http://www.urbanjustice.org/

In Solidarity,
Lisa Roellig
Erotic Service Providers Union
http://www.espu-ca.org

The ‘no rights” language is probably a way to head off private claims for civil damages, which the U.S. Government generally tries to avoid. It’s not necessarily anti-victim specifically though it may be in application.

But yes: in many cases, you can’t sue government for doing a bad job, even if said bad job causes you harm. You can sue them for intentionally malicious conduct under the FTCA sometimes. This makes more sense than it may seem at first glance; you’ll have to research it to find out why though, sorry.

But it can be a wake up call. Basically, you should never trust a layperson’s reading of a complex law, ESPECIALLY a small segment of a complex law. This is hard stuff even for people who do it all the time.

If you look at the linked PDF (I have no idea if it’s current), on the page titled 69 you will find the quoted text. You’ll see that it is to be inserted into the existing U.S. Code after section 2423.

So…. then you have to go find (or as your friendly Internet-savvy lawyer to find) section 2423 so you can look at the definitions of terms within that section

And you’ll see:

(f) Definition. - As used in this section, the term “illicit sexual conduct” means (1) a sexual act (as defined in section 2246) with a person under 18 years of age that would be in violation of chapter 109A if the sexual act occurred in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States; or (2) any commercial sex act (as defined in section 1591) with a person under 18 years of age.

So this is the maximum possible sentence… do you honestly think that it will become the standard sentence, unmitigated by the circumstances of the prostitute in question? And I see 30 years max for people who have illicit sexual conduct with children, but only 10 years max for “support staff” (meaning, I presume, pimps/madams or other parties that procure “dates” for prostitutes/facilitate prostitution).

23 ‘‘(c) ARRANGING TRAVEL AND RELATED CONDUCT.—
24 Whoever, for the purpose of commercial advantage or pri25
vate financial gain, arranges, induces, procures, or facili-
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70
•HR 3887 RH
1 tates the travel of a person knowing that such a person is
2 traveling in interstate commerce or foreign commerce for
3 the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct shall be
4 fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years,
5 or both.

Quote:
‘‘§ 2423A. Sex tourism
9 ‘‘(a) TRAVEL WITH INTENT TO ENGAGE IN ILLICIT
10 SEXUAL CONDUCT.—A person who travels in interstate
11 commerce or travels into the United States, or a United
12 States citizen or an alien admitted for permanent residence
13 in the United States who travels in foreign commerce, for
14 the purpose of engaging in any illicit sexual conduct with
15 another person shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
16 not more than 10 years, or both.
17 ‘‘(b) ENGAGING IN ILLICIT SEXUAL CONDUCT IN FOR
18 EIGN PLACES.—Any United States citizen or alien admit
19 ted for permanent residence who travels in foreign com
20 merce, and engages in any illicit sexual conduct with an
21 other person shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
22 not more than 10 years, or both.
23 ‘‘(c) ARRANGING TRAVEL AND RELATED CONDUCT.—
24 Whoever, for the purpose of commercial advantage or pri
25 vate financial gain, arranges, induces, procures, or facili-
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70
•HR 3887 RH
1 tates the travel of a person knowing that such a person is
2 traveling in interstate commerce or foreign commerce for
3 the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct shall be
4 fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years,
5 or both”

And they are about to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2007/11, which will conflate all prostitution with human trafficking and “protect” the alleged victims by jailing them for up to ten years.

I asked you to prove this, and you provided links. I’ve read the links you provided. The actual text of the proposed amendments are nowhere to be found on any of those links. They do claim that the amendments will conflate all prostitution with slavery. They also claim that the FBI will be forced to investigate pimps. But the second allegation is disputed, and in any case no quotes from the amendments are offered to support the allegations.

And nowhere does anyone say anything about jailing prostitutes for 10 years.

Once again; please provide something that supports your statement that the reauthorization proposed for the Anti-Human Trafficking bill will lead to jailing prostitutes for 10 years. That’s a very specific allegation and you have yet to offer any proof of it.

For the changes to the Act, read the Washington Post article of November 29, 2007: “Anti-Human Trafficking Bill Would Send FBI Agents on Trail of Pimps.” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar…) and the San Francisco Chronicle article of January 13, 2008 by Joel Brinkley (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/…). I got the information first from the “Bound, Not Gagged” website (deepthroated.wordpress.com/), where prostitutes are campaigning for their rights. Read especially the “Help! Contact your Senator” passage and the comments.

Personally, I have very mixed feelings about prostitution. On the one hand, there is the abuse. Is it moral to eat innocent pigs while there are perfectly guilty pimps available? On the other hand, I believe that a person is the only owner of his or her body, and neither a pimp nor a government has the right to deny him or her that ownership. So no matter what my opinion on prostitution may be, I don’t have the right to prohibit it, but I still have the obligation to fight abuse. Prostitution has so many faces that if you only have a single opinion about it, a single approach to understand it, a single solution to its problems, then you probably got it all wrong. But I think that the best way to fight its problems is to work with prostitutes, not against them.

If you read the US Government’s statements on prostitution, they say right in your face that they want these women jailed for being slaves and rape victims. And they are about to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2007/11, which will conflate all prostitution with human trafficking and “protect” the alleged victims by jailing them for up to ten years.

That does seem rather odd. In fact, it seems incredible. Perhaps you could quote the relevant sections of the U.S. Code (i.e., Federal law) that says this. Because I’ve been searching on the web and reading the Act and most recent amendments to the act and I don’t see any language that seems to support your statements. Of course, I may have missed it or misread it. So if you could provide some support for your statements I’d appreciate it.

What you don’t understand is that there is a large minority of Americans who hate sex. Sex within marriage for the purposes of procreation is necessary, of course, and can be unfortunately pleasureable, but sex for any other purpose is Just Plain Bad.

This all-consuming blind hatred of sex overrides their feelings of justice, compassion, and self-interest to the point where it becomes absolutely necessary to punish sex. They feel compassion for the girls who are caught, and they truly feel bad that these girls must be punished, but they see it as a can’t-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-eggs scenario — the suffering is a necessary evil. Their hatred of sex blinds them to the fact that their policies of punishment actually help increase prostitution; to acknowledge such would introduce a contradiction in their world-view, and so in order to protect their sanity their subconscious keeps them blind to the contradiction.

We’ve got a similar process going on for issues of drugs, abortion, and poverty, which is why we have so much of them.

Yeah, special units attract a lot of scandals. Not a lot of supervision. Officers playing the role of criminals and the line gets blurred. They should take great care on who they assign to these units yet in many agencies, it’s often the officers who they can’t put out on patrol because of complaints.

An officer in the Chicago Police Department who plead guilty to battery in connection with beating a handcuffed man in a wheel chair is scheduled to come back to work. He got a whopping 18 months probation and also received an administrative suspension lasting about two years. I guess the new superintendent is appealing the suspension and trying to get him terminated.