You’d be hard-pressed to find a group of women less “oppressed” than sex workers. – Sharanya Gopinathan
Pigs shouldn’t be “investigating” sexting at all, but at least this is a start:
The Nashua, New Hampshire, police received word in May that 10 or 20 students at Bishop Guertin High School had been snapping and swapping sexts. But then, rather than arresting these kids for making child porn, or threatening to register them as sex offenders, the police did something outrageously reasonable. They opted not to charge any of them…
Virginia passes law to indefinitely detain the associates & loved ones of sex workers:
…the law…adds four offenses…to the list of crimes in which [innocent people accused of crimes] can be denied bail…[including] Receiving money from the earnings of a prostitute…[politician] Michael Mullin…was the chief patron of the bill. He’s a prosecutor…[who says] he has seen people make bond, then post bail for sex workers and take them out of town…
Rough Trade (#345)
Not as bad as calling rape “theft of services”, but bad enough:
Sex workers in Spain have protested the acquittal of three men accused of raping a sex worker. 24 hours after being arrested, the three men accused of rape had been released…The men denied the rape “because the woman is a prostitute”…The woman told the court she already knew the men, and that they gave her a strong tranquilizer which left her in an incapacitated state. She underwent medical tests the next day which confirmed that an assault had taken place. The judge released the men with charges of sexual abuse, but not rape, which means lesser punishment…
To Molest and Rape 
A typical hero cop, bravely protecting and serving:
A Texas sheriff’s deputy…sexually assaulted a 4-year-old girl and threatened the child’s undocumented mother with deportation if she reported the abuse…Jose Nunez…is a [screw in San Antonio]…the victim’s mother took her daughter to a local fire station for help. He was charged with super aggravated sexual assault of a child, a class one felony that carries a minimum 25-year sentence…the girl and her mother are relatives of the [rapist]…
Taking the child to a fire station rather than a pigpen was an absolutely brilliant move on the mother’s part.
Torture Chamber (#656)
…[young people] at an immigration detention facility…were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells…They were included in a federal civil rights lawsuit with a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino youths held for months or years at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center [in Virginia. Boys]…as young as 14 said the guards there stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads…The incidents described in the lawsuit occurred from 2015 to 2018, during both the Obama and Trump administrations. Many…were sent there after U.S. immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs…But a top manager at the Shenandoah center said during a recent congressional hearing that the [young people] did not appear to be gang members and were suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma that happened in their home countries — problems the detention facility is [totally un]equipped to treat…Virginia ranks among the worst states in the nation for wait times in federal immigration courts, with an average of 806 days before a ruling…
An Example To the West (#715)
In India, mainstream feminists support sex worker rights and prohibitionists are a crank minority who can be individually called out:
The women and child development minister of Karnataka, Jayamala, has instructed her department’s officials to henceforth refer to all sex workers as “damanitra mahila”…the Kannada term for “oppressed women”…The strides sex workers have managed to make over the last twenty years…are by no means an easy feat. Sex workers have made truly remarkable achievements, like collectivising and organising under the uniquely dangerous circumstances they live and work in, thanks to a tangle of Victorian laws, carrying out their work with agency and ingenuity while protecting themselves from goondas [hired thugs], police, and misguided do-gooders. They have also played a crucial role in implementing a roster of remarkable socio-political and legal changes for themselves in the face of shocking persecution, all in just two decades. These are simply not achievements a singularly oppressed group of people could pull off. And now that these strides have indeed been made, and continue to be made, where do we get off calling these women, of all women, oppressed?…This pushes back [their] struggle for the rights of sex workers by decades; for dignity and rights rather than pity and victimhood…
Dutch Threat (#789)
Dutch authorities’ attempts to Disnify De Wallen are failing:
Amsterdam has not succeeded in its efforts to clean up the city’s red light district…The old city center still contains a “monoculture” of tourist shops and low-value cafes and bars…nor have officials been able to [find any of the] human trafficking and forced prostitution [prohibitionists fantasize about]…Project 1012 had two main ambitions; to replace cannabis cafes and souvenir shops with restaurants and galleries and to [persecute]…sex [workers] by closing brothels and stepping up [harassment]…Nevertheless, the “desired economic upswing” has not happened. Officials may have closed 48 coffeeshops but they have been replaced by waffle shops and mini supermarkets. And the combination of rising property prices and tourism has created a great deal of unhappiness among locals and local businesses…the closure of more than 100 brothel windows and [harassment of] brothel owners have not led to [the discovery of fantasized]…human trafficking…
Checklist (#812)
Just in case you didn’t think you were spied on enough in airports:
This week…about 500,000 people globally – 75% them women and children – will be abducted or lured into a life of prostitution and/or slave labor. And perhaps as many as 300,000 of them will be transported this month to their new, horrible living and working conditions aboard a commercial airliner. That’s why the world’s airlines have launched a global awareness and industry-wide training program called #EyesOpen…aim[ed at indoctrinating] flight attendants, gate agents and other airline personnel [in anti-whore propaganda]…
So Forbes is not only claiming that half a million people a week (ie 26 million per year, or 4% of the entire world’s population every decade) magically vanish without anyone noticing, but also that 300,000 is 60% of 2 million (500,000/week x 4). And people trust this magazine to give them financial advice?
Disaster (#832)
FOSTA is so blatantly unconstitutional this is bound to win; I just hope it’s quick:
Two human rights organizations, a digital library, an activist for sex workers, and a certified massage therapist have filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to block enforcement of FOSTA, the new federal law that silences online speech by forcing speakers to self-censor and requiring platforms to censor their users. The plaintiffs are represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Davis, Wright Tremaine LLP, Walters Law Group, and Daphne Keller. In Woodhull Freedom Foundation et al. v. United States, the plaintiffs argue that FOSTA is unconstitutional, muzzling online speech that protects and advocates for sex workers and forces well-established, general interest community forums offline for fear of criminal charges and heavy civil liability for things their users might share…plaintiff[s include] the Woodhull Freedom Foundation…Human Rights Watch…and…The Internet Archive…
License to Rape (#836)
“When the bad guys at Rikers are the guards”, meaning “always”:
…about 50 of the 800 women [caged] at [Rikers Island] at any one time are being sexually victimized by staff — which puts [it] among the top-12 worst jails in the country. Rikers’ reputation as a brutally Darwinian, scandal-ridden “torture island”, where people who can’t afford bail spend months — and occasionally years — awaiting trial, has been well documented….Although it’s part of the same story of corruption and violence, sexual assault and harassment at Rikers’ women’s facility has received relatively little attention…
Comfort Zone (#844)
Sometimes they don’t even bother with the “sex trafficking” excuse any more:
Police detained 35 foreign nationals suspected of prostitution during a raid at a hotel and bar in central Trinidad…ten men and 25 women, were held…while police suspect they were all engaged in prostitution, they could not charge them for that offense as no one was caught in the act. Instead, the foreigners, who are from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Guyana, Grenada and Jamaica, were charged for various immigration offences including overstaying their time and entering the country illegally…
All-Purpose Excuse (#846)
Trump’s saying stuff like this will hasten the collapse of “sex trafficking” hysteria:
…President Trump [claimed] that the media is enabling human trafficking at the southern border during a speech to a small business group in Washington. “They are helping these smugglers and these traffickers like nobody would believe”…he said, citing no real evidence. He also [claimed] that human traffickers are using children as “a ticket to getting into the country” and as “passports”. As is often the case with Trump’s statements, it’s unclear exactly what he meant or how these alleged human traffickers are supposed to be using these kids. Regardless, it’s the latest in a long line of dubious attempts to tie social and political controversies to human trafficking using weak or non-existent evidence. [Father]land Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen echoed the president’s hysteria…saying, “We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family”…
Legislators Gone Wild (#847) 
Ron Weitzer debunking prohibitionist bullshit:
…legal prostitution is not a crazy, fringe idea. In fact, the American public is much more sympathetic to the idea of it than is commonly believed. Recent national polls show…support for legalizing prostitution increased from 38 percent in 2012 to 44 percent in 2015 and 49 percent in 2016. And legalization bills have been recently introduced in Hawaii, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. Anti-prostitution activists claim that legalizing prostitution will increase sex trafficking. This notion defies all logic. Organized crime thrives where an activity is criminalized and clandestine, not where goods and services are lawfully exchanged. The history of alcohol and drug prohibition offers overwhelming proof of this…UNLV…research shows that brothel workers are generally satisfied with their working conditions, do not consider themselves victims, rarely experience altercations with customers, have freedom to choose the kinds of services they provide and are working in healthy conditions…
