A giant Teutonic brothel - Has liberalization gone too far?

[Eddie Teach]

My super quick search revealed 15-20% for Americans.

That seems awfully high.  As many as one in five guys has banged a hooker?

Sounds low if you look at Hollywood war movies. 

[The Brain]

On a personal note I'm concerned that there is a very real risk of BDSM becoming illegal in Sweden 15-20 years from now. If we accept victimless crimes regarding prostitution then why not regarding BDSM? Or whatever other victimless activity the feminazis let their retarded gaze rest on? Freedom of sex is a bit like freedom of speech, we really should try to keep it intact and not eaten away by "good" (as if!) intentions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcTP7YWPayU

[Sheilbh]

Could you define trafficking fr me? I think maybe I don't understand what you mean..."

Trade in human beings. The normal is a family entering into debt to the traffickers, or buying their service to get someone from, say, Bulgaria or Nigeria to the UK with the guarantee of the job. Sometimes the women are brought to the other country by a native who pretended to be her boyfriend and fall in love. Sometimes they'll be aware they're going for the purposes of sex work.

When the person arrives there normally their ability to contact their family is largely cut-off. Normally they're then made to work - in the EU around two thirds are sexual, 25% or so is forced labour and the rest tends to be a bit more obscure (and darker) like the trade in children or organs.

In sex work they're often raped first and then made to work in a brothel, or for a pimp. Often to pay off the debt that they've incurred getting there. The women tend not to get much of the money they make. Also because they're illegal immigrants there tends to be a lot of difficulty in them ever reporting someone and even if they could go home many wouldn't want to after working as a prostitute. From the Der Spiegel article for example one of the women, originally from Moldavia, said she regularly worked 18 hours a day.

I think it's the same definition everywhere, no?

If we find that in any particular job, if more people doing the job are from somewhere else, does that mean we should make the job illegal because there must be trafficking?

I don't want to make the job illegal. I want to criminalise demand for it and offer ways out for the women involved.

You seem to have a serious problem with trafficking. Why not address that?

Absolutely. Two thirds of the demand is trafficking for sexual purposes. We should do something about that

I think you're a Catholic prude who's susceptible to feminazi propaganda.  So we're even.

But I would point out that at least if you're going to legalise prostitution so they can pay taxes and get benefits then I think you need an extremely intrusive state presence to regulate the industry. Which may not have happened in Germany because that's traditionally the role of unions, perhaps?

Edit: And I would say I've always had a social conservative streak, I'm not terribly liberal on most social issues. I've never thought that decriminalising drugs would be good. I'm relatively pro-life. I think marriage should be encouraged. I don't instinctively think a more liberal social attitude's a good thing.

[Sheilbh]

That is certainly what this discussion feels like - people are just kind of assuming the results they want to be the case to support their pre-conceived notions.

But I've laid out several statistics on women likely to be prostitutes in the UK, the prevalence of human trafficking especially where legalised, the failure of legalisation on other points and the successful angles from the Swedish view. I err to the Swedish side because I don't agree with prostitution, but looking into it more I can't see a fact-based argument against it.

[Sheilbh]

On a personal note I'm concerned that there is a very real risk of BDSM becoming illegal in Sweden 15-20 years from now. If we accept victimless crimes regarding prostitution then why not regarding BDSM? Or whatever other victimless activity the feminazis let their retarded gaze rest on? Freedom of sex is a bit like freedom of speech, we really should try to keep it intact and not eaten away by "good" (as if!) intentions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcTP7YWPayU

I'm not entirely opposed to the British government's desire to ban extreme porn

[Admiral Yi]

Trade in human beings. The normal is a family entering into debt to the traffickers, or buying their service to get someone from, say, Bulgaria or Nigeria to the UK with the guarantee of the job.

I think this demonstrates very well that much of the hullaballoo about trafficking is bunk.  It's comparable to defining rape as including unwanted sexual advances.

Why should it be a crime to lend the cost of a bus ticket to go from Rumania to Germany in order to fuck for money?  Why should it be a crime for a brothel in Germany to ask a Rumanian "talent scout" to go find willing prostitutes?

In order to take this seriously you need to separate out the real instances of coercion.

[Sheilbh]

Why should it be a crime to lend the cost of a bus ticket to go from Rumania to Germany in order to fuck for money?  Why should it be a crime for a brothel in Germany to ask a Rumanian "talent scout" to go find willing prostitutes?

Seriously?

Very often the women don't know (though some do) they're told they're going to be nannies or similar. They don't get barely any of the money from their fucking that goes to the traffickers and they've got no choice in the issue.

[Admiral Yi]

Seriously.  The fact that trafficking "very often" involves X doesn't make trafficking immoral, unethical, or wrong.  It makes X wrong.

[Sheilbh]

Surely the fact it's illegal makes it wrong.

[Admiral Yi]

You can't possibly be serious. 

[derspiess]

[Sheilbh]

You can't possibly be serious.

Yeah. I'll be more specific people in Romania and Bulgaria currently have no right to live or work in Germany.

[Valmy]

Yeah that is pretty crazy.  You cannot even slip across the border to Mexico for it anymore (well...safely anyway).

But it is pretty easy to engage the services of an escort.

Is it?  I have to admit I have never looked into it.  Also to me escort = really expensive for rich old guys.

[Berkut]

Could you define trafficking fr me? I think maybe I don't understand what you mean..."

Trade in human beings. The normal is a family entering into debt to the traffickers, or buying their service to get someone from, say, Bulgaria or Nigeria to the UK with the guarantee of the job. Sometimes the women are brought to the other country by a native who pretended to be her boyfriend and fall in love. Sometimes they'll be aware they're going for the purposes of sex work.

When the person arrives there normally their ability to contact their family is largely cut-off. Normally they're then made to work - in the EU around two thirds are sexual, 25% or so is forced labour and the rest tends to be a bit more obscure (and darker) like the trade in children or organs.

In sex work they're often raped first and then made to work in a brothel, or for a pimp. Often to pay off the debt that they've incurred getting there. The women tend not to get much of the money they make. Also because they're illegal immigrants there tends to be a lot of difficulty in them ever reporting someone and even if they could go home many wouldn't want to after working as a prostitute. From the Der Spiegel article for example one of the women, originally from Moldavia, said she regularly worked 18 hours a day.

I think it's the same definition everywhere, no?

Oh no, I don't think that is the case nor do I even think the definition is at all the same when you are talking about it.

I think this is standard "carefulyl sloppy definitions" so you can define traficking as something brutally bad (as you have here), then reference it in much more general terms in order to drive up the numbers, then conclude that there is a massive problem.

It is like the entire debate over "rape" where you start by refrencing a study that says "50% of women have reported being the victims of unwanted sexual contact" then note that sexual assault is often rape, then suddenly we are talking about 50% of women having been "raped", in the context of someone actually attacking them and forcing them to have unwanted sex, as opposed to their boyfriend being a bit pushy the other night.

I suspect that is exactly what we are seeing here with these reports of "trafficking" - you are engaged in what looks like to me a very clear attempt to draw a connection between "75% of sex workers come from out of the country" to "most of this is trafficking" when in fact there is no reason to assume that just because someone went to Germany and became a sex worker, they were "trafficked". There is no connection between those two data points at all.

If we find that in any particular job, if more people doing the job are from somewhere else, does that mean we should make the job illegal because there must be trafficking?

I don't want to make the job illegal. I want to criminalise demand for it and offer ways out for the women involved.

So if 60% of the people working construction in Germany are immigrants, can we assume that they must have been trafficked, and we should criminalize demand for construction workers?

You seem to have a serious problem with trafficking. Why not address that?

Absolutely. Two thirds of the demand is trafficking for sexual purposes. We should do something about that

Then do something about it. Allocate more resources to catching and stopping it. Trying to stifle the demand is stupid, and won't work. It hasn't ever worked - there is a reason it is called "the oldest profession" or whatever.

I still don't buy the "studies" that show that increased legalization has resulted in increased trafficking. The data there seems pretty smelly to me, largely the kind of analysis you cited above, where we conclude that trafficking must be going up because most of the workers are from somewhere else, therefore they much be trafficked.

[Zanza]

Yeah. I'll be more specific people in Romania and Bulgaria currently have no right to live or work in Germany.

I think that only applies to employees, not self-employed persons. It's just an assumption, but I would expect virtually all prostitutes to be working based on what they themselves can generate as revenue and not based on a wage from an employer.

And even if it were, that will end on 31-Dec of this year, so it's not relevant for the discussion of future policy.