As for your question about incarceration: I don’t see incarceration described in this article. Believe me, I worked in prisons for seven years, and I know very well what incarceration feels like. This article describes parenting. The parenting of children. Parents pay attention to children. And when children make a decision to do themselves serious harm, in our society we expect parents to restrain their children. This doesn’t apply to the people you call “ruined girls”; it applies to every child.

*Love me some Douglas Adams.

Who would’ve thought that banelings were a real thing.

Next thing you’ll hear about is a small Panamanian fishing village being overrun by Mutalisks.

http://ambulancedriverfiles.com/2012/07/28/would-you-have-your-chest-massaged-by-a-porn-star/

Okay, so I got the age cut-off wrong by two years. I repent.

That does not change the question: how are the lives of these inmates made better by the fact of their confinement?

Simply raising the specter of venereal disease (gasp!) won’t answer that for you. Are you defending this place as a shelter, or a quarantine program?

One of the best ways to know if something is good for people, is that they don’t try to escape from it. So when you find it necessary to lock the doors, bar the windows, and conduct frequent head counts, this should be a powerful clue to the possibility that you are now doing something other than good.

You said: “Sexual abuse of young teenagers can have devastating psychological effects that appear, sometimes with lethal results, years after the original abuse.”

I’m curious how you claim to know this? How do you know that sex at age 14 is inherently traumatic, while 16 is a “grey area”, and 18 is fuck away? Because if you mean to start locking people up, then you better have that line drawn good and clear.

From where I stand, it looks a lot like you (and people like Drew Pinsky) have resurrected the idea of the “ruined girl” in a modern psychological guise. And what have people always sought to do with ruined girls? Why naturally, to save them from themselves. You don’t have to lock your doors from the outside, when saving them from someone else!

And speaking of that…how do you know that incarceration itself isn’t one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a 14 year old? Who do you know you’re not just snatching children from a bad situation and dropping them into a worse one?

If a girl escapes from a home where she is regularly beaten, and escapes into a relationship where she trades sex for survival, and then is finally carted off into an asylum where she is locked away and endlessly reminded that her whole life is one big damaged good in the eyes of society…well, you tell me John, where is the happy part of that story? At what point do we pop the champagne corks for a job well done?

the Texas Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that domestic minors younger than 14 involved in prostitution should be considered victims rather than criminals. Recent legislation changed the label for kids charged with prostitution from “delinquent” to “child in need of supervision” and allowed for these records to be sealed.

Let me repeat the operative phrase for anyone who missed it the first time: “minors younger then fourteen”. Younger than fourteen means thirteen and under. How does getting kids that age out of the sex trade, with therapy and educational services delivered in a secure custodial environment if necessary, help them?

Try saving their lives, for one thing. HIV still exists out there, and so do Hepatitis and HPV. We are down to one remaining antibiotic that can knock down the old fashioned clap. Wonder drugs can take down syphilis for those who know they have it, but it can sneak up on its victims with devastating long term results. Old fashioned pregnancy has its dangers, particularly to a thirteen year old street-involved child. Abusive or outright homicidal johns prey on sex trade workers: google “Robert Pickton” to see how bad that can get. Sexual abuse of young teenagers can have devastating psychological effects that appear, sometimes with lethal results, years after the original abuse.

Adults can make a considered decision to take these risks. Importantly, adults have access to alternative forms of work. Adults also have had the opportunity to learn the skills at organizing their lives, the background, and the social confidence to minimize their exposure to the very real hazards of the sex trade. I believe that legalizing participation in the sex trade for consenting adults will help sex trade workers manage the risks even better. But we cannot legislate childhood out of existence. Children have none of the tools to manage risks, which explains why we have standards that protect kids, sometimes even from their own bad decisions or from the predatory behaviour of the adults around them.

I have already said that I agree with the ILO standard, as does your government: for the purposes of sex trade work, adulthood starts at eighteen. Famously tolerant Holland sets the same standard, and people I know who have experience tell me the Dutch enforce it rigorously. For the same good reasons we don’t allow people under eighteen to work in policing or mercury mining, it makes sense to me that we don’t allow them to do paid sex work. But the article here does not deal with the situation of youth in the gray area between sixteen and eighteen. If you want to attack the facility described in this article, you have to attack its stated purpose: providing secure therapy and educational opportunities for children.

What’s more, increasing the danger for those who assist such immigrants by labeling them international gangsters drives up the price and encourages actual criminals (rather than mere status criminals) to get into the business. Remove those restrictions and you remove most of the cost, thus lessening both the expenses occurred in migration and the ability of truly exploitative facilitators to take advantage of desperate people.

This case is interesting and was underreported on the Net:

http://police4aqi.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/judge-mark-s-davis-decides-to-believe-sheriff-bill-watson-at-least-for-now/

I like to start each day by reading a few passages from the conventions of the International Labour Organization. Why, just this morning I was brushing up on C166, which concerns (as I’m sure you know) the repatriation of seafarers who find themselves stranded outside their country of origin. One of these days, we should compare our Kindle notes and highlights on the complete text!

In the meantime, can you tell me exactly how the life of 16-year old sex worker will be made better by being incarcerated and accused of false consciousness in a place that has all the charm of a modern-day Magdalene asylum?

I make no apologies for viewing sex trade work as an activity that requires a certain level of skill and maturity, and carries a certain level of physical and emotional risk. I believe in restricting the sex trade to persons over the age of eighteen for the same very good reasons we don’t allow sixteen year old police officers, soldiers, or mercury miners.

Cop has 20 years of on-duty sex, plus overtime, then retires early at 42 with 7 years of health benefits.

So… were the 4 female officers in the suit the ones he WAS fucking, or the ones he WASN’T fucking? Well, at least he wasn’t fucking the public like a lot of other officers. So there’s that.

My favorite part is the fact that at the age of only 42, even with this less than pristine record… he still gets to retire with 54% of his pay, or 51K a year.

51K a year! Imagine if he was the darling of the force? Wait… it looks like he might have been… but not in the ‘good’ way.

Who the fuck gets to work until they’re 42 then retire with a paycheck like that? Normal people? No way!

This is why politics is so toxic, and why virtually the entire modern world is on the brink of a massive financial collapse. Politics gets power by passing out free money to stupid people.

Kindly refrain from dissing New York and its culture.

Thanks

Nah, it’s clearly the Warner sisterDot

“One of the officers allegedly joked that she would, ‘have a story to tell others at Thanksgiving.’ ”

Oh yeah, ha ha. I’ll bet she’ll really want to re-live a fucking state-approved home invasion while she and the family chow down on turkey and taters. It’s all a big joke. And of course she got to hang out with the cops so she should feel honored, right? I’m surprised one of the goons didn’t try to get her number. Here once again is the macho, narcissistic culture of law enforcement in all its glory.

That is correct. They were acting as Agents Provacateur, Mr. Schaffer.