You can make just as much of an inequality in the other direction. There's a difference between chatting with someone you don't know in a skimpy outfit and doing repetitive manual labor in the heat and sun for 12 hours a day.
Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
No, not hard at all.
I had a friend from high school who met a guy at a party. He gave her drugs. Before long, she was addicted. She couldn't afford the habit. He let her get into full withdrawal, then offered her drugs if she'd have sex with his friends. She did. A week later, she had dropped out of law school and was working a street corner.
My understanding is that this is a fairly common path into prostitution.
> Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
While I agree with what you seem to be arguing in your post, this particular sentence is true in the same sense as "outside of triangles, its pretty hard to have a three-sided polygon."
4.5 million victims of trafficking for purposes of sex, 40 million prostitutes total.
I certainly won't argue with the idea that some of them are forced into it by circumstance, but no matter how you slice it you end up with a lot of voluntary sex workers.
Your post started by excluding trafficked workers!
You can't come back comparing trafficked workers to non-trafficked workers and say that the rest are voluntary.
There are criminal gangs that specialise in coercing girls into providing sexual services, and who take money from punters for those services. See recent UK cases about child grooming gangs.
Your link in incoherent. One example:
> It is true that as I type this, there are young girls and women {and some boys} who are physically locked behind closed doors, who are threatened with their family’s safety, and who are paying off debts by servicing men in brothels. Estimates are, in fact, that there are about 4.5 million women and children forced, by coercion or abuse, into the sex industry today.
That's coercion, not trafficking. I have no idea what definition they're using for coercion, or trafficking, or even prostitution. (Can a 14 year old be a prostitute, or is that always rape of a child?)
>Your post started by excluding trafficked workers!
Yes, to focus on people with choices, because it's obvious that trafficked workers are bad in any type of work.
>You can't come back comparing trafficked workers to non-trafficked workers and say that the rest are voluntary.
I can and do claim that a large amount of non-trafficked workers are voluntary. Sure, not 100%, but I never argued 100%.
>There are criminal gangs that specialise in coercing girls into providing sexual services, and who take money from punters for those services. See recent UK cases about child grooming gangs.
That's certainly a bad thing, but it's unrelated to a discussion of typical work, which involves consent-capable adults.
>That's coercion, not trafficking.
Well great, if that's accurate then it makes my point even better: <4.5M trafficked, <4.5M coerced, 35M voluntary.
> I have no idea what definition they're using for coercion, or trafficking, or even prostitution.
Well I didn't link the blog for its own text, but for having the sources in a convenient form. It cites 21 million trafficked, your link says 30 million slaves, either number works fine.
>Can a 14 year old be a prostitute, or is that always rape of a child?
I would say that it can be both, but the answer doesn't matter when you're comparing 5 million to 40 million.
>Here's a better article
These articles are informative but I'm afraid I don't see the connection to my argument, which is that there are a large number of non-slave non-coerced sex workers, whether they particularly like their job or not.
Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.