The rescue industry is trying to change trafficking laws again, this time in CA. There’s a very well detailed blog about prop 35 in CA on the Orange Juice Blog which I read and commented on a while back and even if you’re not living in CA you might want to take a read and see how this very flawed legislation breaks down. I was born behind the Orange Curtain and only last year moved out of CA after living there my whole life so I still am very interested in the state and its politics but you don’t have to live in CA to be concerned. Legislation like this could come to a city and town near you. I was reading the other day about what looked like to me based on the facts presented in the article to be a driver, someone who drives escorts to their appointments and makes sure they get home safe, out in in Takoma park being arrested for “human trafficking” A Months long investigation over several counties and jurisdictions resulted in an arrest for human trafficking. In CA currently if a driver gets busted its a chauffeur without a license ticket. Trafficking is being applied in all kinds of ways people never expected and legislation is being written so that the new laws could easily be stretched and manipulated to cover all kinds of things besides actual real honest to good human trafficking. Yanno when you force someone into labor situations against their will. That’s what trafficking is and it actually happens in non sexual labor far more often but that doesn’t get the all the splashy headlines that the rescue industry uses to get more funding. Oh and if you don’t believe the rescue industry is an actual industry take a walk down to DuPont Circle in Washington DC and stand outside the Polaris Project’s headquarters. That’s some damn expensive real estate an they have the whole building. Yes, your anti trafficking dollars at work keeping their executives in pretty nice digs.
Being over broad, over reaching, disguising what really amounts to anti prostitution attitudes, ideals, legislation and eventually arrests doesn’t help REAL victims of trafficking. it doesn’t make it harder to manipulate and force people into trafficking situations, it doesn’t provide services for those who are trafficked and it doesn’t punish people who pray and inflict damage on to other people by actually trafficking them. I personally believe it diminishes the real suffering of trafficked people by calling everyone involved int he sex business in all kinds of capacities traffickers or trafficked. Its too often used as just another tool to punish consenting adults who work in the sex business by choice. It seems in some parts of the good ole’ USA Transporting consenting willing adults to and from a business appointment is now human trafficking. The word transport and traffic are one and the same and this kind of thing is only going to happen more and more.
