Sex work encompasses a wide range of adult-oriented commercial services, from stripping to BDSM to pornography to what’s commonly known as prostitution. For example, the World Health Organization has described sex work as:
“…the provision of sexual services for money or goods. Sex workers are women, men and transgendered people who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services, and who consciously define those activities as income generating even if they do not consider sex work as their occupation.”
Groups that oppose the decriminalization of sex work often conflate the term with “human trafficking” and/or “sex trafficking.” But there are significant differences. Prostitution involves commercial sex between or among consenting adults, and it is prosecuted on a local level. Sex trafficking, a subcategory of human trafficking, is a federal crime, defined by statute as causing a person under age eighteen to engage in commercial sex, or using force, fraud, or coercion to cause an adult to do the same.
At the first glimpse of anti-sex work researcher Dominique Roe-Sepowitz on screen, a round of boos erupted from the audience at Tucson’s Screening Room on Friday, where they were watching a preview of director PJ Starr‘s upcoming documentary, Manifesting Monica…
Normally, I don’t like to read books on Kindle, but in the case of Samantha Cole’s breezy, brilliant sex-positive chronicle, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, I practically gulped it down over the…
A recent article in Forbes by the magazine’s associate editor, Thomas Brewster, accuses the popular money-transfer giant Cash App of being the “payment tool of choice” for sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material (CSAM), aka, child pornography. However, Brewster’s…
At the request of this writer, editors at The Washington Post issued a correction to an April 8 review of former California prosecutor Maggy Krell’s self-serving memoir, Taking Down Backpage. The review by E.J. Graff, managing editor of WaPo’s “Monkey…
Granted, the Jonestown Massacre may not be the perfect metaphor for Washington Post scribe E.J. Graff’s recent review of California prosecutor Maggy Krell’s book, Taking Down Backpage. Still, the way Graff blindly glugs down Krell’s self-serving account of the latter’s…
To judge from the responses of sex workers and their allies, John Oliver’s recent segment on the sex trade for his HBO show Last Week Tonight was a moonshot home run of the type Reggie Jackson used to belt out…
The most dangerous place in the world for a hypocrite or any other kind of phony is in Elizabeth Nolan Brown‘s sights. A senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, Brown vivisects bad ideas and politicians like a coroner on crack….
If you think humanity is far from the days of burning witches and examining animal innards for omens, check out the Jan. 14 edition of cable news show Dan Abrams Live, in which veteran TV reporter Dan Abrams interviews former California…
Like the proverbial resident of a mental hospital who claims to be Napoleon, former California prosecutor Maggy Krell crafts a grotesquely self-congratulatory alternate reality in her new book, Taking Down Backpage: Fighting the World’s Largest Sex Trafficker, wherein Krell self-identifies…
In an apparent act of unintentional irony, just three days before International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a statement announcing the conclusion of its investigation into…
