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Unfortunately, in order to “rescue” prostitutes from exploitation, we permit law enforcement officers and civilian males to have sex with them in order to testify against them. As ludicrous as this sounds, it is the logical result of an illogical policy which refuses to make distinctions between consenting and coerced adult sex work.
As reported in a Columbus, Ohio newspaper (by Kristen Convery / July 7, 2005) “They didn’t engage but they could have” - rules for vice cops are sketchy at best, allowing vice officers to "momentarily" engage in a sex act. According to vice squad Sgt. Richard Curry, “an officer will indulge in sexual conduct only when he can't get the prostitute to verbally solicit him but still needs evidence.” Evidence that adult women who willingly work in prostitution are victims of exploitation? No doubt it would be difficult to prove without actually exploiting them! Continues Curry, "If there's no words, then you have to let something else happen."
And to “let to something else happen” is perfectly within the law, according to Joshua Dressler, a criminal-law expert at OSU's Moritz College of Law. “Legally,” he said, “it's OK for a vice officer to have sex with a prostitute in the course of an investigation, just as a narcotics officer is permitted to buy drugs from a dealer.”
And when cops don’t want to engage in sex with prostitutes, they hire civilian males to do the job for them. According to The Tennessean- a paper in Nashville, Tennessee (Ian Demsky, February 2, 2005) “Metro police spent almost $120,000 over a three-year period to foster encounters, mostly skin-on-skin, between confidential informants and prostitutes in an effort to further Nashville's crackdown on the illicit sex trade...
Confidential informants pocketed more than $70,000 of that, with the rest going to providers of sexual services, according to police records from 2002 to 2004. The Police Department stands behind the controversial practice of paying informants to touch and be touched — and sometimes go further — while gathering evidence of prostitution.”
''What's the greater good?'' asked Capt. Todd Henry, who heads the Nashville department's specialized investigations division. ''It may be distasteful to some people, but it's better that we have those places shut down.'' Metro police pay informants about $300 for up to three prostitution ''buys,'' or transactions, and an extra $100 for each additional buy, department officials said.
''It may sound like officers are paying people to have sex all over the place all the time, but that's just not the case,'' Henry said. Certainly not all the time! Where does a guy go to apply for such a job?
Well, if there are no jobs available in Nashville, they can always go to Spotsylvania, Virginia and become a police officer. Of course they need to be single to get this sweet assignment!
"Spotsylvania detectives on assignment to crack down on prostitution in county massage parlors visited Moon Spa three times in January and paid for massages, baths and sexual acts on four occasions, court documents show. On one occasion, they left a $350 tip, records show. [how very thoughtful...iswface]
Smith and William F. Neely, the county's top prosecutor, said the sexual acts were necessary because the masseuses had poor English skills and would have been unable to make clearly spoken offers of sex for money. Such offers and evidence that more than touching occurred are needed to make a case under Virginia law, they said. Only unmarried detectives were assigned to the cases, Smith said."
I thought that being paid to have sex was prostitution and that encouraging other people to have sex for money was pandering- both of which are illegal.… but of course, if it is for the greater good... preventing women from being exploited by their clients... then I suppose it makes perfect sense to allow women to be exploited by police officers or men who are paid by police officers (and taxpayers) to have sex with them! Is this what radical feminists and religious conservatives intended to help the “victims of sexual exploitation”?
Prostitution and its ancillary “activities” are and have been against the law in most of the United States for over a century, although prostitution activity has never decreased since the inception of the prohibitionist legislation against it. As I have already stated, current radical feminist thinking is that all prostitution, whether or not consenting and adult, is a violation of a woman's human rights and dignity. It is treated by these feminists and others as the moral equivalent of rape, regardless of what us so called "victims" say about ourselves or our work. This attitude has caused the disenfranchisement of a large population of sex workers and left us truly vulnerable to unscrupulous law enforcement officers and other government officials.
This article will show that the consequences of ignoring the voices of those in sex work- or consenting adult prostitution- have been, for us prostitutes, a long and unending series of abuses at the hands of the very law enforcement agents, judges and prison guards who are supposed to "protect" prostitutes from exploitation. No one has ever given any rational explanation of how being so traumatized -by being arrested and incarcerated and inhumanly treated by the "justice" system- is supposed to correct the supposed human rights violations, and it is unlikely that anyone can ever do so. The purpose of arrest and incarceration is punishment for committing a crime, not for being the "victim" of a crime.
