Just below her collar bone, beneath a bauble necklace, 17-year-old Adriana has a name delicately tattooed in swirly handwriting.
It is the name of her owner.
At the age of just 14, she – like so many of America’s approximately 800,000 sex slaves today – was branded by a man named Cream who promised her everything in exchange for ‘doing some work’.
800,000 sex slaves in the US? What cockamamie bullshit is this?
Police forces have come to recognize certain ‘marks’ that distinguish victims of the $9billion slave trade.
Do they even do their own sums? That’s $11,250 per year per “slave”. Turnover, not profit.
That’s not the basis of a profitable business nor is it something that people are going to risk decades in jail for.
And think about this for a moment. There’s 320 million people in the US, around 250 million adults. 125 million men perhaps. And our “slaves” will be having, what, 5 punters a day? 5 days a week? 25 punters a week then. That means that one sixth of all American men are being serviced by one of these sex slaves each week.
Given that the usual lifetime incidence of being serviced by a prostitute (which is not just these sex slaves) is around 10%, and habitual use is a fraction of that these numbers just aren’t right, are they?
Not all sex slaves are financial.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/3j3xm5/i_am_a_public_speaker_who_uses_my_testimony_as_a/
Which makes it considerably harder to judge if those numbers are accurate or not.
Certain ‘marks’ used to distinguish witches too.
It is all bullshit.
See the Honest Courtesan blog for chapter and verse.
https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/
The “anti-trafficking” morons (a sub-division of the Senior Anti-Sex League tm) are in a panic because the tide is slowly but surely running towards de-crimming sex work and the abuse industry can see its billion dollar + budgets going down the pan.
Matthew L: Sorry but that is non-sense. How many men do you think there are who can force their wife(or whatever) into sex for sale photos and doing erotic performances for strangers?
Large numbers of blokes have trouble getting any sex out of the wife/gf after the gloss and the novelty have worn off. In the vast majority of relationships it is the women who controls what sex is going on. Yes–no doubt there are a few nasty types who might have the personal force and nastiness to bully a woman in that way but to suggest their are vast numbers of them is piffle.
If it were The Guardian, I’d say it was lies. To be fair, it being The Mail, it could well just be utter pig-ignorance of anything remotely numerical.
I didn’t say there were vast numbers of them.
25 punters a week, 1250 per year, total revenue $11,250. So that’s nine bucks a pop. At that price, I’d hire them as cleaners.
Contrast this bizarre moral panic with the omertà which suppressed for years the actual mass rape and exploitation of actual real women which happened in Rotherham and towns across the country. It’s bizarre.
Yes, I know this article is about the U.S. but the same fantasy is present here too.
From a RM blog thread back in March:
”There is a role for the public intellectual, which is what some say I am, although I am not sure it is quite the term I would use, although I cannot think of another”
I can.
Wrong thread, dammit.
Thank God, I thought you were suggesting Ritchie had a role as a pimp or sex slave.
*shudders*
His writings do suggest a pseudo-intellectual whoredom, however.
Who are the people pushing these lies, Tim, and how do they intend to profit from them?
This sounds like someone who reads the porn stories on the interweb and think that it reflects reality, not sad wank fantasy.
Shades of Grey is a documentary y’know.
All sorts of people push these sorts of lies. Even the Daily Hate seems to have realised and withdrawn the numbers from the updated article.
This lot appear to be “Survivor’s Ink”, a charity seeking donations to tattoo over these “ownership” tattoos.
There’s little doubt, the people who write these things haven’t a clue about the industry they’re describing. Or any other industry not quoted on the NYSE
Let’s take the assertion re the tatoo & presume the 14 y/o bit’s true. Now let’s ask a question: If you were flogging crack, to be sold on the street corner, would you put you’re name on every wrap like you were Armani? Clue: Unlike handbags, crack & underage hookers are illegal. Not a wise move to be identifiable with the product. Like, clear evidence trail, open & shut case in court, long stretch.
Tim does an excellent job of rubbishing the numbers.
But also. The economics of criminal, black or grey market industries work exactly the same as any other industry. If you want to make money out of selling girls asses, it’s the same as any entepreneur. You need to get yourself between the seller & the buyer & extract profit.
And, as anyone in the industry well tell you, there’s absolutely no shortage of chicks willing to sell their asses & a distinct shortage of guys wishing to pay for them. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t have hookers standing on street corners waiting for punters to pass. You’d have punters waiting on street corners for hookers to pass.
And this has an effect on prices. They ain’t a lot. Where I live, I’m told the per-hour market rate hasn’t changed in a dozen years. London’s much the same. Oversupply. So it’s extremely difficult to interpose yourself between seller & buyer & make anything.
But violence.& sex slavery and…and…
But all of those things are going to end up as costs. Have you any idea what it’d cost to hire the muscle to ride herd on a string of hookers? Keep them working, stop them straying, collect the earnings? Rather herd cats. The amount of energy you’d have to put in, to do it yourself? You want to work 27 hours a day?.
Why would you bother?
When there’s a much simpler way of making money. Facilitate. Provide a means of willing sellers connecting with willing buyers. Run an agency. Overheads are a phone line & someone to answer it. Most places, not even illegal. Or provide the venue & let the girls willingly pay rent. You can even sell drinks. The solution in a lot of Europe.
In fact, the only way these “under duress” business models can ever work is if you’ve laws impede the sellers & buyers freely trading. And being that’s what these anti-prostitution campaigners are always pressing for, I start wondering about what business *they’re* in.
Given that this business is best done by adults only, safely but discreetly, I’m again impressed with the TW panel’s willingness to share their knowledge, especially BiS.
Curiously Jeremy Corbyn and his campaign manager John McDonnell are supportive of workers’ rights in this industry, and have opposed campaigns to criminalise their customers. I wonder if the LHTD is aware.
Who’s pushing the meme? Those who profit from it.
The lies are so blatant that even the Washington Post debunks the kind of lies. 100,000 children in the sex trade? No, just another lie.
See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/09/02/the-fishy-claim-that-100000-children-in-the-united-states-are-in-the-sex-trade/
Bloke in Spain
And this has an effect on prices. They ain’t a lot. Where I live, I’m told the per-hour market rate hasn’t changed in a dozen years. London’s much the same. Oversupply. So it’s extremely difficult to interpose yourself between seller & buyer & make anything.
Low inflation is one factor, but I also wonder if greater facilitiation has increased supply.
I don’t indulge, but I do read places like Adultwork, and there’s a lot of students on there, and with cellphones and internet, they don’t need to work a parlour, or work a rota. They can choose times around their studies. Small numbers of clients a week without much in the way of fixed overheads. That’s going to lower barriers to entry (so to speak).
“I don’t indulge, but I do read places like….”
Given the vanishly small number of blokes apparently visit hookers, it’s amazing the poor lassies can make a crust at all.