When police do undercover stings to arrest customers of sex workers, they’re described as HUMAN TRAFFICKING STING. And here, on the other hand, this person is described as prostitute [and] working escort.
One of several reasons we have so much reported “human trafficking” cases in the US is because our current laws make it so that any time more than one person is working in an organization involved in sex work, it can magically get redefined as human trafficking even if no workers were forced to be there doing the job.
There have been cases of two sex workers that were roommates being accused of trafficking each other because the material aid of being roommates qualified them as traffickers. Or drivers employed by a sex worker to literally escort them to and from clients/airports to take them to and from the airport being busted as pimps and traffickers.
And of course, the whole thing about interstate travel turning sex work into trafficking is loaded with its own horseshit. It’s just a reality for a sex worker that the “new girl in town” gets more business, so there’s a huge financial incentive for the worker to occasionally do some business travel.
On top of that, when a brothel or organization gets broken up, frequently all the sex workers are offered deals where they have to say they were trafficked and go after the businesses organizers, seen as the “bigger fish”.
For one layer worse, now hotels are being super, super hostile to “human trafficking” but really all their “warning signs” and policies are just meant to stop sex workers. So sex workers are forced increasingly to ply their trade in unsafe locations like cars / client accommodations instead of fairly safe hotels. Meanwhile, the hotels themselves ACTUALLY benefit the REAL human trafficking threat that we should be trying to address – immigrant wage slavery. Because the hotels frequently are the ones subcontracting things like cleaning to incredibly shady sub-minimum wage exploitative employers that are doing actual trafficking-related stuff. So many of the very things that are causing REAL trafficking are using trafficking to attack sex workers for no reason other than puritanical bigotry.
There’s infinitely more to say here, but I just can’t do the whole thing justice. Here’s a really good podcast episode on the subject that is sensitive and clear about how much nonsense there is in the current, widespread “trafficking” moral panic and how much harm it does compared to the good it preaches.
So here’s something “funny.”
When police do undercover stings to arrest customers of sex workers, they’re described as HUMAN TRAFFICKING STING. And here, on the other hand, this person is described as prostitute [and] working escort.
Schroedinger’s sex worker?
One of several reasons we have so much reported “human trafficking” cases in the US is because our current laws make it so that any time more than one person is working in an organization involved in sex work, it can magically get redefined as human trafficking even if no workers were forced to be there doing the job.
There have been cases of two sex workers that were roommates being accused of trafficking each other because the material aid of being roommates qualified them as traffickers. Or drivers employed by a sex worker to literally escort them to and from clients/airports to take them to and from the airport being busted as pimps and traffickers.
And of course, the whole thing about interstate travel turning sex work into trafficking is loaded with its own horseshit. It’s just a reality for a sex worker that the “new girl in town” gets more business, so there’s a huge financial incentive for the worker to occasionally do some business travel.
On top of that, when a brothel or organization gets broken up, frequently all the sex workers are offered deals where they have to say they were trafficked and go after the businesses organizers, seen as the “bigger fish”.
For one layer worse, now hotels are being super, super hostile to “human trafficking” but really all their “warning signs” and policies are just meant to stop sex workers. So sex workers are forced increasingly to ply their trade in unsafe locations like cars / client accommodations instead of fairly safe hotels. Meanwhile, the hotels themselves ACTUALLY benefit the REAL human trafficking threat that we should be trying to address – immigrant wage slavery. Because the hotels frequently are the ones subcontracting things like cleaning to incredibly shady sub-minimum wage exploitative employers that are doing actual trafficking-related stuff. So many of the very things that are causing REAL trafficking are using trafficking to attack sex workers for no reason other than puritanical bigotry.
There’s infinitely more to say here, but I just can’t do the whole thing justice. Here’s a really good podcast episode on the subject that is sensitive and clear about how much nonsense there is in the current, widespread “trafficking” moral panic and how much harm it does compared to the good it preaches.
It’s also “funny” that they go out of their way to put “mom” in the headline, in case there was any doubt about what they were trying to do.