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Amazon and Microsoft Directors Charged in Prostitution Sting (kiro7.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A director from Microsoft and a former Amazon director have been charged with promoting prostitution after an investigation into Seattle-area sex trafficking, according to a local news report. Investigators say the director of worldwide health for Microsoft submitted over 70 reviews of prostitutes that he had allegedly hired since April 2012, according to the report, while the director of software development at Amazon, who worked on Fire TV, "allegedly hired prostitutes at least 29 times through The Review Board and TheLeague.Net, according to court documents." Both men have pleaded not guilty and are free on $75,000 bail, part of a group of 19 people now facing criminal charges. "These defendants, we allege, were absolutely devoted to the commercial sexual exploitation of vulnerable, powerless immigrant women," King County Prosecutors said in January, adding that the women, who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia, are not being charged.
Last January a Seattle newspaper reported that one alleged brothel owner "previously had made his living off illegal marijuana grows, but moved into prostitution when the drug was legalized."
Last January a Seattle newspaper reported that one alleged brothel owner "previously had made his living off illegal marijuana grows, but moved into prostitution when the drug was legalized."
It should be illegal to enter a contract for sex when the person providing the sex is being forced to provide it and is not even the one getting compensated for it.
Well, they *are* vulnerable, because they operate outside the law and can be exploited by criminals You don't think that a prostitute you've paid $300 gets to keep that money? Almost all of that goes to the pimp.
Freelancing women are targets for beatings by pimps because they threaten the pimp's income. And what are they supposed to do, go to the cops and say "This guy is trying to steal my prostitution business?"
Once a prostitute is in the clutches of a pimp, she's not free to leave to business either. Even if she wants to move to a different city, if the pimp keeps her in place by threats to her friends and family.
And not every prostitute is a prostitute by choice. There are runaways who fall into a pimp's control; rural foreigners who are tricked into thinking they're immigrating to the US for a high-paying (by their standards) domestic service job.
Understand I have no issues with prostitution per se, but I have a big problem with slavery, and in any system where prostitutes operate outside the protection of the law it's a given that most of them are de facto slaves.
I'd like supporting evidence for that. That sounds more like a tabloid TV show than the results of research done by criminologists.
We all know how Nicholas Kristof's reporting on the supposed "sexual slavery" fell apart. Other studies of so-called sexual exploitation, forcing women into sex work, and forcing minors into prostitution have similarly fallen apart when they were investigated by social scientists who were trained to get the facts.
When somebody is running an anti-prostitution organization, some of which have budgets of $1 million or more from government and private grants, they have a strong motivation to exaggerate and lie about the problem, and they've often been caught exaggerating and lying.
Similarly, when a commercial sex worker (the public health term) gets arrested for prostitution (the prosecutor's term), they have a choice: they can admit that they are voluntarily engaging in this business because that was the best way they could make money, and become criminals who go to jail; or they can claim that they were forced into it, enslaved and exploited by pimps and johns, and become victims who cooperate with the prosecutors, has all the charges dismissed, becomes a client of a social service agency that gets her housing, work and education, and sometimes gets citizenship as a political refugee rather than being deported as a criminal. So they also have a strong motivation to tell the prosecutors what they want to hear.
Suppose I assume for purposes of argument that it's explotation for a woman to make $300 a night as a sex worker. Is it also exploitation for a woman to make $300 a week as a minimum-wage fast-food worker or hotel worker making beds and scrubbing floors? I would say they're both explotiation, and a woman has a right to decide which exploitation she prefers. If you really want to stop commercial sex work, do what Mao did and provide the sex workers with better jobs and living conditions. That would take public money.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/06...
Why Did Nicholas Kristof Believe Somaly Mam's Lies?
The roots and consequences of a deception.
Jesse Walker
Jun. 3, 2014
Last week, Somaly Mam resigned from the foundation she co-founded seven years ago. Mam, dubbed "the James Frey of anti–sex trafficking activism" by my colleage Elizabeth Nolan Brown, achieved her fame by telling the world that she had been forced to work in a Cambodian brothel as a child and that her group rescued girls who had suffered a similar fate. For several years, journalists have been questioning many of Mam's claims. Those investigations culminated last month in a devastating Newsweek piece that showed Mam had lied repeatedly both about her own life and about the experiences of the people she says she rescued. One of the latter