"The company itself doesn’t make any judgments about what might constitute illegal trafficking behavior. That’s up to investigators to determine, as there are adult women who want to do sex work and aren’t being trafficked."
I'm glad to see this at least get mentioned; there are people in bad situations who need help, but too often well-meaning people are unfortunately reluctant to listen to the people they think they're trying to help.
Yeah, I went and read their FAQ, and I'm struggling to see how this tool isn't equally useful to target sex workers.
I'm perfectly willing (in my ignorance) to believe that sex trafficking is a problem worth tackling (in scale, in urgency, etc). But I also (already) believe that anti-sex-work laws act to oppress and victimize already-marginalized women, with dubious benefit (without taking a side on whether this effect is deliberate).
For example, in my jurisdiction (IANAL), although I understand that prostitution itself is not illegal as such, the following things are illegal:
* posting/negotiating prices openly
* operating a place of business for prostitution (a "bawdy house")
* living "off the avails"
This last law is supposed to allow the prosecution of pimps (yay!), but it also means that sex workers cannot hire bodyguards or accountants. The second law is presumably supposed to keep "decent" neighbourhoods "decent", but it also results in more streetwalkers, and more liaisons in minimum-price hotels, and so lowers safety.
It seems sort of obvious that the right direction is to have better laws, and then enforce them. I'm not holding my breath.
And, to return to TFA, in the mean time, what stops LEAs from using Rescue Forensics to pad their docket by harassing already-oppressed sex workers who are not victims of trafficking, merely victims of being poor and desperate.
PS: I salute and hugely respect people tackling social justice problems, and I want to emphasize that I'm not condemning Rescue Forensics, I'm expressing a concern.
Hey, thanks for the concern. We take this very seriously. We also didn't build this in an echo chamber. I've worked for five years in this space and am very familiar with concerns about sex workers, poverty, desparation, and exploitation.
I can say with confidence that law enforcement, particularly human trafficking investigators, are also sensitive to these distinctions, generally. This used to not be the case, but a lot is changing and very quickly.
An example: An investigator I spoke to the other day said they used to be called a "VICE" unit, but they changed their name to the "counter-exploitation unit". This is similar to many agencies across the US and Canada.
We reserve the right to revoke a user's license if they are using our platform to harass persons, but so far this has not been a problem. In fact, just the opposite.
Probably changed their name because "vice" obviously sounds like enforcing a questionable moral code (while having fun), whereas "counter-exploitation unit" sounds more important and serious.
Underage sex work and human trafficking was already illegal in Canada, but they recently shut a lot legitimate sex workers down.
How are you actually auditing LE to make sure they're only targeting trafficking/minors or other real offenses?
Edit: To be clear, how do we know this isn't a sham like drug laws? No drug user I've ever known, even the ones that OD'd and died, ever benefitted at all from drug laws. Quite the opposite in fact. So forgive us for being skeptical about another morality law enforcement system that might have a similar damage ratio.
Even the first question that comes to me: Is the sex market so bad that buyers are interested in coerced workers? Sure, some people might be into underaged (regardless of the cutoff), and I suppose some people might be into abusive stuff they couldn't buy from willing participants. But does that make up the majority even? Or is it really just a lot of bored, or ugly, or busy, or curious, etc. etc. buyers?
More pointedly, where are your morals? Are you pushing for better laws, despite that they might hurt business?
If you are not working with groups like http://www.swopusa.org/ already, you need to start now, or you will likely end up hurting more people than you help.
There are retweets of sex work abolitionist groups, @SharedHope and @RestoreCorps. There are also tweets like this one: https://twitter.com/RescueForensics/status/25676583846244352...
"We are building forensics to fight human trafficking online - abolitionists must bring the fight to the internet!"
It looks like Rescue Forensics has aligned itself with sex work abolitionist groups that pose as anti-trafficking groups. And who have huge incentives to inflate the problem by many orders of maginitude, to create government funding for their groups and for this kind of work.
An aisde: as of today, @RescueForensics has 6,231 followers but only 74 tweets. The first 6,000 or so of these followers look like they were bought. Some might say that gives some indication of the ethics of this company.
If you look at most human trafficking law enforcement efforts, the vast majority is arrests of adult men and women who are consensually buying and selling sex. This is incorrectly labeled "sex trafficking" by law enforcement and the media. But the federal definition of sex trafficking is coercion, or of someone under 18.
It is unconscionable for law enforcement and abolitionists to use stings to go after the large, easy targets of consenting adults to pump up the numbers and money, while the horror of real human trafficking takes real investigative effort, time, and money, but doesn't have large numbers to as easily justify this effort.
The real solution is to decriminalize consensual adult sex work (like in New Zealand and parts of Australia), allowing everyone to focus on the true horrors of human trafficking. But that goes against the goals of the religious-based abolitionist groups, which have hijacked the human trafficking discussion and funding to push their anti-sex agenda.
I'm glad to see this at least get mentioned; there are people in bad situations who need help, but too often well-meaning people are unfortunately reluctant to listen to the people they think they're trying to help.