Audacia Ray calls out a genuinely egregious form of discrimination against a former prostitute based on a Louisiana state law from... the year 1806!

The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status as a sex offender stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.” Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution

Source: Waking Vixen

This is a form of reflex prosecutorial piling on that's just inexcusable. In what conceivable universe is a prostitute who performs fellatio a registerable sex offender in a way that a prostitute who "merely" performs intercourse isn't?  Or that a prostitute's customer isn't.  My personal and 100% correct opinion is of course that a prostitute is never a registerable sex offender and, for that matter, shouldn't be considered a criminal at all.   And while there's a bit more division in the ranks over this, with one interesting exception it's also my opinion that simply being a prostitute's customer should never be considered either a sex offender or a criminal either.

The exception, of course, is when the customer engages in behavior that would normally get them charged as a criminal or sex offender.  But, in today's... morally conflicted environment is considered boys-will-be-boys, hearty-fellow-well-done when a customer does it.

In other words, when customer has paid for sexual activity with someone who through age or coercion couldn't or wouldn't ordinarily be considered a freely consenting adult.  So paying for sex with a trafficked person?  If you weren't paying it would be rape, and thus a registrable sexual offense -- therefore if you get caught paying for it you should go on a sex-offender registry as well.  Same with sex with minors.

I happen to think it's appalling that prosecutors or judges in Louisiana, or any other state, would use such a heavy tool to penalize a voluntary adult prostituted or his or her customer.  But I also think it's appalling that they leave the same tool on the table when it comes to customers who have sex with children or slaves.

I have a number of friends and even more extended family members who are massage therapists. Here in Washington State licensed massage practitioners are required to take ongoing courses in order to maintain their certification. Here’s a catalog entry for the Pacific Northwest School of Massage’s continuing education program from earlier this summer. You’ll notice one of the items on the list is very not like the other ones.

All classes are NCB approved (NCB #451040-09) and valid for NCB, AMTA, and WA state CE Credit. You will be issued a certificate at the end of class.

• Treatment Massage for the Low Back Structures
• Muscle-Specific Deep Tissue Techniques for the Back
• Deep Muscle-specific work of the Anterior Neck
• CTM-Bindegewebsmassage Review
• Massage and Prostitution: What’s Going On?
• Understanding the Somatic Nervous System and Proprioception
• Deep Tissue Chest and Supine Shoulders
• The Neuroendocrine System, Stress, and Massage
• Deep Tissue of the Iliopsoas, Diaphragm, QL, and Paraspinals
• Nutritional Self-Care: Know Your Macronutrients
• Deep Tissue of Legs
• Deep Tissue Techniques for the Iliopsoas, Diaphragm and QL (Quadratus Lumborum)
• Hydrotherapy Principles and Physiology and Banya 5 Field Trip

• Deep Muscle Therapy Workshop in Hilo, Hawaii

Read the list and course descriptions in context here.

Now figleaf, you might be saying, aside from their 90+ inches of rainfall a year what possible problem could you have with privately paid-for education junkets Hilo, Hawaii? And how could it possibly related to recent news about Craigslist’s capitulation to pressure to black out their “Adult Services” category? Which is, after all, a major point of this post.

Eh, if you didn’t have the patience to closely read the list the odd duck in the mix would be…

Massage and Prostitution: What’s Going On?

One of the great frustrations legitimate massage therapists face is the confusion in the public eye between massage therapy and prostitution. We like to believe that there is less of this confusion than there used to be, and that massage is much more accepted as legitimate therapy by the general public. The truth is that the overlap has actually gotten worse in one significant respect: there are more prostitution businesses fronting as massage businesses in Washington than ever before. Some of these businesses are engaged not only in sexual massage, but in human trafficking.

Come and learn why the problem has gotten worse and what we can do about it. Our instructor will be Butch Watson, LMP, a massage therapist and retired police detective who has been studying the problem for 3 years. The situation we find ourselves facing in Washington is a perfect storm of legal, legislative, enforcement, and economic issues. This class is a call to action—our response to the problem will need to be organized, nuanced, and multifaceted if we are to disentangle our profession from prostitution.

This class satisfies the new Washington State Ethics requirement, and fulfills 4 hours of the NCBTMB Ethics requirement.

Instructor: Butch Watson
Ethics CE hours: 4
Location: Redmond, WA
Tuition: $75 if registered by August 20th; $100 thereafter
Registration: Send check to Pacific Northwest School of Massage, 7511 25th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98117

It happens to be a persistent, perpetual annoyance to massage practitioners almost everywhere, that the work they do is confused with sex work. It’s a problem made even worse by the fact that many prostitutes advertise themselves as massage therapists, and that many brothels advertise themselves as massage “parlors.”

It’s a problem in the sense that the spouses, partners, friends, and family members of clients often question the legitimacy of the treatments they’re receiving. It’s a problem in the sense that many state and local licensing authorities impose increasingly stringent certification requirements for licensing*. It’s a problem in the sense that the penalties for letting your license lapse are high** (as is the lack of reciprocity between jurisdictions that leads to sometimes year-long training requirements to get back in compliance in a new jurisdiction!)

And it’s a big fucking problem with customers who show up wondering whether, when, and/or why they’re not getting a “happy ending” with their massage.

And why might this be? Well, it might be because it’s illegal to be a prostitute and so they have to lie about what they’re doing.

Y’know one of the nice things for massage therapists in Washington State? Craigslist had two separate sections for the two kinds of “massage:” a section for real, trained, professional, licensed massage therapists, and one in the Adult Services section called (I think but, of course, I can’t check at the moment) “body rubs.”

Not everyone knew about the difference. And not all sex workers advertised in the “body rub” sections. Some, annoyingly, continued to advertise in the professional massage-services sections.

Now? Well, now they’re all going to start advertising in the massage-therapy sections. And even if they didn’t? Even more of their erstwhile customers are going to start fishing in the pool of real massage therapists to see if maybe, just in case, they’re one of the ones that does more than grind their thumbs and elbows into pressure points in your neck and back.

Anyway, next time you need to fulfill continuing-ed ethics requirements what are the odds you’d be offered a section on the hassles of sex workers pretending to be members of your profession? I’m not saying it never happens in other professions (though I can’t think of many.) I’m definitely not saying there’s anything wrong with sex work per se.

I am saying the burden placed on legitimate body-work professionals it just one more stupid, thuggish, and ill-considered consequence of all these Attorney’s General grandstanding against Craigslist’s Adult Services sections.

* Significant bit of trivia: back in the day a common requirement for a license were tests of anatomy but tests for sexually transmitted diseases! Connection much?

** Amusing anecdote: According to the instructor, former police detective and current massage-therapist activist Butch Watson, state agencies are actually quicker to take action against legal massage practitioners who let their license lapse than they are against individuals and businesses who never bother to get licensed at all!

A rare, sort-of off-topic post for this blog: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones says of recently-spotted bumper stickers in California’s Humbolt-County pot-growing region that say “Keep Pot Illegal”

....Legalization could take many forms. But the conventional wisdom here is that fully legal weed might fetch no more than a few hundred dollars a pound, as more people grow it and police no longer pull up millions of plants a year. Illegal marijuana “is the government’s best agricultural price-support program ever,” said Gerald Myers, a retired engineer and former volunteer fire chief who moved to the county in 1970. “If they ever want to help the wheat farmers, make wheat illegal.”

Read the quote in context here.

A few hundred dollars a pound? Sorry but it takes more energy, skill, and effort to grow agriculturally-intensive corn and the spot price for that peaked at $7.88/bushel back in 2008 — about thirteen cents a pound.

Commodity price to tobacco growers is maybe a couple dollars a pound, even though retail-quality tobacco is also harder to grow than “retail-quality” pot. Even after intensive processing — which, sorry, pot doesn’t need — fancy imported pipe tobacco costs maybe $35 pound.

Highly-cultivated northern-latitude hot-house tomatoes and green peppers, which are probably most comparable in terms of cultivation technology, cost on the order of four to six dollars a pound.

Therefore its inconceivable that, absent the cost of risk, even highly-cultivated marijuana would cost more per bushel or bale than corn, tobacco, or tomatoes. Consequently I just don’t see the gazillion-dollar gross revenues, let alone tax revenues, materializing should the stuff be legalized.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be legalized. Quite the opposite! The closer to commodity pricing you get, and the lower the profit margin, the less incentive to sell it to those who aren’t already interested.

Of course you’ll notice this sort of policy position isn’t that far off the beaten path for me: I think the same thing is true about roll-your-own porn (which appears to be just killing industrial porn) and destigmatization of “premarital” sex (which in the last 50 years appears to have decimated the traditional market for prostitution.)

The point being that as with opponents and proponents porn and prostitution the positions of both opponents and proponents of legalized pot are almost hopelessly entangled with the taboo/stigma-based status quo than with almost any realistic projections of what’s really going to happen when the cost closes in on zero.

According to Lieutenant Raymond E. Foster, LAPD (ret.) of Criminal Justice Online

Florida Couple Charged in Forced Labor and Document Servitude Conspiracies

April 28, 2010 – WASHINGTON – Sophia Manuel and Alfonso Baldonado Jr. have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges arising from a human trafficking scheme to hold Filipino nationals in forced labor in country clubs and hotels in Southeast Florida, the Justice Department announced.

According to the indictment, defendants Manuel, 41, and Baldonado, 46, owners of Quality Staffing Services Corporation of Boca Raton, Fla., conspired to obtain a cheap, compliant and readily available labor pool. The indictment details the defendants conspired to hold the workers in their continued service, for little or no pay, and housed them in substandard conditions without adequate food or drinking water.

The indictment alleges that the defendants used false promises to entice the Filipino nationals to incur debts to pay up-front recruitment fees; and then compelled the workers to remain in the defendants’ service, despite inadequate work or income to pay off the debts, using a scheme of threats to have the workers arrested and deported with no way to repay their debts, confiscation of the workers’ passports and rules and controls restricting the workers’ freedom of movement and communications with outsiders.

He said it here.

But wait, from the same website there’s more

Arlington, Texas Couple Convicted of Forced Labor and Other Crimes for Holding Nigerian Woman in Domestic Servitude

February 3, 2010 – WASHINGTON—A federal jury has convicted an Arlington, Texas husband and wife Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji of engaging in a nine-year scheme to compel the labor of a Nigerian victim as their domestic servant, the Justice Department announced today. The jury found the defendants guilty of conspiracy, forced labor, document servitude, alien harboring and false statements. Ngozi and Emmanuel Nnaji each face a maximum sentence of up to 55 years in prison.

According to the evidence at trial, Emmanuel Nnaji and Ngozi Nnaji enticed a widowed Nigerian mother of six to come to the United States to be their domestic servant by falsely promising a salary and support for her children, who she was struggling to support.

“Holding other human beings in servitude against their will is a violation of human rights that will not be tolerated in our free society,” stated Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to combating human trafficking in all its forms, vindicating the rights of trafficking victims and bringing human traffickers to justice.”

He said it here.

But wait, there’s still more

Two Brothers Plead Guilty in Conspiracy to Hold Thai Workers in Forced Labor in Hawaii

Defendants Alec Sou and Mike Sou, co-owners of Aloun Farm, pleaded guilty on Jan.13, 2010, in federal district court in Honolulu, to conspiring to commit forced labor. The two defendants, who are brothers, each face up to five years in prison for their respective roles in a labor trafficking scheme that held Thai agricultural workers in service at Aloun Farm through a scheme of debts, threats, and restraint.

During their respective plea hearings, the defendants acknowledged that they conspired with one another and with others to hold 44 Thai men in forced labor on a farm operated by the defendants, using a scheme of physical restraint and threats of serious harm to intimidate the workers and hold them in fear of attempting to leave the defendants’ service.

“Holding other human beings in servitude against their will is a violation of individual rights that is intolerable in a free society,” stated Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to combating human trafficking in all its forms, vindicating the rights of trafficking victims, and bringing human traffickers to justice.”

He said it here.

Now why, you might ask, would I be talking about all this domestic, agricultural, sexual, and labor servitude, a.k.a. human trafficking on a nice morning in May, 2010?

One big reason derives from a companion piece to the Dreams Die Hard documentary about trafficking and involuntary servitude in the United States from Free The Slaves. The companion piece is called the Dreams Die Hard Study Guide. In the section “What Happens to Slaves?” the following bullet point really stood out.

When they turn to officials, trafficking victims may get harsh treatment if the police officer or immigration staff regards the escaped victim as an illegal immigrant. Although some law enforcement officials have immediately rescued and protected people in slavery, there have been tragic situations where police simply failed to recognize slavery. Proper training is crucial.

Source: Pg. 3

It just made me wonder how much better off Arizona’s de facto slave owners are now that the state legislature has made it even more illegal to be an undocumented immigrant. And, given the gleeful promises of ever-more draconian enforcement by sadists like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, how much further is this law going to shift the balance of power even further in the direction of those who already abuse trafficked people.

—-

Note: I was inspired to write this post by search results that showed up while I was trying to verify whether the authors of the website Citizens Against Trafficking were living up to their claim that they’re “a broad based coalition formed in 2009 to combat all forms of human trafficking.”

The short answer appears to be no: they instead appear to have been primarily opposed to prostitution, which they say is a hotbed of trafficking, and only in the state of Rhode Island. They were particularly opposed to a loophole in Rhode Island that made some forms of prostitution legal there.

The law has recently been amended, with much applause and support from the website’s authors: it’s now as illegal to be a sex-worker in Rhode Island as it is to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona. With what will turn out to be, I’m afraid, similar consequences for sex workers.

As I’ve mentioned relatively often I personally don’t care much for sex work in the current dominant paradigm since I believe, strongly, that it reinforces rather than relieves our expectations that all sex between men and women is ultimately transactional. And I strongly regret when people cross borders illegally. On the other hand I don’t think either sex work nor immigration ought to be illegal primarily because it increases rather than mitigates the underworld environments serious anti-traffickers are concerned puts victims most at risk — whether they’re “massage parlor” workers in Rhode Island, or “nannies” in Maryland, or “lettuce pickers” in Arizona.