On 9/11, Paul And Sheila Wellstone, And US Sex Trafficking Victims

[+ stevenkesslar]

This makes me wonder ...If we can convey the message that taking down websites like Rentboy will move sex workers back into the streets, back where families don't want them, and that this can be prevented by decriminalizing it, I wonder in which direction public opinion will go.

 

Conveying the message is the problem. Right now, at least in the U.S., there seems to be no appetite for public dialog on this subject. We can't win a battle if no one will show up at the battlefield.

 

9/11 is definitely an appropriate day to reflect on this topic. First and foremost, it's an appropriate day to remember and honor the victims of terrorism that died that day. I'm proud that we now have a new Freedom Tower standing. We've rebuilt. And while the world is less than perfect, if you remember back to the worst fears we had after that horrible day, none of them have come to pass. I'm very thankful for that.

 

http://cdn01.boweryboogie.com/content/uploads/2011/08/twin-towers-construction.jpg http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/04apr/freedomtower.jpg

 

I would never have guessed that in the weeks leading up to this year's 9/11, I'd be totally focused on what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - created to prevent another 9/11 - was doing to target Gays and rentboys like us. Rentboys all over the country are both angry and afraid - not of being victims of another United 93, but of being branded as "criminal" by DHS. It feels bizarre.

 

I think we have a challenge, as Corndog says above, to figure out messages that resonate. It's a good day to be thinking about another form of Homeland Security - protecting the tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, who are victimized by sex trafficking in the US every year. And to remember Paul and Sheila Wellstone, two leaders in the fight against sex trafficking who died in a plane crash about a year after 9/11.

 

I was a Religion major in college. (I would have majored in Political Science, but unlike Sheila, there were only so much of Paul's passionate rants I could take). We all know there is more than one Gospel, that tells the same story in different ways. So brace yourselves, or click out. This is a reading from the Gospel According To Steven. It's about lots of things, but mostly about why today is a good day to think about having a good heart, and doing what we can to help real victims. And because it's an epistle, I'm posting it over several threads.

 

There is a battlefield, and a battle. There are real victims of prostitution and trafficking. And a fairly loud and politically effective group has just been tossed on to the battlefield: us! After two decades of more or less defacto decriminalization, the Rentboy bust just changed the game. We are now part of the "global criminal enterprise," like it or not.

 

I'm not buying into the narrative that I'm a criminal, or a pervert. Before I got my Religion degree, I went to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school, and grew up understanding that it was a sin or something bad to be Gay. Maybe that's what made me a moral relativist. I learned early on I had to keep my own conscience clear. Later, I found that many of the moral absolutists pointing to my alleged perversions or deficiencies turned out to be child abusing predators themselves.

 

You want a real global criminal enterprise? Check this out:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases_in_the_United_States

 

The numbers are staggering, and make it clear how irrelevant the $1.2 million seized from Rentboy is. Wikipedia claims the church paid out over $1 billion to victims by 2002. Over $600 million in 2007 alone. I can't find a reliable count of the actual number of child victims of sexual abuse, but it has to be in the thousands. Check out this huge list of alleged predators - excuse me, I meant to say priests:

 

http://bishop-accountability.org/priestdb/PriestDBbylastName-F.html

 

How many proven, or even alleged predators, has DHS named in the Rentboy case? Zero. How many proven, or even alleged, victims? Zero. I really don't mean to pick on the church, because I know many of you are devout members of one religion or another. I do mean to put the allegations made against our community in perspective. So far, unlike the allegations made against the Catholic church, they add up to just about nothing.

 

The worst they can say about the guy who ran Rentboy is that his email address said "cyberpimp." Sheesh! And here I thought I got myself in a mess earlier this year when I called myself a "whore."

 

So it will be interesting to see which actual rentboy rats him out, and confesses that he was brutally subjected to this kind of horrible abuse: "Now, they've created a "Cash4Class" scholarship fund to give male escorts advertising with Rentboy.com a financial boost to go back to school. Potential winners of the $1500 fund can submit a 500-1000 word essay or a 1-5 min video answering the question "why is going to school part of achieving your dream?" Will one of you guys please volunteer to be deposed, so we can get this over with, and testify under oath how painful it is to have to read endless crap like this from escorts like me who know how to write?

 

The church scandal itself suggests you are right, Corndog. There is little or no public appetite to talk about awkward matters of sex, like Gays who hire rentboys. I think there is even less of an appetite in this country to talk about, and devote considerable resources to, helping victims who are often illegal, illiterate, and poor.

 

There's a lot of rhetoric being thrown around about alleged crimes and alleged victims, but this report of sex trafficking in San Francisco in the last half of 2014 probably gives a fairly accurate picture of what the real victims in this narrative look like:

 

http://sfgov.org/dosw/sites/sfgov.org.dosw/files/HT Report_FINAL.pdf

 

About one third are kids. About 3 in 4 are women. Fewer than 1 in 5 are white. Only 1 in 3 are known to speak English. This report reads like a Who's Who of America's Dispossessed. If the anti-prostitution advocates are even half right, these 291 people are only the tip of the iceberg. They believe most victims are hidden. I don't have a hard time believing that there could be tens of thousands of victims. Way more victims than 9/11. Not murdered, but raped and intimidated and dehumanized. And it happens every year.

 

If you believe the narrative of their victimization, which I mostly do, the men in the picture are mostly sexual predators. So tossing Gays like us into the "global criminal enterprise" adds an interesting twist. We are a relatively sophisticated and educated group of men, who are not predators into abusing women. In fact, the word Gay sort of communicates that we're not into having sex with women at all. And we know a little about victimization ourselves.

[+ stevenkesslar]

As I see it, we have three choices: help fight it, help fix it, or flee.

 

If we were really predators, we would flee. My guess is that even though we've done nothing wrong, a lot of us are going to simply head for the hills and wait this out, which is perfectly understandable. We'll accept certain minor inconveniences, but anybody who was around before the Internet will know they really are minor. That impulse alone may do some good. Every operator of every male and especially female escort website may think long and hard about what they can do to ensure they at least tried to keep predators from using their website to "run" underage boys, or trafficked "girls."

 

Note that none of the reviews on any escort website have a line for contact info for "pimp" or "predator." But that is exactly the problem. A U.S. Attorney seemed to admit to SF Weekly that one of the Redbook staff actually cooperated with families and law enforcement, for example in removing ads suspected to have been posted by minors. Does removing the website itself solve the problem, or simply drive it underground? Predators and pimps know how to flee, way better than we do. My guess is the cops are just going to make their own jobs harder, by driving the real criminals further into the dark, where they are even harder to find.

 

My first impulse, as some of you may have noticed, is to help fight this. I spent years helping in the trenches in the fight for same sex marriage, and we did change how people viewed us.

 

But Corndog is right. This is different. Coming out as Gay is never a piece of cake. It's a bit more complicated to come out as an older married man, Gay or Straight, who enjoys the occasional companionship of a hot muscled twenty something, who appreciates getting paid for his services. And even single Gays with nothing to hide, other than perhaps that extra inch around their belly, may find their liberal friends raising an eyebrow if the word "rentboy" enters polite conversation.

 

We all know most of society actually understands and even accepts that we do not live in a Puritan culture. If it didn't, Bill Clinton really would have been impeached, divorced, and jailed. They just don't want it waved in their faces. They don't really want to have to think about whether it's really your "nephew" or "grandson" who you are taking to dinner, or who is spending the night.

 

The most critical difference is that in this fight, there are real victims. In other words, no one argued same sex marriage creates victims. Everybody agrees prostitution does. And those victims have a lot of liberals and feminists on their side, as they should. I, for one, have no interest in getting in a fight with people like Kamala Harris, who I hope will be my next US Senator. If elected, she will be a leading liberal US Senator, and she is probably always going to be an outspoken opponent of decriminalization.

 

As a legal tactic, to advance the issue in court, it may make sense for the Erotic Service Providers to sue her. But her response is simple: "there is no fundamental right to engage in prostitution or solicit prostitution." Thankfully, the Supreme Court did legal contortions to find a way for us to marry each other, even though the Constitution was written before anyone knew what LGBTQ meant. Don't hold your breath for a legal victory on this one. If we learned anything from the same sex marriage legal fight, it's this: if we have any hope of winning, we have to bring the public along. No judge wants to be hung out to dry by bucking the majority, any more than we do.

 

Can we bring the public along? I think so, if we do what we did on the marriage fight, and broaden the vision. In fact, all the words that I'd put in the forefront start with "v": vision, victim, and violence. There are real victims out there, who are subjected daily to real violence. I think we have to put ourselves on their side.

 

I think the public knows the moral Puritans are wrong: we will never "abolish prostitution". But there is deep public support for fixing the problems that stem from it. Instead of simply focusing on fighting the Rentboy raid, and how it dredges up the countless ways Gays have been branded as perverts, I think we should focus our message and our efforts on helping to fix a real problem.

 

I actually do feel like Gays have just been victimized. With all due respect to the Catholic Church, we conduct ourselves better than many priests, and certainly better than predators or pimps. To use Daddy's word, we known all about decorum. We should defend ourselves from a misguided attack, and conduct ourselves with dignity.

 

But in doing so, I think we can also help expose and defend the real victims, who do have little or no voice. It doesn't hurt them for us to be shouting that there are real predators, but it's not us. It doesn't hurt them to demand that the government stop targeting us, and line up the resources right.

[+ stevenkesslar]

I want to go into even more detail about the San Francisco study cited above, because to me it is very encouraging. Its findings go along with other reports I've read that seem to be the most data-driven, and the most sympathetic in understanding what causes female and child sex workers to be victimized, and how we can actually help them.

 

http://sfgov.org/dosw/sites/sfgov.org.dosw/files/HT Report_FINAL.pdf

 

One key finding is that almost all the victims were identified and helped by community-based organizations. That alone suggests that busting national or global Internet sites and other top-down approaches is probably not the best way to identify and help actual victims. It also suggests that if we don't commit resources to help people, we're not likely to help them. The study specifies how helping real victims required helping with food, emergency shelter, and health services. Busting Redbook or Rentboy didn't help one person get any service like that. In Rentboy's case, it shut down a college scholarship fund, and made it harder for a lot of rentboys to pay rent, or college tuition.

 

Another funny thing is that of 291 identified victims of trafficking named in the San Francisco report, only 6 - all children - were identified by the SFPD. Why? "The Police Department reported 62 cases of adult sex trafficking. The Police Department counted every adult sex worker they encountered as a possible sex trafficking survivor, even if there was no sign of force, fraud of coercion. Since this is not consistent with the legal definition of human trafficking, this report does not include these numbers in the cumulative data. We point it out here to illustrate the importance of uniform reporting criteria." In other words, even an anti-trafficking report took the SFPD to task for simply defining all "adult sex work" to be "trafficking," to suit their purposes.

 

The report acknowledges other problems with its data. All children - 40 % of the victims - are identified as "trafficked," even if they were runaways selling sex on their own to survive. It acknowledged this: "Many trafficking survivors, and in particular sexually trafficked youth, may not identify as 'trafficked' or may be reluctant to disclose their trafficking status". But nobody would argue that the best way to deal with runaway teens is to allow them to sell themselves on the streets. The report proves there is a real problem, with real victims, some of them born in the US, many of them sex migrants.

 

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was not cited as the law used to bust Rentboy, but it is part of the federal arsenal used to fight abhorrent aspects of prostitution, like sex slavery. One of the most effective tools it uses is providing T-visas and U-visas to migrant sex workers who cooperate with law enforcement to bust traffickers.

 

Read this line from a 57 page study called "Online Prostitution and Trafficking, " published on a rabidly anti-prostitution website called "Prostitution Research and Education:"

 

"The Department of Justice prosecuted 162 defendants for sex trafficking under the TVPA in 2012, with 366 T-visas issued to victims and 103 issued to foreign national children. These numbers remain limited because of the burdensome requirements for the visas. Created primarily to prosecute traffickers rather than to assist victims, the TVPA is onerous for trafficking victims. It is often too dangerous for victims to testify since traffickers and organized crime groups threaten not only their lives but the lives of family members,sometimes holding them hostage..."

 

http://prostitutionresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FarleyFranzblauKennedyOnlineTrafficking-2014.pdf

 

The TVPA was co-sponsored by another leading liberal US Senator, Paul Wellstone. That matters a lot to me, because he was my college professor, and my mentor. Paul and his wife Sheila were driving forces in creating a bipartisan coalition to enact it. Paul was viewed as a knee-jerk liberal, but he was a pragmatic man, of profound decency and conscience. He inspired a lot of people like me to fight for social and economic justice.

 

He was exactly the kind of guy that would risk his Senate seat in 2002 to try to stop us from going to war in Iraq as a misguided response to 9/11. Today is a very good day for me to remember how much I miss Paul's voice. What he argued to prevent the Iraq War was viewed as radical and even unpatriotic at the time. Now his perspectives are the consensus view, that even Jeb Bush and Donald Trump mimick. History has vindicated him.

 

Paul and Sheila were the kind of moral pragmatists that would push hard for the victims, and push in ways that actually worked. Paul was the guy who argued passionately for universal health care. Had he not died in a plane crash, I have to believe right now he'd be arguing for more visas for trafficking victims, and more assistance, including for the families of victims, if that's what it actually took to free them from threats and intimidation.

 

http://blogs.state.gov/stories/2012/10/25/ten-years-later-remembering-senator-paul-wellstone

 

He ran up against the hard wall of moral cowboys when he tried to stop the Iraq war, who thought it was all going to be as simple as getting rid of "weapons of mass destruction" and declaring "Mission Accomplished." Tragically, no.

 

I think what we are facing now is the same thing. We have a bunch of moral Puritans who want to "abolish prostitution," and think they can do that by targeting a "global criminal enterprise," that happens to include us. They mean well, but they are lashing out in ways that just don't make sense. They are targeting and hurting people in unfair ways. My biggest fear is that this really is Iraq all over - meaning we are going to create more victims by doing dumb things.

 

Like I said above, I recognize there is no public apetite for really having this debate. Remember when tens of thousands of dispossesed kids from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras showed up on our border last year? It was easier to just blame it on President Obama, even though the law that provided the legal basis for them to enter the US was signed by President George W. Bush, and was a fundamentally decent thing to do. Like Paul, I believe the US should stand for fundamental decency.

 

If we want to do what is fundamentally decent, we should be using everything from the Internet to community groups to word of mouth to tell women and kids who are being trafficked now that we will help them, and provide the visas and resources to back them up.

 

I have to believe that's what Paul would fight for. That's what I'm going to going to fight for. I'm glad the DHS labeled me as part of the "global criminal enterprise," because it hands me and us a loudspeaker not only to defend ourselves, but to fight for the real victims of global sex trafficking in the US.

 

By the way, even the study written by the rabid prohibitionists reinforces what I said above - that online advertisements can actually help lead law enforcement to predators who sell sex with kids: "There have been a number of successful prosecutions of pimps and traffickers who used online prostitution classifieds to advertise and sell women and children for sexual use." This is a complicated problem, that requires catching rats who are experts at flight. Why throw tools that have proven to be effective away, and drive the predators and problems further into the dark? My guess is it's actually cheaper and more effective than giving thousands of T-visas and U-visas away, which is a very politically touchy subject.

[+ stevenkesslar]

The precise meaning of words matter in court, and they will matter in the Rentboy case. Outside of court, less so. Anybody who's not clear on that need only watch this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs

 

In case you didn't know already, even if you despise Bill Clinton, what he said actually may be "true." Here's why.

 

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/17/time/clinton.html

 

We are having a Bill Clinton moment. Gays are being called into question regarding our awkward and adult sexual relations. I think we need to respond with a Paul Wellstone heart.

 

In court, I'm assuming it makes a huge difference what "sexual act" means as written repeatedly in the Rentboy complaint. Outside, I'm not sure that America cares to know about what really happens between a Gay man and the twenty something college student he hired from Rentboy, any more than they really wanted to know about Monica Lewinsky's stained dress. I doubt they would view guys earning money to go to college, which at least one Gay escort named in the complaint is doing, as akin to a terrorist threat.

 

I'd guess they are much more likely to view the trafficking of women and children as real threats to people's homeland security and safety. I think we should embrace the victims, and demand that the government focus on helping them.

 

Heads we lose, hearts we win. Let's not get hung up on the words "decriminalization" and "criminalization." Let's focus on the fact that the root of both words is "crime," and that crimes tend to have actual victims, and they are worse yet when they involve violence.

 

Speaking for myself, this isn't a fight I picked. If the goal is to "abolish prostitution," it is a fight that will never end, just like the "war on terror." Paul and Sheila knew that you don't fight endless wars by doing dumb things. His political leadership on both fighting trafficking and NOT fighting in Iraq prove that.

 

If we follow their lead, and focus this battle on what we can do - helping to fix the very real problems related to prostitution - I think we may actually be able to do some good for the victims who most need help today.