"It was like Yelp for prostitution."
August 2, 2017 10:41 AM   Subscribe

In January 2016, a Seattle, WA-area, wide-ranging investigation resulted in the shutdown of two sex-trafficking websites, the shuttering of 12 brothels and the initial arrest of about a dozen people. More than two dozen would eventually be arrested. The brothels were operated out of high-end apartment complexes in Bellevue, where prostituted women from South Korea were forced to work -- often for 12 hours a day, seven days a week -- to pay off debts. A Seattle Times report: Busted: How the police brought down the tech-savvy prostitution network.

Over the past five years, King County, Washington law-enforcement agencies have increasingly gone after the demand side of prostitution, arresting the buyers rather than the prostituted women. It is a countywide effort to shift responsibility for the sex trade onto the men who fund it.
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Seattle Against Slavery is an organization that fights trafficking of both sex and labor workers.

The Organization for Prostitution Survivors provides support and services for those trying to leave the life of paid sex work or recover from their experiences. The organization also offers classes for men who want to stop buying sex. 24-hour hotline: 206-853-6243.

In the United States, the national hotline for victims of human trafficking is 888-373-7888. See https://humantraffickinghotline.org for more info.
posted by zarq (16 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite


 
All the links in this post are SFW.
posted by zarq at 10:41 AM on August 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Urquhart said the investigation into TheReveiwboard.net and “The League” is “unprecedented in size and scope” in the region. Twelve South Korean women were rescued from the brothels and will be eligible for visas to remain in the U.S.

I'm still working my way through this, but hearing that the women weren't charged with anything - except for the one who was helping organize it - was such a relief to hear. Thanks for posting this, zarq.
posted by mordax at 10:58 AM on August 2, 2017 [12 favorites]




Richey is even more adamant that what the South Korean prostitutes were doing could not be called consensual because they were being paid.

“What you have is someone paying this person essentially to turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes.’ Because as several of the buyers on this board observed, these women, as a leisure activity, are not looking to have sex with 10 guys in a day. They’re doing it for the money.”


There is so, so much fucked up in this article, and it's clear that this had to be taken down and prosecuted. However, I'm really uncomfortable with this quote here.

There are a ton of things that people do for money that they wouldn't do for free. The presence of money is not what makes it non-consensual. They really should focus on the abuse of immigrants, the living conditions, the wages, the coercion.

We see the same sort of abuse in construction, farm work, aestheticians, et cetera. Focus on the actual abuse.
posted by explosion at 11:10 AM on August 2, 2017 [27 favorites]


That's a good point, explosion. Taken at face value, Richey's quote casts any kind of sex worker as a rape victim. That's very problematic.

While I was looking for links to include in this post, I came across:
Meet the Sex Workers Who Lawmakers Don't Believe Exist. How a New Anti-Trafficking Push in Olympia Is Disrespecting and Endangering Consensual Sex Workers
and
Seattle sex workers: ‘We’re not all victims’

They may be of interest.
posted by zarq at 12:12 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I knew this sounded familiar: I read a Reason.com article about the same story last year. It states that many of the claims in the story are inaccurate and sensationalized. I am quite suspicious of anything Reason.com puts out, so don't take this link as an automatic endorsement of their take on the matter.
posted by Zarkonnen at 12:52 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


From the Stranger article zabuni posted:

"It's also extremely frightening," Sly added. "It's like punching into work and seeing FBI tape all around your building. I think there's going to be a whole lot of sex workers around Seattle who have a hard time making rent this month, who are extremely concerned about their safety and worried if they're going to get a knock on their doors from police officers."

I'm not going to make any friends here, but... if it's dangerous and illegal, why don't you just... not do it? Almost every other able bodied person has to work a regular job for a living. Yeah, for some sex workers the money will be terrible by comparison, but most people manage to pay rent, and most people don't worry about getting raped or arrested at work.
posted by AFABulous at 12:53 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm not going to make any friends here, but... if it's dangerous and illegal, why don't you just... not do it?

Criminal background history for drug use can make someone unemployable. As does an active addiction. A john doesn't care if you show up to work high and self medicating, whether it's due to trauma or plain old addiction.

Looks can also also factor into being unemployable, IE, excessive tattoos, unable to meet dress code for interviews, too poor to do laundry or buy new clothes.

By and large most sex workers aren't doing this voluntarily. They're doing it because it's what they know and they don't have the resources, experience or skills for traditional employment.
posted by loquacious at 1:13 PM on August 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'm not going to make any friends here, but... if it's dangerous and illegal, why don't you just... not do it? Almost every other able bodied person has to work a regular job for a living. Yeah, for some sex workers the money will be terrible by comparison, but most people manage to pay rent, and most people don't worry about getting raped or arrested at work.

It so happens that I know a number of sex workers who have done a number of different kinds of things, from dancing to cam work to in-call (or whatever the opposite of outcall is) to the kind of escorting where you actually go places with people in addition to having sex with them.

Why did/do they do sex work?

1. Schedule constraints - several are raising children as single parents. Incall is both fairly flexible and fairly predictable, not like part time jobs where you get jerked around a lot about hours, and you still make enough money, plus you can cancel if you have a sick kid.

2. Gender stuff - easier to make it as a trans woman doing cam work than get and stay hired

3. Health stuff - chronic illness that makes it unpredictable just when you'll be well enough to work. Disability is difficult to get and it's a horrifying pittance (most people don't realize this). "All I need to do is muster up a few days a month of feeling fairly good and it's also flexible which ones those are, and on those days I can make enough to stay housed and fed".

4. Hatred of capitalism, hatred of how you're treated in working class jobs. If you are not trafficked and if you're smart and if the market is decent, you can get treated fairly well, certainly much better than eg as a cocktail waitress. (One friend had a job at a fancy chain hotel where she was pushed to have sex with clients for free to keep her job. That's sex work, if you like.) I know an atypical bunch of people, but not that atypical - lots of working class people hate how they're treated.

5. Barriers to entry in other jobs - people with no high school degree or interrupted college, people with college debt, people with criminal histories, debt histories, medical histories, trauma histories that all made it very difficult to get hired anywhere but the meanest and most disgusting places.

If you have the right personality, access to screening and security measures and the ability to make friends with other sex workers, it isn't that bad a deal.

Most people who end up doing sex work don't have the right personality to be comfortable with the sexual, body and social aspects. Many are not able to access sex worker communities, many don't have access to security measures. For a lot of people, the deciding factor is "I'm desperate and this is work that I can get" or "someone is coercing me". But there are still a large number of people who do it because it's a pretty good option for them.

I think that the best case against sex work is that, because of patriarchy and capitalism, it inevitably generates a market that is mostly sleazy and coercive - that the 10 percent or so of sex workers who are happy in their work and relatively well compensated are pretty much maxing out that sector of the market, and that their employment and wellbeing does not trump the misery of the other 90%. The apparent super-creepy racism, back-patting and general grossness of the "League" in this article seems to suggest that when you grow the sex-work market, you also grow the grossness market.

But I'm not totally sure - this sounds like it's more an issue of worker empowerment than anything else. I feel like what we see in parts of Europe is that merely legalizing sex work isn't a total solution, because patriarchy and inequality keep conditions bad and stigma high.

My feeling is that working on patriarchy and inequality via policies that improve conditions for all workers and all women will probably shake things out to a decent situation in sex work, whereas criminalizing sex work doesn't do much against patriarchy, etc.
posted by Frowner at 1:40 PM on August 2, 2017 [36 favorites]


I think that the best case against sex work is that, because of patriarchy and capitalism, it inevitably generates a market that is mostly sleazy and coercive - that the 10 percent or so of sex workers who are happy in their work and relatively well compensated are pretty much maxing out that sector of the market, and that their employment and wellbeing does not trump the misery of the other 90%.

This is a really compelling argument. I'd be interested in the actual numbers (is it really 10/90?), but I suppose it doesn't matter that much. Is this something regulation could fix?
posted by mr_roboto at 2:12 PM on August 2, 2017


Many are not able to access sex worker communities, many don't have access to security measures.

Shutting down TheReviewboard was a real blow making this harder, from what I understand. Which of course the Seattle Times relegated the detail about vetting clients via the community on that site to the very end.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:34 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Prostitution is legal and regulated where I live. There are still reports of prostitutes being abused, and occasional reports of human trafficking, but they're not common. I don't know much about this industry, but a brief perusal of sites like this and this leads me to believe that they're genuine representative organisations, not the mostly-explotative rating sites described in the article. Consequently, given that prostitution has never been successfully prohibited, I think it's better to have legal prostitution with empowered workers than illicit prostitution and vulnerable ones.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:31 PM on August 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


One of the things that is bad about the stigma around sex work is that it's extraordinarily hard to do the kind of research into conditions and worker opinions that would be useful. Like, to me there are all kinds of questions about sex work that are literal, empirical questions that could be answered through research - what percentage of sex workers are trafficked or coerced? What percentage of sex workers would prefer to do a non-sex-work job even if it meant earning a lot less and having worse hours because they really hate the fact of doing sex work itself? What percentage of sex workers would like to continue doing sex work but more safely and with less stigma and what percentage would like to do something else in the near future (assuming that like most people, sex workers would like some change over their whole working life in any case)? How do feelings about sex work differ between, say, someone who is doing street prostitution, someone who dances, someone who is an escort, someone who does very high end escorting, etc?

Something else I'd like to know: a lot of people talk up the Swedish model, which seems to have at least somewhat reduced the percentage of Swedish men who pay for sex. But the researchers do not seem to have done a good job finding out what happened to the sex workers who no longer had customers. My suspicion is that many of them migrated to other parts of Europe and are now doing sex work in poorer places with worse safety nets. This is where I feel that stigma impedes research, because it's seen as a self-evident good that these men aren't buying sex, even though we don't know what that's meant for the life prospects of the women who were selling it, and so of course this program is painted as a success.

To me it's also an open question: if men can buy sex from women, does that inexorably degrade how men think of women? Is sex work categorically different from other forms of gendered labor or is that just our knee jerk assumption? Do we think of sex work more like the sale of kidneys, where we feel that a trade in sex, like a trade in kidneys, is inexorably going to do harm to the sellers and give buyers an offensive amount of power? Or do we think of it more like being a cocktail waitress, where it's gendered and sexualized and the power dynamics are terrible, but it's still within the realm of work that we think people should be allowed to do? These are all questions that on the one hand can't be answered without some ideology - there's no "objective" answer, per se - but on the other could be answered a lot better and more plausibly through conversations with sex workers, surveys, etc conducted with a genuine curiosity rather than under the usual sign of "prostitution is very, very bad".

Also, what differentiates the working conditions for different types of work? What if some kinds of sex work are bad and degrade the social experiences of women (and also men who do sex work - a largely forgotten bunch - but other kinds don't? How would we know? (I often think that butch women, cis/trans/straight/gay/etc guys who do sex work and other trans men should all have some kind of sodality called "Straight men don't want to fuck us, straight women don't want to be us, so we get left out of everyone's calculus")

Also, to me the first question about sex work has to be "what is being done to make sure that sex workers are better off as workers", not "what is being done to get rid of sex work". If your proposal about sex work doesn't focus on the material wellbeing of sex workers, it's no good - just hand-waving and saying "getting rid of sex work benefits all women because it is good that men think of women as not being for sale" doesn't cut it.

Which is partly why I think that the best way to address the "what is to be done" angle is to treat sex workers as workers, and to protect and empower them as workers alongside other workers doing non-sex-work.
posted by Frowner at 5:54 PM on August 2, 2017 [11 favorites]


Also, if there were less stigma on sex work, former or current sex workers could openly participate in governance, speak to city councils, etc, which would mean that policy decisions around sex work would be taken from a more informed standpoint rather than, as now, being at best taken with some information relayed at second or third hand.
posted by Frowner at 6:01 PM on August 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


most people don't worry about getting raped or arrested at work.

I'm on my phone with a poor connection so searching is difficult, but I recall FPPs about the sexual assault risks faced by both janitorial workers and farm workers. And in the military, too, now that I think about it.

For sex work, things should be legal and well regulated, so that people who choose to be involved will have every legal and social protection necessary.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:15 PM on August 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I'm on my phone with a poor connection so searching is difficult, but I recall FPPs about the sexual assault risks faced by both janitorial workers and farm workers. And in the military, too, now that I think about it.

* Rape on the Job in America (Rape in the Fields is a Frontline documentary that explores the persistent allegations that female agricultural workers in the U.S. are frequently sexually assaulted and harassed by supervisors who exploit their (often undocumented) immigrant status.)

* Under cover of darkness, female janitors face rape and assault (Rape on the Night Shift: Every night, as most of us head home, janitors across America, many of them women, begin their night shift. They are often alone or isolated in empty buildings — and vulnerable to sexual violence.)

"Rape" tag on metafilter
posted by zarq at 11:22 AM on August 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


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