Lying lips are abomination to the Lord: but they that deal truly are his delight. – Proverbs 12:22
I go through lots of news items every week. Most end up in one of the two news columns or the links column; others end up not being interesting enough to feature; still others inspire me to write whole columns around them. But a few are such monumental aggregations of bullshit, with lies heaped atop other lies, that I feel compelled to blow them up with dynamite; this is one of them, made subtly more ludicrous by the fact that some editor apparently thought it was an outstanding piece of journalism (see that little “editor’s pick” label above the headline?)
…Linda Burkle…[of] the Salvation Army, shared [a tragedy porn] story with state lawmakers in the hopes of sparking new legislation against human trafficking. She read the woman’s story from a paper, telling it in the first person, as if she was the victim…
It’s rare that a prohibitionist literally speaks for a sex worker, but that’s what we see here. Whether the supposed victim actually exists or is just a figment of Burkle’s masturbatory fantasies is immaterial; it’s a total abomination for an amateur to actually represent herself as a sex worker, even in the guise of a [melo]dramatic recitation, in a naked attempt to urge more criminalization of the people she’s temporarily representing herself to be one of. This is no different from what Rachel Moran does, except that Moran at least pretends to be an ex-whore full time; this nasty bitch will set down the burden of whore stigma as soon as she finishes her appeal for greater police violence against us.
…In January, Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks introduced a bill that would protect juvenile sex workers from prosecution…
Except that it won’t. “Safe harbor” laws are total bullshit; they’re nothing but worthless “feel-good” legislation that help nobody but very rare “perfect victims”. The majority of underage sex workers, such as Latesha Clay, do not qualify as “victims” under the laws and are still prosecuted while the pigs and DAs trumpet their “victimhood” as an excuse to ratchet criminal penalties for consensual behavior up yet another notch.
…An estimated 300,000 American men, women and children are victims of…trafficking, according to the Polaris Project…Sex trafficking is a $9.5 billion industry in the U.S…Police are finding that some dealers have switched from trafficking drugs to trafficking people because the “product” can be sold over and over…From 2010 to 2015, the Omaha Child Exploitation Task Force rescued more than 100 women and girls from sex trafficking. Their average age was 20 — the youngest 13, the oldest 40. In a survey done by the Women’s Fund of Omaha…agencies in Nebraska reported they identified sex trafficking victims younger than 17 at least 176 times in the past year…
I’m sure you’ll recognize these tired lies, but if you don’t that’s what the embedded links are for. One interesting thing about these lies is the way they change shape; for example, the usual “300,000 sex trafficked children” has here transmogrified into the much-more-conservative (though still bogus) “300,000 men, women and children”. Those “task force” numbers? More bullshit; they probably represent arrested sex workers, but there’s no way to know because there’s no link to any data. It’s just an unsupported claim from those paragons of honesty, the cops. And that last sentence is even more absurd; they “identified” 176 “trafficking victims”? Using “signs” like this, perhaps? We’re not even told what happened to these supposedly “identified victims”; we’re just supposed to take it on faith that they exist.
…Nikki Siegel, outreach director for The Bay…outreach program for at-risk youth, said she’s encountered trafficked teenagers, but until recent years, she didn’t realize that’s what they were…
If the only tool you have is a hammer…
“I found a lot of girls who were exploiting themselves”…
May the gods save us from idiots. Any definition of “exploitation” which includes things one chooses for oneself is utterly meaningless, because it must encompass all volitional activity someone else dislikes.
…In September, the Lincoln Police Department was involved in a national sex trafficking sting by invitation from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois. In all, 1,032 people were arrested. Of those, 961 were would-be sex buyers, and the rest traffickers…
That would be Swanee Hunt’s privately-funded pogrom, which results in dramatic increases in police violence against sex workers while referring to them as “victims”.
…It wasn’t until 2010 that Congress expanded the definition of trafficking to include mental punishment by traffickers as well as physical…
More reeking bullshit. “Force, fraud or coercion” has been the accepted definition since the TVPA in 2000. Where did this “fact” come from? Who knows? Maybe the reporter just thought it sounded good.
…Cindy Hultine…of…the…Set Me Free Project…described the relationship between a trafficker and victim as “mental bondage.” Many young girls don’t understand what is happening to them…
In other words, women don’t get to define our own relationships; “authorities” get to say what our relationships are, and if we disagree we’re in “mental bondage”, AKA “false consciousness”.
…Many people…wonder why they don’t run away or ask someone for help…“It’s called survival sex,” [political appointee Stephen] O’Meara said…
No, that isn’t what survival sex is. Survival sex means trading sex for basic necessities like food or shelter, or for just enough cash to acquire those things.
…[Prohibitionist Sriyani] Tidball…[says] buying sex should come with harsher punishments…“I have never met a woman who wanted to sell themselves”…
This is a common but incredibly venomous prohibitionist lie. It isn’t just the moronic dysphemism “sell themselves”, though that’s bad enough; it’s the total negation of the agency of all sex workers everywhere, with the implication that anyone who disagrees is dysfunctional. Either Tidball is consciously lying, or she’s delusional, or she’s never actually climbed down from her ivory tower to talk to any whores.
…Former state Sen. Amanda McGill, who helped pass legislation to decriminalize prostitution of minors…
No, she didn’t; she gave courts the power to commit them to “treatment” of indefinite duration.
…“We definitely need to help (the public) understand that these are really victims, that these women, even if they’re 25, the trafficking probably started when they were 12 or 13 with sexual abuse,” she said…
McGill says that any woman who was ever raped, molested or otherwise sexually violated should forever be a ward of the state, unable to make sexual decisions for herself. That’s what prohibitionists call “decriminalization”.
…The Omaha project visited…middle and high school students about trafficking. “Human trafficking is a form of modern day slavery,” Cindy Hultine told them. “Pimps are slave owners.” She also spoke directly to their parents, telling them to continue the “stranger danger” education…and to monitor social media accounts…
And so we close with a representative of the Establishment appropriating the imagery of historical black slavery for a campaign to breed paranoia, encourage mass surveillance and give more power to the cops who beat, murder, cage and otherwise destroy the lives of so many black citizens. This is the real face of “anti-trafficking”: yet another means by which the ruling class tricks the peasantry into giving it more power to oppress minorities…power which will then, inevitably, be extended to oppress everyone, including the useful idiots who thought the government would keep them “safe” from the imaginary menaces it told them were lurking among us.
