You know what FOSTA/SESTA did? Push it deeper underground.
Evidence indicates that lawmakers don't care about victims in a meaningfully helpful way. They absolutely crave the power/cash that anti-trafficking rhetoric brings.
A competent press would examine the history of trafficking laws and report the actual outcomes - instead of parroting the PR that pols hand to them.
Lawmakers were warned that shuttering Backpage would harm LEO efforts to rescue trafficking victims and they passed SESTA/FOSTA anyway.
The law has been used exactly one time.
> I was specifically referring to your claim that They absolutely crave the power/cash that anti-trafficking rhetoric brings
Is your assertion that lawmakers do not crave the power/cash that comes with anti-traffic rhetoric? If so, why do you believe that?
> TechDirt isn’t exactly a reputable, well-researched newsgathering organization.
That's an interesting opinion about one of the few news orgs that actively documents their analysis in every article (inc court filings), consistently targets all administrations (inc popular ones) - and (unlike most news orgs) isn't at all known for parroting Gov/Corp/LEO PR w/o contextual or historical analysis.
> Genuinely curious, not crapposting.
okay
I’ll stipulate to that. But it’s a pretty long logical leap to deduce from the fact that they heard a lot of opinions and made a (perhaps incorrect) judgment call that they don’t care about sex trafficking victims.
Also, linking to other news sources and commenting on them isn’t “newsgathering.” That’s just operating a blog. If they perform their own investigations, then my opinion might change.
Before passage: LEO warned lawmakers and those lawmakers minimized and gaslighted their expert concerns - concerns voiced by the exact people in the best possible position to know.
After passage: LEO exampled the harm done by FOSTA/SESTA and how the law was further endangering sex trafficking victims. In response, lawmakers crowed about the success of the law - w/o offering anything at all that might indicate success.
Creating a law that further harms and endagers sex trafficking victims while pretending the opposite - this seems like a fairly stellar example of not caring about the well being of sex trafficking victims.
It is one thing to claim that we are passing laws in good faith that end up not working as well as we hoped. It’s quite another make unsubstantiated claims that people are acting in bad faith.
They're not accused of acting Immorally, which would be taking action with mal intent. They're not trying to increase child prostitution. They're not trying to enable it. They're not looking to abuse children themselves.
They're accused of being psychopaths, not criminals.
I don't understand how the default position can be anything but that politicians indeed act amorally. There is a very long history of politicians enacting laws specifically to hide prostitution, not to stop it. There is an equally long history of people asking them to do so. Society definitely wants prostitution. Society also wants very vulnerable prostitutes, well hidden from view.
I think you may be confused. The articles' consistent and well done sourcing is a solid opposite of rumor-mill behavior.
> It is not a reputable source for anything and the owners make no qualms about it.
Obviously not true as even a casual read will attest. As evidence I offer the site, in partial or it's entirety.
TechDirt has been on a backslide in readership for years, primarily from it's crappy "we just post what we hear" nonsense. What you see now is a rebranding (eg* "free speech") which has served them better than the previous snicker journalism that they are known for. The fact that they have seemingly well-sourced articles is incidental to the past, which you seem wholly ignorant enough to assume was a quality source.
*It does seem to be working as other sites are increasingly linking to it.
From this article:
> “We assume it’s a great thing that Backpage closed down,” Stefanie Jeffers said. “And it is, because it’s horrible that Backpage existed and so much trafficking occurred through the users of Backpage. But I do think that it comes with its dangers too.”
> Jeffers, the founder of the nonprofit Grit Into Grace, works with women who are engaged in street prostitution in Indianapolis to help them get out of the life. She says Backpage’s closure came as a shock to the women she talked to.
I don't get why you're hung up on whether TechDirt is reputable or not, just read the actual article?
I would imagine a vanishingly small percentage of people are consenting to be on the receiving end of racial discrimination or hate crimes.
However, we know very well that making prostitution illegal has no effect on those either. All else equal, it's more expensive to fight something you can't stop or even really slow down very much, which is why I think less money should be spent on enforcement than, say, treatment of the inevitable consequences.
(Or better yet, trying to address the underlying factors that drive demand, though we almost never try that)
I think there are legitimately different classes of problems, and some are better addressed through regulation, and others are just made worse.
Racism (read: systematic racism at an organizational or policy level) and worker mistreatment are likely in the former: problems that are possible to at least noticeably mitigate through legislative changes, incentives, and punishments.
Alcohol and drug prohibition I would put into the latter class: things people will continuing doing no matter how illegal they are.
Prostitution seems like it clearly belongs with drugs and alcohol, though I would love to hear the reasons you disagree.
By the way, I have no idea why your comment got downvoted. I disagree with it so far, but it's a coherent argument and not particularly nasty. It's hard to have discussions on HN when dissenting opinions just get buried.
Not going to lie, but I feel most people don't care about these either. All I see are platitudes.
For example, the criminal justice system is all messed up. Over-criminalization, coercive plea bargains, law enforcement unaccountability etc. But we focus on police shootings of black men, which aren't actually disproportionate to the number of police encounters with black men.
Because it's a thing you can put video of on the television and get people frothy about, but it's not a thing you can solve on its own because it's a consequence of all of those other things and not a cause in itself.
By getting people to focus on the wrong thing, they can get votes without having to do the hard work of solving the underlying problems. Instead they give you empty symbolism -- take down statues, rename stuff -- which doesn't fix anything. More than that, because the underlying problems never get solved that way, they can keep campaigning on it forever.
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Quoting @notsureaboutpg: “This hasn't led to a decrease in trafficking in the countries that have tried it though. Many of them in Europe have become trafficking destinations for women from other countries. There's lots and lots of studies out there that show that decriminalizing prostitution does not lead to lower trafficking or better outcomes for prostitutes.
Also the rhetoric we use here (defeatist, people are going to solicit sex and break the law so let's make it easier for them, etc.) is in stark contrast to how we talk about problems we actually want to fight in our societies like obesity, racism, worker mistreatment by employers, etc. In those situations we never say that people are going to do such things anyways and criminalizing it just makes those who do those crimes more unlikely to change, more unlikely to get back into society, more distrustful of the system, etc. In those situations we spend tons and tons of money at the corporate and the government level trying to teach people these behaviors are wrong and to not engage in them.
Why can't we do that with people who solicit prostitutes?”
You seem very confident that this is an indisputable fact. Can you explain to us why paying for sex work and performing sex work are always degrading acts?
We completely agree about the purpose of government.
The government exists to provide education and support for people to escape toxic situations, NOT more LAWS backed by the threat of violence, with over reaching questionable authority to force people to do what a subset of people believe is morally right, based on sensationalized media reporting, whether that's prostitution, drug use, abortion, gun laws, mask usage...etc.
Unless there's unquestionable hard science to make a law over, with data effecting the majority of the population, the federal government should not be involved in a legislative capacity.
There's already an uncountable number of federal laws(you can google it).
We need to err on the side of freedom not safety and morality.
Also the rhetoric we use here (defeatist, people are going to solicit sex and break the law so let's make it easier for them, etc.) is in stark contrast to how we talk about problems we actually want to fight in our societies like obesity, racism, worker mistreatment by employers, etc. In those situations we never say that people are going to do such things anyways and criminalizing it just makes those who do those crimes more unlikely to change, more unlikely to get back into society, more distrustful of the system, etc. In those situations we spend tons and tons of money at the corporate and the government level trying to teach people these behaviors are wrong and to not engage in them.
Why can't we do that with people who solicit prostitutes?