A few years ago, when I was a full-time faculty member at the Naval Graduate School, faculty and staff were required to undergo a variety of training. One of them was about how to detect sex trafficking so that we can turn the traffickers over to the police.
I am the type of person who, during those lessons, learns something important. It wasn’t like that then. My memory is hazy, but I remember that one slide in the presentation showed the parallel between being an old prostitute and sex trafficking. “That can’t be fair,” I thought. I thought that sex trafficking involved some degree of coercion or, at the very least, someone under age. If it was a live presentation, I would have addressed this issue. But it was an online video. Keeping track of who to talk to was a lot of work.
The experience made me wonder, however, whether there are many other cases where adults willingly engage in the activities of capitalists were called sex traffickers.
I was right to wonder. For today The reason location, The reasonElizabeth Nolan Brown talks to sexologist Tara Burns. This article is titled “What Everyone Gets Wrong About Sex Trafficking Laws,” The reasonOctober 14, 2024.
Here is the important passage:
Burning: So, I thought maybe some people were being helped by all this anti-trafficking talk and anti-trafficking laws. I knew at the time two prostitutes who were arrested for sex trafficking when they weren’t sex traffickers, but I thought, “We’re just doing damage together and something good is happening to other people who really need it.” What I found when I made a request for my records to find all the charges under the new trafficking law: At that time, it was. only the accused prostitutes. And every prostitute who was charged with sex trafficking was charged with prostitution in the same case that they were charged with sex trafficking.
When I designed the survey, I had included questions to find out if people met the organization’s definition of a sex trafficking survivor or not. And when I filtered out people who met the definition of a sex-trafficking survivor, they were two to three times more likely to have been sexually assaulted by the police. And just about every other bad thing in the study—being turned away from shelters or counseling or being turned away from trying to report the crime—all happened to them two or three times more often than to other sex workers.
So I thought that there were victims who were being helped, but in reality it was those victims who were hurt the most by the laws and speeches. I think the same kinds of discrimination that make people vulnerable to abuse in the sex industry can also make people vulnerable to abuse by the police and discrimination by shelters and the like.
Note the disgusting irony. It is said that we should look closely at prostitutes because that will reduce the number of people who are forced into prostitution. But if we work together, we may be helping the police use force against innocent people who are not under duress.
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