That seems weird, since the jury did not find him guilty of any crime in which he supposedly earned that illegal money — the jury deadlocked on 84 of the remaining charges against him and found him not guilty of the 85th. That seems like the sort of inconsistency which should result in the conviction being overturned, but in a world where you can be convicted of lying to cover up a crime which never occurred, I’m not counting on common sense prevailing.

Several articles have noted that the crime carries a sentence of “up to 20 years,” which would be an especially harsh sentence for the 75-year-old Lacey. However, as Ken White always points out, such maximum sentences are usually meaningless. Federal sentencing guidelines and practices are too complicated for me to follow, but most sentences fall below the maximum. I don’t expect Lacey to go away for a full 20 years.

Except…federal sentencing allows for some bullshit called acquitted conduct sentencing, in which the judge is allowed to use other criminal charges in the determination of the sentence, even if the defendant was found not guilty of those other charges. So those other 85 charges against Lacey could actually lengthen his sentence considerably. The judge is still constrained by the 20-year maximum for the single proven charge, but she could conceivably hit him with long prison time.

This is an ugly outcome to an ugly trial, and it gets worse. Two other Backpage employees, Scott Spear and John Brunst, have been found guilty of much more. Spear, the former executive vice president, was found guilty of of 18 prostitution-related charges, 23 money laundering charges, and a conspiracy charge. Brunst, the chief financial officer, was found guilty of 31 money laundering charges. Federal sentences don’t multiply by the number of counts, but these convictions seem likely to send them away for a long time.

Adding to the ugliness, Lacey’s long-time business partner, James Larkin, had been indicted as well, but he committed suicide shortly before the trial was scheduled to start.

(Two other Backpage defendants, Andrew Padilla and Joye Vaught, were found not guilty of conspiracy and prostitution charges.)

Unfortunately, I fear there is more ugliness yet to come.

As a libertarian^[1]Definitely “small-L” these days., I have been following the War on Drugs for decades and calling out the evils when I can. At the same time and for the same reasons, I also found the criminalization of consensual sex deplorable: Gay sex, group sex, furry sex, whatever — it’s none of the government’s business. Paid sex is no different. Adult consensual sex work should not be a crime.

One of the remarkable things about prostitution compared to drug dealing is how out in the open it is. Maggie McNeill has been blogging as The Honest Courtesan for 13 years now, Tits & Sass ran for 9 years, Brooke Magnanti started Diary of a London Call Girl twenty-one years ago last month and still writes today although she’s in a very different line of work. Sex workers also have a vibrant presence on Twitter/X (and now on Bluesky). Sex workers even have advocacy organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project and Old Pros which operate in the open to advance sex worker causes. Even much of the business of sex work is in the open, with sex workers advertising on sites like Slixa, PrivateDelights, and Tryst. Many of them also have individual marketing websites.

Sex workers used to have Backpage for advertising too, but it was shut down in 2018 when the Department of Justice seized the site. This turned out to have unintended consequences.

Shutting down Backpage didn’t make the sex trade go away. Backpage‘s sex workers still needed to make money, and Backpage‘s readers still wanted to have sex. Buying ads on Backpage had been the low-cost entry-level alternative to setting up a personal website or advertising on one of the major escort sites, and while it was in operation, Backpage allowed thousands of street-level sex workers to inexpensively switch to a much safer way of doing business. This almost certainly saved lives, and it definitely made sex workers’ lives better. But with Backpage gone, many sex workers were dumped back into a life on the streets, with all the dangers that involves.

Backpage‘s attackers accused it of being complicit in child sex trafficking, claiming that pimps would advertise children on the site. This was undoubtedly true to some extent, but what goes unmentioned is that Backpage worked closely with law enforcement agencies to fight child sex trafficking, alerting them to possible cases and helping them track down perpetrators. But now that Backpage‘s share of the sex trade has moved back to the streets, it has become less visible. Child sex trafficking is still going on, but now it’s much harder to find.

The Iron Law of Prohibition says that making something illegal will make it stronger and more dangerous. Nobody drank bathtub gin in America until the Prohibition laws of 1920 criminalized alcoholic beverages. Almost nobody smoked crack until law enforcement started a war on cocaine, and we didn’t have much of a fentanyl problem until the government started cracking down on opioids. Legal alcohol and tobacco distributors didn’t shoot each other in the streets the way drug-smuggling gangsters do.

Criminalizing a good or service necessarily drives it underground. The need to hide makes it harder to build a good reputation, which makes it less rewarding to have good business practices. Customer service and attention to product quality fall by the wayside. Without transparency, public regulation, or access to the courts to redress grievances, there is little penalty for being a bad actor. Thus bad actors enter and thrive in the market, engaging in fraud, theft, and violence, which can often only be countered with more violence. Prohibition drives good people out of the business, resulting in entire markets being controlled by gangs of criminals, and the harder the prohibition laws are enforced, the more power gets transferred to people willing to endanger themselves and others to make a buck.^[2]Stronger drugs are also more compact and easier to smuggle, but I can’t think of an analogous effect for sex work.

With the success of the Backpage prosecutions, it seems likely that more such prosecutions will follow. The SESTA/FOSTA laws, which were advertised as being useful in fighting Backpage-style websites (but which passed after charges were filed) would make it even easier for the government to harass sex workers. We could be on the verge of a dangerous War on Sex Work.

I don’t think we’re there yet, and I don’t think it’s inevitable. We may be able to head off a War-on-Drugs-like attack on sex work. I don’t know how, but I assume activists at SWOP and other organizations have some good ideas. For myself, I’m going to continue drawing attention to the issue and making arguments for decriminalizing sex work.

I do have one suggestion, however: Let’s try to keep the people behind the War on Sex Work from holding elected office. The idea that sex work should be fought with severe police action is not widely taken as given. Many people still aren’t very concerned about it.^[3]And many of those who are very concerned are tainted by QAnon conspiracy theories, which thankfully undermines their credibility. And if we can punish these anti-sex-work warriors at the ballot box, maybe it will never catch on.

To that end, let’s name some names.

The war on Backpage was started by Kamala Harris who, as Attorney General for California, brought the first criminal case against Lacey and others in 2016. The case was pure theater — Harris was running for Senate at the time — and it was was unceremoniously laughed out of court, as was her second attempt in 2017.

(This was not Harris’s only terrible decision as an office holder. As District Attorney for San Francisco she made some odious decisions which caught up to her as “Kamala is a cop” during her failed presidential campaign.)

The Department of Justice’s case against Backpage was started under the Trump administration by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It tanked due to prosecutorial misconduct, but was eventually taken to trial by the Department of Justice under Biden’s Attorney General appointee, Merrick Garland. The actual dirty work, however, was done by local DOJ lawyers who for all I know had the best of intentions.

I’m pretty sure that when Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kevin Rapp, Margaret Perlmeter, Andy Stone, and Peter Kozinets caught this case for the District of Arizona they didn’t set out planning to make the sex trade worse. But that’s what they’re doing. And I’m pretty sure that when Austin Berry from the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section joined them, he wasn’t planning to make it harder to catch child predators, although that’s what he’s doing.

(As for Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel Boyle and Joseph Bozdech, they’ve been running the civil forfeiture operation against Backpage — stealing assets from the defendants with questionable justification, thus impairing their ability to pay defense lawyers — so fuck ’em.)

In the War on Sex Work, these are some of the people we need to keep an eye on. Merrick Garland has the power to prosecute more cases like this one, against many more web sites and organizations. As Vice President now, Harris is (a) powerless, but (b) a heartbeat away from being able to set Justice Department priorities. I’m not sure we can do much about either of them.

As for the rest of the prosecutors, they may just settle into ordinary careers, but they could just as easily leverage their credentials to get into politics. We should be ready if they do.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Backpage and The Iron Law of Prohibition

I wonder if Chat-GPT^[2]Using the GPT-4 language model. can help?

Write a first contact email to a young escort to set up a date. You can leave placeholders for personal information.

Subject: [Your Name] – A Special Date Inquiry

Hello [Escort’s Name],

My name is [Your Name], and I recently came across your profile on [Website/Platform]. I was genuinely impressed by your charm, elegance, and the unique personality that shines through your photos and description. I hope this message finds you well.

I am writing to express my interest in spending a delightful and unforgettable evening with you. I understand that discretion and mutual respect are of the utmost importance in this arrangement, and I assure you that I will always treat you with the utmost courtesy and respect.

I would like to schedule a date for [Date and Time], preferably at [Location/Hotel], if that works for you. I’m interested in booking a [Duration, e.g., 2-hour] appointment. Please let me know if you have any specific requirements or boundaries that I should be aware of in advance. Your comfort and satisfaction are my top priorities, and I want to make sure that our time together is as enjoyable as possible for both of us.

As for a little bit about myself, I am a [Age]-year-old [Your Profession] with a passion for [Your Hobbies/Interests]. I believe that genuine connection and shared experiences are the key to creating unforgettable memories. I’m looking forward to getting to know you better and exploring the chemistry between us.

In order to facilitate the booking process, please let me know the preferred method of screening or any information that you require from me. I am more than happy to provide any necessary details to ensure your peace of mind and maintain our privacy.

Lastly, kindly let me know your preferred method of communication going forward (e.g., email, phone, text) and any instructions for the day of our date.

Thank you for considering my request, and I look forward to the possibility of spending a wonderful evening together.

Warmest regards,

[Your Name]

[Your Email Address]

[Your Phone Number, if comfortable]

I wanted to try to refine this, but I got a content policy warning.

So if any of you ladies get a message and you’re wondering if a ‘bot wrote it, this what that might look like. Your results may vary depending on the prompt given to ChatGPT and some randomness in how it responds.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at ChatGPT the Hobbyist?

Roughly 40 per cent of online ads offering escort and sex work services in B.C. included language indicating child sex trafficking, according to a new pre-print study from SFU.

The article also includes this blurb from the head of a Canadian anti-sex-trafficking organization:

“This is research-based proof and evidence that human trafficking is prevalent in our province, and that human trafficked victims are bought and sold in the same industry as sex workers,” Tiana Sharifi, CEO of Sexual Exploitation Education, said in a statement.

Note the difference: The first quote speaks of sex ads “included language indicating child sex trafficking” whereas the second quote directly says “human trafficking is prevalent.” In some ways, this whole post is about that difference.

If you’ve been following Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s coverage of sex trafficking at Reason magazine or through her Twitter account, you’re probably familiar with the ongoing moral panic over sex-trafficking. From bogus claims of 300,000 children at risk to police “sex-trafficking stings” that arrest hundreds but result in no sex trafficking charges, there’s a long history of law enforcement agencies and anti-sex-trafficking NGOs exaggerating the problem.

So I was suspicious of the Province article. I suspected that the study’s descriptions of complicated subjects became less nuanced and more sensational as they traveled further from the source. By the time parts of the paper make it from researchers to reporters, commentators, and people with an axe to grind, a lot of important context can be lost.

I’ve obtained a copy of the pre-print research paper ^[1]Barry Cartwright, Richard Frank, Tiana Sharifi, Mandeep Pannu. Deploying artificial intelligence to detect and respond to the use of digital technology by perpetrators of human trafficking. International CyberCrime Research Centre, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, pre-print April 2022., and that does seem to be what happened here. The paper, titled “Deploying artificial intelligence to detect and respond to the use of digital technology by perpetrators of human trafficking,” was produced by researchers at the International CyberCrime Research Centre at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. And as far as I can tell with my limited expertise, it appears to be a perfectly reasonable piece of research.

What it’s not, however, is a study of sex trafficking. Not really.

Before explaining what I mean by that, let’s take a look at the research. The Province article gives a pretty accurate summary:

The research, the first of its kind in B.C., used machine learning and custom web crawlers to collect and analyze a data set of online ads for escort and sex work services. It was co-authored by SFU’s International Cyber Crime Research Centre and Sexual Exploitation Education, a Vancouver-based agency working to prevent human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

[…]

The research involved training a machine learning model on “a highly elaborate list of key words and phrases,” including emojis, according to Sharifi. Ads were collected from four of the most popular websites in Canada offering escort and sex work services.

You don’t develop machine learning (ML) solutions the same way you solve a problem with ordinary software: You don’t have to provide the detailed step-by-step process for reaching the solution. Instead, you use a collection of input samples matched to the desired outputs to “train” the ML model. During this process, the ML algorithm tries to extract information from the inputs that will allow it to produce the correct outputs. This is the learning part of “machine learning.” and different type of ML algorithms perform this process in different ways, have different costs, and produce different forms of solutions.

For example, suppose you want to analyze traffic patterns in a tunnel, perhaps to predict pavement wear, by determining how many trucks are passing through. You’ve already installed cameras with motion detectors to capture images of every vehicle, but the system is also capturing images of cars, and you need to separate the trucks from the cars to prepare your reports. You decide to try doing that with machine learning.

To train the model, you’ll have to show it a bunch of pictures of vehicles and tell it which images contain cars and which images contain trucks. In this case, you can get a good training set by using a sample of actual images from the tunnel and having a team of people look at each one to classify it as a car or truck.

Let’s say you determine the vehicle type for 10,000 images. You then feed the images with corresponding vehicle types to the machine learning algorithm in training mode and let it do its thing. Unfortunately, trained ML systems tend to be somewhat mysterious — they build their knowledge in ways that are inherently difficult to understand, even if you can see how the knowledge is encoded, so the only way to really tell if the training worked is to try the model on new data and see how it does.

That means having your human team and your trained ML model each classify another, say, 1000 images and compare their results. The closer the model comes to matching the human results, the better it’s performing. If it’s 95% accurate at picking out trucks, and that’s close enough for your purposes, your machine learning project has been a success.

The researchers behind the human trafficking study wanted to do the same kind of thing, but with online sex ads, and instead of finding pictures of trucks, they wanted to find ads for trafficking victims.

This was the part that got my attention. Just as you need pictures of trucks to train an ML system to recognize trucks, you need sex trafficking ads to train an ML system to recognize sex trafficking ads. I suppose it’s possible in theory: They could have searched police human trafficking case files to find instances where the victims were the subject of online sex ads and then used those ads for training and testing the ML model against ads tied to actual sex trafficking.

The problem, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, is that actual sex trafficking cases are extremely rare — too rare to build up a large enough corpus of online ads to train an ML classifier. So where did the researchers find those ads? How did they know the ads were for human trafficking victims? The short answer is that they didn’t. Instead, they used a manual classification system to deem some of the ads as possibly related to sex trafficking, and then trained the ML models against those ads.

The researchers started with a list of trafficking indicators from the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons published by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2020. With that basic framework, they set about identifying words to search for:

For this present study, we used search terms consisting of key words and key phrases identified by law enforcement agencies and community outreach organizations who specifically seek to educate about, prevent and interdict sex trafficking, we winnowed those down into key words and key phrases where we could confirm through careful manual inspection that they applied exclusively (or almost exclusively) to the marketing of the services of sex trafficking victims, and for the sake of precision, decided for the qualitative inspection that at least three of those key words or key phrases had to be present in order to flag an online advertisement as involving sex trafficking.

The researchers also obtained lists of target words and phrases from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Sexual Exploitation Education, a Vancouver-based anti-trafficking agency. Combining these and other sources, they eventually came up with a framework for identifying possible sex trafficking ads based on key words and phrases. Here’s the example from the paper: (Caution, dirty words!)

Indicator	Key Words	Key Phrases
Sweet, compliant, obedient	Sweet; sweet; sweetest; polite; personality; cheerful	Sweet and polite; sweet and polite; super sweet; Great Personality; cheerful mood; nice and friendly
Availability	24/7; 24hrs; anytime	Always available; always available; available right now; all day; any time; Day or night; all day and night; available day & night; Ready Now; always ready; READY ANY TIME; always ready and available; available right now; Available 24hrs; 24 hours; 7 days a week; 7days a week
Flexibility	CARDATE; CAR; CARPLAY	INCALL AND OUTCALL AND CARDATE; CAR DATE; Car-Date; Car Dates; CAR DATES; CARPLAY; incall and outcall; Incall and Outcall; INCALL AND OUTCALL: any where;
No restrictions	Openminded	Open Minded; open-minded; open minded; as much as you want; Low restriction; No Restriction; NO RESTRICTION; NO restrictions; no limit; No limit; NO LIMIT; no limits; all service; unlimited fun; MINIMUM RESTRICTIONS; ALL STYLE; ALL STYLE ARE WELCOME; What you like; your own style; all you can play; do as you wish; anything you want; whatever you desire; TRY EVERYTHING; ALL YOUR NEED; everything you want; all your needs
Unprotected sex	Bareback; raw; BAREBACK; Bbj; BBBJ; BBBj; BBBJ+; B-B-B-J; b88j; bxxJ; B*BJ; B-B-B- ; BB Be J; BEBEFS	bBlowj,ob; BARE BACK; With Out Condom; without condom; without condoms; no condom; NO CONDOM; No Condom; raw; No Cover; no cover;
New in town, short visit	town; new; NEW; plane; arrived; arrival; ARRIVE; ARRIVED; ARRIVAL	Catch me while you can; a few days; new in town; COMING WEEKLY; NEW IN TOWN; NEW here in town; new to town; NEW ARRIVED; NEW ARRIVAL; New Arrival; New arrival; new arrived; Newly Arrived; just arrived; short visit; Short-Term; Short Term Only; just off plane; limited time
Young girl; new girl, fresh and juicy	Baby; baby; BABY; fresh; Girl; GIRL; GURL; Newly; New; new; NEW; YOUNG; yOunG; Youth; tight; Juicy; daddy; Daddy; Pettit; Petite; PETITE; Cherry; student; Student; students; college;	Rope bunny; babygirl; YOUNG GIRL; super tight; Tight Juicy; Sweet and Juicy; Sweet & Juicy; New girl; New girls; Brand new; SUPER TIGHT; SUPER TIGHT FIT; 100% PRETTY; PRETTY GIRL; Pretty Girl; 100% YOUNG; YOUNG girl; young girls; SEXY YOUNG GIRL; REAL YOUNG; First Time; PetiteCute; SEXY YOUNG GIRL; daddy; NeW YouNG Girl; FIRST TIME; 1st time; my first; First Day; first day; first customer; PetiteCute; cutegirl; student girl; school girl; shaved and sweet; sweet, young; SHOWERED & SHAVEN; 19yes; 19yo; 19 Year old; 19 yrs; 19year old; 19yrs old; 20yo; 20/yo; 20 yrs old; 20yrs; 20 years old; 20 year old; 20yrs old.; 19-22; 21 yrs; 21 old yrs; 21 years; 22yo: 22 yrs old; 22 yrs.; 22 year old; 22 years old; 22yrs; 22yrs old
Low prices	CHEAP	NO DEPOSIT; price is low; PAYMENT ON ARRIVAL; 100 dollars an hour; $100 1 hour; FOR CHEAP; cheap rate; CHEAP~RATE; very cheap rate; low rate
Multiple girls	girls;	COME AND PICK; Our selling-points; different girls; Different new girls;
Male Operator		male operator

To their credit, the researchers wanted to distinguish sex trafficking from adult consensual sex work. To that end, they also created a list of key words and phrases that implied consensual work:

Starting with these criteria, the researchers designed a set of coding rules specifying things like the number of key trafficking words or phrases required to code an ad as trafficking (three), whether to count repeated words or phrases (no), and what to do with ads that mixed trafficking indicators and sex work indicators (exclude them). They also considered how to handle obvious copy/paste duplicate ads and other confusing situations, e.g. an escort described as young and petite but with stats given as 27-years old, 5′ 6″, and 136 pounds.

In all, the qualitative research team manually coded—and cross-validated the scoring of—1,840 online sex ads, breaking them down in accordance with their likelihood of representing sex trafficking or sex trade work. The team derived extensive lists of (ever-evolving) key words and key phrases and made note of the presence (or absence) of specific emojis or symbols. All this information was made available to the web-crawling and machine-learning teams for the purposes of refining their searches and/or the development of the machine-reading/machine learning algorithms.

It was this group of 1840 coded online sex ads, or subsets thereof, that were used to train the machine learning models (they used five different models).

That brings me to an important point: The training set for the ML systems did not use a known set of sex trafficking ads, because no actual sex trafficking ads were available for training. Instead, the training set used was composed of ads that were judged to be sex trafficking ads based on criteria — key words and phrases — provided by UNODC, the RCMP, and Sexual Exploitation Education.

It would be one thing if those words were culled by statistical methods from samples of actual ads for actual sex trafficking, but they aren’t. The paper goes into great detail about the use of key words and phrases, but at no point does it indicate that the word lists were derived through any kind of empirical research. The word lists appear to be entirely the guesswork of cops and anti-trafficking advocates, both of whom may see sex trafficking where none is occurring.

That makes me reluctant to take these word lists seriously as signs of sex trafficking. For example, the word “new” appears in ads for all kinds of products and services, from dessert topping to hair care. I think the key words and phrases are probably indicative of some aspects of the various forms of sex work represented by the ads, but I don’t see a case for declaring them to be a priori sex trafficking. As far as I can tell, the difference between the sex trafficking list and the sex work list is the amount of control that the escorts gave up or retained. The researchers are assuming trafficking victims have little control whereas free sex workers can exert more control.

Of course, I’m hardly an expert on how sex workers advertise, so I asked Maggie McNeill — sex worker and sex work activist — to look at the lists and tell me what she saw:

What I see in the examples you’ve provided are mainly due to agency vs independent (no single woman or operator, however coerced, is available “24/7”; that requires multiple shifts); to inexperience vs experienced escorts (inexperienced businesspeople of every type imagine promising the Moon and then bait & switching is a clever tactic to bring in business); and to level of desperation.

Very poor, inexperienced sex workers who need money NOW will often advertise very low prices, services (including bareback) outside the norm, very broad hours, low screening requirements, etc, in hopes of outcompeting the many others in what is right now a bit of a glutted market (as often happens in a faltering economy).  Some of them are counting on being able to raise the price (“Oh, that price was just to get me here; if you want to fuck it’ll be extra”) or otherwise change the odious conditions; some are cash-and-dash artists who have no intention on following through with their promises; some are cops trying to cast a wide net; and a few are truly desperate newbies trying to avoid eviction tomorrow.

There are a couple of these which require specific comment: “New in town” generally just means touring, and has zero to do with coercion; it’s also a popular claim in cops’ bait ads, or for liars/those with bad reputations who have recently changed stage names and wish to capitalize on the male lust for “new meat”.  And “young” was once the single most popular lie in sex work ads, because some men will always want “as young as possible”; it’s less popular now among experienced or well-mentored escorts because it attracts cops and “trafficking” fetishists…

The bottom line is that when an ML model flagged an ad as “sex trafficking,” it was not because it was trained to recognize sex trafficking, but because it was trained to recognize ads that the researchers coded as “sex trafficking.” And since the researchers coded the ads based on word and phrase lists that were based on information from UNODC, the RCMP, and SEE, the best we can say is that they were training machine learning systems to recognize ads for escorts that people at UNODC, the RCMP, and SEE would think were sex trafficking ads. That doesn’t mean sex trafficking actually happened.

I want to emphasize that the researchers were in no way hiding this. The background and methodology sections of the study go over the coding and training procedures in page after page of detailed explanation, describing their choices and explaining their rationales. There may be a few sentences here and there which could be confusing when taken out of context, but the paper as a whole is quite explicit about exactly what the researchers are doing.

They also go into some detail explaining the difficulty in identifying sex trafficking, which leads to this cautionary note:

However, it is important to heed the caution of Raets and Janssen (2021)^[2]Raets, S., & Janssens, J. (2021). Trafficking and Technology: Exploring the Role of Digital Communication Technologies in the Belgian Human Trafficking Business. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 27(2), 215–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-019-09429-z: “One critical issue…is the lack of ground truth in identifying human trafficking cases” (p. 227).

Having skimmed the pre-print, I think I can see how it has been distorted by the time it reaches the pages of the Province article:

Roughly 40 per cent of online ads offering escort and sex work services in B.C. included language indicating child sex trafficking

This is somewhat careful in saying that 40% of ads “included language” about sex trafficking, which is not the same as saying that 40% of ads are sex trafficking. On the other hand, Sharifi is dead wrong in this quote:

“This is research-based proof and evidence that human trafficking is prevalent in our province, and that human trafficked victims are bought and sold in the same industry as sex workers,”

As should be clear by now, the only thing proven by this research is that machine learning models can produce similar results to human analysts when trying to detect signs of human trafficking in online ads. This does not prove anything about actual human trafficking in online ads.

I said at the beginning that the research was not really about sex trafficking, and I think it’s clear that there’s no actual sex trafficking data used to train the machine learning model. Rather, this research is about the ability of machine learning to perform certain tasks: The researchers started with humans using key words and phrases to identify human trafficking in online ads and then tried to get a machine to do the same thing. This was a machine learning research project that used sex trafficking ads as raw material.

A few other items in the Province article are also illuminating:

“Teens or older children are at greater risk for online recruitment, as they often have unfettered internet access with limited monitoring by parents or guardians,” wrote the report authors.

That’s technically true — the authors did write that — but that wasn’t a conclusion of the research. It’s part of the Introduction, where the authors summarized a St. Augustine Record newspaper article.

They also noted that children who are lured and groomed in B.C. “may well be trafficked in other parts of Canada or in other countries.”

This was also part of the introduction, and it’s unsourced, probably because it’s an obvious general statement used to describe how research in British Columbia was relevant to other locations as well.

In 2019, there were 511 reported incidents of human trafficking, according to the report. Of those, only a third resulted in charges and even then, 89 per cent of charges were stayed, withdrawn, discharged or dismissed. Among reported cases of human trafficking, 95 per cent of the victims were women.

Again, none of this was part of the research. It was all just background sourced from three different papers published by other people.

At its most basic, this research was an attempt to get a machine learning algorithm to do a task that that humans had been doing — trying to use key words and phrases in online escort ads to detect sex trafficking, especially child sex trafficking. And judging by the results, it pretty much worked, at least well enough for the researchers to announce their intent to integrate these algorithms into their web crawler to create an A.I. system to detect sex trafficking content.

I have mixed feelings about that. Given the rarity of actual sex trafficking in escort work and the harm that is done to consensual sex workers through misdirected or pretextual law enforcement, I question the wisdom of providing police with better surveillance tools. If the researchers had trained the models against the ground truth of actual online sex trafficking incidents, I would say a tool like this helps legitimate sex workers by directing police attention away from them and onto serious criminals. But since the models are based on the unsupported linguistic notions of cops and anti-trafficking activists, I fear they will be misunderstood and misused to justify harassment of sex workers.

In any case, it’s important to be accurate and address research like this for what it actually is.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at No Ground Truth: Sex Trafficking and Machine Learning

International Whores’ Day commemorates the occupation of Église Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, France by a bunch of sex workers who were even more pissed off than Mistress Matisse. Forced to work in secrecy by the police, they were increasingly the victims of violent attacks. After a series of murders, more than 100 prostitutes invaded the church and held it for 8 days to gain attention for their cause.

This occupation is often considered the start of the modern movement for sex workers’ rights, and International Whores’ Day has been celebrated on June 2 for 45 years.

Naturally, this day pisses off prostitution prohibitionists, who want to wipe out sex work entirely. And like Christians scheduling their holidays to coincide with pagan holidays, prostitution prohibitionists are trying to replace International Whores’ Day with their own re-branded International Day of Remembrance for women who died in prostitution.

What makes this especially creepy is that organizations like Radicailín want stricter laws against prostitution, but anti-prostitution laws are one of the biggest causes of violence against sex workers, because outlawing the way someone makes money does not empower them. In places where sex work is illegal, prostitutes have to work in secret, hidden away from the violent hand of the police, but also isolated from the protective benefits of rights supported by government and community.

If you follow sex workers rights issues, you may know that the traditional day for remembering those who died by violence is not June 2 but December 17, which is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Started in 2003 by Annie Sprinkle and the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA, it is observed all over the world with gatherings and demonstrations.

So you’d think that these people who are expressing so much concern over violence against sex workers would have had something meaningful to say in their twitter feeds on December 17th…wouldn’t you?

Turns out, not so much. A quick Twitter search of Elly Arrow’s twitter feed finds lots of ranting about brothels and pimps, but no recognition that it’s the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. No mention of that year’s victims. No hint of a memorial. Same with Radicailín and the European Network of Migrant Women and AF3IRM.

(To be fair, the folks at Nordic Model Now, also quoted by Mistress Matisse on June 2, did have a single tweet on December 17 mentioning the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, although it included verbiage that used the word “prostituted,” which is much reviled by sex workers for denying their agency.)

The prohibitionists’ failure to recognize the long-established International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers reveals the hollowness of their concern for the victims of violence in the sex trade. It’s clear their attempt to establish an International Day of Remembrance is little more than an excuse for their attempt to erase International Whores’ Day.

Prohibitionists never want to hear from sex workers who want rights rather than rescue, and they don’t want anyone else to hear them either.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Prohibitionists’ Hollow Remembrance of Sex Workers

First of all, I had to learn a new word: “thot.” Apparently, it means something like “slut” or “whore,” but it’s a relatively new word that showed up around 2011. Because, you know, American vernacular English didn’t yet have enough derogatory terms for sexually active women.

(When I was in high school, I literally didn’t understand why guys used the word “slut” to demean girls. “Wait a minute…you’re insulting girls…for wanting to have sex with us…? Why would you do that?”)

Anyway, #ThotAudit is some kind of weird campaign to report sex workers to the IRS for tax evasion, and it’s organized by exactly the kind of people you’d think would organize such a thing:

Online sex workers have slammed a viral campaign by right-wing “incels” and men’s rights activists to mass report them to tax authorities for allegedly failing to declare income.

The hashtag #ThotAudit, which appears to have been started by a Facebook user calling themselves “David Wu”, began to trend on Sunday after being promoted by controversial pick-up artist and “legal rape” advocate Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh.

“Online thots are finding out that all income generated from their breasts and vagina is taxable,” Mr Valizadeh tweeted.

“Men are aggressively organising to report all thots. I don’t blame them: these girls are getting a free ride via beta bux and a broken sexual marketplace that is rigged in the favour of females.”

Man, that whole “income generated from their breasts and vagina” line is creepy as fuck. Can you imagine having to spend every day of your life being that guy? Who worries about stuff like that? I guess the same kind of guy who whines about a “broken sexual marketplace.” #ThotAudit is so aggressively stupid that I don’t know where to start.

I guess I might as well start by anticipating that someone will accuse me of “white knighting.” That’s a term that pickup artists, MRAs, and other assholes use when some other guy steps in to defend a woman they’re bothering. It’s meant to taunt the other guy for using the appearance of chivalry in a weak attempt to get laid, because they can’t imagine any other reason for talking to — or about — women.

The thing is, I’m not white knighting, because I’m not defending these women. They don’t need my help defending against something this dumb.

First of all, it’s not like any of these #ThotAudit assholes have actual knowledge of tax evasion. They don’t have any information that they could give in a statement in a legal setting that would help establish any of the elements of tax evasion.

All the #ThotAudit assholes have is a suspicion that these women must be evading taxes because they are sex workers. And that’s on the basis of Twitter feeds and escort web sites, which IRS agents can easily find by themselves without help from the #ThotAudit twits. Heck, the #ThotAudit twits don’t even have the real names of the women they claim they are reporting to the IRS.

But let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that some #ThotAudit twit is actually able to get IRS investigators to take interest in a sex worker that he brought to their attention. If the investigators are able to bring the legal powers of the federal government to bear on the problem (I have no idea what level of proof is needed for this) they could probably trace a Twitter account or website to an actual person. And if they did that, what would they find?

Probably, a taxpayer.

In the case of purely online sex workers, like cam girls or phone sex performers, they have to be able to accept electronic payments, which will create records in the banking system that will make the income visible to the IRS, pretty much guaranteeing they will have pay taxes on the income. Things get a little more complicated with sex workers who accept cash payments in person, such as strippers or escorts. If the #ThotAudit jerks get IRS investigators to look into the finances of someone like that, what will they find?

Probably something familiar: A cash-oriented business.

The IRS is of course deeply suspicious of cash-oriented businesses because it’s hard for the IRS to know how much money they really receive when there are no electronic bank records of the payments. Everyone suspects that a lot of cash-based businesses cheat on their taxes, so the IRS would be right to be skeptical about the tax returns of sex workers.  But, well…the point of unreported cash income that no one knows it exists. The IRS isn’t going to be able to do much without proof of income.

And it’s not as if most sex workers don’t pay income taxes. Sure, if a customer pays them $300 cash, and they go to Target and use the money to buy groceries or clothing or a television, they won’t leave a paper trail, so they can cheat by not paying those taxes. But if they lead anything like a normal middle-class life, they probably have a ton of expenses that leave a trail. If they have a $2000/month mortgage, a $600/month car payment, and $300/month in utilities, plus $500/month for health insurance and another $1000 per month in miscellaneous credit card payments, they need to be able to show almost $6000/month in income to cover those expenses.

That means reporting somewhere around $18,000 in income every quarter and making estimated tax payments. It will be more if they want to put some money in the bank or pay into an IRA. So if the IRS takes a look at them because of #ThotAudit, they’ll find a woman reporting over $70,000 in annual income. They may suspect that she’s bringing in even more as unreported cash income, but it will be hard to turn those suspicions into evidence.

Given that the #ThotAudit douchebags aren’t reporting people in other cash-oriented business — bartenders, food truck operators, bodega owners, dry cleaners, farmstand owners, landscapers, housekeepers, dance teachers, handymen…or for that matter, male sex workers — it’s pretty clear this is just another excuse to harass women.

But it’s not even effective as harassment. I had to think for a while to convince myself that the threat to tattle to the IRS was toothless. But to actual sex workers, who know far more about the tax implications of their business than I do, this has got to be incredibly obvious. Sex workers on Twitter are certainly not frightened. They’ve been mocking #ThotAudit without mercy.

Look, sex workers deal with more than their fair share of assholes online. They are used to fending off time wasters and religious nuts and every would-be edgelord who thinks it’s epic to ask them if they suck dick for a living. They are used to harassment, and they have strategies for dealing with it. They are not impressed by someone threatening to mail a piece of paper to the government.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at #ThotAudit Is Really About Ethics in Tax Collection

yessssssssssss https://t.co/y1iDqWTMK4

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) October 4, 2018

Some people were upset that Brown was apparently applauding an attempt to shut down advertising by sex workers, through the now-familiar subterfuge of claiming to be fighting “sex trafficking.” But she’s been reporting on that trick for years, and she’s been anticipating that the sex trafficking panic will eventually hit a non-fringe website like Facebook.

That would be a good thing for sex workers, she believes, because with $40 billion in annual revenue — much of which would be at-risk if Facebook is labeled a “sex trafficking website” — they have both the means and motivation to fight this tooth and nail. Their legal team could end up setting some good precedents in the courts that will help other sites that carry sex work content, and their lobbying efforts could get some important changes to the law that would prevent these attacks on sex work in the future.

I’m not so sure.

Back in 2006, there was a bit of a panic when it was discovered that a bunch of children’s toys manufactured in China had high levels of lead in some of their components. The toy company Mattel was by far the most affected: Six of the seven toy recalls were for Mattel products, and the company ultimately recalled 19 million toys. Naturally, Congress leaped into action.

The resulting law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), did a number of things, the most far reaching of which was that it added a lot of new testing requirements:

The law bans lead and phthalates in toys, books, clothes, and any other object intended for children under 12. To enforce these rules, the law requires every toymaker, distributor, or retailer who sells products in the U.S. to certify each of its models through third-party testing, labeling every item with an individual date and batch number.

Broadly speaking, manufacturers used to ensure their products didn’t contain dangerous substances like lead by making that a requirement for materials purchased from suppliers. E.g. A company making painted metal toy trucks would make sure to order only lead-free paints and lead-free metal alloys from their suppliers. Under CPSIA, however, toy makers were required to independently test a sample of their assembled toys for lead content.

The law left a lot of decisions up to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), such as how items should be marked:

On July 20, only three-and-a-half weeks before the rules were to take effect, the CPSC announced some lenient if vague interpretive guidelines. The agency said it didn’t think individual marking was required for very small objects and items in sets, such as wooden blocks, and agreed that harm to a product’s functionality or aesthetics might be a possible reason to reject marking as impracticable.

More craziness: Regulators banned lead outright in children’s items, apparently without accounting for bio-availability, so even lead locked up in tight chemical bonds could keep a product off the market:

Jewelry is subject to particularly strict requirements, since most true crystals and rhinestones contain lead—although it poses minimal danger to kids, since the metal remains locked inside the crystal structure of the stones.

The effects of this requirement are harder on smaller manufacturers who lack economies of scale. A giant toy maker could spread the costs of testing over hundreds of thousands of units of each toy, but a company that sold only 3000 units of a toy would have to cover the testing with much larger increases to the cost of each of a much smaller number toys.

One small business owner, with fewer than 10 employees, told me of needing to add an employee to do nothing but administer and document his testing and regulatory compliance program. Another told me that since children’s garments were not a major part of his business, he has decided just to get out of that aspect of the business altogether rather than have to hassle with all the rules.

This was especially brutal for craft toy makers: A woodworker making hobby horses in his garage would be required to pay for outside testing of his toys — about $4,000 per batch (whatever a “batch” is for handcrafted toys) even though the wood and paint he used were lead-free. That could wipe out his entire profit from selling the toys, and possibly his entire revenue.

Eventually, a bunch of exceptions were carved out, and some small toymakers were able to stay in business, but it was a mess for a long time. At least for some people… Remember Mattel? The giant toy company responsible for most of the contaminated products that kicked off this whole mess in the first place? Yeah, well, funny story…

Turns out, when Mattel got lemons, it decided to make lead-tainted lemonade (leadonade?). As luck would have it, Mattel already operates several of its own toy testing labs, including those in Mexico, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and California.

So while most small toymakers had no idea this law was coming down the pike until it was too late, Mattel spent $1 million lobbying for a little provision to be included in the CPSIA permitting companies to test their own toys in “firewalled” labs that have won Consumer Product Safety Commission approval.

The million bucks was well spent, as Mattel gained approval late last week to test its own toys in the sites listed above—just as the window for delayed enforcement closed.

Instead of winding up hurting, Mattel now has a cost advantage on mandatory testing, and a handy new government-sponsored barrier to entry for its competitors.

That particular episode in legislative history is why I’m not as optimistic as Elizabeth Nolan Brown about Facebook coming under attack in the sex trafficking panic. I agree with her that Facebook is going to throw money, lawyers, and lobbyists at the problem, and they’ll come out of this just fine. But I’m not convinced that Facebook’s victory will be a victory for sex workers.

That’s because I expect Facebook to work toward a Mattel-like outcome. Their lobbyists and lawyers will offer their expertise at social media to work with Congress to help craft the most effective legislation for “protecting vulnerable people.” I’m probably not devious enough to figure out exactly what they’ll do, but I would expect the 2019 Stopping Internet Facilitated Child Sex Trafficking Act (or whatever they call it) to include provisions like:

• This rule applies to all entities that operate websites that sell ad space to people offering services including but not limited to escorting, massage, exotic dancing, modeling, cuddling, or any other service that must be performed in person in a non-public location.
• Web site operators must “know their customer” and obtain suitable identification from ad buyers.
• Web site operators must, within one year of passage of this law or prior to accept their first ad, which ever comes later, submit to the Department of Homeland Security their comprehensive pland for preventing child sex trafficking through their site. The plan must include,
  • Appointment of a Sex Trafficking Prevention Officer.
  • Description of how the site proposes to identify potential child sex trafficking related advertising materials.
  • Description of how the site proposes to handle reports from law enforcement agencies indicating that one or more ads are child sex trafficking related.
  • Description of how the site proposes to handle reports from third parties that one or more ads are child sex trafficking related.
  • Establishment of a liaison relationship with the state agency responsible for child sex trafficking crimes in every state in which the website does business.
  • Establishment of a liaison relationship with the city police unit responsible for child sex trafficking crimes in every city with a population of 250,000 or more in which the website does business.
• Upon receipt of a request from a law enforcement agency to take down an ad suspected of being related to child sex trafficking, the website operator must remove the ad within 24 hours.
• Website operators must furnish to the Department of Homeland Security a quarterly report detailing the number of suspected child sex trafficking ads reported, the source of the report, and the final disposition of the ad.

And so on.

There’s be adjustments. Some church groups would notice that the law technically applies to their programs to match teenage members of the congregation with elderly members who need help around the house, and Congress would quickly amend the law to exclude faith-based social services providers. Amazon’s Home Services sales group would arrange for their own carve-outs. Maybe language would be added to require that the services be of “a sexual or intimate nature” and leave it to DHS and the courts to figure out all the details. Eventually, as with FOSTA/SESTA, something would get signed.

Facebook, with $40 billion a year or so in revenue, could easily afford to create a department and hire 10 or 20 people to comply with a law like that, as could many of the other social media giants. But a lot of smaller businesses would be casualties, not all of them escort advertising sites. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that sites like Model Mayhem and One Model Place would fall under such a rule.

Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if escort advertising sites survived just fine. I think Slixa and Eros are already run from offshore, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some more foreign websites start selling to Americans. On the other hand, I can also see how small sites where a few escorts pooled their money to advertise might get shut down.

Ultimately, I just don’t think Facebook is going to end up defending sex workers.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Facebook Lawsuit Isn’t Going to Help Sex Workers

I realize that sounds condescending, but I don’t mean it that way. Corporate IT security managers would be thrilled if company employees understood security as well as Annie does.

I’m not a security expert, but as a software developer, I am somewhat familiar with the basic ideas behind information security, such as establishing a subject’s identity and controlling access to resources. What was especially fascinating to me about Annie’s posts is that — in part because she does business over the internet — many of her practices bear a striking resemblance to network security protocols.

Start with her section for newbies that explains why screening is necessary.

Just in case you don’t get where I’m going with this: This man was asking me to meet with him alone, in private, when he was completely unwilling to provide ANY information about himself whatsoever.

[…]

I know literally NOTHING about this man.

The man she’s talking about had sent her an email expressing his wish to meet her but did not want to provide screening information such as his name, employer, and phone number. This is a problem for Annie, because there are certain things she wants to establish about a potential client before she is willing to meet him alone in a private place:

For most of us, the client must:

• be someone we’re willing to spend time alone with,
• agree to provide the requested honorarium in the amount we’ve specified beforehand (on our websites, listings, etc.)
• be someone we feel is not a danger to our personal safety.  We each have our own standards regarding what makes us feel safe.

(“Honorarium” is Annie’s way of saying she wants to be paid. Due to the legal climate, sex workers in America tend toward euphemism.)

In the world of information security, we might call the items in that list claims. They are assertions of fact about the client that Annie needs to establish before she will let him meet her. In a sense, Annie is specifying her access control requirements.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure that Annie’s access controls imply an additional implicit claim that she wants to establish about a client before she will meet him: Don’t be a cop. She doesn’t say this explicitly anywhere that I can see, but it seems like an obvious concern. (I’m guessing Annie doesn’t mention her no cops requirement because expressing a desire to hide from the police could be taken as evidence she’s doing something illegal.)

When discussing security, we often talk about establishing one’s identity, but in practice the details of an identity are linked to what the identity is used for.

For example, you can leave comments on this blog by signing in with your Twitter account. That doesn’t really tell me who you are, it just tells me you have the password to a Twitter account. So if @JohnSmith signs in, it doesn’t really prove that John Smith has left the comment. It literally only proves that the comment was left by someone with the password to the @JohnSmith Twitter account. That’s good enough for Twitter, and since I only want to offer people the ability to establish a secure history of comments, that’s good enough for me.

Annie’s got more at stake than I do, so she has more stringent requirements. Before getting further into those, however, let’s look at a screening method that doesn’t satisfy her requirements. She offers this fictionalized example:

To: Annie@NOLAcourtesan.com
From: BobRoss1965@gmail.com
Subject: Appointment with you tonight

Hey Annie,

My name is Bob Ross. You may have heard of me. I’m a painter, and I used to have my own TV show. Remember “happy little trees?” Yeah, I started that whole thing. Anyway, I want to meet with you tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I’m sure you can accommodate a slick guy like me.

Talk to you soon,

Bob Ross the TV Painter

That’s not going to work. It’s the equivalent of letting people comment with their Twitter handle without having to login to Twitter. It doesn’t prove the claim that they are the owner of the Twitter account, it only proves they know the Twitter account exists. The only authority for the claim that they own the account is their own assertion that they do. In matters of security, such self-certifications are worth nothing as an authority for a claim. Similarly, Bob’s letter only proves he knows Bob Ross the TV Painter exists, and his self-certified assertion that he really is Bob Ross the TV Painter doesn’t actually prove that he is.

Going into a little more detail, when you sign in with Twitter, my server receives a message from the Twitter server telling me you correctly logged in to your Twitter account. I trust Twitter because their business model depends on them being a reliable authority for identity claims. I believe that the message came from Twitter because it is signed with a certificate that belongs to Twitter. I trust that the certificate belongs to Twitter because it is authenticated with a chain of certificates that ultimately ends with a top-level public certificate that came installed on my server. Once my blogging software has enough information to link all these things together, I know I can trust your comment to have come from your Twitter identity. I have established a chain of trust.

Annie’s problem with Bob’s insistence that she just Google him is that so far there’s no chain of trust. There’s actually only one trustworthy claim she has about him: That he controls the BobRoss1965@gmail.com email account. The chain of trust for that claim runs through her email provider, which allows her to exchange email with Bob at that address.

Google does tell her a lot of things about Bob Ross the TV Painter, with all the authority of whatever public news stories and websites it finds for her, but it does not close the chain of trust: It doesn’t prove that Bob Ross the TV Painter is the same person as the owner of the BobRoss1965@gmail.com mailbox.

This problem can be hard to understand when you;re on the other side of it. After all, you know who you are, right? It’s hard to figure out where the gaps are from the other person’s point of view. I’ve run into this a few times when I missed paying a bill and somebody called to ask for their money. I have to explain to them that while I apologize for my error, and I promise to pay as quickly as possible, there is absolutely no way I’m giving my credit card number to a stranger who called me. If I had called them at their public customer service number, that would establish a chain of trust I could believe in, but when they call me, I have no proof that they are who they say they are.

Annie understands these things, and she goes through some trouble to explain several possible chains of trust to Bob:

What I need is an email address that is associated with you publicly and professionally. For instance, if you work for PBS, and the PBS website lists Bob Ross’s email address as BobRoss@PBS.org, that will work perfectly. You can either shoot me a quick email from that account, or I can contact you through that address and you can reply that you’ve received that message. Then, I’ll know that you are really Bob Ross, the TV Painter.

The chain of trust is pretty clear. Annie trusts her email provider, so she trusts the claim that email from BobRoss@PBS.org is from whoever controls the BobRoss@PBS.org email address. As for the claim that the owner of BobRoss@PBS.org is Bob Ross the TV Painter, Annie trusts that Bob’s employer wouldn’t put fake contact information its public website, so if they say that Bob Ross the TV Painter has the email address BobRoss@PBS.org, that’s enough to authenticate the claim for her. She now trusts that she’s talking with Bob Ross the TV Painter.

But perhaps Bob Ross is afraid to use his work email address for his dalliances with harlots. That’s why Annie offers a second option: She’ll send him something through his public address, and then he can respond to it through the BobRoss1965@gmail.com address, thus extending the chain of trust  to that address. In other words, Annie has reinvented the computer science concept of a bearer token.

When you login to your bank’s website, you provide your credentials — your username and password — in order to access the first page of the site. In return, the server generates a cryptographically secure token — basically some random data that would be hard for someone else to guess — and sends it back to your browser. After that, as you navigate around the website, whenever you click to bring up a new page, the browser sends the token along with the page request. (In browser terminology, the token is a cookie.) Since the server knows it gave out that token to a user who provided valid credentials for your account, possession of the token proves you are the owner of the account without your having to send along the username and password with every request.

Annie’s plan works the same way. She can send a message like this to Bob’s public account, referring to a randomly made-up order amount and using a made-up name (this is my example, not hers):

To: BobRoss@nolapbs.com
From: sales@soapandstuff.com
Subject: Thank you for your order!

Robert,

Thank you for your order. Your credit card will be billed $21.57.

If you have any questions, please refer to order number 1807561.

Margaret P. Granholm
Sales Associate

Bob can then respond from the private account that he used to contact Annie earlier:

To: Annie@NOLAcourtesan.com
From: BobRoss1965@gmail.com
Subject: Got your message.

Hey Annie,

Got your message. Here’s the information you asked for: The amount is $21.57, the order number is 1807561, and the sales associate’s name was Margaret P. Granholm.

Talk to you soon,

Bob Ross the TV Painter

The public websites establish the chain of trust to assure her that BobRoss@PBS.org is controlled by Bob Ross the TV Painter. And since she sent that address a token composed of the made-up name, order ID, and amount, she knows that anyone who has that information must be Bob Ross the TV Painter, so when she gets that token back via the BobRoss1965@gmail.com address, she can close the loop and verify that BobRoss1965@gmail.com really is Bob Ross the TV Painter.

She further explains a similar technique over the phone:

Alternatively, you can supply a phone number that is traceable to you. Let’s use the PBS example. PBS lists Bob Ross’s office contact number as (504) 555-5555. I can call that number and ask to speak to Bob Ross, and all you have to say is “Yes Annie, it’s me,” and I’ll know I’ve been emailing back and forth with the right guy.

She also explains how the chain of trust can be broken:

However, if you only supply me with a phone number for a prepaid phone, or a number that, when Googled, is not attached to your name or business, that doesn’t really help me.

Backing away from the details a bit, the purpose of all this is to establish that BobRoss1965@gmail.com is a client that Annie can do business with rather than somebody who will hurt or arrest her. It’s possible to do this more directly:

And if neither of those methods works for you, you can also provide references (names and contact info or websites) from two established professional companions/providers/escorts you’ve met with in the past. I’ll contact them to make sure you’re safe and a gentleman. When they respond positively, I’ll get back to you and we can set up an appointment.

Elsewhere she clarifies the information she needs about the other escorts:

Generally, when we ask for references, we’re looking for a name, email address, and a link to a website. For example:

• Annie Calhoun
• NOLAcourtesan.com (or the url, whatever)
• annie@nolacourtesan.com

This way, the provider can look at my website and see that I’m legit (or even search for my name on various ad, screening, and networking sites) before contacting me).

Notice again, the careful chain of trust: From the public website to the email address to the escort’s emailed verification that the client is safe.

One thing we might wonder is why does Annie put so much trust in public websites. How much does a website really prove? Couldn’t a cop or a serial killer set up fake escort sites? The short answer is that although public websites aren’t hard to set up, they do require an order of magnitude more work than getting a gmail address. That additional work will tend to screen out some bad actors.

Again, this is a common technique in information security. For example, it’s used in encrypted password systems to prevent password guessing. Passwords are stored in a hashed format that is computationally expensive to test, so even if a hacker obtains an encrypted password, it will be time-consuming to test password guesses.

Annie’s basic goal here is to pick verification techniques that are difficult for someone to spoof. A malicious person would have to plan ahead by setting up two fake escort websites with email addresses. And while setting up a website isn’t very hard, it’s considerably harder to setup a convincing website, especially for someone like Annie, who’s actually in the business. She could easily research the other escorts to determine their legitimacy.

To show how this works, let’s use Annie’s own website as an example, and look for signs that she’s legitimate. We can see that her WHOIS entry shows that her domain was registered in March of 2012 and the Wayback Machine starts picking up content from it in May of that year. Furthermore, Annie has purchase an advertising page on the Eros guide for New Orleans and at Preferred 411, and before they shut down U.S. access, she had reviews on The Erotic Review from 2012. Annie is also active on Twitter, and her website and Twitter bio link to each other to close the trust loop.

All of this is evidence of an internet presence going back for years, which is a strong indicator of legitimacy. If the Annie Calhoun identity was only created so that someone could give out fake escort references, the perpetrator must have gone through a lot of trouble to set all this up, and they’ve somehow maintained the fiction for six years without anyone blowing the whistle on them. It seems far more likely that Annie Calhoun is a legitimate escort who began working six years ago, which means that a reference from her is most likely legitimate.

It’s worth noting that Annie doesn’t have to do all the work herself. The online escort industry is large enough that it has spawned a services industry to support it, and escorts like Annie have been able to use screening services to do some of the work. The feds have been shutting things down lately (in their effort to stop sex work by making it more dangerous), but in the past, Date-Check performed screening, The Erotic Review had some kind of whitelist for clients that allowed escorts to vouch for them, and Preferred 411 did both screenings and escort endorsements. 

In computer security terms, these sites act as trusted third parties that verify claims. Some of the sites issue ID codes that escorts can check and others use email addresses, but all of them eventually provide a chain of trust between the potential client and some information that can be used to judge whether he’ll make a good client.

It turns out that a lot of potential clients don’t want to cooperate with the screening process because they don’t like revealing their identity to a stranger. That makes things difficult, but note that Annie’s screening goals — “someone we’re willing to spend time alone with…agree to provide the [correct payment]…be someone we feel is not a danger to our personal safety” — do not include knowing the client’s true name.

Getting the person’s true name is usually a practical requirement for screening, but we could imagine other ways of establishing trust. For example, if several other legitimate sex workers say they’ve met the person at the BobRoss1965@gmail.com email address, and he was a great client, that might be good enough. His control over the email address proves he’s the person the other sex workers met, and their references establish his safety. Annie might consider that sufficiently strong evidence that he meets her standards even if she does not know his name. (Or not. I can’t speak for Annie) The referring sex workers might not establish that the owner of the BobRoss1965@gmail.com address is Bob Ross the TV Painter, but they do help establish the other claims Annie is interested in, such as agreeable personality, ability to pay, and safety.

Again, Annie doesn’t have to do all of this for herself. If she works for an agency or a brothel, they may provide the screening services. The computer security equivalent would be a trusted third party that enforces compliance to certain standards, such as workflow orchestration services like IFTTT and Zapier, or business coordination services like athenahealth medical billing or Quickbooks payment processing.

I find it fascinating that American sex workers face some of the same security problems as software engineers, and that they solve them in analogous ways. Annie’s thoughts on issues of identity are particularly clear, and they parallel a lot of modern thinking about identity on the internet. If more people learned to think about these issues the way Annie does, a lot fewer people would fall for phishing schemes and other con games.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Courtesanal Access Protocols

I’ve been following online sex workers for several years now, and based on my observations, I believe I can offer some helpful signs to look out for:

Five Signs Your Daughter May Be an Online Sex Worker!

1. She can recite the legislative history of the FOSTA-SESTA Act and describe its effects on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
2. She rolls her eyes whenever a news story mentions “sex trafficking.”
3. She is extremely knowledgeable about internet privacy technology and can name an offshore web hosting service off the top of her head.
4. She can explain Operation Choke Point banking regulations.
5. She has a surprisingly vehement dislike for Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Mira Sorvino, Julie Bindel, Swanee Hunt, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris.

Special bonus 6th Sign: Her favorite journalist is Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

I hope this helps.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Five Signs Your Daughter May Be an Online Sex Worker!

It’s common to speak of “being an ally” to sex workers. There’s a lot of advice online about how to do that, including a guest post by Stacey Swimme at Honest Courtesan. But to be honest, I don’t think of myself as an ally to sex workers, because a lot of being an “ally” is amplifying sex workers’ voices, and this blog is not about amplifying other people’s voices — it’s a about me having a place to write in my own voice about ideas that I find interesting, and right now I don’t want to write about how much sex workers earn or the politics of review sites or clients who fight the screening process. What I am interested in writing about is the rights and freedoms of people doing something that shouldn’t be a crime.

I’ve spent a lot of time, as a blogger and before, arguing against the War On Drugs. Not only is the War On Drugs wasting resources, destroying lives, and eroding civil liberties, but it’s also a fundamentally evil idea: It’s using violent law enforcement to stamp out a consensual crime — a supposed crime in which all parties are voluntarily participating of their own free will. The War On Drugs hurts a lot of people, but it helps no one, except the people carrying it out, who get paychecks and the enjoyment of feeling smug and self-righteous as they hurt people. I hate everything about it.

I’ve also begun to hate the War on Prostitution. I’ve long been opposed to all consensual crimes — recreational drugs, gambling, pornography, public drunkenness, vagrancy, homosexuality, food trucks, gun ownership, kink, migration, raw milk, incest, risky sports, transgenderism, loitering, status offenses, braiding hair without a license, whatever — because as long as everybody involved has consented freely and competently, I don’t give a shit, and I don’t think it should be a crime. So I’ve always opposed prostitution laws in theory.

My opposition became somewhat less theoretical a few years ago when I bumped into Maggie McNeill in the comments section over at Radley Balko’s old Agitator blog, before it moved to the Huffington Post. At the time, Maggie was an ostensibly retired New Orleans call girl who had recently launched her own blog, The Honest Courtesan. I eventually asked Maggie to contribute to a group blog I had started with some friends, and she provided a bit of content for us.

That blog is dead, but I became a steady reader of Maggie’s blog, and I began to learn more about the legal issues that concern sex workers in this country. The obvious problem is that prostitution is illegal, but the details are important: What are the specific actions that are outlawed? In what manner are those laws enforced? And what effect does that have on the lives of sex workers and others?

I’ve learned that laws against pimping are used to prosecute babysitters who got paid with money earned from prostitution, and that carrying condoms can be used as evidence of prostitution, which makes it harder for sex workers to follow safe sex practices. I’ve learned that cops treat transwomen sex workers as if they were men exploiting women sex workers. I’ve learned that it’s a myth that waves of sex workers come to cities for major events like the Superbowl.

I’ve also been learning some of the terminology. The most disorienting thing for someone coming from the War on Drugs is that the meanings of legalization and decriminalization are reversed for prostitution — if you want it to be all-the-way legal, you want to legalize drugs, but you want to decriminalize prostitution.

The terminology for sex workers is a little frustrating. Words like “whore” and “hooker” can be insulting — although the latter sounds friendly to my ear, and many sex workers claim the former proudly. “Sex worker” is always safe, but it refers to a broad spectrum from escorts to dominatrices, streetwalkers, massage parlor girls, strippers, cam girls, and Hooters waitresses.

“Prostitute” can be problematic because it’s used by law enforcement to oppress sex workers, but I tend to use it a lot because most of my writing is concerned with that part of sex work which is illegal.

(And everybody hates “prostituted women,” which strikes sex workers as an attempt to deny that they have agency in choosing sex work.)

One good thing about the War on Prostitution is that it isn’t as intense as the War on Drugs. Anti-drug law enforcement is vicious and heartless: They can send you to jail for decades for selling drugs, and drug dealers have learned to keep their heads down. There are apparently a few online digital drug markets, but there’s nothing like the thousands of sex worker ads you’ll find on the web. There’s no recreational drug dealing equivalent of a big advertising site like Eros or ratings sites like Erotic Monkey or Rubmaps. Drug dealers just don’t have a big online community. (Or maybe I just doesn’t know how to find it.)

Sex work has benefited from something like benign neglect at times, and this has allowed a lot of sex workers like Maggie to be out in the open. There are blogs like Tits & Sass that have been around for years, and there are advocacy organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project and the Desiree Alliance which work out in the open to advance sex worker causes. Sex workers also have a vibrant presence on Twitter, and I follow a whole bunch of them.

Unfortunately, the situation for sex workers seems to be deteriorating, in ways that are sadly familiar to those of us who know the War on Drugs.

It begins with finding people to demonize. Drug warriors will tell you that cops don’t go after casual users. They claim to only go after drug dealers — the “pushers” and “high-level traffickers” — who seem to practically force young school kids to do drugs. What they don’t tell you is that the laws define drug dealing so broadly that making a purchase with a friend, or even just passing a joint, can be enough to get you charged as a drug dealer.

When it comes to prostitution, cops seem to realize that their pearl-clutching over call girls is a dumb waste of police resources, so they’ve tried to recast what they do as fighting a genuine evil. They’ve hit on the idea of calling everything “sex trafficking,” or even worse, “child sex trafficking.” They talk constantly about the relatively small number of actual child sex trafficking incidents, and they pretend that that’s all there is to sex work. This allows them to justify arresting vast numbers of people on prostitution charges, and it allows them to cast supporters of sex workers as soft on child sex trafficking.

We’re also starting to see other unpleasant features of the War on Drugs, such as federal funding and inter-agency task forces. Federal funding tends to encourage police excesses because the funds are often tied to enforcement intensity: The more arrests, the more money. Because task forces do not operate under any one police agency, they remove control of policing from local governments. (Almost every really outrageous raid turns out to involve a task force.) Throw in additional funding through civil forfeiture of the supposedly ill-gotten gains of sex trafficking, and the result is police forces operating as self-sustaining predators who answer to no one.

One thing that is unique to sex work prohibition is the involvement of a dizzying array of interlocking “rescue” organizations that purport to be fighting sex trafficking and saving women victims. To be sure, the War on Drugs now includes a massive rehab industry that wouldn’t exist if the courts weren’t forcing thousands of people into mandatory drug treatment, but the War on Drugs started with law enforcement.

When it comes to sex work, the rescue industry is in some sense leading the way. They have created the environment and the sex trafficking mythology that makes high-intensity law enforcement seem like a reasonable approach. They participate in law enforcement activities, and they rely on law enforcement to send them women to “rescue.” They even provide funding for prosecutors (which has to be one of the worst charitable programs ever). It’s kind of a rescue industrial complex.

Since 2010, the anti-sex-work prohibitionists have been attacking web sites that support sex workers. One of the first was the Craigslist adult services section. This was soon followed by San Francisco-based MyRedBook.com, the gay-oriented Rentboy.com, and review site TheReviewBoard.net.

Late last month, in the name of fighting sex trafficking, Congress passed the FOSTA/SESTA law, which for the first time breaks Section 230 protections to make websites liable when their users post content that promotes prostitution. Even before the law went into effect, Craigslist shut down their personal ads, Reddit deleted a number of sex work related subreddits, and The Erotic Review stopped serving pages to U.S. visitors. And then the big news hit: The feds shut down Backpage.com.

It’s been a bad month for sex workers. Shutting down these sites — especially Backpage — takes away some of the safest channels for selling their services. For many sex workers, Backpage was part of the path that got them off the streets. Now thanks to a bunch of overbearing law enforcement groups and their self-righteous enablers in the “anti-trafficking” movement, many of them will be forced to return to the dangers of street work.

FOSTA/SESTA hasn’t even come into effect yet but already tons U.S. sex workers are reporting getting contacted by pimps. This law isn’t stopping trafficking or the people taking advantage of sex workers, it’s giving them exactly what they want.

— Svensk Hora (@SvenskHora) April 9, 2018

Wouldn’t it have been smarter to make U.S. laws more like Australia’s (especially NSW) instead of pushing American puritan bullshit on the rest of the world? Wouldn’t it be cool to have a future where U.S. sex workers question the purpose of pimps as they have never seen one irl?

— Svensk Hora (@SvenskHora) April 9, 2018

https://twitter.com/LailaDevereaux/status/984603453912592384

Upset to hear of a sex worker's disappearance after being forced to work outdoors now that Backpage is gone. Let me talk for a minute about why we knew this was going to happen.

— Morgan M Page (@morganmpage) April 12, 2018

https://twitter.com/profstripsalot/status/984458749816524800

This is the sort of thing I’ve been seeing in Twitter. I only sample a tiny fraction of the sex work community, but I’m seeing a lot of concern over the consequence for sex workers, and it’s all pretty ugly. Here, for example, is my favorite anarchist sex worker explaining the value of online advertising:

https://twitter.com/bonnot_babe/status/982738276493774849

https://twitter.com/bonnot_babe/status/982738280260259841

Here’s another sex worker, explaining some the the cause-and-effect that’s going to hit the community:

And taking away the medium that provides safety to the people most at rosk of traffic just exacerbates tue problem creating a negative feedback loop. Sex workers are the one most at risk of coercion and exploitation. Removing our buffers only makes it worse

— the death of god 1312 (@ShredyBettyMTB) April 13, 2018

Prior to BP being shit down I would get maybe one message from someone that was looking to do exactly that, and I still had a phone and backpage as a buffer. Now I have the street, no income, and no buffered between myself and them. @womensmarch is talking about exactly that

— the death of god 1312 (@ShredyBettyMTB) April 13, 2018

No. We were cut to shreds. When Craigslist, the first avenues of online advertising for sex work, opened an adult section, there was such a pronounced impact that total femicides dropped 17.4%. Just because we moved off the street. This /will/ and already has started killing us.

— the death of god 1312 (@ShredyBettyMTB) April 13, 2018

I used to get angry whenever I heard of some new atrocity in the War On Drugs, but I was usually able to keep some emotional distance from the worst of it because I didn’t actually know any drug dealers. It wasn’t personal for me. I knew there was suffering, but I didn’t have to feel it.

But when it comes to sex workers, I follow far too many of them on Twitter. I know it’s just social media, but I feel like I know these people. And the last few weeks have been pretty bad. This bullshit is hurting people I know, and they are bitter, hurt, and angry.

Me, I’m just angry.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Getting to Know Sex Workers

Until today. Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post was nice enough to post a copy of the 61-page indictment here, if you want to take a look.

Back on Saturday, however, before the DOJ released the document, I posted a set of very cynical predictions of what would happen, and we can now check a few of them. To start with, my third prediction was

The majority of the counts in the indictment are not actually going to be about child sex trafficking. I think a lot of them will be crimes with what I like to think of as fictitious elements, such as “conspiracy” and “intent.” The prosecution is also going to be about adult consensual sex work and the usual smattering of federal add-on crimes, like money laundering or false statements, maybe with some wildcards like fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the action is around these ancillary crimes rather than the flashy child sex trafficking that prosecutors are claiming they’re fighting.

To analyze this, I prepared a spreadsheet listing all of the defendants and all of the sections of the U.S. code that they are accused of violating, and tallied which defendants were charge with which crimes.

If you’re interested in learning more about the trafficking laws, the Department of Justice website helpfully provides an overview of all sections of the U.S. Code covering Involuntary Servitude, Forced Labor, and Sex Trafficking Statutes Enforced. From that, I prepared this brief summary:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1581 (Peonage)– Makes it unlawful to hold a person in “debt servitude,” or peonage, which is closely related to involuntary servitude.
• 18 U.S.C. § 1584 (Involuntary Servitude) — Makes it unlawful to hold a person in a condition of slavery, that is, a condition of compulsory service or labor against his/her will. Also prohibits compelling a person to work against his/her will by creating a “climate of fear” through the use of force, the threat of force, or the threat of legal coercion.
• 18 U.S.C. § 1589 (Forced Labor) — Makes it unlawful to provide or obtain the labor or services of a person through threat of harm or restraint or abuse of the legal process
• 18 U.S.C. § 1590 (Trafficking) — Makes it unlawful to recruit, harbor, transport, or broker persons for labor or services under conditions which violate any of the offenses contained in a variety of other code sections.
• 18 U.S.C. § 1591 (Sex Trafficking of Children) — Makes it unlawful to cause a person to engage in a commercial sex act through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, or if the person is under the age of 18.
• 18 U.S.C. § 1592 (Documents) — Makes it unlawful to seize documents (e.g. immigration papers, even if counterfeit) in order to force others to work.

That is just my non-lawyer summary of the DOJ’s summary of the actual criminal code. If you want to learn more, you could go read the original DOJ summary or spend a few hour poring over the relevant sections in Chapter 77 of the U.S. Code. I’m sure it’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.

It would also be a complete waste of your time, because the Backpage.com executives weren’t charged with any of those crimes. There’s not a single child sex trafficking charge in the entire indictment. When I predicted that “The majority of the counts in the indictment are not actually going to be about child sex trafficking,” I was apparently nowhere near as cynical as I should have been. The indictment consists entirely of charges of facilitating prostitution, various flavors of money laundering, and conspiracy.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Most of the rest of my first five predictions assumed that there would be some child sex trafficking charges and made predictions about those charges. Since there were no such charges at all, I’m tempted to claim victory because nothing in the indictment contradicts my prediction.

The narrative material in the front of the indictment includes a lot of discussion that follows my predictions, but I haven’t read it all yet. I think some of the who-knew-what-when discussions I alluded to will still apply to the charges for adult consensual prostitution.

My remaining predictions will have to wait until the case is resolved.

All in all, however, it seems to be even a bigger steaming pile of bullshit than I predicted.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The DOJ Performs As Expected on Backpage

I hate these website confiscation notices. The agencies involved always plaster their logos all over the damned thing, like they’re so proud of how they wrecked someone’s business, like a bunch of dogs pissing all over to mark their territory. It makes me sick.

The reaction from sex workers on Twitter is heartbreaking:

https://twitter.com/feralhussy/status/982391492453974016

https://twitter.com/SadistHailey/status/982469473163558912

(TER is TheEroticReview, a site that offers lists and reviews of escorts, which now has a message up that they are no longer serving content to U.S. visitors. EscortDesign is a service that I think created small websites for escorts…I can’t tell because they just have a blank page now.)

https://twitter.com/LiaraRoux/status/982449360611848193

As I write this, the DOJ media site has no press release about any of this, but rumors and reports are flying. The FBI has reportedly raided the homes of Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, two of the founders of Backpage, and Lacey has been arrested. I’ve heard reports of the FBI going into colo facilities to confiscate Backpage’s servers. Anti-trafficking activist Cindy McCain (wife of Senator John McCain) is claiming that the FBI has raided other Backpage offices as well. Lacey’s lawyer says the DOJ has a 93-count indictment, but the court is keeping that sealed, so we don’t know exactly what’s in it.

There’s a lot we still don’t know, but I’m going to go out on a limb and call this a giant steaming pile of bullshit. The most obvious bullshit is that the feds have already seized Backpage property and shut the whole business down. You don’t see this kind of thing with normal crimes. If a someone gets road rage and runs over three people with their Buick Regal, the cops don’t seize General Motors and arrest the board of directors. This attack on Backpage is law enforcement showboating. Prosecutors have been looking to drag down a deep-pockets defendant like this for years.

Before continuing, yes, I know I could be wrong. I could be very wrong. Maybe the Backpage honchos are truly bad people, master criminals, and all of Backpage is nothing more than a criminal enterprise they founded solely for the purpose of child sex trafficking. I should also remind the reader that I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know much about federal anti-trafficking law. I am not an authority and this is not analysis. This is wild-assed guesswork.

But…I’ve seen this sort of thing before, and I think I recognize some familiar patterns. So my purpose here is to make predictions that will allow me to test my cynicism against reality, when the truth eventually comes out, days or months from now.

So here’s what I think will happen:

Prediction 1: The relevant anti-child-sex-trafficking laws will not be about straightforward crimes. Grabbing children and pimping them out to pederasts is already all kinds of illegal: It is at least the crimes of kidnapping and rape. You don’t need specialized anti-child-sex-trafficking laws to put guys who do that in prison for a very long time. What you need specialized anti-child-sex-trafficking laws for is to take that core act of violence and smear culpability around until the prosecutor can indict someone exciting, maybe even someone with valuable assets to seize.

Prediction 2: The definition of sex trafficking will not be what most people are thinking when they hear “sex trafficking.” I say this because I know the history of anti-pimping laws, which often define pimping broadly enough to include anyone who receives money earned through prostitution, including drivers, landlords, website designers, and even babysitters. The Backpage trafficking indictments will probably include the trafficking version of that kind of thing.

Prediction 3: The majority of the counts in the indictment are not actually going to be about child sex trafficking. I think a lot of them will be crimes with what I like to think of as fictitious elements, such as “conspiracy” and “intent.” The prosecution is also going to be about adult consensual sex work and the usual smattering of federal add-on crimes, like money laundering or false statements, maybe with some wildcards like fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the action is around these ancillary crimes rather than the flashy child sex trafficking that prosecutors are claiming they’re fighting.

Prediction 4: Most of the legal conflict over the trafficking charges will be about criminal intent. That some child sex traffickers advertised on Backpage seems almost certain — the site has carried millions of ads, after all — but those ads were almost certainly handled by low-level employees, if they were seen by humans at all. This is not something the executives would normally have done, and yet they are the ones arrested. I expect to see a lot of effort picking over evidence such as email messages in an attempt to tie the executives to specific ads.

Prediction 5: Attempts by Backpage employees to block sex trafficking ads will be used against them by prosecutors as proof that they were aware of trafficking. We’ve seen this kind of thing in drug enforcement, where a nightclub or motel owner takes steps to keep drug dealers out, and that becomes evidence that he was aware of drug dealing on the premises. I wouldn’t be surprised to see analogous measures by Backpage used to argue that the knew, or should have known, that something illegal was happening, and that they either helped it happen, allowed it to happen, or didn’t take adequate measures to prevent it from happening.

Prediction 6: Less than 20% of the charges will survive to end. If it goes through trial, make that less than 5%.

I am sure that some of these predictions are wrong. But this whole process just has a familiar feel to it…I’ll bet I got some of this right. I guess we’ll find out.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at You Bastards! You Killed Backpage!

Supporters of anti-prostitution law enforcement operations often justify them as necessary to protect victims of sex trafficking, especially children. Brown’s article mentions a Department of Justice report titled Evaluation of Services for Domestic Minor Victims of Human Trafficking as an example. In particular, she references the following passage, which ends with a question that needs an answer.

Detention was also used in the belief that it protects young people and ensures their connection to services. Key informants acknowledged that this situation was not ideal but argued that young people were likely to be safer in detention than elsewhere. A public defender asked, “How else do you get them services but lock them up and force them to engage in services?”

As a libertarian, my instinctive response is “How about…nonviolently?”

Is it really necessary to send cops with guns to forcibly “help” people? And even if you think it’s necessary to coerce child victims of sex trafficking into accepting social services, can’t you do it without giving them a criminal record? State child protection agencies have the authority, if they believe there is immediate danger, to remove at-risk children who are living with their parents. I’m pretty sure they can figure out a way to take a child off the street.

That won’t work with young adults, but that doesn’t mean arresting them is the only solution. There are better alternatives. We know this because non-governmental organizations like the Sex Work Outreach Project (SWOP) don’t have arrest powers, and they’ve been doing outreach to sex workers for years.

Katherine Koster from the U.S. chapter of SWOP characterizes many of the problems facing young sex workers as basically a variation on homelessness:

The issue is that there is a very large gap in no-strings-attached resources for homeless youth. A great example of this is the lack of shelter beds for youth.

[…]

Institutions–from schools to hospitals–very commonly are not a “safe” and comfortable space for homeless, especially GLBTQ youth.

[…]

We need to be making these resources available to youth on a voluntary basis. We need to stop attaching funding for services to the criminal justice system, as is frequently the case, and start making sure funding for these core services are available to people without being arrested and locked up, without interacting with the criminal justice system.

Here in Chicago, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project spent years studying ways to help young women in the sex trade, and they had some useful observations, especially about what they call institutional violence:

First, we were surprised how many stories we heard from girls, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women about their violent experiences at non profits and with service providers. This was upsetting because adults and social workers often tell us that seeking services will improve our lives. Yet when we do the systems set up to help us actually can make things worse. This was clear when looking at the foster care system.

[…]

Health care providers were also identified by girls as being unethical. We heard many stories from girls going to the emergency room or to a doctor and being placed in psychiatric units just because they were in the sex trade, transgender or were thought to be self injuring. 

Law enforcement authorities come in for special criticism:

There are particularly a lot of examples of police violence, coercion, and refusal to help. Police often accuse girls in the sex trade of lying or don’t believe them when they turn to the police for help. Many girls said that police sexual misconduct happens frequently while they are being arrested or questioned. […] Stories about police abuse outnumbered the stories of abuse by other systems by far.

So what are the alternatives? The YWEP has their own solution:

When leaving isn’t an option or what a girl might want, YWEP is here to encourage and facilitate safety planning, harm reduction ideas, and offer support and resources. Unlike programs that focus on exiting the sex trade—which usually exclude girls who aren’t ready, able, or wanting to exit—YWEP meets girls where they are and helps them make the next steps they choose. Empowerment means that girls are in charge of their decisions and have power over what they want to do—even if that means something different than what adults think is safe or appropriate. YWEP believes that the more often girls are in charge of the choices in their lives—whether that choice is about food, sleep, relationships, housing or the sex trade—the more power they take in their lives as a whole.

(My guess is that most members of YWEP lean liberal and progressive, but damn if that isn’t a heartwarmingly libertarian approach to helping people. They offer choices.)

The local SWOP chapter here in the Chicago area offers a variety of services, including a support group, monthly meetings, and weekly street-corner outreach events offering food, coffee, condoms, and referral to resources such as sex-worker-friendly doctors and lawyers. In winter they give out warm clothing.

Other organizations, although not focused primarily on sex workers, provide services that will nevertheless help homeless young people in the sex trade. Project Fierce Chicago, for example, has purchased a nine-bedroom house in the North Lawndale neigborhood, and they are renovating it to provide housing for 10-12 LGBTQ youths. (That may not sound like much, but with only a few hundred youth beds in Chicago, it’s going to help.)

Koster summarizes why this approach can help:

I think what is super-important is that 95% of the time, youth are not engaging in the sex trade because they are kidnapped from a secure home where all their needs are met. They are engaging in the sex trade because they ran away from an abusive home or foster home or were kicked our because they are GLBT, and they don’t have a place to sleep, they don’t have older people rooting for them and supporting them, they don’t have food. […]

So you don’t need to hold these kids in detention to protect them–you need to give them a safe place to stay and healthy meals, with great mentors and counselors. So meet their emotional and social and material needs, and they will be safe. You don’t need to hold them in a juvenille detention center to protect them.

This doesn’t sound hard. No, that’s not quite right…it sounds like it’s a lot of very hard work. But it doesn’t sound hard to understand. If you want to help people, you listen to them, you get to know them, you figure out what they want, and you give it to them.

And yet, we keep seeing stories like this one that I found at random:

Sure, there are a few local facilities where juvenile prostitutes can live, waiting for trial dates or transfers home, but these places are hardly ideal. They’re not designed for child sex workers—if therapy is offered, it’s certainly not tailored to the specific needs of juvenile prostitutes. More importantly, perhaps, they’re not lock-down facilities. Residents can leave. This means the girls must want to stay in a court-mandated home for delinquents (and what teenager would?) They must resist the urge to run back to their pimps—which sounds easy, until you remember that most were only selling sex because there was a pimp, with a lot of power over them, pulling the strings. Or throwing fists. Or both.

Girls living in these facilities have been known to bolt into the idling cars of pimps waiting outside—running right back into the abyss of abuse.

“These girls are so broken. They identify with the girls they work with, the pimps. [Prostitution] becomes their safe area, and they want to go back to where they feel safe,” says Susan Roske, Clark County chief deputy public defender. “We want to hang onto them, to keep them from running, and sometimes the only way to do that is in a secure environment.”

Many people running these arrest-to-rescue programs may have the best of intentions, but I think they need to stop dismissing these girls’ choices as “broken” and answer an important question: Given that the girls, having experienced both, are running away from your facilities to be with abusive pimps, what does that say about the quality of your attempt to help?

If you have to arrest people and lock them up to get them to accept your help, maybe you need to rethink your approach to helping.

(Thanks to Katherine Koster at SWOP USA for her comments and for helping with some of the research for this post.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Not Helping Youths In the Sex Trade

My skepticism is even cutting into my enjoyment of fiction. I get an attitude whenever one of my shows features a human trafficking story line. It’s especially annoying on Major Crimes, because Captain Raydor’s adopted son used to be a teen street hustler, and none of the cops are saying he would have been better off in jail. (Hey Rusty, next time your mother is sweating a prostitute in the interrogation room, how about you try standing up for your fellow sex workers for once, you useless fuck!)

I probably need to adjust my perspective. Just because police (and prosecutors and politicians and rescue agencies) lie about these things all the time doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There really are human traffickers. There really are violent pimps. There really are people who sell the opportunity to rape a child. I wouldn’t want to dismiss a serious crime just because the authorities have been lying about it with such reckless abandon.

But…damn, there’s some awful things going on here.

In an unremarkable hotel room, a team of officers watches the footage streaming from a hidden camera next door. A middle-aged man is making arrangements to pay a young woman for sex. Once she agrees, the squad will rush in, shouting instructions, their bulletproof vests bulging with firearms and emblazoned with police or FBI. The woman—or is she a girl?—will have her hands tied behind her back and her phone confiscated. She will sit on the bed, partially undressed, as a team of men search her room, pawing through her underwear drawer and toiletry bags, seizing any cash they find. She will eventually be fingerprinted, interrogated, and taken into police custody.

That’s the opening paragraph from Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s long-form piece in Reason magazine about the FBI’s long involvement in policing Americans’ sex lives.

The surveillance of morally suspicious women and the war on commercial sex were what took the FBI—then known as the Bureau of Investigation—from a fledgling East Coast–centric operation to a force with outposts, agents, and authority across America. With the Mann Act of 1910, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, the bureau became responsible for ensuring no one transported women or girls across state lines for prostitution or “any other immoral purposes.”

And this paragraph about the recent Operation Cross Country X anti-trafficking initiative perfectly reveals the reasons for my skepticism (emphasis mine):

Overall, the operation identified 82 “children” engaged in prostitution, an average of about 0.88 per city, or one for every five agencies participating. All were teenagers—mostly 16- and 17-year-olds—and a number of cities where they were found made no simultaneous pimping or sex trafficking arrests. To the feds, anyone under 18 who trades sex acts for money is defined as a victim of sex trafficking, regardless of whether they have experienced abduction, violence, restraint, or threats.

The whole article is filled with details like that. It’s a terrific piece of journalism. Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a clear writer, and after several years of reporting on this subject, she has a masterful command of the facts. I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Sex, Lies, and Sex Police

For one thing, Kutcher is routinely ridiculed by sex work activists, who accuse him of helping police to catch and jail adult consensual sex workers. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, his congressional testimony has numbers which suggest he’s still doing that:

According to Kutcher’s testimony before Sen. John McCain and other U.S. lawmakers, the app—funded by the McCain Foundation—has helped save more than 6,000 U.S. sex-trafficking victims, including 2,000 minors, in the past 12 months.

…

These numbers wildly outpace the average number of new criminal investigations into sex trafficking opened in the U.S. each year or average number of victims identified by U.S. law enforcement. …

The report also notes that in government fiscal-year 2015, the FBI identified around 672 adult and child victims of sex or labor trafficking. The FBI opened 802 human-trafficking investigations (resulting in 453 convictions) that year, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened 1,034 sex- or labor-trafficking investigations (and got 51 sex-trafficking convictions). In addition, Uniform Crime Reporting data from the states indicates that 744 investigations into state-level sex-trafficking offenses were opened in 2015.

There’s almost certainly overlap between the FBI and state investigations. But even if we count all cases separately, we’re looking at a total of 2,580 investigations into sex or labor trafficking—5,725 less cases than Thorn allegedly helped identify in a one-year period.

This suggests that Kutcher is counting something other than child sex trafficking to boost his stats.

Considering the data we do have on state and federal human trafficking cases, the only way the numbers from Kutcher’s group could make sense is if a) they’re counting every red-flag ad Spotlight identifies, regardless of whether these tips are ultimately deemed worthwhile enough to prompt a criminal investigation, or b) they’re counting cases of consensual prostitution between adults and lumping all adult sex workers identified into the “adult trafficking victim” numbers.

What really caught my attention, however, was this statement of his:

“I’ve seen video content of a child that’s the same age as mine being raped by an American man that was a sex tourist in Cambodia. This child was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play.”

Kutcher’s children are two or three years old,  so unlike so much of the grandstanding over “sex trafficking” these days, that truly is a sad and disgusting crime, and someone should probably go to jail for it. And assuming the video was explicit, it’s also a piece of true child pornography.

It’s not often that you see a major Hollywood celebrity like Ashton Kutcher confess to viewing child pornography. In front of Congress. On television.

To be clear, no matter how much I disagree with some of the things anti-prostitution activists like Kutcher do in the name of fighting “sex trafficking,” I’m against prosecuting them for non-prurient viewing of video of the crime that they are fighting.

Still, that’s something you don’t see every day.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ashton Kutcher’s Unusual Confession

I don’t know if this site will contribute meaningfully to the cause of sex workers’ (and clients’) rights, but one item on the Myths vs. Facts page caught my attention, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

MYTH: Clients are pathetic losers who can’t get dates or sustain meaningful relationships.

CoSWAC responds with these facts:

• Many clients are in relationships, but turn to sex workers to address unmet needs.
• Some sex workers specialize in addressing the needs of disabled clients.
• Sex work clients have diverse and complex reasons for retaining the services of sex workers.

I’m sure those facts are a reasonable response, and I understand why CoSWAC used them, but someone needs to address the motives of the people promoting this myth. People who say things like this aren’t just making an academic observation; they’re arguing that sex work should be (or remain) outlawed because of these kinds of clients. And that’s an ugly argument. Because even if the myth were true, so what?

Why should it matter that some clients are “pathetic losers who can’t get dates or sustain meaningful relationships”? Does that mean they should never have sex? That they should never experience pleasurable physical intimacy, never touch a woman, because they lack the confidence or charisma to charm a woman into bed? Keeping them from hiring sex workers isn’t protecting women from predators. It’s just sentencing people with personality disorders to a life without intimacy. It’s just cruel.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Losers Deserve Love Too

The problem, as it so often is for us libertarians, is the lack of respect for freedom of choice. Here’s the recent Twitter exchange that triggered this post, beginning with Miss Lorelei Rivers discussing sex work:

"Sex work" is intrinsically dangerous, intrinsically exploitative, intrinsically misogynistic.

— Francois Tremblay (@TPrimeDirective) June 1, 2016

Great… now listen to the 90% of women in your "work" who want to leave, who have PTSD, or are not as privileged as you are.

— Francois Tremblay (@TPrimeDirective) June 1, 2016

In case that doesn’t look right, here are the important bits:

Francois Tremblay: “Sex work” is intrinsically dangerous, intrinsically exploitative, intrinsically misogynistic.

Miss Lorelei Rivers: I disagree completely with this statement – and unlike you, I actually am a sex worker.

Francois Tremblay: Great… now listen to the 90% of women in your “work” who want to leave, who have PTSD, or are not as privileged as you are.

I’ll leave the validity of the 90% statistic (and the prevalence and causes of PTSD among sex workers) to someone more qualified. Worrying too much about the details could make us miss a more important point: Why should Lorelei Rivers give a shit what other sex worker want?

There is certainly nothing wrong if Lorelei Rivers wants to know the needs and desires of other sex workers. Maybe she’s just a good person who has empathy for others. But she shouldn’t have to care what other sex workers want. That is, her right to go about her business should not depend on how other people feel about it, and that includes other sex workers. If 99.9999% of sex workers want to quit and find a different line of work, but Lorelei Rivers prefers to keep doing what she’s doing, what possible justification can there be to stop her?

Because we live in a democracy, it may seem reasonable to worry about what the majority wants, but the desires of the majority are a distraction from the real issue, which is personal choice. It’s true that sometimes we have to make collective decisions — usually when making different individual choices would cause irreconcilable conflicts — so we depend on majority rule to tell us that stealing is illegal, and that we should drive on the right side of the road. But we can make our own choices about where to live, and whether to drink Pepsi or Coke.

Choice of employment, including employment as a sex worker, is a Pepsi or Coke kind of thing. In a free society, if some women want to be sex workers and others don’t, there’s no reason they can’t both get what they want.

The second example is even worse:

.@PointTaken @AmnestyOnline is a human rights org. Prostitution exists in fundamental opposition to women's humans rights #PointTakenPBS

— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) June 1, 2016

.@loreleirivers Women deserve REAL choices. Also, men should make the CHOICE not to pay vulnerable women for sexual access #PointTakenPBS

— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) June 1, 2016

Again, the relevant portions:

Meghan Murphy: [Amnesty International] is a human rights org. Prostitution exists in fundamental opposition to women’s humans rights.

— and yet this prominent human rights organizations disagrees with you —

Miss Lorelei Rivers: Sex workers are humans who also deserve rights – including the right to make choices about their bodies and work.

Meghan Murphy: Women deserve REAL choices. Also, men should make the CHOICE not to pay vulnerable women for sexual access.

Lorelei Rivers has it right: People deserve the right to make their own choices, including the right to sell sexual services, and anyone who takes away that choice (whether through the U.S. model of jailing sex workers, or through the Nordic model of jailing the the people who pay them) is not respectful of their rights.

I don’t know what Meghan Murphy is trying to get at by claiming sex work is not a “real” choice. Usually when people try to dismiss someone else’s choice by saying it’s not “real,” they mean one of two things, and both of them are bullshit.

First, Meghan Murphy might mean that a woman’s choice to be a sex worker isn’t “real” because the women is deluded, or suffering from “false consciousness,” or is otherwise making a mistake. This raises the obvious question of why anyone should believe that Meghan Murphy is better at understanding Lorelei Rivers’ life than Lorelei Rivers is. There’s also the problem that claiming a choice isn’t “real” isn’t an argument. It’s an attempt to hide the fact that you don’t have an argument.

Second, Meghan Murphy might mean that a woman’s choice to be a sex worker isn’t “real” because many women who choose sex work are trapped in such dire circumstances (economic or otherwise) that sex work is the only way out. This actually makes a certain amount sense. Women who engage in sex work to save themselves from dire situations are like people who jump from a fourth story window to escape a burning building: The jump is a choice, but it’s a choice that is forced upon them by circumstances.

Of course, all our choices are constrained by our circumstances, so there’s a certain amount of special pleading in assuming that the choice to do sex work is qualitatively different from the choice to do something like construction work or nursing.

Even if we assume that sex work is special, there’s a bigger problem: When we see people jumping from a fourth floor window to escape a fire, our response should not be to stop them by boarding up the window! Similarly, if women are engaging in sex work out of desperation, it is presumptuous and possibly even dangerous to force them to stop.

(I’m sure sex work prohibitionists would point out that they’re providing exit services for sex workers — the equivalent of installing additional fire escapes in the burning building — but in that case, why bother boarding up the windows? If your exit services are getting women out of sex work, then why the need to criminalize it? If it’s because women are rejecting your exit services and staying in sex work, then perhaps you need to rethink how you’re “helping,” because it’s obviously not working.)

Then, of course, there’s the problem that some sex workers insist they aren’t desperate. I don’t know Lorelei Rivers, but I do know Maggie McNeill a bit, and I’m pretty confident she could be successful at a lot of other jobs besides sex work. But that’s not what she wants to do.

Which brings me back around to the prohibitionist’s pointless claim that sex workers like Maggie McNeill are highly privileged, and that most sex workers would rather quit. But so what? Why should Maggie McNeill give a shit what other sex workers want?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why Should Miss Lorelei Rivers Give a Shit What Other People Want?

Sex buyers were more likely than men who did not buy sex to report sexual aggression and likelihood to rape. Men who bought sex scored higher on measures of impersonal sex and hostile masculinity and had less empathy for prostituted women, viewing them as intrinsically different from other women. When compared with non-sex-buyers, these findings indicate that men who buy sex share certain key characteristics with men at risk for committing sexual aggression […]

(Speaking of lack of empathy and treating sex workers as intrinsically different from other women, the phrase “prostituted women” implicitly robs sex workers of their agency, making it easier for anti-prostitution activists to ignore the voices of sex workers. That sort of language is a longstanding complaint from sex work activists. You’d think “facultied women” like Farley would know that by now.)

I really didn’t feel like reading the whole study, and fortunately I didn’t have to, because Elizabeth Nolan Brown has read it and she has a few concerns which are worth reading if you’re wondering about the accuracy of the study. Having said that, I’m not so sure that accuracy matters, because even if the study holds up, I don’t see how you can get from the results of this study to a policy of prohibiting sex work. If sex work clients are disproportionately dangerous, then wouldn’t it make more sense to decriminalize prostitution so that sex workers don’t have to work in secret and can safely ask for help when they need it?

I broke down and read some of the study, and it turns out Farley and company explain their thinking this way (internal citations omitted):

Researchers of prostitution have been largely polarized into two camps based on whether they understand prostitution to be primarily sexual labor or primarily sexual abuse.

[…]

Is a sex buyer’s use of a woman in prostitution motivated by the same dynamics that lead a person with resources to seek a service provider to clean their house or shine their shoes, or is the use of a woman in prostitution more akin to the dynamics seen in perpetrators of sexual violence? […] If buyers of sex, compared to those who do not buy sex, score higher on attitudes and behaviors of sexual aggression, given that prostitution is also a sexual practice, that result would empirically suggest that, for the consumer population, prostitution is a practice that is consistent with those attitudes and behaviors, making it more similar to a practice of sexual aggression than to the purchase of other services.

[…]

The question of whether prostitution is more like a job or whether it is more like abuse/sexual aggression is an important question on a societal level as well because it leads to very different policies. If prostitution is understood primarily as labor, then it needs to be legalized and regulated (as in the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia). If prostitution is understood primarily as abuse/sexual aggression, it needs to be abolished (as in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland).

That approach struck me as so wrong-headed that I had to stop writing this post because I couldn’t figure out how to explain why it bothers me. (And it’s not just because I’m shocked to read that prostitution has been successfully abolished in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland — which must be really shocking to Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic prostitutes.) It’s just absurd to try to determine if a relationship is exploitative by looking at aggregate statistics about psychology and attitude.

I mean, prostitution is often conflated with sex trafficking, a form of slavery, but would it make sense to judge whether slavery in America was bad for the slaves by profiling slave owners to see if they had sadistic tendencies?

Let me expand on that example. Not every black person living in the South was a slave. For a variety of reasons, about half of all free blacks — a couple of hundred thousand people — chose to live and work in the American South right up until the Civil War. In particular, some types of plantations had slaves working as skilled craftsmen. If they were freed, they often stayed in the area for economic reasons: They had developed skills that were valuable to plantation owners, so it made economic sense to stay with the plantations. These free craftsmen often worked side-by-side with slaves.

Now suppose an abolitionist version of Melissa Farley had discovered free black carpenters working on plantations in the South. It’s not hard to imagine her concluding that since plantation owners are known to use slave carpenters, which is clearly exploitation, the free carpenters must also be victims of exploitation by the plantation owners. Therefore, she would conclude, the best way to protect free blacks from exploitation is to outlaw carpentry on plantations.

The free black carpenters might try to explain that they were working on the plantations by their own choice, but it’s easy to imagine someone like Farley dismissing these claims for the same reasons people like her dismiss the claims of sex workers: She’d say they’d spent so much time as slaves that they’re suffering from “false consciousness.” Or since some of them used to supervise other slaves on the plantation, she’d accuse them of being part of the “slave driver lobby.”

It’s a bit of a stretch, but we could even imagine some sort of abolitionist NGOs that “rescue” free blacks and transport them to the North, even though the North wasn’t necessarily better than the South for free black people, especially since leaving the South meant abandoning their community and quitting lucrative jobs for less desirable work in the North.

In this historic setting, it’s pretty clear that “rescuing” free blacks would be a mistake. Our imaginary abolitionists claiming to rescue free blacks from plantation owners are in fact the ones ignoring the choices of free black workers. They would be the ones denying blacks their freedom.

The moral and ethical aspects of specific actions should not be confused with the general moral and ethical tendencies of the individuals who perform them. Enslaving black people is about as racist and white supremacist as you can get, but the plantation owner’s enslavement of some black people doesn’t mean that every black person found working on a plantation is the moral equivalent of a slave. A bad person doing good things doesn’t make the good things bad.

Similarly, asking whether clients of prostitutes have good attitudes toward women is missing the point. Prostitution is labor if the women get paid and choose to do it of their own free will, it’s abuse if the women get abused, and if the women are forced into it, it’s rape and human trafficking. We don’t need to do social surveys to get this right. What we need to do is make sure that sex workers are free to choose, and then we need to trust that they will make the best choices about who they accept as clients.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Does It Matter If Prostitution Clients are More Aggressive?

While there are clearly sex workers by choice, the majority globally are there because of poverty, homelessness etc. Aka lack of choice.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) August 8, 2015

In case that wasn’t formatted right, that’s Lena Dunham, who opposes Amnesty International’s proposal to decriminalize prostitution, tweeting “While there are clearly sex workers by choice, the majority globally are there because of poverty, homelessness etc. Aka lack of choice.”

When she talks about “sex workers by choice,” I assume she’s talking about vocal activists who have made it clear that they think sex work is a great job. Around here that’s folks like Maggie McNeill, Mistress Matisse, Brooke Magnanti, Serpent Libertine, Furry Girl, and the whole Tits & Sass crowd. These are the sex workers (or former sex workers) who are speaking out in favor of Amnesty’s proposal, and who are arguing against Dunham’s condemnation of it.

The implication is that these women are special cases — sex work’s 1 percent — who have chosen sex work freely, and who are not representative of the vast majority of sex workers, especially worldwide, who are not doing sex work by choice.

If by “lack of choice” she meant coercive sex trafficking, she’d have a point, because by definition the victims of sex trafficking have no choice: They are slaves, and they are rape victims. There’s little evidence, however, that these victims are more than a small minority of sex workers, and in any case, Amnesty International is not proposing to legalize slavery and rape.

When Dunham writes “the majority globally are there because of poverty, homelessness etc,” she’s talking about poor women, often in developing countries, whose choices are severely limited by economics. The do sex work out of necessity, and Dunham doesn’t think that’s really much of a choice.

Unfortunately, statements like Dunham’s confuse the issue because they conflate two different meanings of the concept of choice, which can be defined as:

By the last definition, choice is about the set of options available to you, but by the first definition, choice is about your power to control which option you pick.

The set of options available to you is outside your control. It depends on factors like your genetics, how you were raised, what society you were born into, what kind of people you met, and what kind of options they offered you. This kind of choice is about where life takes you, and a lot of it is just a matter of luck.

On the other hand, when activists talk about people choosing sex work, they are talking about the first definition: Women who, given the options available to them, have chosen to do sex work. A big part of the anti-sex-work message is the claim that no women would choose to be a prostitute, that all prostitutes are “prostituted” by someone, that they are all victims of human traffickers and pimps. One of the ways sex work activists counter those claims is to tell their own stories about the choices they made.

This is not to say that they chose that line of work from a field of infinite possibilities, but that they freely choose from the options available to them. And of course women living in “poverty, homelessness etc” have to choose from a smaller array of options.

Economist Amartya Sen has argued that the range of choices available to people is a better measure of comparative quality of life than the usual measures of income or consumption because it captures the value of having choices: All other things being equal, having access to a Walmart that sells 140,000 items makes your life better, and earning $50,000 in a free country is better than earning $50,000 in a totalitarian state. So when Dunham and others talk about “poverty, homelessness etc” limiting women’s choices, that’s another way of saying these women are poor.

We now arrive at the point where I really have trouble following the logic: If these poor women are choosing sex work because they have so few choices, you’d think the solution would be to offer them more choices, wouldn’t you? But if we criminalize the way they earn money, we’re reducing their choices. People who think like Dunham are advocating the very thing they are complaining about.

Or to approach it from a different direction, I’d like to ask Dunham why she thinks these poor women have decided to do sex work. Is she saying they’re too stupid to know better? I’m sure she’d deny it, but how else to explain why she’s disregarding the choices these women made about their own lives?

By definition, these women are trapped in a situation that offers them very few options, none of which are very good. And out of that array of bad options, they chose to do sex work. Doesn’t that mean that every other option was worse? So when you prevent them from doing sex work, aren’t you forcing them to do something that will make their lives worse? These poor women have decided that that sex work — sometimes referred to as “survival sex” — is their best option. It seems arrogant and unwise to think you know better than they do.

Unfortunately, when you try to make this argument, someone inevitably tries to put it in the worst way they can think of:

My response is that I could just as easily have started this post with that image and called it “Everything Wrong With Feminist Anti-Sexwork Thinking In One Tweet.”

(I’ll admit that message sounds pretty harsh, but that’s because we use references to blowjobs as insults: “You cocksucker! Suck my dick!” I’m not sure if that’s because telling another man to suck your dick implied that he was gay or effeminate or what, but given how much men enjoy getting blowjobs, it’s a little weird to imply that giving blowjobs is demeaning. I mean, what’s the message here? Giving a blowjob is demeaning to women, but you totally don’t think it’s demeaning when your girlfriend is giving you one?)

In any case, fair enough, I’ll own that. But I would phrase it a little differently: Poor women should be able to earn money by giving blowjobs to rich men if they want to. The if they want to part is real important, because I think we all agree it’s wrong to force women to sexually service men. But opponents of decriminalization apparently think it’s perfectly okay to use force to prevent prevent women from earning money by sexually servicing men.

I’ve got to wonder if the people who made this sign gave any thought to what would happen if rich men took their message to heart and stopped paying poor women for sex. Wouldn’t that make them even poorer?  Do these people imagine that, freed of the option of sex work, the women would all just go out and get better jobs? Or do they think that once those “rich men” can’t pay women for sex, they’ll instead contribute the money to charities for the poor?

Prostitution by poor women is called “survival sex” for a reason. And nothing good happens when you take away someone’s means of survival.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Everything Wrong With Feminist Anti-Sexwork Thinking In One Tweet

If you actually read both previous posts, you may have noticed that I place a lot of weight on the subjective judgements of the participants in the sex trade. If people are voluntarily paying for sex, I accept their decision and assume they are getting something that is, at least in their eyes, worth the money. And more to the point, if people are voluntarily performing sex acts for money, I accept their choice and assume they are receiving enough money to make it worth whatever costs — financial, physical, or psychological — they may incur.

Not everybody sees things this way. Many people feel that transactional sex inherently exploits sex workers, regardless of how the sex workers say they feel about it, and some people feel that prostitution is also harmful to men, because transactional sex is not as emotionally healthy as sex in the context of a loving relationship. They’re welcome to judge the situation that way, but in an economic benefit-cost analysis we have to accept everyone’s decisions equally.

We especially shouldn’t substitute our own judgement. That would be an error for at least three reasons:

First, that’s just not how economics is done. One of the basic assumptions in economic thinking is that people are rational utility maximizers, which is economist-speak for saying people are always trying to improve the quality of their lives, based on their own personal ideas of happiness. Economists assume that when people choose to do something — buy sex, sell sex, whatever — it’s because doing that thing will provide the greatest benefit in their lives at the lowest cost possible, according to their own evaluation of the benefits and costs.

Strictly speaking, that’s not always true. People make mistakes all the time, and economists are developing more complex models to refine their predictions accordingly. Nevertheless, there’s a difference between observing that people deviate from the rational utility maximizer model and proving that those deviations are large enough, imbalanced enough, and consistent enough to justify discarding people’s revealed preferences. In practice, the assumption that people will rationally pursue their own best interests is very useful, and if we discard it, we’re straying far from well-understood economics.

The second reason for not overriding people’s judgement with our own is that it’s not our life. The people making the decisions probably know a lot more about their lives than you or I do, and they have a much stronger incentive to make the right decision, since they will receive the benefits and suffer the costs.

Unlike most of us, sex workers don’t just read about prostitution, they don’t just study it. They live it. They work strange hours and see oddball clients, they have sex with strange men and do the emotional labor of pretending to enjoy it. They take all the risks everyone worries about, from getting ripped off to getting killed. They take the money, and they risk getting arrested and being labeled a criminal. They know a great deal about being a sex worker, and for us to think we can make better decisions about their lives is the height of arrogance.

That’s not to say that people don’t make mistakes about their own lives, since they certainly do. I think we can all speak from experience about that. And sometimes we can see other people are making a mistake even when they can’t. But to dismiss a whole group’s decisions about their own lives is to assume we are consistently smarter than all of them. That’s an amazing claim that should only be accepted under exceptional circumstances.

Sometimes, granted, circumstances are exceptional. Doctors, for example, often have a really good understanding of medical issues, and in the course of a medical career they must encounter thousands of examples of patients making health decisions that are just flat-out wrong. And yet…one of the core principles of medical ethics is to never do anything without a patient’s consent. If a patient is refusing treatment, doctors can have the results of thousands of dollars in lab tests, decades of medical history, and billions of dollars worth of peer-reviewed reproducible research saying that the patient is wrong, but medical ethics do not permit the doctor to force the treatment on the patient. But somehow the folks at Le Mouvement du Nid think their far less rigorous knowledge entitles them to make decisions for tens of thousands of sex workers they’ve never even met.

The third reason for not substituting our own judgement for the judgements of the people we’re studying is that it would be cheating.

Let’s say you hate the taste of brussels sprouts so much that you’d like the USDA to ban them for human consumption, and to support your effort you commission a survey to prove that the taste of brussels sprouts is so awful that no one would eat them, and therefore that farming them is a waste of agricultural resources.

When you get the survey results back, however, most of the participants say that brussels sprouts taste like week-old armpit, but a significant fraction of the population — a fraction large enough to account for all brussels sprout consumption in America — says they find brussels sprouts to be a tasty alternative to more traditional vegetables.

Obviously, no matter how wrong you think those people are about the taste of brussels sprouts (and they are very, very wrong), it would be unethical for you to simply discard their responses and present the remaining data in your study as if it were unbiased. If you discard the opinions of people who disagree with you, then of course the study will support your opinion.

That’s what you do if you try to perform an economic study but you substitute your own preferences for the preferences of the subjects of your study. That’s what the ProstCost study does when it counts the costs of prostitution but it ignores the benefits — benefits that must be present to explain why tens of thousands of people engage in sex work and hundreds of thousands more hire them.

Getting back to the study itself, I explained earlier that we know prostitutes produce their services for a cost of at most € 3.2 billion and consumers receive at least € 3.2 billion in benefits — together these are the producer and consumer surpluses from trade. The benefits almost have to be greater than the costs, but is the resulting gain greater than the € 202 million external cost that I calculated in the previous post?

I have no way to know without more economic data. However, € 202 million is only about 6.3% of the prostitution trade, so the surpluses wouldn’t have to be very big to overcome it.

We can, perhaps, make some headway by looking at the taxes. Even if the people making money from prostitution are able to evade € 853 million in income taxes by hiding their earnings as the study indicates, there are lots of other taxes which they can’t avoid.

They have to live somewhere, so they can’t avoid paying residence and land taxes, and everything they buy is subject to value-added taxes (similar to sales taxes), and there are also some industrial taxes that are passed along to consumers. The sex workers may not report their income, but they still have to spend money, and some of that money eventually gets paid as taxes.

We can make a rough estimate of how much sex workers still still pay in taxes because we know that the tax burden in France is about 45%, which means that the expected tax burden on € 3.2 billion in prostitution earnings is about € 1440 million. Even if they manage to evade € 853 million of it, that still leaves an expected € 587 million in paid taxes, or about 2.9 times the € 202 million external social cost.

So based on the data in the study, plus a few other statistics and some economic thinking, prostitution provides a net benefit to France.

At the beginning of this post, I speculated that one of the reasons Le Mouvement du Nid conducted this study was that they objected to the recent decision to include prostitution in European Union GDP calculations. However, as far as I can tell, most of the costs discussed in the ProstCost study have nothing to do with GDP.

Taking money from taxpayers and giving it to poor people may be the compassionate thing to do, but it’s not a productive activity. Therefore these transfer payments do not go into the GDP calculation. So if I’m right that “Cost implications direct social” refers to anti-poverty welfare transfers, then these items have no effect on GDP and neither do taxes or, more importantly for our purposes, evasion of taxes.

“Direct costs Medical (Cost of health)” is healthcare workers producing healthcare, so it actually adds € 85 million to French GDP. And “Direct costs non-medical” is the cost of government employees doing something presumably productive, so that’s another € 35 million, for a total of about € 120 million contributed to GDP.

(If it strikes you as odd that poor health can lead to expenditures that show up as increased GDP, you’re not alone. It’s one of the reasons why economists warn that GDP is only a very rough proxy for national well-being. Neither pro- nor anti-sex work advocates should really be arguing GDP. It’s the wrong economic measure for this kind of thing.)

“Human costs for people Prostitutes” — rape and murder — are not traded in the marketplace, so they are left out of GDP calculations, as are “Homicides/Suicides.”

“Losses production due to incarcerations” is a direct hit on GDP that reduces it by € 19 million, but that loss is due to criminalization of prostitution, not to prostitution itself, so the effect on GDP is still around € 120 million.

I don’t know what goes into “Placing children.” If we treat that € 59 million as the cost of caring for children, that’s a productive activity that goes into GDP. If it’s a transfer payment, then it doesn’t. Let’s assume the latter, and keep our total at around € 120 million.

The remaining costs amount to € 1547 million, but they don’t affect GDP.

The net effect so far is that the “costs” of prostitution seems to be producing a total of € 120 million in additional GDP because of spending on healthcare and government services.

To be honest, that could be completely illusory. We don’t know what would happen to all those healthcare and government workers if they weren’t getting paid to provide services to sex workers. Maybe they would would be unemployed, in which case the € 120 million is a real gain to GDP, or maybe they would just be doing some other work, in which case they’d still get about € 120 million, implying that prostitution contributed nothing. The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

(As I said, counting medical expenditures for health problems probably isn’t the best idea for measuring social welfare — if doctors didn’t have to take care of sick sex workers, French society could presumably spend the money some other way. This is why I counted them as costs in my analysis in part 2.)

Of course, even if that GDP gain from healthcare and government spending is illusory, there’s another huge GDP gain that is not: The € 3.2 billion that prostitution adds directly to the GDP. Unless you’re able to make a convincing argument that prostitution — unlike all other work — doesn’t belong in the GDP, that’s a hard number to beat.

(And remember, you can’t argue that the € 3.2 billion should be excluded from GDP because prostitution is a crime and then argue against decriminalization of prostitution because it doesn’t help GDP. That’s cheating again.)

The study concludes with an odd note:

“It is important to note that while prostitution customers spent their money in any other activity, the French company would save each year several hundred million euros expenses related to the consequences of prostitution and parallel increase its tax revenues of at least EUR 853 million.”

I’m having trouble getting my head around what that even means. Counterfactual propositions are always tricky to think about, but that one is really broad and open ended. I’m not even going to attempt a full analysis. But I’ve got to ask a few questions.

What if prostitution consumers quit hiring sex workers and decided instead to spend their € 3.2 billion on high-end iPads and Ford F-150 pickup trucks? Those are imported, so France would still lose € 853 million in taxes. And without that € 3.2 billion flowing to sex workers, they would be unemployed, which would certainly cause social welfare spending to skyrocket. Even if they did find jobs, they would probably pay less or have other less desirable features. After all, if there were easily available jobs that were better than sex work, why would there be sex workers?

That last point is actually pretty important. Sex workers do sex work for the same reason all of us do our jobs: Because it is the best job they can find that meets their requirements. If their customers went away, it would reduce the quality of their lives. We know this because if having no customers raised the quality of their lives, they could simply quit the business.

However, the real problem with the quoted observation is that even if we assume that everything I’ve written in these three posts is dead wrong, and even if we accept the premise that if prostitution customers spent their money on any other activity, the French economy really would save € 1.6 billion, it’s still just a fantasy.

Sure, if hundreds of thousands of French men all voluntarily decided to give up a bit of their personal happiness out of an altruistic desire to improve the welfare of others, that would make other French people’s lives a little better. But that’s never going to happen.

Or to put it another way, why is Le Mouvement du Nid thinking so small? Why limit their fantasies to having Frenchmen give up only prostitution? As long as they’re looking for imaginary solutions, why not imagine how much better France would be if everyone also gave up burglaries, car thefts, robberies, rapes, murders, scams, riots, and public corruption? I’m sure that would save a lot of money too.

In the real world, if Le Mouvement du Nid wants to get French men to give up hiring sex workers, they’re going to have to do it with some kind of law enforcement “end demand” policy that will force them to stop. That might be possible, but the effort would be an enormously expensive War On Prostitution, for which we haven’t even begun to estimate the cost.

In the end, what I’ve seen so far of this study doesn’t prove much of anything. I may change my mind if I ever see a better translation or more data from the actual study, but until then I think this whole thing is better viewed as a publicity stunt.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at ProstCost – Part 3 of 3: The Meaning Of It All

Now I’d like to discuss the costs described in the study. I should warn you, this will be getting into the weeds.

Before that, however, I want to discuss a cost that the study never directly addresses: The production cost of prostitution, as paid by the sex workers themselves. This includes not just financial out-of-pocket costs, but also the time value of the sex worker’s labor and any costs in the sex worker’s quality of life. That cost would be difficult to determine directly, but we can once again use the economist’s trick to set a bound.

Going back to that $50 steak dinner from the previous post, how much do you think it costs the restaurant to prepare and serve it? Well, just as you wouldn’t buy it unless it was worth more than $50 to you, the restaurant wouldn’t sell it for $50 unless it cost less than that to make. $50 was the lower bound of its value to you, but it’s the upper bound of its cost to the restaurant.

Except in the degenerate case where both you and the restaurant value the steak at exactly $50, the steak is being transferred from an owner who puts a value of less than $50 on it to an owner who puts a value of more than $50 on it. For example, it might cost the restaurant $45 to prepare the steak, and you might be willing to pay $60 to eat it. When you buy it for $50, the restaurant gets $50 for its $45 steak — a $5 gain — and you get a $60 steak for $50 — a $10 gain. That’s a combined net gain of $15. You have made the world $15 richer. This is the economic benefit of trade.

And just as we estimated the benefits of prostitution to be at least € 3.2 billion per year, we can estimate that the production costs must be at most € 3.2 billion per year. The difference between the production cost and the value to the consumer is the economic social gain from prostitution, at least for those participating in it.

That’s not quite the whole story. Even though clients gain more than sex workers lose, it’s possible there are third parties who experience losses that outweigh the gain. That’s the implication of the ProstCost study, and we ought to take a closer look at it.

The ProstCost study breaks the costs out into six main categories. The first one I want to look at is “Human costs for people Prostitutes.” (Because I’m using Google Translate to get the category names, I’m going to quote them as a reminder that the translation is shaky.) This is where the study tries to estimate equivalent financial amounts for non-financial costs. Here’s the list:

Some commentators are concerned that the study assigns financial costs to very non-financial harms like rape and murder. I understand why that creeps people out, but it’s really the only way to answer or even ask these kinds of questions: You have to have some way to compare costs and benefits, so you have to translate them to a common measurement. People have always been willing to risk their well-being for money or the things that money can buy, and we have some idea how they make those tradeoffs, so we have some reasonable methods of assigning financial costs to these kinds of risks.

A more troublesome issue is that this category is counting crimes against sex workers as a cost of prostitution. We see this attitude with some other crimes, where victims are punished for making themselves vulnerable — from cops ticketing people who leave their cars unlocked to efforts to shut down bars where fights break out.

Furthermore, it’s arguable that much of this crime against sex workers is exacerbated by the criminalization of prostitution and related activities. It makes sex workers reluctant to report even serious crimes to police — because police might decide to arrest them — and it discourages business practices that would make them safer, such as keeping records, installing security cameras, and hiring people to protect them.

The fundamental problem with the study’s approach, however, is that including these costs makes no sense because these costs are borne entirely by the sex workers themselves under the € 3.2 billion cost cap I calculated above. Sex workers are smart enough to take these costs into account when deciding to do that kind of work, and therefore the ones doing that kind of work are those who have accepted the costs in return for the benefits.

A similar cost category in the ProstCost study is “Direct costs Medical (Cost of health),” which is estimated at € 85 million per year. The study says these estimates are for costs “specifically related to prostitution,” and I’m going to assume that € 85 million is (as it should be) only the excess cost of medical care for sex workers over and above that of other people in the same demographic.

If this was in the United States, I would lump medical costs into the previous category because they would be borne directly by the sex workers themselves. Because this is France, however, some of those costs are covered by national health insurance, which makes them a cost born by the French public.

Another similar category is € 58 million for “Cost implications direct social” which is, from the looks of the individual items, a collection of social welfare programs. Assuming again that these numbers are estimates of the excess costs — the costs of sex workers compared to the population average costs — then they are legitimate costs borne by the French public.

What’s less clear about these costs is which way the causality is flowing: It’s not clear that prostitution causes poverty. Certainly some desperately poor people have turned to prostitution as a way to survive, but in that case it’s the poverty that’s causing the prostitution. In fact, the prostitution income is probably reducing social welfare spending.

More generally, it seems likely that poverty and prostitution have co-factors — conditions that make it hard to hold a well-paying regular job, but which are less of a problem for people doing sex work — lack of education, mild mental disorders, substance abuse, medical problems, single parenthood. If French sex workers are disproportionately likely to face such difficulties, that could create a correlation that the study would detect.

Another category is “Direct non-medical costs,” which consists of “Administration penitentiary,” “Activities police and gendarmerie,” and “Activities criminal Justice,” which are estimated to cost € 35 million per year. In other words, part of the cost of prostitution, according to the study, is the cost of enforcing the laws against prostitution (or related activities like solicitation and pimping).

That’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. When counting the social cost of a crime, it is standard practice to count the cost of preventing the crime. The social cost of burglary includes not only costs imposed by burglars on their victims, but also the costs paid by society to prevent burglary — door locks, alarm systems, security guards, police detectives, and so on. It’s not just the cost of burglary, but the cost of living in a society that has burglars in it.

The catch is that this kind of analysis assumes the activity in question is a crime, so it’s not applicable when you’re trying to decide whether something should be a crime. That would be assuming the conclusion. And if you never make prostitution a crime, you never have to pay the cost of punishing people for it.

One of the more baffling categories is “Cost of traffic money money prostitution” (honestly, that’s how Google translates it) which appears to be tax evasion, broken down like this:

I know I said I wouldn’t get in to data quality issues, but reading the translation, I can’t for the life of me figure out how they estimated this, even assuming they have a good estimate of the number of prostitutes or how much money they make.

I’m also confused by the fact that the study authors divide the estimated spending on prostitution, € 3.2 billion, by the estimate of 37,000 working prostitutes to get an average annual earning per prostitute of € 85,700. As near as I can tell, that is more than double the median household income in France, which made me question the study’s figures for the burden of prostitution on social welfare programs.

Looking at some diagrams in the original summary, I see they are saying that of the € 3.2 billion in gross prostitution earnings, about € 1.4 billion of it goes to “pimps.” I assume that when they say “pimps,” they are talking about the sex workers’ business operating expenses, which may include a payment to what we usually think of as a pimp, but may also include things like agency fees, advertising, drivers, hotel bills, and apartment rentals. This would still leave € 1.8 billion for the prostitutes, meaning the the average prostitute’s take-home pay is roughly the same as the median household income, which still conflicts with public aid costs. (I suppose there could be distributional issues that make it all make sense.)

The French tax burden is really high, so it’s plausible tax evasion could amount to more than 25% of income. Sex workers probably earn most of their money in cash, so hiding the income wouldn’t be difficult. In fact, they’d probably have the opposite problem — figuring out how to report the income and pay taxes so they can put the money in a bank and spend it in ways that would be visible to tax authorities.

Of course, if sex workers can work legally, they’d probably have to behave more like regular businesses, which would make it harder to evade taxes. Besides, it’s hard to blame them for not paying taxes when honest reporting would likely get them arrested for a victimless crime. Tax evasion is both enabled and encouraged by the criminalization of prostitution.

In any case, just as it doesn’t make sense to hold sex workers responsible for the costs of law enforcement, it doesn’t make sense to hold sex workers responsible for the effects of France’s tax policy.

This section of the summary also sees fit to mention that 45% of the money earned by prostitution is sent out of the country. They don’t say how the money is sent (or how they could possibly know about it), but I think we’re supposed to imagine some sort of shadowy international trafficking ring. I’m guessing that in reality it’s mostly remittances — immigrants sending money to family back home.

I don’t know why the study authors consider this a problem. It may be that money earned by (for example) Romanian sex workers in France is flowing out of France to their families in Romania, but in return French men get to have sex with Romanian sex workers. This is called international trade, and it’s usually considered a good thing.

The most confusing section is titled “Costs aftermath indirect social,” which is broken out this way:

I have no idea what “Placing children” means here, and the Google translation isn’t clear, so just for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume it’s a real social cost of prostitution.

As for “Homicides/Suicides,” I’ll summarize what I said above: To the extent that these are due to prostitution, they are risks assumed voluntarily by the prostitutes. Furthermore, the correlation between suicide and prostitution is not proven to be caused by prostitution; there could be confounding co-factors that cause both. Finally, at least part of the homicide rate is probably due to sex workers’ adversarial relationship with the police and the resulting loss of personal security due to the need to work in secret.

Finally, I’m saving the most infuriating cost for last: “Losses production due to incarcerations.” In other words, we’ve thrown people involved in prostitution in jail, and now we’re going to blame them because they aren’t holding down a job. By any sane accounting, this is a cost of criminalization.

So what is the cost of prostitution in France? Here’s how the costs in the study sort out according to the categories I’ve been using:

Of these, only the public costs go into the benefit-cost calculation for prostitution, which leaves us with external costs totaling € 202 million.

In the third and final part, I’ll add a few more details and try sum it all up.

Update: Part 3 is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at ProstCost – Part 2 of 3: Counting the Cost

Before getting into my thoughts, I have a few important caveats:

1. I’m working from a summary of the study, not the actual study, which I believe is still unpublished. It’s often the case that formal studies are much more rigorous, nuanced, and cautious than the summaries and press materials that are prepared from them. So when I talk about “the study,” my comments really only apply to the summary of the study, taken as a standalone expression of its ideas.
2. The study summary is in French, which I can’t speak or read, so everything I’m writing here is based on a Google translation, which means there’s a fair chance that something got really mangled. I’m trying to stick with parts of the study that don’t seem to depend on subtle meaning, but there’s a pretty good chance I got something wrong.
3. I’m going to leave discussion of the quality of the data in the study to people like Maggie McNeill who know a lot more about the available data than I do. For my purposes, I’m not going to dispute the numbers in the ProstCost study. That doesn’t mean they are correct, however, because how would I know?
4. Prostitution is technically legal in France, but various related activities such as soliciting and pimping are not. Law enforcement definitions in this area are often real stretchy (e.g. two sex workers operating together may be arrested for pimping each other) so in practice prostitution is still pretty much a crime. Consequently, I’m going to assume for purposes of the study that basically all arrests are of prostitutes, even if that’s not the charge against them.

With those warnings in mind…

Some have speculated that the ProstCost study is intended to discourage further decriminalization and even support re-criminalization of prostitution. If so, I think it fails to make its case.

The study is also a response to the European Union’s decision to start including prostitution in the the national accounting figures for Gross Domestic Product:

In 2014, the European Commission proposed that Member States the European Union to increase their “national wealth” including the turnover of prostitution in the calculation of their GDP. In France, INSEE has refused to bow to European demand explaining to rightly, that prostitution is akin least a “provision of voluntary services” as an exploitation of the people more precarious.

ProstCost, unpublished study by the Mouvement du Nid – France and Psytel takes from behind the myth of creative prostitution increasing growth and provides an estimate of the dual economic burden and the social system of prostitution poses to his victims and the whole society.

Mouvement du Nid appears to believe that counting prostitution in the GDP figures will normalize it and make it politically more difficult to fight, and this study is apparently intended to show that prostitution is in fact a burden on the economy. I don’t believe the study makes this case either.

When analyzing a policy choice such as whether or not prostitution should be legal, the most useful approach is probably a benefit-cost analysis of the effect on social welfare. Which leads me to the most important question you can ask about a study purporting to show the cost of something: Does the study include benefits as well? Because if you count only the costs, everything seems like a bad idea. A fair evaluation requires examining the good and the bad.

That doesn’t mean studies that only account for costs are necessarily faulty or deceptive. It can make sense to study only the costs as long as everyone understands that a complete analysis will require study of the benefits as well. For example, we may know the cost of producing a new drug from a pharmaceutical corporation’s recorded expenditures, but we might not have a very realistic idea of its effectiveness until people have been taking it for a few years.

Studies also don’t discuss benefits when the benefits are already well understood. Probably the most common example is when there are no benefits, such as with diseases and natural disasters. Hurricanes and pandemics are deadweight losses which have no upside, so studies don’t bother to account for any benefits.

Unfortunately, some studies assume away all benefits in situations where it’s misleading at best and deceptive at worst. For example, I’ve been meaning to blog about this study, which I believe is the source of several reports on the cost of alcohol consumption. The problem is that the study doesn’t even attempt to account for the benefits of alcohol consumption — benefits which are obvious to anyone who’s had a nice wine with dinner or partied the night away with friends.

That doesn’t mean the study is crap. The public health entities that fund these studies aren’t interested in parties, so they don’t need that in the study. What it does mean, however, is that you can’t use studies like this to answer questions about whether it’s a good policy to allow people to drink alcohol. The study implicitly assumes that alcohol consumption is only bad.

The ProstCost study similarly fails to discuss the benefits of prostitution, so it isn’t suitable for answering the question of whether prostitution should be a crime. By neglecting the benefits, it is implicitly assuming that prostitution is always bad.

We can try to fix that by coming up with an estimate of the social benefits of prostitution in France. You might think this would be a massive research project involving lots of fuzzy estimates of intangible benefits, but economists have developed a neat trick that works in situations like this, and it turns out that the ProstCost study already has all the information we need.

The key insight is that when you buy something, you don’t generally pay more than it’s worth to you. Oh, you might complain that the price is too high, but you don’t really mean it, in the sense that you still go ahead and buy it. You might think that $50 steak dinner in the hotel restaurant is overpriced, but if you still buy it, it’s pretty clear that you must have thought, in some sense, that it was worth $50 to you.

Or more precisely, you must have thought it was worth at least $50 to you. You might think it was the best steak dinner you ever had — worth it at twice the price — or you might only just barely have been willing to part with $50 for the steak dinner rather than have something else. In either case we can sure you didn’t think it was worth less than $50, because $50 is what you paid. We can therefore safely assume that its value to you has a lower bound of $50.

The ProstCost study estimates that France’s 37,000 prostitutes earn about 3.2 billion euros per year. That’s the same as saying that prostitution clients are spending about € 3.2 billion per year. By the same logic we used with your steak dinner, we can deduce that prostitution clients are receiving benefits of at least € 3.2 billion per year.

Basically, we’re done right there. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the ProstCost study’s estimate that prostitution costs € 1.6 billion per year, we can subtract that amount from the € 3.2 billion benefit to see that prostitution in France still produces a net benefit of € 1.6 billion per year.

That’s not the impression you’d get from press reports with headlines like “Prostitution costs France ‘€1.6 billion each year'” is it. Perhaps a better headline would be “Prostitution sector contributes €1.6 billion to French economy.”

In my next post on this topic, I’ll discuss the costs of prostitution, as identified by the study and as estimated by me.

Update: Part 2 is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at ProstCost – Part 1 of 3: Missing the Benefits

This pattern looked familiar… Watch what happens when I overlay the sex trafficking hotspots with another geographic data source. The overlay’s not perfect, because the maps use different projections, but I think a clear pattern emerges:

The other data source is a map of every McDonald’s location in the United States. Note that every single sex trafficking hotspot corresponds to a cluster of McDonald’s restaurants. The conclusion is obvious: McDonald’s food is turning our women into whores!

The obvious alternative explanation — that McDonald’s restaurants are caused by sex trafficking — can be easily disproved by noting the presence of McDonald’s clusters in places that the sex trafficking map shows as prostitution-free, such as Minneapolis, Portland, and Dallas. Clearly McDonald’s are the causative variable.

(The suggestion that maps of sex trafficking and McDonald’s restaurants are really both just maps of the U.S. population is clearly a deceptive tactic by sex trafficking apologists trying to downplay the magnitude of the crisis. Pay no attention to it.)

So alert the media, write your Congresscritters, and start the #EndMcWhoreDemand hashtag campaign now! Our children’s future is at stake!

Update: I should probably credit the great Randall Munroe for the original idea.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at McWhores!

Me: I’ve got some busy evenings this week. On Tuesday…um, this is going to be one of those awkward conversations…

Her: As long as you’re not seeing any hookers.

(silence for a few seconds)

Me: How about a retired hooker?

(silence again)

Her: That would be okay.

Maggie McNeill is the retired escort who blogs at The Honest Courtesan., and she has been on a driving tour of the country to promote her book, Ladies of the Night, which is a collection of short stories in various genres featuring members of the oldest profession. Both the book and her appearances are also opportunities to promote sex worker rights. I dropped in on her Tuesday evening appearance at a Liberty On the Rocks meeting at the Goose Island Brewpub on Clybourn.

Maggie wasn’t the only sex worker there. Serpent Libertine from SWOP Chicago was sitting at a corner, and I briefly said hello because I’d like to interview her someday about sex work activism in Chicago (assuming I ever get around to doing actual journalism again). A couple of male sex workers spoke up at the meeting as well.

I chatted with Maggie for a few minutes before her presentation, and I told her that before I started learning about prostitution enforcement through her blog, I hadn’t realized that the United States actually has one of the harshest anti-prostitution legal environments in the developed world. To emphasize this, I then somewhat ironically suggested that that the much-hated Swedish model of legalization, which emphasizes prosecuting clients and pimps instead of prostitutes, seemed like it would actually be an improvement. This turned out to be a mistake, because it derailed Maggie into explaining the problems of the Swedish model, which I kind of already know from reading her blog. Maggie was very patient and polite about it, though.

Many of the things Maggie spoke about will be familiar to regular followers of her blog, but it was still worth the trip to hear her talk about them. Her presentation ties it all together in a way that a series of blog posts just don’t.

Some of what she had to say was kind of depressing. We’re at a time when gay marriage is increasingly recognized and marijuana legalization is breaking out all over, yet sex worker rights have had some recent setbacks from dangerous legislation. I find it particularly worrying that Maggie describes a trend toward fighting prostitution with anti-racketeering prosecutions. That way leads down the same road to hell that the War on Drugs has been on for 40 years.

The cops and prosecutors and their enablers aren’t calling it the “War on Prostitution” however. Most people don’t really see prostitution as a threat to society or — perhaps more importantly when trying to stir up a moral panic– to society’s children. Instead, there’s been an increasing emphasis on “sex trafficking.” With the specter of strange men who will kidnap your children and force them into sex slavery, it’s a lot easier to get funding for anti-trafficking task forces and pass “tough” anti-trafficking legislation.

But since actual sex slavery is very rare in this country, they end up busting pretty much the same people they would have busted for prostitution. Then prosecutors pick a few of them to be charged with trafficking, perhaps for handling money or answering a phone, or perhaps just for being male. Clients get swept up for trafficking, as do male and transgendered sex workers. Sometimes sex workers are charged with trafficking each other.

All of this is a worrisome development. Maggie doesn’t quite reach Balko-esque levels of gut-punch, but the thought of the drug war’s industrialized system of arrest and incarceration metastasizing into sex work is depressing. On the other hand, just being in the room with people like Maggie and Serpent Libertine is kind of exciting. It feels a bit like being at the start of a civil rights movement.

I say “a bit” because I know that feeling is mostly subjective. It comes not because a sex worker rights movement is starting but because I’m learning so much more about it lately. The modern sex worker rights movement in the United States goes back at least as far as Margo St. James and COYOTE in the 1970s, and there has been a lot of progress by sex worker’s rights movements in other countries. (I’m pretty sure what I’m feeling is the same thing that leads journalists to write stories about a “new trend” they just heard about, no matter how long it’s actually been going on.) In some sense, my interest in the sex workers’ rights movement is actually a product of the movement’s outreach to non-sex-workers.

In any case, if Maggie comes to your town, it’s worth your time to meet her and hear what she has to say.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Maggie McNeill at Liberty On the Rocks

Interviews with Mam’s childhood acquaintances, teachers and local officials in the village where she grew up contradict important, lurid details in her autobiography. Many of the villagers in Thloc Chhroy say they never met or even saw Mam’s cruel “Grandfather,” the rich Chinese merchant who allegedly raped her or the violent soldier she says she was forced to marry.

Not even Mam can keep the story straight. In February 2012, while speaking at the White House, she said she was sold into slavery at age 9 or 10 and spent a decade inside a brothel. On The Tyra Banks Show, she said it was four or five years in the brothel. Her book says she was trafficked when she was “about 16 years old.”

[…]

Another of Mam’s biggest “stars” was Meas Ratha, who as a teenager gave a chilling performance on French television in 1998, describing how she had been sold to a brothel and held against her will as a sex slave.

Late last year, Ratha finally confessed that her story was fabricated and carefully rehearsed for the cameras under Mam’s instruction, and only after she was chosen from a group of girls who had been put through an audition. Now in her early 30s and living a modest life on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Ratha says she reluctantly allowed herself to be depicted as a child prostitute: “Somaly said that…if I want to help another woman I have to do [the interview] very well.”

In light of these revelations, the cover of that edition of Newsweek asks the question,

Somaly Mam saved countless girls in Cambodia. Does it matter that parts of her story aren’t true?

Anne Elizabeth Moore provides the answer to that question in her piece at Salon (Yes, it does.) and along the way she touches on an important truth: Small-time criminals break the rules. The biggest criminals make the rules.

By way of illustration, one of the classic failures of the free market occurs when businesses collude to gain monopoly power over their customers. This can happen when a group of suppliers agree to divide up the market between them, or when companies form a cartel in which they agree to gang up on customers rather than competing against each other. By working together instead of against each other, businesses can extract a lot more money from their customers than they would if they competed in the free market.

These sorts of trade-restraining deals are not easy to pull off, however. For one thing, they’re pretty much illegal in the United States, and the U.S. Department of Justice has an Antitrust Division which enforces the laws against cartels and monopolies.

Cartels are also difficult to operate in the real world. Even if they’re legal, the members of the cartel usually figure out very quickly that if everyone else is committed to high prices or low production, they can greatly increase their market share by offering more product at lower prices. Furthermore, new businesses will spring up to take advantage of the high prices by offering the same services as existing companies, but at a discount, so they can grab some market share. For these reasons, it’s not uncommon for cartels to collapse almost immediately into a competitive race to the bottom.

At least that’s the case when the cartel members are the kind of people you read about in newspaper stories — shady characters meeting in smoky back rooms and Las Vegas hotels to rig bids, fix prices, and divide up markets. These guys are small-time monopolists, or at they very least they’re inexperienced at it.

The serious, experienced, big-money cartels don’t have to hide from the government and worry about who might be cheating. They have a much better strategy for monopolization that gets around anti-trust laws and prevents cheating: They get the government itself to create and enforce the cartel.

If taxi company owners tried to get together to artificially limit the number of taxis in operation to drive up prices, it would never work. For one thing, they’d be prosecuted for anti-trust violations. But probably even before government investigators figured out what they were up to, their cartel would be undermined by new taxi companies created by people who noticed the high prices and decided they wanted to get in on the action. They would quickly bid down prices and compete away most of the monopoly profits.

On the other hand, if the taxi companies can get the city government to artificially limit the number of taxis through a medallion licensing system, then the antitrust lawyers at the DOJ would ignore their arrangement, and they would be able to get the city police department to enforce their cartel by ticketing or arresting unlicensed cabbies. It’s a very sweet deal, and it’s the reason taxi medallions often trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Similarly, if hospital operating corporations in a state colluded to raise prices by limiting the availability of hospital beds and facilities, there would be hell to pay. Reporters would investigate them, Congress would launch hearings, and the DOJ Antitrust Division would land on them like a ton of bricks. But when hospitals get health care agencies in 35 states to require a “Certificate of Need” — demonstrating that there is “unmet need” in the market — before new hospitals can be built or existing hospitals can be expanded, the DOJ and Congress and most of the journalists remain silent about it, and hospitals continue to earn huge profits.

Of course, nobody involved ever admits that these laws are about increasing profits for those who are politically well-connected. There’s usually some pretense that the laws are promoting the public good. Taxi medallion laws are usually sold to the public as protecting consumers from unscrupulous cab operators or reducing taxi congestion in downtown areas. The hospital “Certificate of Need” rules are supposed to prevent expensive and wasteful “excess capacity” that somehow drives up health care costs.

In a similar way, at least some of the ongoing moral panic about “human trafficking” seems to be a pretense to hide less worthy motives. To be sure, human trafficking is a real problem, and organizations like SMF and other anti-trafficking NGOs do rescue some people from bondage. But as Marks made clear, there were a lot of lies, and as Moore makes clear, there’s more going on:

I visited one such NGO in Phnom Penh in January — not run by Mam, but built on the attention she’s brought to the issue since 2007. What I saw was not shocking: totally normal Cambodian women in a large room, sewing apparel. But it wasn’t social services, either: It was a garment factory. […]

Ending deeply embedded misogynistic practices, including both sex trafficking, which is likely rarer than Mam admits, and the policies supposedly waging war against it, is not an effortless gig. I’ve nonetheless heard several students expressing the desire to get into the brothel-busting game themselves. Listen: I spent seven years researching and doing work in Cambodia, made concerted efforts to learn the language, developed a strong stomach and reliable sources, and honed my skills in investigative reporting before I could even understand what, really, anti-human trafficking NGOs do. What they do is normalize existent labor opportunities for women, however low the pay, dangerous the conditions, or abusive an environment they may be. And they shame women who reject such jobs.

[…] Massive strikes in recent years have seen demand grow for an increase in pay, although other jobs for women remain few and unregulated. Among them, work in the sex industry is both reliable and flexible enough for, say, working moms. […] Most women in Cambodia live under conditions of poverty and desperation, and the garment industry’s insistent refusal to meet living-wage standards ensures this will continue for some time. Still, garment workers know an entire international trade system relies on their willing participation, which was how they built such a strong showing in the last elections. The big brands know it too, which is why the Nike Foundation funds Half the Sky — as do other multinationals that both enforce, and rely on, women’s desperate poverty around the world.

What anti-trafficking NGOs are saving women from, in other words, is a life outside the international garment trade, which, according to folks who sell us our clothes, is no kind of life at all — even though folks in those jobs tell me they can barely survive. About one-seventh of the world’s population of women works in the garment industry, which very rarely pays more than half a living wage (including to folks who work fast fashion retail in U.S. urban centers). This helps keep women in poverty around the globe.

In other words, the human traffickers that SMF and the other NGO’s are fighting, the guys who grab children off the streets, who smuggle them across borders in containerized shipping, who operate slave brothels, they’re like the business owners meeting in back rooms: They’re the little guys. The amateurs.

The serious professional human traffickers in the garment industry don’t need to do any of that. They’ve co-opted governments to steer women into their industry, and they fund NGOs that capture those who try to escape and re-educate them for garment work, all while claiming to be “rescuing girls.” This is how the serious human traffickers get things done. They turn their crimes into government policy and into respectable-seeming social welfare organizations.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How the Real Professional Human Traffickers Do It

As you’d expect from that description, it’s vile crap that conflates homosexuality with predatory pedophilia. Yet it doesn’t make me angry. I can see that it portrays gay men in a hateful and degrading way, but in style and substance it seems like a thing out of time and space, disconnected from our way of understanding the world. It doesn’t connect with me enough evoke the visceral anger that it should. I mean, it features a homosexual man who prowls the streets trying to seduce young boys by — I’m not making this up — taking them fishing at the duck pond. I guess gays hadn’t invented dance clubs and ecstasy yet.

(Sid Davis’s social guidance films inspire a certain creepy fascination. In Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970, Ken Smith describes them as having “a trancelike style, stripped of anything even remotely approaching drama or human emotion.” Despite that, they were quite alarming for their time, including situations in which children could be seriously injured, raped, or killed. Probably the most bizarre is Live and Learn from 1951, which includes several unpleasant injuries, including a young lady tripping while running with scissors!)

Boys Beware actually tells four short stories, but it’s the first one that everybody remembers. I’ll be talking about it below, and I’m going to recap it, but if you’re in a place where you can watch some vintage homophobia without embarrassment or a complaint to Human Resources, you might want to check it out. It’s just the first five minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECilAeLLATc

I want to talk about this story because it contains a certain type of misunderstanding about gay people that also arises in other social contexts.

It’s about a young man named Jimmy Barnes who needs to get home after playing in the park, so he thumbs a ride from a stranger named Ralph who seems friendly enough. They chat on the ride, and he drops Jimmy off at home. The next day, he meets Jimmy at the park and takes to a drive-in and treats him to a Coke. He tells a few off-color jokes. The following Saturday they go fishing at the duck pond, and Jimmy has a lot of fun. After fishing, they have lunch, and Ralph shows Jimmy some pornographic pictures.

And now the narrator reveals the shocking truth:

What Jimmy didn’t know is that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious — a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual: A person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.

But by now Jimmy felt a fondness for Ralph, and they continued to go places together. Ralph was generous and took Jimmy many interesting places and did many nice things for him. He bought presents, and even gave him money. But payments were expected in return.

You see, Jimmy hadn’t recognized Ralph’s approach soon enough. When Ralph first asked Jimmy to go fishing alone, he should have discussed it with his parents or teacher.

The film then shows Jimmy and Ralph going into a hotel room, presumably to have sex. Later Jimmy confesses everything to his parents and Ralph is arrested. So is Jimmy, but he’s released on probation. And that’s where the story of Jimmy and Ralph ends.

One thing the film never really addresses is why exactly Jimmy Barnes goes into that hotel room with Ralph. It’s not like Ralph had a weapon or made any threats. Yet in the frame established by Boys Beware, Ralph the sick homosexual somehow manipulates Jimmy into having sex with him. It’s almost like he casts some sort of mysterious spell.

The filmmakers have of course stacked the deck — making Ralph kinda creepy, and portraying Jimmy as almost child-like (much younger than the actor who plays him) — but they clearly intend this to be a “typical story” of the dangers of encountering homosexuals. So how exactly do typical homosexuals like Ralph get boys like Jimmy to go along with them? How do they manipulate young men into joining them in their perversions? The filmmakers leave that unexplained.

However, from our vantage point in the more open and tolerant future, it’s really not so mysterious, and the answer seems kind of obvious: Jimmy Barnes is gay.

So with just a little bit of re-framing, we can tell the story of Jimmy and Ralph a little differently: As he goes through adolescence, Jimmy no doubt realizes his sexuality is different from other boys, but he’s probably struggling to understand what it means. Gays are still mostly in the closet — the first Gay Pride parade won’t happen for about a decade — so Jimmy’s probably feeling confused and lonely. Then he meets Ralph, an older and more confident gay man. They spend time together, going out on dates — the drive-in diner, the local duck pond fishing hole, hunting (in the park, from the look of it), and even miniature golf — until they eventually get a hotel room and have sex.

In other words, it’s a fairly routine story of a young person losing his virginity to a more experienced partner. Or maybe I’m being too dramatic. Maybe Jimmy’s been getting laid all the time, and Ralph was just the first guy his parents found out about.

But the thing is, regardless of whatever really happened between our hypothetical Jimmy and Ralph, given the prevailing attitudes about homosexuality at the time, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes probably view it as happening a lot like the way Boys Beware shows it. After all, they don’t realize their son is gay — most people at the time would have had very little accurate information about homosexuality — and they know they raised their Jimmy to be a good boy. So if he’s doing something sinful and perverted, it must be because of the evil influence of this Ralph person. There’s only one logical conclusion: Their nice straight son met a homosexual man, and somehow he turned their son into a homosexual!

(Just to be clear, I’m not saying that pedophilia, or even Boys Beware‘s story of creepy old Ralph having sex with young Jimmy, is ordinary gay dating behavior. What I’m saying is that ordinary gay dating behavior is re-told and re-interpreted by others as Boys Beware style stories of creepy older guys like Ralph who want to have sex with young boys like Jimmy.)

Parents and other people who care about children probably make this kind of logical mistake about other things besides homosexuality. Think, for example, about the mythology of the “pusher.”

I remember when I was a kid, getting lectures from teachers and other adults, warning me about drug pushers who would try to get me to use drugs. Even today, it conjures up images of a creepy guy who skulks around the neighborhood trying to talk kids into using drugs. I wouldn’t have wanted to run into any pushers in school.

Fortunately, I never did. Not a one. But I did have a number of friends who used drugs, and when we were at a party together, they were usually polite enough to offer me some of whatever they were smoking. I always politely declined (really). Although if I had started smoking pot, I probably would have been expected to pay for it. But anyway, I had friends who offered me drugs and would have been willing to sell them to me, but I never met anyone who pushed them, whatever that means.

I assume this is another example of Boys Beware-style thinking. Parents don’t want to believe their kids might decide to try illegal drugs all by themselves, so they assumed it had to be some mysterious individual — the pusher — who got their kids to try drugs. Young Jimmy is a good boy. It can’t be that he wanted to smoke pot. He would never have tried it if it weren’t for that awful pothead Ralph…

I was reminded of Boys Beware and the kinds of logical errors behind it, after reading one of Maggie McNeill‘s many posts about the myths behind how women get into sex work. I think there’s a lot of the same kind of faulty thinking going on with the people who believe those myths.

Most people don’t know a lot about how sex workers live their lives, and for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere, I think people tend to overestimate the hardship involved. This makes it difficult for them to believe that women enter the profession voluntarily, so they tend to assume there must be a lot of coercion involved. They conclude that every young girl working the street must have been “turned out” by a pimp, and that any woman who travels to take a sex-related job must be trafficked.

So I’m sure that someone has produced fictional cautionary tales about Ralph the pimp, who treats young Jane real nice until he puts her out on the street to sell herself, or Ralph the human trafficker, who brings young Jelena to America by promising her work as a dancer only to force her to work in a brothel.

To be sure, there is sometimes coercion involved in sex work, just as there are some people who trick others into taking drugs by slipping them into drinks, and just as some adult men like Ralph will force themselves on young boys like Jimmy. But when people are unable to believe that anyone would willingly participate in sex work, when they are unwilling to believe that kids would be curious about drugs on their own, and when they refuse to admit that their children could ever be gay, then they are prone to overestimating the amount of coercion, and conjuring up demons where none exist.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Boys and Harlots Beware

The police officer lay face down on the massage table, on duty, unarmed and naked.

For 30 minutes Shu Yuan Sun worked the muscles of the officer’s back, his shoulders and legs, and then told him, “Turn over.” And that, said Hallandale Beach Police Sgt. Todd Crevier, is when the crime went down.

(Went down, get it?)

During one visit, the woman identified as Nikki “brushed her hand across my penis” and then “made an up and down motion with her hand” to indicate an offer of masturbation, wrote one officer. The officer said he declined, saying, “Maybe next time.”

Naturally, this raises a few questions regarding just how far a police officer should go to make a prostitution arrest. And here’s the answer from Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy:

“Sometimes officers have to make their own moral decision as it relates what they feel comfortable with,” he said.

So your officers get to make their own moral decisions, but when these women and their customers make moral decisions you disagree with, you drag them off and throw them in a cage? Fuck you, Dwayne. Fuck you in your ass with a cactus.*

Of course Dwayne offers the usual excuse, invoking the moral panic du jour:

Hallandale Beach Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy said the nude stings are integral to a joint investigation with federal authorities into human trafficking, where women, many from China, are held as sex slaves. Florida ranks third in the nation in the number of such cases, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.

Yes, yes, they were rescuing these women from the ubiquitous-but-oh-so-elusive sex slavery rings of America.

The thing is, this is the United States of America. We had slavery, actual real slavery, for about 250 years. And during much of that time, we had real rescue operations. How exactly the “underground railroad” worked isn’t entirely clear because it operated in secrecy and few records were kept, but it didn’t involve dragging the slaves off to cages and publishing their names and pictures in the newspaper.

Yes, I realize that modern slavery is different, and some women really are coerced into sex slavery, but even so, what the Hallandale Beach police are doing still isn’t how you rescue slaves.

Hat tip: @mistressmatisse

*”Fuck you in your ass with a cactus” is a trademark of Marc Randazza.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Here Come the Naked Rescuers