It would be shitty to drive from your city (where a car wash is $10) to the neighboring tent city and give them only $1 to wash your car, because you know they won't have another option.

If there's no alternative, doesn't that mean they'd starve? Are you saying death by starvation is preferable to sex work?

The charities should instead hire people who aren't predators. People who don't take advantage of the vulnerable people at the catastrophe site.

What if you had a child or sister, who got kidnapped. Then the police came, and said to your child or sister: "Ok, we'll rescue you, if we can have sex with you."

Based on your reasoning, this would be fine to do, to your child or sister. Because if it wasn't for those hero policemen, she'd remain kidnapped, right.

However, the make-sense approach, is to fire those policemen and instead hire others, who took the job because they want to help victims and society, rather than wanting power so they could abuse vulnerable people.

What? That's a completely different situation. The person in the story was doing his job just fine, no blackmail involved. He just decided to spend his free time paying for a sex service.

Hiring a prostitute in your free time is not abusing people.

I get the impression that you have in mind hiring a prostitute, in a well functioning society with no poverty, and with a well fare system that people can fall back on.

Actually I read about someone in the country where I live -- he was working as an artist, made okay with money, and decided to quit his job and work as a prostitute instead. After doing that, he made about as much money as before, and he liked being a prostitute, better than his previous job as an artist. I think he and his customers -- it's fine, I see no problem with that. He also did not have a traumatic childhood or anything like that.

However that's different, from an earth quake disaster site. There, people are struggling for survival and food and shelter, and some of them will do things they don't really want, to stay alive.

I want the aid workers who did not become aid workers to help anyone, but instead to take advantage of vulnerable people, to be fired. And replaced with others who are genuinely interested in helping people -- I think the latter will do a better job. And b.t.w. I think these two groups of people: men looking for cheap sex with vulnerable women and children, versus genuine helpers, are non-overlapping.

OK, fair. I might be assuming the best, but is that really unreasonable? We don't have any details, but I think it's most likely that the guy used protection, wasn't violent and paid properly. My issue in these discussions is just that everyone seems to go on a moral panic and assume the worst whenever sex is involved. Informal jobs in a poverty-stricken country with no legal oversight are an issue I agree, but there's nothing special about the ones that are sexual in nature. Now do you think people would be talking about it at all if what the guy had done was pay someone to carry his luggage for a couple hours?

Sex is a maybe-death thing.

If the woman gets pregnant, there's a relatively high risk that she'll die, during delivery. Or, if there's no man there to help her, when she is pregnant and vulnerable and cannot find her own food, she's at risk of starving and dying.

Maybe / probably those "aid workers" used contraceptives, however, the feelings part of the human brain doesn't understand contraceptives. Those parts of the brain are still in the stone age. The feelings involved, for a woman who gets raped or has sex because otherwise she might starve to death, is not "I carry bags", instead it's more "I might die from this".

(For a man, the feelings can instead be "I'm reproducing, great. No risk for me, I don't get pregnant".)

It's like you're saying that having sex is so terribly bad that it's better to let people starve instead, but that's a bizarre idea considering the fact that sex actually feels really good.

What would you do in the car washing example? Drive back to your city and pay $10 because paying someone who's willing to do it for $1 is exploitative? Surely the people doing it for $1 would rather do it for $1 than not do it for $0.