> Tara I shouldn’t have phrased my original question as a personal attack on you

It’s not about it being a personal attack – it’s about the institutionalized idea that if I’m not too privileged to speak than I must be to fucked up to speak and if that’s not it there’s probably another reason you can find not to listen to the people who have actually been affected by sex trafficking and related policy because you should really never listen to us.

> I find the relationship between trafficking and choice in this instance to be confusing TO ME

Here’s how I heard someone smart explain it once: you can be raped, and then you can choose to have sex again. Being raped doesn’t take away your ability to choose or to consent (or not consent) in the future.

Something I’ve heard from a lot of trafficking victims (and that matches a lot of my experience) is that they didn’t mind the work, but they minded the boyfriend or agency owner or whoever who became abusive. Imagine that you’re doing whatever your job is now, and then one day your boss says you’re going to have to start doing twice as much work for half the money, and if you don’t he’ll call the state and you’ll lose your kids and go to jail, because your job is immoral and means you’re stupid and morally confused. That’s a very typical trafficking scenario, but would it make you hate your job? If you got another job in the same field later would it mean you suffered from stockholm syndrome and weren’t capable of making viable choices? When I was young I liked sex work. The problem wasn’t that I was going to a house with nice ladies where I had sex that wasn’t violent for the first time ever, the problem was that I’d been isolated and abused by my dad for my whole life. (Later things got way more complex for me.)

Email me if you want. I’m happy to educate. hobostripper at gmail.

I don’t want law enforcement to treat ANYONE like a potential trafficking victim, because what they do to trafficking victims is violently arrest them and charge them with prostitution or with conspiring to traffick themselves or just plain trafficking.

Exactly!

And do you think that the author is unwilling to assist people in her former situation or similar? Maybe that sort of sentiment on her part is what motivated her to speak on a survivor panel at an anti-trafficking conference. Makes…sense.

Laying aside the question of whether I’m capable of making choices or not, I think that even if people have been trafficked into the sex trade and just want to get the hell out, it is wrong to arrest them and leave them with a criminal record that makes it difficult for them to obtain housing or employment. It is also wrong to create a system that leaves them vulnerable to police abuses and unable to report crimes that are committed against them, even if they are victims.