Service is No Secret in Colombia…and the Women Get Police Support, Too
I just sent this to “Letters to the Editor” at the NY Times. Donno whether they’ll print it so I’ll drop it right into my blog:
I wish to thank the New York Times for its April 19th printing of the details of the dispute between the Columbian escort and the American client involved. I am particularly grateful for the printing of the details of her recourse to the Colombian police for support—and the fact that they did indeed help her.
The reliance of this foreign escort on the police for help sheds light on the fact that here in the States, no such recourse for sex workers exists. Sex workers here are persecuted, sometimes abused, and never helped by the police. Such flagrant violation of their human rights is the one great ugly fact that discredits the cause of the anti-prostitution camp, and it always will, period.
Thank you again for illuminating that truth.
“Keep your laws off my body”
I love that poster the protesters wear that says: Keep Your Laws Off My Body”. That just says it all, doesn’t it???!! It kinda makes you wonder how all those rad fems can be screaming out against sex work, when the pros who chose the work, and were NOT coerced, are screaming for the very same freedoms that the fems are supposed to represent….?! What the hell…
I used to drive by an abortion clinic under seige, almost every day. It was right on the way to a place I had a job. One day I was driving by with a friend in the car and she yelled at them: “Mind your own twat!!!”
If the rad fems and other supposedly pro-freedom-for-women people can relate to that sentiment in front of an abortion clinic, then why can’t they relate to it in exactly the same way when it comes to the controversy over freedom to sell oneself????????????
How to get rid of the traffickers of children on Village Voice Media-owned Backpage
Eros.com is an international adult services website that has been around for a lot longer than the Village Voice Media-owned adult Backpage site, which also posts adult services ads. Eros.com has a method of identity verification that is an almost ironclad way to keep traffickers of minors from posting. This site requires all posters to scan a photo I.D. of themselves to it, and then to pay for the ad post with a credit card that carries the same name as the photo I.D.
A trafficker of minors would be very hard-put to pull that off. The minors he’s trafficking would have to come up with all that I.D. A credit card in particular would be hard for a minor to produce, and in many cases, the same for a license.
Although some sex workers might be put off by the exposure this method creates, Eros.com will most likely never come under fire by AG’s or anti-trafficking groups, because of its I.D. proofing policy. Therefore, Eros.com is likely to never shut down as Craigslist adult services did, and as Backpage adult services might. Sex workers should consider that, and rally to have Backpage start proofing I.D.’s. Village Voice Media (Backpage) does absolutely no such thing currently.
Having Village Voice Media (Backpage) adopt that proofing policy would be better than switching to Eros, because Eros charges so much more for the ads.
To end the constant attacks of anti-trafficking groups, Village Voice Media (Backpage) should adopt this proofing policy. I have written VVM about this, and have gotten no response.
Here we go again…Backpage.com Adult Ads are under fire now…
Adult sex workers are as much against child prostitution as anyone else, and are in an excellent position, out there in the trenches, to really do something about it. But all those Attorney Generals and their anti-prostitution affiliates want to throw the baby out with the bath water, they want to end prostitution altogether, which is a total waste of effort, a pointless and absurd endeavor, and it makes it harder for adult sex workers to hang in there taking care of their families the only adequate way they can. It also makes it nearly impossible for those same adult sex workers to bear witness to child prostitute pimps and coercers, and really help out with that issue.
Norma Jean Almodovar, the nation’s foremost fighter for prostitutes’ rights, is compiling a backlash of FACTS about the numbers of child prostitutes pimped on Backpage, and FACTS about the numbers of law enforcement people and other authority figures who have been found to sexually abuse minors themselves.
Here I quote Norma Jean:
Personally, I’d like to have a world without idiots, where the
politically correct BS artists don’t control the lives of millions of
adult man and women who are not sex slaves or victims of trafficking but are victims of the anti- prostitution crusaders. While columnists and investigative journalists post endless philosophical claptrap about slavery, the law enforcement agents whom you presume are working to free those poor victims are actually raping and extorting them for sexual
favors. You can find a number of such government thugs listed here:
http://www.policeprostitutionandpolitics.com/ look under the latest news for the links to the cops who are diddling children even as the States Attorneys General are insisting that backpage.com and other adult classified sites shut down their adult ads “to protect the children.”
Yes, human trafficking is a terrible thing when it involves persons who have not chosen to engage in domestic service, sweatshops, agriculture and other areas of forced labor, but it is criminal to conflate sex work with sex trafficking and disallow consenting adults from engaging in sexual labor. The majority of sex workers are no more victims of human trafficking than are the majority of those who work in domestic service,
garment manufacturing and other factory labor – and no one insists that we ‘end the demand’ for those services or that we punish anyone who employs a household staff member, seamstress, farm worker or any other type of labor into which persons are frequently trafficked.
Additionally, if you are concerned with the oppression of human
trafficking victims, why not also be as concerned about the 4.8 million victims of intimate partner violence each year, or the 400,000 to 500,000 rape victims across the US whose rape kits go untested because there are not enough resources available to test them as the cops are MUCH more interested in conducting undercover sting operations to arrest the non violent, non abusive clients of adult prostitutes as they get
federal funding to do that (human trafficking you know) but not the money to test the rape kits so they can put violent rapists behind bars where there was an actual victim who called the police, filed a report and underwent a traumatic procedure to obtain DNA and who never find justice. Unlike the theoretical victims of human trafficking which for some reason the US Government which funds all these organizations cannot
find: go to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics to find the recently published (April 2011) report “Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents, 2008-2010″ and the previous report from 2007-2008, which give some very interesting statistics. Rather than just relying on the numbers from local law enforcement agencies, these reports show a much different scenario than Ashton and the prostitution
abolitionists claim is the extent of child trafficking AND adult sex trafficking.
For the two and a half years covered in the most recent report, total number of incidents of found victims of human trafficking was 2,515, of which 2,065 were classified as sex trafficking. Of these, 30% were found to be actual cases of trafficking, 38% found NOT to be human trafficking and the rest were undetermined at the end of the study. Data in this report are from the Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS), which was designed to measure the performance of federally funded task forces.
HTRS is currently the only system that captures information on human trafficking investigations conducted by state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States. So while the abolitionists posit that there are hundreds of thousands of victims every year, the federally funded agency says that of the 2,065 cases (over the two and one half year span that this report covers), only 218 were confirmed to be sex
trafficking, 267 were found not to be sex trafficking and 229 were pending or unknown status. Where are the rest of the victims? Why can’t they be found?
Victim service providers (those agencies which get federal money) report serving more labor trafficking victims than sex trafficking victims. This report relies on information from task forces receiving federal support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).
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I’d like to hear from anyone who feels their human rights have been violated.
I don’t care who you are…a sex worker, a housewife, an employee…I want to start a discussion about real-life violated human rights. Though I’m partial to the human rights violations of sex workers who are in the work because they want to be and are persecuted by their choice from all sides, I want to hear from everyone. I want to develop an awareness of the common thread that’s shared amongst ALL PEOPLE whose human rights have been defiled.
The arrest of the Backpage escorts’ attacker has a very bright side
In the past, American prostitutes from all venues, whether street women or courtesans, simply endured abuses or robberies by clients, and didn’t report them to the police. The reason is they were afraid of getting arrested, themselves. They were also afraid of abuse by the police! Therefore, I’m cheered by the fact that the Backpage ad escorts who were attacked in VA went to the cops to report him. This smacks of progress for the women in sex work! It’s awful that they were attacked, but it’s wonderful that they didn’t just take it, and lick their wounds in hiding, in fear…they came out and demanded the same protection and justice that any other citizen would have gone for!!!
I’m glad Craigslist dumped the Adult Services section
The Craigslist Adult Services section caused much woe to escorts. It caused many, many arrests of escorts, nationwide.
Before the Craigslist Adult Services section existed, independent escorts posted their ads on adult sites or in print media sources that never attracted the interest of minors. In other words, they posted their ads in places where kids were not likely to be looking for toys or bikes, and where soccer moms weren’t looking for washing machines or childcare.
Those sites and print sources were safer for escorts, because only adult males read them. No one was outraged by kids or soccer moms blundering into the ads while looking for things to buy, because unlike at Cragislist, that wasn’t going on, so the cops weren’t told to sting escorts.
So now things are returning to normal. The adult stuff will be separate from the kids stuff, as it should be, and far fewer escorts will be arrested (victimized) by communities out to get them because attorney generals say to.
And the men seeking escorts are finding them, wherever they’re posting now. That’s the perfect beauty of that business: the customers are needy and loyal, and will ALWAYS find the providers, no matter what, as long as the providers are posting somewhere.
Indeed, that process is flourishing right now, even as I write this.
Tools ‹ Aphrodite Phoenix — WordPress
A Healthy Lifestyle Creates Healthy Sex Work
I consider my sex work an extension of my healthy lifestyle.
When a person is dedicated to an inner-strength-growing lifestyle, and then she discovers sex work, her personal provision of that service is likely to be health-imparting. Her personal approach to sex work is likely to be both empowering for her, and a wonderful experience for her clients.
A sex worker in the healthy lifestyle understands that prostitution, practiced with safe sex measures, is natural and healthy relief of stress, provided for a fee. It can even be spiritual. “Donations” can actually be seen as “tithes.” Sex stands as the one true way to relieve stress and loneliness with NO toxins, NO side-effects, NO hangovers or chemical addiction: just the simple, beautiful sense of peace that comes with Nature’s best release.
So why is this healthy and natural act illegal when provided as a service? Unspeakably horrible “relievers” of stress are both legal and obscenely profitable (ex.: tobacco). Many other legal agents of relief are questionable at best (ex.: antidepressants, alcoholic beverages).
And as usual, the wisdom of the matriarchy strongly objects. And the matriarchs in the trenches get arrested or otherwise violated.
I will die with my voice raised in protest. Even on my deathbed, I will scream these truths. Think I’m just being dramatic? No way.
I’m glad that Craigslist is getting rid of the erotic services section
I want everything to go back to normal…and by normal I mean less of us getting arrested. The Craigslist busts are legendary by now, and I know more about it than I want to.
If there’s no more Craigslist Erotic Services section, then the clients will go back to looking for us at all the places they used to…and that’s where we’ll go back to advertising….remember those places, like the Boston Phoenix? Escorts.com? A lot less of us were getting busted through those.
Of course, that’s my ONLY cause for being glad about escorts getting ousted from Craigslist. The “reason” for the ousting is ridiculous…because of the killer in Boston? We all know that’s just an excuse. (They haven’t ousted jogging paths or coed colleges, right? But more female joggers and female college students have gotten murdered than all the harmed escorts in the world put together). Nah…the real reason is, we’re just hated. By people who don’t understand us. By people who ought to appreciate us….even the soccer moms.