protecting” them is suddenly seen as reasonable, logical, and necessary…
How many more kids’ lives have to be destroyed before we stop the cops?
Police in a Pennsylvania school district have charged at least three kids—one of them just 11 years old—with distributing sexually explicit pictures of other minors. They…face juvenile detention, expulsion, and a variety of other life-altering consequences. This is somehow in their best interests—and the interests of kids everywhere—authorities claim…The levelling of charges…should not be viewed as some low-cost precondition to keeping kids safe, but a horrible, life-derailing consequence in and of itself…But we live in a country where paranoid delusions about safety provide cover for police to enforce absurd laws that make life miserable for kids…
Kenyan police are investigating the murders of 10 women working as prostitutes, a record number of attacks in one month that has led to fears of a serial killer…campaigners have called on the government to legalise prostitution and offer proper protection to vulnerable women. The police commander in the town of Nakuru, where four bodies were found, said an intense manhunt was under way…Hassan Barua said security had been improved in the area, but would not comment on whether one suspect was wanted for multiple murders…
When the issue of sex workers in Thailand is brought up, any discussion is usually characterized with words of “exploitation”, “coercion”, and “human trafficking”. However…Some…girls…[feel] that sex work [is] a means of emancipating themselves economically…A prevailing attitude…[is] that they feel better being paid for the sex they provide, rather than providing sex to a husband in a dead end relationship that they get nothing for. This was most prevalent in those who had been married before…Some even talk about providing sex as helping clients with a basic need…What was most common with those sex workers who had been prudent financially, was a satisfaction with their career as a sex worker…
The Mother Learns From Her Children
…Sex worker rights activists from around the world will join researchers and experts to present evidence to parliament in support of the decriminalisation of sex work. The day-long symposium, organised by the English Collective of Prostitutes and hosted by shadow chancellor John McDonnell, is an opportunity for parliamentarians and the public to sidestep the charged emotion of international debates on the nature of sex work and hear crime-related, humanitarian, and public health analyses from leading academics and campaigners…The symposium will compare the outcomes of Sweden’s criminalisation of the buying of sex with the full decriminalisation model that has flourished in New Zealand…activists from Thailand, Taiwan, Canada and South Africa will explain how criminalisation, rescue and rehabilitation programs have affected sex workers there. Rachel West, an American sex worker rights activist, will explore how a recent surge in anti-trafficking policing has disproportionately affected black sex workers and their clients…
Laura Agustín on the uselessness of the term “human trafficking”:
…There are young people now who have grown up surrounded by campaigning against trafficking, unaware there is conflict about how to define the term. Some want to dedicate energy to combating what is figured as a modern social evil. Some compare themselves with 19th-century anti-slavery advocates and feel outraged that anyone would question what they are doing…after…the idea of trafficking began its ascent…we who were interested in migration, sex work and labour policy realised it was useless for gaining equity or rights…the assumption is this human mobility to work is fomented by criminals who use force and coercion against their victims…Behind this over-simplification and over-focus on sex lie real social inequalities and oppressions: migration policies that favour middle- and upper-class jobs, out-of-date notions of the formal economy and productive labour, young people who want to get away from home, job-seekers willing to take risks to make more money, laws that make commercial sex illegal, laws that make sweatshops illegal and…more. To lump all this under a single term simply disappears the array of different situations, encourages reductionism and feeds into a moralistic agenda of Good and Evil…
“The Harvard of sex trafficking” has now morphed into “The Harvard of pimp school”. Or was it really the other way around? Does it really matter, when both phrases are utterly ludicrous?
Milwaukee has become “the Harvard of pimp school” and Wisconsin is a hub of human trafficking, a [self-declared] expert has said in the wake of an FBI sting last month in which nine adolescents were [arrested]…meaning Milwaukee is tied with Las Vegas for the third highest number of young people [arrested]…Denver topped the list, with 20…and Detroit was next with 19. Over the past four years, however, Milwaukee has consistently ranked among the top five cities in the nation for [arrests of underage sex workers]…
Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together:
A…Houston mother of two says she was raped in her hospital bed by a doctor…she reported the rape to nurses who responded with cold skepticism. She had to wait nearly two years for police to collect the alleged attacker’s DNA and make an arrest. And now…Dr. Shafeeq Sheikh…may get off scot-free in civil court. And Texas law may entitle her to only modest compensation from Sheikh’s employer at the time of the rape, the prestigious Baylor College of Medicine…Baylor doctors staff Ben Taub, which is a public hospital owned by Harris County. The doctor isn’t the only one who can deploy the “government unit” shield. Baylor lawyers have successfully argued that the college itself can be construed as a government entity and is entitled to the same protections a county institution would enjoy…Baylor can argue it is immune to the claim altogether…and…the Texas Supreme Court has ruled that rape in some circumstances is covered by medical malpractice laws…
Acting and Activism (Traffic Updates)
Anderson’s right at home in a movie based on ridiculous, exaggerated conspiracy theories:
Gillian Anderson wasn’t expecting to appear in the movie Sold. The actress, known for her role on The X-Files, had initially been approached by…director Jeffrey Brown…about just being part of the film’s campaign. She immediately said yes because she felt passionate about…sex trafficking…”High school students go missing and they are…forced into prostitution where there is violence and they don’t get paid for being a sex slave…And they get brainwashed into being a part of a community and they are terrified for their lives to escape”…
Tara Burns, Maxine Doogan and two others on “sex trafficking” in Alaska:
…Last year a woman dialed 911 in Anchorage and reported that she had been a victim of sex trafficking. When the [cops]…decided to follow up with her they…traveled to where she was working as an independent escort and…posed as a customer to book an appointment with her and meet her in a sexual context. Then [they] placed her in handcuffs, threatened her with felony charges, and told her nobody would be able to “actually” love her as she was. In response to a…complaint about this incident, the Department of Public Safety explained that this is a common “strategy of building rapport” with victims…
“Oakland City Council Takes Stand Against Sex Workers“. Seriously.
On October 20…[Oakland, California] endorsed…The “CEASE Network”…a project of Demand Abolition, a Boston-based program dedicated to “eradicating the illegal commercial sex industry” by going after “demand.” That means targeting clients…Demand Abolition is a program of Hunt Alternatives, the foundation of Swanee Hunt…the daughter of…oil tycoon H.L. Hunt…The groups fund law enforcement and public media campaigns and advocate for stronger legal penalties…when police agencies and district attorneys broadly target demand, they end up wasting resources on arrests and prosecutions that further criminalize adult sex workers and their clients…the Demand Abolition approach…[threatens] marginalized workers in the sex industry. That was a concern of government officials in San Francisco, which last year ended a brief partnership with Demand Abolition after facing a backlash from…sex workers…
My friend Savannah Sly is quoted extensively in this article about the fascist BEST program:
…a new public-private coalition that aims to have sites like backpage.com blocked in…workplaces…free speech advocates and…sex workers…are critical of the BEST Employer Alliance’s methods, warning that it errors on the side of censorship and endangers sex workers…If third-party Web hosting were akin to aiding in criminal activity, then Facebook and Twitter would quickly cease to exist…By pressuring credit card companies to divest, and now by pressuring employers to block the site en masse, the anti-Backpage set hopes to slowly choke the site out of its users…Savannah Sly, the director of…SWOP…said…”This painting of all clients as pedophiles reminds me of how we use to paint all homosexual men as pedophiles…If you shut down Backpage adult listings…You’re denying thousands and thousands of workers who need money. And if you shut down all of Backpage, you’re punishing hundreds of thousands of people who want access to roommate listings, sale items, general classifieds…all for the crimes of a very, very small few”…
In fact, I’m relatively sure she was riding in my car while giving this interview.
Re: Saving them from themselves
“How many more kids’ lives have to be destroyed before we stop the cops?”
I don’t know. Does anyone have a plan to stop them that actually stands a chance of success?
Reblogged this on SaneSurvivor.
If 11-year-olds are producing and distributing sexually explicit images, that’s good news. Despite the mass hysteria over sex abuse and various attempts to terrorize kids against sex, the opposite effect happens: kids become even more interested in sex than they were already. It’s tragic that some kids are going through the trauma of legal prosecution, but in reality they are courageous heroes.
The Keisha analogy hits vey close to the bone. It barely needs pointing out that if stripping and making soft-core porn are sex work (and they are), then Keisha, Minaj, and all the rest of the auto-tuned can’t sing but can dance crowd are sex workers.
“I fear that there is a great deal more filthy, indecent play amongst our girls and boys than we have any idea of.” – Ellice Hopkins, “On the Early Training of Girls and Boys: An Appeal to Working Women.” (London: Hatchards, 1882).
The thing I find fascinating is that people apparently do not remember what they did at that age.
I remember: https://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/learning-about-love/
(This comment is a truncated version of what was originally a quick, sloppy draft I wrote for a blog which never came to fruition—I’ve been thinking about creating a blog focusing on queer issues for years— and I subsequently amended it and tried posting it as a comment to an article on the teen sexting case, under the name “Attention Civil Libertarians and Journalists,” but it was rejected. So, um, I’m dumping it here. Your welcome?)
First of all, child pornography is wrong; people shouldn’t break the law. Kids need to be taught about the dangers of sexting, maybe even as part of their school curriculum. With that out of the way…
In 1982, in New York V. Ferber, the Supreme Court cemented the current
legal status of pornography involving minors, signaling a decades long march towards harsher and harsher laws.
Porn involving minors was said to: increase the market for such vice material (even though nothing resembling a market has existed since the 80s, the material currently almost entirely being exchanged for free on the “dark net”); lead to the re-victimizing of the victim upon watching; higher rates of child abuse, as people are driven to crime by the material (since the ruling, however, Milton Diamond and other researchers have shown that rates of sexual abuse were lower in societies where such material was legal); an audience of almost certain child molesters, or molesters in waiting (since disproven by a study by Michael Seto).
Over the years, penalties for possession began to surpass even those for actual cases of child molestation — and, in some cases, murder. In February of 2007, the Supreme Court refused to knock down a 200 year sentence for a well respected Arizona teacher convicted of viewing ~20 erotic images of boys; he had no prior convictions.
What’s particularly odd about all this is that videos that could loosely be called “snuff” films (with the caveat that they don’t meet the criteria of being made for profit) aren’t illegal to watch, even though the same logic behind CP law is just as applicable. For instance, is watching a video of a beheading “re-victimizing” the victim? Does doing so create a market for such material? Are viewers of shock videos likely sociopaths, possibly committing unreported acts such as animal cruelty? (To be clear, as a hardcore civil libertarian, I am in no way, shape, or form arguing for the criminalization of the viewing of said material, just using it to illustrate the absurdities in CP law.)
“Best Gore,” one of the most popular shock websites on the Internet, rakes in a breathtaking 15 to 20 million visitors a month, with patrons flocking to see videos such as a live man’s head being torn off with a chainsaw, kids filming themselves beating a man to death with a hammer for fun, and numerous animal torture videos—including a a cat being put in a blender—plus a plethora of material involving non-sexual maltreatment of children, all of which has been compiled on DVD. Here’s a link to the IMDB page, with its contents listed under the “parental guide”: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2730186/
Here’s the Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestgore.com
So it’s understood that there are people out there that, for whatever reason, get their jollies from watching awful things caught on video, and the viewing of the material is not the moral equivalent of making it—unless it involves a minor in a sexual context, in which case the attendant criminal sanctions are extreme: 10 minute torture/murder video involving an ice pick = legal to view; video of bearded 17 year old doing naked jumping jacks with boner = illegal to view, with 10 years in prison (and, if you live in the UK, even a cartoon depicting said hypothetical scenario would be illegal).
Cultural critic Richard Mohr: “Imagine making the possession of an image of a murder a more serious crime than the murder itself. We would do this only if we thought, first, that the mere existence of the murderous mind constitutes treason pure and simple; second, that the act of murder is chiefly a representation or extension of this mind rather than something culpable because harmful; and finally, that, as a representation or extension, the act is less robust than the image. We see this configuration of values as bizarre and counter factual in the murder case, but our culture replicates this absurdity precisely in its configuration of the pedophile mind…”
I leave you with four pertinent articles, the first by Judith Levine for Boston Review, the second by Barbara Hewson, from Spiked, the third a study showing that the majority of sexual abuse of children, perhaps 80%, isn’t committed by pedophiles (the supposed viewers of the aforementioned vice material), and the last an APA study showing that emotional and physical abuse have effects as bad as, or worse, than sexual abuse (in turn calling into question the notion that representations depicting sexual abuse are unique):
http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/judith-levine-sally-mann-photography-child-pornography
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/6800#.VNcRxIZOKc0
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141008131200.htm
Thanks for the background information, but I would disagree with making sweeping statements like “child pornography is wrong” without carefully defining your terms, which is convenient if somebody wants to sound authoritative without revealing the monstrousness of what it suggests. What exactly do you mean by wrong? What is pornography? What is a child?
Here’s are some likely definitions: Anything some individuals don’t like or disapprove of is “wrong.” Any text or image that is remotely related to human sexuality is “pornography.” Anybody one day before midnight of their 18th birthday (the magic moment) is a “child.”
People shouldn’t break the law? So by that logic if the law becomes: “Kill all Jews,” we should do exactly that, and if someone asks why we kill Jews we would explain: “Because people shouldn’t break the law.” As the rest of your comment explains, I think we certainly should refuse to obey vague laws that promote body shame – especially concerning so-called children.