According to Zaz Hollander, reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, police in Wasila, Alaska used funds allocated for fighting child-sex trafficking to… round up adult customers who answered ads where police officers pretended to be… adult prostitutes.

The late October bust resulted in the arrests of 10 men, plus the seizure of more than $2,100 in cash and 10 cell phones, police say. The sting, conducted by Palmer and Wasilla police with help from the FBI and Anchorage’s vice squad, was associated with a larger federal strategy called Operation Cross Country that targets child prostitutes and people who sell children into slavery.

The Mat-Su operation turned up neither, said Palmer police Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney. Instead, Turney said, the arrests represented the beginning of “us being able to work the issue”— arresting low-level johns to find pimps for adult prostitutes who may also be trafficking young girls.

Police knew prostitution happened here, but they didn’t know to what extent. The sting was one way to figure that out.

Police placed ads on Craigslist and other places. Turney wouldn’t describe the ad, but did say it made no reference to child prostitution.

Read all about it here.

Not to seem too petty or anything here but WTF? Whatever you think of sex trafficking, and whatever you think of sexual exploitation of minors, and however seriously you take ‘wingnut allegations that millions of American children are trafficked for sex, you’d sort of expect funds used to fight child-sex trafficking would be used to fight child-sex trafficking!

As one dour-sounding Alaskan “complete energy manipulation” provider (reiki massage, guided meditation, “ancient hot stone body work,” “some [presumably customer] nudity involved”) in Hollander’s article put it “If you advertise in the paper for whatever service and you’ve got grownups coming to see you, you think they’ve got child abductees in their car?”

I think that’s about right: it sounds like, you know, exactly the sort of thing you’d do if you didn’t actually take the problem at all seriously but you saw a way to featherbed your local budget with Federal dollars.

This is one of those things I find really frustrating. Because it relies so heavily on paradigms of sexual scarcity and transactional heterosexuality I don’t have much patience with prostitution. And because I think the transitory benefits to adults don’t merit the sometimes lifelong consequences for children I’m intolerant of sexual exploitation of minors. And don’t even get me started on commerce in coerced or conscripted people. But Zeus on Zanzibar I hate it when people pretend there’s no difference between the three. And so I’ve got nothing but contempt for the boneheads who pulled this stunt in Wasila, or for anyone who thinks it was just a swell idea.

Hollander says the community reaction isn’t going down well for the Wasila’s police chief

“It’s a little disheartening when you actually try to do something good and the majority of people think you’re wasting money, wasting time, why aren’t you out doing something bigger?” said Palmer police Commander Tom Remaley.

“It’s almost like you can’t win.”

See, this is what’s frustrating about it. If he was serious about investigating prostituted children or trafficked adults he wouldn’t be pulling stunts like this. That he did pull this stunt suggests he actually doesn’t take it seriously. He actually could win, you know. He just can’t do it that way.

(Via Google Alert on keyword “sex trafficking”)

Hortense of Jezebel has some good news

Several states have begun taking steps to better protect teenagers who end up in prostitution rings, treating the teen prostitutes not as criminals, but as victims of abuse, and charging their pimps with human trafficking.

Prosecutor Nancy O’Malley, who wrote California’s sexually exploited minors law, tells Christina Hoag of the Associated Press: “This is an institutional shift. It’s about getting people to shift their attention and judgment from the minor and seeing what’s beyond this criminal behavior.” Several other states, including New York, are following suit, offering rehabilitation programs rather than jail time for children caught up in the sex trade.

She said it here.

The thing is there’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem with legalizing adult sex work: because it’s currently a criminal enterprise criminals have considerable latitude to not engage in activities that ought to be legal but also to engage in acts that decidedly shouldn’t. Yet resistance to legalization is high precisely because of the corners criminals cut. Corner cutting, incidentally, that legal or decriminalized sex workers would be unlikely to tolerate were it legal and non-jeopardizing for them to complain. But I digress.

The real point is that conflicting social priorities have tended to treat prostitutes in general, and child-prostitutes in particular as nominal victims but actual criminals (see item #1 in the Two Rules of Desire. Especially since victims of child prostitution are generally seen as especially “broken” since they’ve already had Teh Sex and all.) Anyway a move to instead treat child-sex laborers as actual victims is pretty welcome.

The next step in that direction, of course, would be to prosecute pimps and customers with (generally overreactive but in this case laudably and, even better, enduringly punitive) child-sex and child-exploitation offenses. As it currently stands sex with a minor tends to be “washed away” if the child is a sex worker. Turning that on its head where prosecutors disregarded the sex-work angle and simply started putting customers on life-long, wherever-you-live sex-offender registries would have a marvelously “chilling” effect on customers who currently needn’t worry at all about age.

Anyway, if you’re anti-sex-work you should be fine with that. And if you’re pro-sex-work you should be fine with that too. Any time the question of legalization comes up the anti-sex-work side raises the child-prostitution issue. The best thing the decriminalization/legalization side could do is take the issue away from their opponents with vocal support for initiatives like Nancy O’Malley’s.

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says (bold emphasis Professor Bartow’s, italic emphasis mine)

The BBC News reports:

...

Officials say a 16-year-old girl who recruits children as prostitutes is being sought as a priority.

Special Agent Melissa Morrow, of Washington’s FBI, said adult prostitutes who were among those arrested tipped authorities off about the girl.

“She is currently 16 and started when she was 13,” Agent Morrow said.

“Now she is out there recruiting other juveniles as well,” she said, adding that finding her was “at the top of our list”, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The 13 to 17 year olds are recognized to be victims, but the “adult prostitutes,” anybody 18 years old or over, are arrested as criminals, rather than rescued…

Read the quote and links in context here.

Including, I’m guessing, the adult prostitutes who tipped authorities that a juvenile was recruiting other underage prostitutes.

I mean, geez gang, you don’t have to like prostitution to recognize that if child prostitution is really a concern of yours then you really want adult prostitutes on your side of the law. And the best way to get that would be, maybe, you know, not arresting them for prostitution.

(Let alone “rescuing” them by… having the cops who were shaking you down for sex last week “rescuing” them this week with… arrests, strip searches, jail time, and — if I recall correctly — zero consideration for arrangements for the often-latch-key children of “rescued” prostitutes. Beyond the standard “one phone call” thing. But I digress…)

Seems to me you can even be dead cynical about prostitution and still have the system work — legal sex workers aren’t exactly going to sit around smiling when their livelihoods are undercut by children.

And by the way, it doesn’t sound like the “rescued” children are faring much better. Here’s the LA Times, via Professor Bartow again.

“We may not be able to return their innocence but we can remove them from this cycle of abuse and violence,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller.

...

Most of the children are put into the custody of local child protection agencies.

Yeah, because juvenile holding facilities, group homes, and foster care are such bastions of compassionate intervention.

That’s not to say there aren’t numerous ways to actually, you know, rescue coerced or even self-emancipated juvenile prostitutes. But when the only hammer you’re even remotely interested in using is the criminal justice system child sex-workers no less than adults are just going to get nailed.

I mean, seriously, you go spending multiple years and millions of dollars arranging multi-state arrests, and making pious statements about lost innocence and rescue, you damn well ought to have a better idea for what to do after the rescue than putting children “into the custody of local child protection agencies.”

Just sayin’

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And another thing! When are we going to start seeing regular and spectacularly publicized, perp-walked-on-CNN prosecution of johns for pedophilia, statutory rape, and anything else on the books when they buy sex with children?

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Oh, and while I’ve been meaning to mention this in its own post, on a related note check out the embedded Cherry.tv video at Nikol Hasler’s Midwest Teen Sex Show. It’s actually chock-a-block with hints about why early sexualization doesn’t particularly do young people any favors.

Photo “Boston red light district” by Flickr user hebedesign. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Via Echidne Pierre Thomas of ABC News says (emphasis mine)

In the last three days, the FBI and police from 29 cities rescued 47 children from 73 alleged pimps and more than 500 others who authorities say sought to exploit them. Among those children saved: a 12-year-old from Texas; a 13-year-old from Ohio; and a 14-year-old from Michigan.

...

FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole vowed today that the effort would continue. “Those that exploit children should know they will be brought to justice,” Pistole said.

Read all about here.

When I saw that “more than 500 others” I thought if it’s 73 pimps it must be 500 customers. Finally, I thought to myself, we were going to see action taken against the customer. And, given the fiery rhetoric Federal authorities used to decry sexual exploitation of children, they’ll face penalties stiffer than a few weekends at “john school.” Maybe, I thought, prosecutors will finally get serious about those who pay for sex with children by throwing the book at them for having sex with children! Including, oh, say, sexual assault of a child, statutory rape, sexual exploitation of a minor, pedophilia or ephebophilia, and all the other appropriately extremely draconian laws reserved for adults who have sex with children. Oh, and followed by, preferably, spending the rest of their lives registered as class two or class three sex offenders, reporting to local police every time they change address, having their names posted on neighborhood-watch registries, and putting big orange signs on their front doors on Halloween that say “No Candy At This Residence.”

Imagine my dismay then when, dissatisfied with the meager information at the ABC site I discovered instead that (emphasis again mine)

“Operation Cross Country II” involved efforts in 29 cities and resulted in the arrest of 73 pimps and 518 adult prostitutes, the FBI said.

Source: CNN.

Actually, to the extent that any adult prostitute knowingly fails to report sexual exploitation of a minor (inside or outside trafficking) I think it’s actually hunky-dory that they, like any other involved adult, be charged as accessories to the crimes committed against the victims. (Although admittedly the fact that adult sex work, even when coerced, is criminalized makes it not only personally but legally perilous for them to report trafficking of children or anyone else.) Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case either — instead the 500+ adult sex-workers were evidently just swept up in the course of the investigation.

So. Seriously. If people were serious about prostituted children then why the sam hill are they giving a pass to those who pay to have sex with them? And if people are serious about reducing demand for prostituted children it ought to be extraordinarily efficient to employ already well-established criminal law against the customers of the pimps who traffick them.

Thus announcing the arrest of 500+ adult prostitutes is beyond unimpressive. Either they were coerced adults in which case they too should have been rescued rather than arrested, or else they were voluntary sex workers in which case their arrests were irrelevant to the stated purpose of the law-enforcement initiative to rescue prostituted children.

I mean, seriously, a year-long, multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction “Operation Cross Country II,” presumably directed by a team that had already conducted a previous Operation Cross Country didn’t turn up one single solitary customer arrest? Yielding not one solitary prosecution for sexual assault of a child?

Priorities, people, priorities!

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For the record I think it’s dumb to prosecute affirmative, non-coerced sex between consenting adults, including sex for compensation between consenting adults. (In fact as I pointed out above, it’s counterproductive to protecting conscripted or otherwise trafficked children and adults.) But there we’re talking about consenting adults: adults, plural. Minors, by legal, social, and developmental definition aren’t adults and consequently none of the arguments supporting sex work for consenting adults have no bearing whatsoever on this discussion.

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See also – Why Reality Trumps Fantasy – “Patrons” of Child Prostitutes Need to be Registered as Sex Offenders – The Fledgling Fund: Very Young Girls – Not Pretty Babies – “Who Pays the Price? Assessment of Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle” (pdf)