If an ~anti kidnapping PSA~ is based on the idea that sex traffickers all want to go snatching up random middle class women, it’s almost guaranteed to be bullshit clickbait
Traffickers (and also serial killers) almost never go snatching Suzy Q. Whitegirl, suburban wife and mother of two, from the whole foods parking lot, because Suzy is guaranteed to have family and friends who would very notice something was wrong, and report her as missing. Additionally, and most importantly, Suzy is going to be seen as a sympathetic victim by police and the wider community, so grabbing her is going to get the entire damn police department, local news, and possibly national news hot on your ass. Kidnappings like this are incredibly rare for this reason, but they’re the ones you hear about because they’re the once where we’ve collectively agreed the victims are actually worth giving a fuck about.
Traffickers know this, so they prey on women who are already isolated, and won’t be seen as important and sympathetic victims even if someone does notice their absence–and playing on social prejudices is how this is usually done. Snatching Suzy Q. Whitegirl means you’ll get all kinds of hell and investigation, but manipulating and then kidnapping someone like an undocumented woman who’s afraid that trying to get help will get her deported, or a Black trans teenager who got kicked out by her parents, or a homeless indigenous woman struggling with diagnosed but untreated bipolar disorder + a criminal record related to sex work and self-medication with drugs/alcohol; that gets maybe a few fading “missing person” signs hung around the rough part of town, and cops making “lol dead hooker” jokes down at the station.
I’m not trying to guilt or yell at people who share those posts, but supposed “advice” that ignores one of the main ways predators operate and pick their victims isn’t actually advice, it’s just clickbait advertising that preys on women’s fears, while continuing to ignore the women who are most at risk.
Tag: human trafficking
I want to say something about that “90% of women want to exit the industry” statistic
As someone who was forced into sex work because of extreme economic
circumstance (aka poverty), I would probably be considered one of those
who “wanted out”But using me as a statistic to silence sex workers who love their jobs and continue working by choice DID NOT HELP ME
Four
years ago, I begged my day-job boss to give me more hours. BEGGED.
Said if something didn’t change soon I would have to become a sex worker
in order to feed my family. Nobody helped me. I didn’t qualify for
any government assistance programs. Minimum wage was $8/hr at the time,
and it was not even close to being enough to survive. I had no other
options. Sex work was my ultimate last resort.Because
of websites like Backpage, I didn’t have to work on the street, where
conditions are a thousand times more dangerous. Redbook allowed me to
screen clients by looking at their review history. But in the back of
my mind there was always an incredible amount of fear. Fear of law enforcement trumped my fear of bad clients. An arrest would have destroyed my entire family.
Because I was terrified of the police, I took many clients that I
should not have, and in doing so subjected myself to abuse in several
cases.The notion that sex workers should just “get another job” because of tightened prostitution laws is unfair and unrealistic. Many of those you claim to support because they “want out” are already doing sex work as a last resort. There is no other job. This is it. Taking
away the few safety precautions they have is pulling the rug out from
under them and making their job that much more dangerous. Again, for many of us, sex work was our only option.You
will never eradicate the sex industry, and these moral crusades to “end
demand” do nothing but harm those you claim to care about.If
you really want to help people exit the industry, advocate for a living
wage. Advocate for better addiction services that help rather than
punish addicts. Provide assistance to LGBT teens who were disowned from
their families and are now living on the streets. Stop the
school-to-prison pipeline. The problem is a societal one that cannot be fixed with anti-prostitution laws.also like… making sex work a crime, aka giving sex workers (and sex trafficking victims) a criminal record… is literally the opposite of helping ppl leave the industry bc guess what, other jobs can and do refuse to hire people with a record of being a swer!! you know what job is most attainable for an experienced sex worker with a criminal record? sex work.
Yep!!!
This includes survivors of trafficking, too!
“In the eyes of the law, I’m both a criminal and a victim – and the
impact of being arrested as a prostitute because I was trafficked left
deep emotional scars. But the consequences of my arrest goes beyond the
anxiety and hurt feelings: it impaired (and continues to impair) my
ability to find a job, to obtain housing and government benefits and,
really, to improve my life.”
The Trump Administration Quietly Defunded Legal Services For Trafficking Victims
Just realized I might have been wrong about Drumpf. Turns out he might not be a Used Rug Merchant after all.
Looks like running Three Card Monty/The Shell Game on Hayseed Tourists is his racket.
“Direct representation on vacatur or expungement matters through court filings or through other litigation services, is NOT an allowable cost under this cooperative agreement or with FY 2018 funds.”
so now, after FOSTA-SESTA has forced many sex workers, trafficked and untrafficked alike, onto the street, where violence and arrest come at much higher rates, trafficking victims are being functionally barred from getting our criminal prostitution records vacated (in the states that’s even possible to begin with), making it even more difficult than it already was to get “above-board” jobs and housing… pushing the formerly-trafficked right back into sex work.
right. yes. fantastic plan to fund the prison industrial complex, trump. not even a little evil, for sure.
The Trump Administration Quietly Defunded Legal Services For Trafficking Victims
U.S. Placed Immigrant Children With Traffickers, Report Says
The Department of Health and Human Services placed more than a dozen immigrant children in the custody of human traffickers after it failed to conduct background checks of caregivers, according to a Senate report released on Thursday.
Examining how the federal agency processes minors who arrive at the border without a guardian, lawmakers said they found that it had not followed basic practices of child welfare agencies, like making home visits.
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations opened its inquiry after law enforcement officials uncovered a human trafficking ring in Marion, Ohio, last year. At least six children were lured to the United States from Guatemala with the promise of a better life, then were made to work on egg farms. The children, as young as 14, had been in federal custody before being entrusted to the traffickers.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the subcommittee. “But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”
In addition to the Marion cases, the investigation found evidence that 13 other children had been trafficked after officials handed them over to adults who were supposed to care for them during their immigration proceedings. An additional 15 cases exhibited some signs of trafficking.
The report also said that it was unclear how many of the approximately 90,000 children the agency had placed in the past two years fell prey to traffickers, including sex traffickers, because it does not keep track of such cases.
“Whatever your views on immigration policy, everyone can agree that the administration has a responsibility to ensure the safety of the migrant kids that have entered government custody until their immigration court date,” Mr. Portman said.
In the fall of 2013, thousands of unaccompanied children began showing up at the southern border. Most risked abuse by traffickers and detention by law enforcement to escape dire problems like gang violence and poverty in Central America.
As detention centers struggled to keep up with the influx, the Department of Health and Human Services began placing children in the custody of sponsors who could help them while their immigration cases were reviewed. Many children who did not have relatives in the United States were placed in a system resembling foster care.
But officials at times did not examine whether an adult who claimed to be a relative actually was, relying on the word of parents, who, in some cases, went along with the traffickers to pay off smuggling debts.
Responding to the report, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had taken measures to strengthen its system, collecting information to subject potential sponsors and additional caregivers in a household to criminal background checks.
Mark Greenberg, the agency’s acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, said it had bolstered other screening procedures and increased resources for minors.
“We are mindful of our responsibilities to these children and are continually looking for ways to strengthen our safeguards,” he said.
U.S. Placed Immigrant Children With Traffickers, Report Says
Neko Case is right.
Adult, consenting and responsible sex workers deserve and should have safe spaces to advertise and work. A lot of them are in dangerous and abusive situations. They need safety, they need support. They are workers. They are human beings.
These types of sex workers are NOT the same as unconsenting adults caught in sex trafficking, are NOT the same as women or children being coerced into illegal sex work, are NOT synonymous with letting violent and abusive pimps/johns do whatever they want.
These are ABUSE. These are VIOLENCE and disregard to humanity. And there are many variables that may result in these situations AND NOT HAVING A SAFE SPACE TO WORK AND ADVERTISE LEGAL, CONSENTING AND RESPONSIBLE SEX WORK IS ONE OF THEM.
Just like I said about consenting adult and responsible sex workers, children deserve and SHOULD have safe spaces to just exist and develop their own minds and bodies, with the support of adults they can trust with their safety and well-being. And no, that is not to support child sex trafficking. It is to STOP that.
Child sex trafficking happens because adult humans are rotten beings who will abuse their own species for personal gain. We should strive to live in a society with educated adults that understand that children and minors cannot consent to any sexual act. And we should be even harder with the punishment for these crimes. Science and psychology and philosophy prove time and time again, and yet adults don’t make the effort to grasp the gravity of sexual crimes against children.
So, no, my good self absorbed human being: supporting safe spaces for responsible, consenting adults’ sex work is not downplaying any other problematic situations caused by illegal sex work or human sex trafficking. If anything, it would be one of the (several) first steps to solving these problems.
Get your head out of your ass.
Be aware that the sex workers you follow are a … rather strongly selected group. Sex workers on tumblr are disproportionately likely to be upper-class, educated, well-paid camgirls or escorts who will be much more likely to think sex work is “empowering” than poor immigrant survival street hookers who regularly get assaulted and raped for very little pay.
Immigrants, who can be deported for committing a crime, absolutely do not benefit from the criminalization of the work they’re doing to survive.
I agree that sex workers who have access to tumblr are not a representative sample of sex workers, but they’re definitely not all upper-class, many of them are immigrants, many of them are disabled, many have been assaulted, some did survival sex work while underage and homeless, and I still think they’re more credible than non-sex-workers on the question of whether sex work being illegal makes them safer.
If you know of surveys of survival sex workers I’d obviously be very interested in seeing them.
Also, not to be a blunt asshole about this, but do you know how many women I knew as a housekeeper who were sexually assaulted by customers? Spoiler alert: it was all of them!! We had protocols in place to prevent guests from trapping us in a room while we were trying to clean, it was all very matter of fact, because housekeepers being assaulted by guests is just like. Extremely normal.
I had more than one strange man masturbate in front of me while I was trying to scrub toilets. Fun times.
This was a Fairfield Inn, BTW; a nice, mid-grade franchise that caters to businesspeople in a pokey little rural college town. We’re not talking about Vegas, here, not that it would be okay if we were.
Housekeepers, like survival sex workers, are mostly poor immigrants. It’s one of the few legal customer service jobs you can get without speaking much English, so there’s that, too.
The place I worked was actually really great about supporting their staff and making sure that the non-Anglophone workers had avenues to report issues. A lot of places are fucking terrible and exploitative, and immigrants–especially undocumented immigrants, especially people who don’t speak much, or any, English–are easy as hell to exploit. So, to return to the point, the problem isn’t that people are doing survival sex work. The problem is that some groups of people are really vulnerable to exploitation, and making their only means of earning money illegal does exactly fuck-all to prevent that. Making sex work illegal doesn’t suddenly mean that these people have other options; it just makes the shitty options they do have even more dangerous.
In that vein, there are many, many more trafficked domestic and agricultural workers than sex workers. I have rarely, if ever, heard calls to dismantle the hospitality industry.
Yuuuup. The most exciting thing to happen in the small town I grew up in was when it turned out that the South Americans who could barely speak English who made up all of the workers at the local Dunkin Doughnuts franchise had been lied to, trafficked, and held hostage and forced to work by the owner. They were all shipped back by ICE with marks against them if they ever try to immigrate legally, which seemed unfair because they hadn’t meant to enter the country illigally.
Anyway, there’s very little talk about Dunkin Donuts or nail salons or vegetables as exploitive industries that use trafficked workers, but all the SWERFs and conservatives are sure that every sex worker is trafficked. It pisses me off that “caring about human trafficking” usually just means “anti sex workers” and not actually “anti human trafficking” because human trafficking is fucked up and the non sexy forms are a big problem too.
‘Comfort Woman’ Memorial Statues, A Thorn In Japan’s Side, Now Sit On Korean Buses
One goal of President Trump’s trip to Asia has been to rally America’s allies to help put pressure on North Korea. But the mission is complicated by the fact that America’s two staunchest allies in East Asia — Japan and South Korea — don’t get along well when it comes to issues involving their history.
Much of the friction dates to Japan’s occupation of Korea in the first part of the 20th century. Tensions related to that occupation still simmer — even 70 years after South Korea was liberated.
Things flared up again this year over a statue of a young girl known as the “Peace Statue.”
The small bronze figure depicts a girl sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead with a look of determination. She has cropped hair and wears a hanbok — a traditional Korean dress. She’s barefoot. Her fist is clenched. Next to her is an empty chair.
The girl memorializes women like Ahn Jeom-sun. She’s now 89 and says she has visited the statue often. It symbolizes the youth she lost at age 13, when the Japanese Imperial Army abducted her from her village.
“What I remember is that I was forcibly taken out of Korea and taken to China,” Ahn says.
The United Nations estimates 200,000 girls and women — mostly Koreans — were seized from villages to join Japan’s military sexual slavery program before and during the Second World War.
“It remains only Japan that is seeking to remove a statue of a victim. Politically speaking, there’s just no winning in that,” Dudden says.
Ahn, the former sex slave, says she never got married or had children after what happened to her during the war. She didn’t start speaking out about her story until the 1990s. She says she doesn’t want compensation from Japan.
“At this point, we don’t really care about the money; we don’t really care about politics. We just want a proper apology from them directly to us. We want them to think about us, the actual women that were involved,” she says.
‘Comfort Woman’ Memorial Statues, A Thorn In Japan’s Side, Now Sit On Korean Buses
North Carolina church investigated for importing hundreds of Brazilian worshipers and turning them into slaves
okay this is the craziest shit i’ve seen all day.
According to the Associated Press, the Word of Faith Fellowship recruits young members from two affiliated churches in Brazil to come to the U.S. on tourist and student visas where they are put to work on the church’s 35-acre compound in Spindale for no pay.
One man, identified as Andre Oliveira, told the AP that he was forced to work 15 hours a day, usually for no pay, cleaning offices and warehouses owned by the evangelical church. He well also forced to work at private businesses owned by some of the church’s ministers. Olivera stated that failure to comply resulted in beatings and shaming from the pulpit.
“They kept us as slaves,” Oliveira explained. “We were expendable. We meant nothing to them. Nothing. How can you do that to people — claim you love them and then beat them in the name of God?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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