Sex trade - Harm Reduction

Infosaturated wrote:

 

Your claims of decreased violence are not true anywhere in the entire world. You cannot point to a single place where violence against women has decreased as a result of decriminalization or legalization of pimping.

Infosaturated, I can't point to a single place in the entire world where violence against women has been eliminated. I know that in my own country, it has mostly gone indoors. Overwhelmingly, women in danger in Canada are in danger from intimate partners.

I did not think that this was a general discussion of violence against women.

Infosaturated wrote:

skdadl wrote:

What has happened to aboriginal peoples in this country and especially to aboriginal women is a history on its own that goes much deeper than this court case.

So that means we can ignore what aboriginal peoples think about the issue now, in 2009?

Oh, yes. That must be what I meant when I suggested that using this court challenge as a way to do concern trolling for aboriginal women was perhaps less than logical or helpful.

martin dufresne wrote:

CASAC's Lee Lakeman answered Zerbisias critique of Benedet's Op-Ed on the Broadsides blog with additional information about Nicole Parisien's murder in a B.C. brothel:

I sat in court to observe the murder trial to which Janine Benedet refers in her op ed piece. And yes as a feminist I also observed the Pickton case from the early years of police failure to the media circus. Interestingly those promoting the decriminalization and de facto legalization of prostitution ignored the details of both Pickton and the murder of Nicole Parisiene by Andrew Evans. If they both had been more featured you might have seen things differently. Both Pickton and Andrew "hired" women for indoor prostitution. The pig farm was a brothel and so was the apartment where Nicole was murdered. Both were used quite often by numbers of men. In Nicole's case there was a security surveillance system run by an owner and on which her killer was captured. That is how the jury could see that he was not rendered incapable by his consumption of alcohol. I heard the evidence in that trial that Nicole was strangled by hand. Like many men before him, when the fantasy they paid for disappoints, Evans exploded. According to the forensics, that explosion of projected anger took somewhere between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. He hit Nicole with a shoe so hard that the sole left an impression of treads on her face and could have cut off her oxygen. Andrew says he does not know whether he strangled her or hit her first. Contrary to your imagining, no "beefy security guard" could have saved her even if he was standing outside the apartment door. What I find so horrifying in the testimony of the case is what appears in so many cases of the beating and killing of women and in every case of prostitution: an unchallenged presumption that men have a right (paid for or not) to project onto women a responsibility to satisfy the sexual needs and wants of men. Benedet gets it: the answer to tell men to grow up and stop risking women's lives.

 

my "illegal" security/'pimp' would have saved her...you people are out of it quoting lakeman...he would have run!!!any man interupting an assault would have saved her.....the boy would have run...

remind wrote:

"Concern trolling for aboriginal women"

Please do explain what you meant by that?

ohai, remind.

When I wrote what I did at #56 (groovy new system you have here; is there a way, though, of seeing the whole thread while writing a comment without opening two tabs?), I was reacting to what I consider an absurd reduction (#54) of one paragraph in an earlier post of mine.

I'm not sure I'd know what staying on topic in this thread would mean, but the topic of the court challenge had come up, so I figured my comment to that fairly narrow topic would be ok. The short paragraph of mine that got quoted later (at #54) was a paragraph that basically said "these are related but distinct issues that I am not writing to at the moment because they are too big."

And for that, I got dinged for dismissing the concerns of aboriginal peoples about every aspect of this very complex topic. Perhaps it is my bad writing, but I honestly don't see how my original post (#50) could have been read that way unless (1) the commenter  hadn't read the full discussion; or (2) the commenter was expecting to push a babble button.

The wiki definition of concern troll looks disputable to me (and that may be why it is so garbled, because people have been disputing it). I don't know who threw in sock puppets as a distraction there. Unless you consider all online handles to be sock puppets, which obviously most of us don't, it doesn't take a sock puppet to be a concern troll. I'm not writing this out as an accusation against anyone; I'm writing it because the conversation has continued and I want to keep the facts straight.

I don't mind disagreeing with someone like Martin, although clearly we are writing to different priorities. Martin must know that I'm not letting go of mine, as I recognize he can't let go of his. Fair enough.

But otherwise, I'm kind of at sea in this conversation. I try to stay on the turf I argued in the first place (howzzat for a mixed metaphor?), and suddenly I'm a racist: I'm dismissing voices; I'm driving the thread into a ditch -- oh, and on top of that, I have assignments that I haven't turned in yet! Someone has given us wiki links to the general entries for a whole lot of countries, and I am a bad girl for not doing the homework that someone else feels s/he/it has the right to impose on everyone else.

Sheesh. Next thing you know, we'll be taking attendance.

PS: I know that my presence here is iffy, and I srsly do not want to give Michelle and oldgoat grief. I'll try to shut up for a while.

Your presence here is not iffy as far as I'm concerned.  It's more than welcome, as others have stated.

While this is all interesting...I think we have skidded off the rails a bit. can we bring it back to harm reduction? This is one of those phrases that has become ubiquitous, and yet there are few (if any) definitions to which everyone agrees. I'll start...I understand the concept of 'harm reduction' as emerging from western medicine to address some problems related to intravenous drug use. Specifically, IV drug use by people who are, if not homeless, pretty street-entrenched. and harm reduction is a set of tactics directed at these people to interfere with the spread of blood-borne diseases, especially HIV/AIDS. But if we can prevent overdose deaths and decrease public disorder, that's good too. In relation to prostitution, harm reduction are strategies that are supposed to reduce the harms of prostitution. These harms are things like mess and disorder in neighbourhoods, physical danger to women who are prostituting/ed in these neighbourhoods, and so on. There are free condoms, outreach workers with resource lists and bad- trick sheets, in Vancouver there's a van that goes around at night, giving some hot drinks, condoms, first aid and other comforts to women on the streets. It's staffed by medical professionals and also a peer counsellor. the aim here, at base, I think, is the same as the aim for drug users--and that is to reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS, and to reduce the harms of those people who represent a 'symptom' of social dis-ease--namely, street entrenched drug-users and women in street prostitution. I am interested to learn more about what others understand about harm reduction as it relates to women in prostitution.and what's the goal of HR?

and are we directing anything that might be called 'harm reduction' toward men who are the johns or pimps?

In 1985, the Fraser report on Prostitution and Pornography in Canada stated that women in prostitution were most in danger from the johns and the pimps. Seems to me that is still the case. if we are offering 'harm reduction' to those who are harmed, but not to those DOING the harm, how can the harm be reduced?

Prohibition is the problem - let the hookers set up shoppe and run it like any business. That way they can protect themselves.

Meanwhile, harm reduction is the next best thing. Using condoms is harm reduction, and it has been helpfull and it is now accepted as  "standard equiptment" when paying for sex.

I want to add one thing off topic -  this whole SEX thing is a little wierd isn't it? Mostly, for the men I mean - it just seems like their natural instincts are being used to control them, and to take their money from them, like hanging out a carrot that they cannot resist. I think it would be liberating for males to lose their sex addiction... but apparently then there wouldn't be much worth living for? Really?

Quote:

Prohibition is the problem - let the hookers set up shoppe and run it like any business. That way they can protect themselves.

Again  that is a shallow trivialization of what the process would actually entail...

Fingers just are not snapped, and  *poof*  there appears a business, in this case a industry, out of no where.

Regulations, restrictions, everything has to be be created from the ground up.

The Netherlandshad to start installling regulations after the fact, because things have gotten so bad there after the legalization, without regulations,  happened.

Violence against women is up there,  new laws and special programs have had to be started, to address how bad it has gotten, so much so they are compelled to give reports on status to the UN, as per this document linked to below.

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2007/wom1601.doc.htm

Thre is much in there, exposing the failures and how trafficked women became the norm, with out regulations that were put in place before legalization.

It indicates that the overall status of ALL women diminished significantly in the Netherlands, after legalization of prostitution, with out regulation, occured.

That's the first time (Noah @ 72) I've seen anyone use the word "prohibition" in these discussions (I haven't been reading until the last couple of weeks, though), although it seems to me a common-sense thought and I suspect it's a thought in the back of many people's minds.

We have so much experience with prohibition in Western societies, going back centuries, and it is all bad. I'm not talking just about likker but about, eg, the current so-called war on drugs, which has made the war on drugs almost indistinguishable from the drug trade itself. This isn't the place to analyse the U.S. government as the biggest trafficker in the world, but it pretty much is that, much to the horror and tragedy of many other societies.

I've been interested to see how much practical work Susan Davis and her colleagues have done to make sex work conceivable as a safe, legal business in Canada. They aren't trying to cope with every problem at once; they're being reasonable about a trade that is there -- and by trade, I mean both the work itself and the market demand from the johns.

Their work doesn't address human trafficking, but we have other kinds of laws that can do that. It doesn't address the exploitation of minors, but we have other kinds of laws that can do that. And it doesn't address the kinds of political consciousness-raising that many people here want to do, in different ways for different reasons, but that's for debate in the agora, not for legislation. You can't make laws about how people should think, and we actually have a law that says that. Yay, section 2.

Anyway, I find it helpful to keep prohibition in the back of my mind as an instructive warning, and I thank Noah for mentioning it. I probably disagree with some of the rest of what he's written, but I amn't a man, so I wouldn't know ...

Infosaturated wrote:

 the prohibition of murder, assault, fraud, driving without a license, etc. all work for me.

"Prohibition" is an ordinary English word with many meanings, but in North America for the last century and a half (at least) it has had a very specific meaning. Narrowly, it means the period from (depending on jurisdiction) the late C19 to the 1930s when attempts were made to suppress the trade in alcohol altogether. Some but not much of that happened in Canada; the Americans went to extremes (I know: you're shocked), which mainly resulted in the creation of at least one major Canadian fortune and the birth of the Mafia in the U.S.

More broadly, because of that edumacational experience, prohibition in discussions like this one is commonly used to mean attempts to control practices common among the citizenry -- any form of seeking of intoxication (a universal human urge), sex, and I guess gambling qualifies too.

The universal interdictions against murder, assault, etc, do not qualify as mere prohibition. They are there in every society for the obvious reason that no one has an interest in furthering them and everyone has an interest in stopping them. I think that was a specious and cynical misuse of ordinary language.

The term used by those wanting an end to prostitution is abolition.  Probition refers often to restrictions on consumption but Abolition refers to ending abusive human relations and the use and abuse of human beings.  It is used precisely to reference the continuity between the abolition of slavery and the abolition of prostitution or what some call sexual slavery. The definition of feminist abolition and the similarities and links to the discussion of the ending of race slavery in Canada and to those who called for reforms and regulation instead of abolition in that context are available at

http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/issues/feminist_definition_abolition....

Lee Lakeman wrote:

Prohibition refers often to restrictions on consumption but Abolition refers to ending abusive human relations and the use and abuse of human beings.

Actually, that is a useful and correctly put distinction, Lee, and I thank you for it.

I think it begins with a correct description of what prohibition entails, although not detailed enough. Prohibition is about restricting consumption of things that have been universally attractive to human beings throughout recorded history. That's why it doesn't explain, eg, our interdictions against murder or assault.

Abolition classically refers to the abolition of slavery, and I doubt you'll meet anyone on babble who isn't an abolitionist in that sense. I doubt you'll meet anyone who isn't opposed to human trafficking, which is slavery, no doubt. I doubt you'll meet anyone who isn't opposed to the exploitation of minors. For all those situations, we have or we can write or refine our laws.

Exactly remind.  This class and race and and sex bias becomes especially clear if one takes a global perspective on the harm to be reduced.

We are in a global economy where thousands of women are in an economically forced migration from desperate reserves and desperate third world homelands and delivered into sex trafficking sex tourism and prostitution. 

The demand created by men/johns who caqn and do buy sex creates the flow of women from the desperate areas to satisfy those men and the profiteers/traffickers and bawdy house owners who take advantage of both.

World-wide it is men who buy and racialized poor women who are prostituted

martin dufresne wrote:

It would be egregious to prohibit prostitution abolitionists the use of the word abolition. Fortunately, I doubt you'll meet anyone on Babble who would do that.

I doubt anyone will prohibit you (although I never like to speak for anyone else), but I suspect that many will disagree with you. I certainly do.

Maybe we should have a thread -- in some other forum; I dunno -- on the notion of "stigma."

If it were up to me, I'd just say "F**k stigma" and be done with it. I accept that I don't always recognize the stigmas (stigmata?) that others have had to cope with, but if they explain them to me and I get the logic of stimatization, then I'm there. It is just one of the stupidest things that human beings do to each other, and imho all adults should have learned how to defeat it in their everyday lives, allatime. I live with minor stigmata myself, and am mainly disappointed, sometimes disgusted by the stupidity of people who react to me that way.

One thing I will stand firm for, though. We cannot start basing human-rights law on notions as vague as stigma. No matter what you do, who you are, how you look, some people are just never going to like the cut of your jib. You want to change society at that level? You don't do that through repressive laws telling people that their gut reactions are illegal. You do that by living a life that proves them effin' wrong.

I'm not saying it's easy.

martin dufresne wrote:

Or, instead of dumping that job on the stigmatized, you commit to dissuading the people that stigmatize some folks for their personal pleasure. They are NOT the feminists.

Well, sure, martin. Can't disagree with that.

And that has what to do with the law?

Yes stigma is a problem, a problem of human dignity according to the Supreme court is the subject of the Charter of Rights and Freeodms which is one of the Canadian applications of internatioanhuman rights law. 

Violence against women and eating and housing and the laws and social policies that apply to them are right up there too.  And just in case you have not yet seen the face of class oppression for women in urban centers check this out   --> http://www.bclocalnews.com/news/66692847.html

remind wrote:

All things that harm people are legistated against,

No, they aren't, nor should they be. My God: what a vision of horror.

I think I understand why the lawyers hereabouts never weigh in on these threads.

Okay, I am willing to be persuaded,  give me an example of what harms people in a broad public way, and isn't legislated against?

ach Lee, I did not even bother going there,  as if prostitution is a thought.

linking of  harm reduction to abstinance modelling is very  light weight awareness, and it signifys there needs to be a massive educational strategy put in place.

Dealing in the mystical mythical is pissing into the wind and thinking you are having a cleansing shower. I know it well, have been there myself.