Slavery in America: 2008
By Erick Posted in Culture | prostitution | Slavery — Comments (38) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I have an article in the Macon Telegraph, my local paper, this morning about modern American slavery. It's a problem we don't like to talk about, but it is a growing problem in this country.
Because it is wrapped up in growing libertine values about sex and prostitution, the problem is frequently ignored. I would respectfully submit that we cannot turn a blind eye to the problem.
The most common route into slavery is kidnapping and smuggling. In 2006, the Department of Justice charged nine people connected to an international sex trafficking ring. The ring smuggled women into the United States either with promises of a new life or against their will. The women were forced to work in brothels, usually in Asian themed massage parlors or spas. The network ran throughout the United States. The profits were funneled back to the Northwest and funded Asian organized crime operations.Between 2005 and 2008, there have been numerous raids across the nation turning up the same pattern: Women held against their will who are forced to perform sex acts under the cover of giving massages. The women are frequently abused or drugged and are told repeatedly that if they seek help or talk to the police they or their families back home will be harmed.
A Clayton County raid two years ago found a significant number of the women were illegal aliens smuggled across the border and forced to work. Fulton and Gwinnett counties have found the same pattern.
How can Macon be wholly unique - no slaves here, just sex? In fact, it is no different here, despite some in this community who would say "it's just sex between consenting adults." The weight of all the data shows at least one of the individuals is not consenting.
"Legalize prostitution," is the most frequent retort. The Netherlands has legalized it, Australia has legalized it, New Zealand has, Sweden has. It is time for a new argument. Those countries are now at the top of the slave importation list. In fact, all of these countries, libertine symbols for the pro-prostitution crowd, have begun dramatically curbing or ending legal prostitution because of the connection between legal prostitution and increases in human trafficking.
You can read the whole thing here (scroll down to the bottom).
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Slavery in America: 2008 38 Comments (0 topical, 38 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
I'm basically agnostic on this issue, but an argument often made in our of legalization is that it's the least powerful (ie. the prostitutes themselves) who generally bear the brunt of enforcement. While I agree whole-heartedly with the diagnosis of severe problems in the sex trade (whether legal or otherwise), it doesn't seem like much of a fix if increased vigilance simply means women kidnapped into sex slavery simply end up in jail. Law enforcement might have the best of intentions, but power is still power, and those higher up the chain are generally one step ahead of the law - that's the problem that we need to fix; Lord knows I don't have the answer!
Anytime you hear the yipping about "my rights", consider when somebody says that whether their "rights" are purchased at the expense of somebody else's rights.
Unfair. Unbalanced. Unmedicated. -- IMAO
believe it or not, Legalize it, You site nations who have problems through legalization. Well, they did it wrong. If you legalize a vice you have to spend nearly the same resources you once spent trying to stop it.
Only you spend those resources on trying to fight organized crime through sting operations, and surprise inspections.
The facts are clear that in areas of legalized prostitution where the government does do inspections the prostitutes have a much better life and get to keep their money.
To anyone who thinks otherwise, I would like you to watch the documentary Pimp, by the Hughes Brothers.
One retort would be that we could spend those resources now to fight organized crime and not legalize. But it just does not work that way, All the vice laws in all the world have never made much of a dent in prostitution, especially in a post-religious culture like ours.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
their families back home will be hurt?
Legalizing this doesn't help this problem. It expands opportunities for sex trafficking and makes authorities much more likely overlook it. This "profession" ruins the people that are in it voluntarily, we don't need to compound the problem by giving a chance for more lives to be used up and flushed down the toilet by the disgusting sex traffickers.
It should be outlawed. Outlawing it will stop situations like this from occurring.
While we are at it, we should make select drugs illegal well, then no one will be able to use them, and we won't have any violent drug lords.
Right after that we should make firearms illegal too, after all, they are used in school shooting and other crimes all the time. Just making things illegal makes the problem go away!
On a serious note, it surprises me that you guys can't separate slavery from prostitution. Its like looking at child soldiers in Africa and declaring every military to be bad. Its such a liberal way of thinking.
Have you added to the population of the McCain 2008 minicity yet today?
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Evil men are evil, and will simply find another criminal activity in which to involve themselves.
Do you really think Al Capone would have been an upstanding citizen involved in only legal business ventures if Prohibition had never become law?
And the good people of the Midwest could have had a tipple without contributing to organized crime.
The same goes for prostitution.
The same goes for drugs today.
Either you are an adult who can make your own decisions or the state holds you in loco parentis.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
So as long as we legalize everything, we won't have illegal activity.
The state has a constitutional right to limit certain activities when it protects its citizens.
You say legalized prostitution eliminates illegal activity. I say it increases it.
You say legalizing drugs eliminates illegal activity, I say it increases it.
I take a really libertarian view on this.
Unless you can show me a victim or you can show damage to the state outside of the individual it shouldn't be illegal.
But back to legalizing drugs as a counter point. There is a large amount of illegal activity related to the drug trade due to its contraband nature. When is the last time someone knocked off a Johnson and Johnson distributor so they could take their territory.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
You simply choose to ignore it.
I just don't have the information needed to properly evaluate it.
Before you can throw up your hands and say my god !!! You need to know what the other effects were.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
You site nations who have problems through legalization. Well, they did it wrong. If you legalize a vice you have to spend nearly the same resources you once spent trying to stop it.
Yeah, people keep saying the same thing about communism. Everyone who's tried it has just done it wrong.
Considering for years Amsterdam and Sweden were cited as places that did it right and now these two places are backing away from it, you please tell me how to do it right.
You might want to try the same with communism.
There is no right way of liberating man's lust for power or pleasure without the state having to get massively involved to maintain order. Taking personal responsiblity of self containing my own lusts is paramount for a limited government to exist. Unfortunately man is incapable of performing such an act without divine assistance. The ignorance of the vast historical and present evidence of this by libertarians and socialist is absurd.
Perhaps Nevada has it right, they legalize it, zone it (very important), and regulate it. While I lived in Nevada, there really wasn't many issues. Most of the prostatutes lived on ranches and were not part of the regular neighborhoods.
However, in the end, its a states issue.
mean the problem does not exist! You mean there are actually arrests in Clark County (Vegas) even though it has been "Zoned".
I see how how Zoning solves the problem, it doesn't-afterall it prevents freedom of CHOICE.
Prostitution is illegal in Clark County (where Las Vegas is) and a few others. Prostitutes openly advertise in the yellow pages (the section under "Entertainer" is huge).
The problem is when you leave it as illegal but nonetheless tolerate it. The black market and sex slave rings operate, due to the illegality, and they can do a lot of damage due to their being tolerated.
Half measures only makes things worse...
Zoning illegal behavior does not solve the problem, only makes our Elected Money Grabbers able to tell us they dar solving the problem. Like we don't see what they are really doing.
and it is a long way to adjoining Nye County, or so I've been told.
Here in Alaska, prostitution is technically illegal, but actually pretty open and tolerated in the urban centers - so long as the hookers and their pimps behave and the massage parlors and strip joints contribute LOTS of money to charity and various other causes - contributing to the right politicians helps too.
The White Slavery problem is very real here as well. The feds busted a couple of guys a few years ago for bringing in a group of legitimate dancers from Russia in the guise of a "cultural" tour of Alaska. Soon as they got them to Anchorage, the "sponsors" took their passports and visas, held them hostage and pimped them out. One finally got the courage to get away and go to the cops.
On the Asian side, slavery is a fact of life, and not just in prostitution. Fake "family reunification" is the tool of choice. The Patron is the one who holds the immigrant hostage with the threat of revealing that he/she isn't really his second cousin twice removed or whatever. The Patron just puts the immigrant to work somewhere and takes all the wages or forces the labor in his own business. There's a considerable but very subterranean Asian prostitution operation here "serving" the largely Asian crews of the cruise ships. There really isn't much other prostitution here in Juneau because there's just too much amateur competition.
In Vino Veritas
Nevada and San Francisco, a place where it is illegal but not prosecuted, have the two highest rates of human trafficking into the United States.
Or are the laws we have against these things good enough and they're just not being enforced?
Is this something that could be fixed by more government funding?
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire
of legalizing prostitution, kinda halfheartedly support it, but I can't see a libertarian view towards slavery. And make no mistake about it, these people are slaves in every sense of the word.
In Vino Veritas
I think that prostitution is one of those things where the War On Drugs model actually works pretty well.
Here's the analogy I'm making.
The War on Drugs tends to bust the small guys, the small-time dealers, the small-time users. The runners. The Big Fish very, very rarely get caught.
In the Prostitution thing, however, the ones at the bottom are the ones that need protection, the ones that need saving. They're the ones most likely to be humans that have been trafficked.
Once you get up into the dizzying heights of the Spitzer-level "escorts", I'm pretty sure that you are *NOT* dealing with Human Trafficking any more but are dealing with the Libertarian issues of people exchanging goods and services.
But the folks at the bottom? Yeah, they've been coerced and the folks coercing them probably deserve to be shot in the stomach and left in the woods somewhere.
But how should we deal with these things?
Are the laws we have insufficient?
Are they just not being enforced? If not, why aren't they?
Is this something that more government funding would help?
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire
is requiring training and licensing of massage therapists for a business license.
It can shut down the slave trade almost overnight in areas that do it.
or "private dancers." The options are almost limitless and if you push in the balloon one place, it just bulges out in another.
In Vino Veritas
To be sure, there is some moving around, but overall, effective regulation of the spa and massage industry really helps.
We're never going to get rid of it, but we can certainly massively dent it.
Warner Robbins AFB just down the road and a straight shot to Ft. Benning, you're going to have prostitution in some form in Macon. Anchorage and Fairbanks are much the same with their large military bases but with the addition of lots of construction workers and oil field workers who work in remote areas and come to town with lots of pent up "energy" and lots of money. Frankly having raised a daughter in Anchorage for a while, I'm much happier with all those horny soldiers and construction workers having a nice convenient strip joint or massage parlor to go to rather than chasing my daughter.
In Vino Veritas
I dealt with this business a lot in the form of having to deal with cops and correctional officers who were disciplined or fired for what we euphemistically called "undue familiarity" with female offenders, the vast majority of which were in custody for drug and protitution related offenses.
The two roots are illegal immigration and drugs. Here the tool of choice among the predominantly Asian immigrant population is fraudulent family reunification. Strict limits and strong ICE enforcement would go a long way. The drug side is much more problematic since it knows no sociodemographic boundary. It is all too easy to get a woman of any background strung out on coke or meth and put her out tricking to support the habit.
In Vino Veritas
Like the drug problem, prostitution is essentially a supply and demand problem. And most of the law enforcement focuses on the supply side.
I have always thought that the best way to combat prostitution is to focus on the demand side. Bust the men. Publicize the arrests. Publicize the convictions. If you can diminish the demand (I doubt you could ever stop it), the supply should self diminish.
The problem is when you bust the men, you normally get powerfuly men. Men who contribute to politicians. So we go back to focusing on the supply.
Fortuna Favet Fortibus
Denver recently had a huge stink about it.
There was a private squash club (or something like that) where the city's movers, shakers, etc all had memberships. There was a major prostitution bust. Apparently, there was a number of girls who were on call for parties. Girls for the sauna, the whirlpool... that sort of thing.
The bust happened. They arrested several girls.
They didn't arrest a single guy.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire
You have to turn off the tap at the source.
The reason why we get so many Latin American immigrants flooding into the U.S., is simply that conditions suck for them back home.
The reason why there is sex trafficking in women into the U.S., is because those women are being enticed to flee the parlous conditions in their native countries.
There was a huge upsurge in sex trafficking in Russia, after the Soviet collapse in 1991. It was one more symptom of the fall of a once-great power, along with the beggars in the streets and the graduates with doctorates reduced to driving taxicabs.
This is not a national problem for America. It's hopeless for an open society like America to try to seal itself off from the rest of the world. It's a problem for these other nations that are failing to provide real hope and opportunity for their young women.
Nevada has legalized brothels in locales outside of the major cities.
ABC's "20/20" did an investigative report on some of them. As far as they could tell, none of the women was being "enslaved." Some have left the brothels and tried working on their own, either in the business or in some other business.
It's not enough to legalize prostitution and then ignore it.
Nevada's brothels are periodically inspected by the government (at taxpayer expense). The women are required to undergo periodic checks for STDs, again by government mandate. Finally, state laws keep the brothels away from densely populated areas.
This is why conservatives, like myself, are NOT libertarians. We understand that to promote the well-being of society, government has to take a hand in it. A free market without government oversight is anarchy, not democracy. Which is why so many libertarians sound like semi-anarchists.
See this lovely piece on the "Model Libertarian:"
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/plofker.html
Had me laughing uncontrollably after verse 2. Try and tell me that doesn't aptly describe many of the Ayndroids out there.
The next time some annoying blue nose is running as a Republican.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
It's a constant theme. Those that support legalizing prostitution in the name of freedom turn a blind eye to the slavery that always goes with it.
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