Amnesty international

[WarriorN]

By Julie Bindel

An important read.

spectator.us/topic/amnesty-international-travesty-trans-rights-ireland/?fbclid=IwAR3rNgRCKFS50BxNfhH6zw9U_48aqk8eaEogLMZ7rnS0wS7ciaZt5Ou7cM4

@MargaritaPie

"Pimps sell sexual services."

I think you'll find pimps generally don't offer to give oral sex or whatever in exchange for money (this is what prostitutes or sex workers do). Pimps do things like run brothels, rent rooms to sex workers, make websites (yes, the legal definition of "pimping" is very broad and includes providing any service for prostitutes for payment), driving a sex worker to/from a client etc etc.

I think you will find that this is selling sexual services.

Similarly agents and publicists sell books.

Do you mean that pimps don’t perform sexual services?

"Do you know the relative ratios of consensual to trafficked"

There was a large scale operation called Operation Pentameter Two to find traffickers and trafficked victims. Six months involving all UK police forces and specialist agencies doing surprise raids on known and suspected brothels all over the UK. In summary if the aim was to find traffickers and trafficked victims it was a complete failure.

www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails

Maybe, just maybe, the number of trafficked victims may be exaggerated by some tabloids or politicians? I have read tabloid articles that make a big deal over trafficked victims but offer no evidence for this other than "there are prostitutes who are foreign, that must mean they are trafficked!".

I do think the number of sex-trafficked victims in the UK is greatly exaggerated, yes.

From that link:

Augsburg’s chief police inspector, Helmut Sporer, says that the huge growth of the sex industry post-legalisation has fuelled a rising demand for women. German authorities have no data on the number of women who work in the domestic sex trade, but conservative estimates suggest 400,000. According to Sporer, more than 90% of these women come from south-east Europe and Africa, and half are under 21.

“The majority don’t conform to the profile of the self-employed sex worker. They speak no German – or only very basic German. They have a limited education and they are travelling abroad for the first time. Many don’t even know which city they are in,” says Sporer, who says that all these factors make it likely that many are not working voluntarily in prostitution.

Re Op Pent. Two- In the UK at least, I am curious why 6 months involving every police force surprise raiding every known suspected brothel, for the task of finding traffickers and their victims, was a complete failure? Some police forces actually made zero arrests (they didn't find any reason to arrest anyone, and were caught making up arrest figures possibly out of embarrassment).

Should we have an Operation Pentameter Three and have every police force in the UK raid every suspected brothel again to find traffickers and victims, if you are sure there are so many out there?

@MargaritaPie

"Pimps sell sexual services."

I think you'll find pimps generally don't offer to give oral sex or whatever in exchange for money (this is what prostitutes or sex workers do). Pimps do things like run brothels, rent rooms to sex workers, make websites (yes, the legal definition of "pimping" is very broad and includes providing any service for prostitutes for payment), driving a sex worker to/from a client etc etc.

Pimps exploit the bodies of women and children and live of their earnings. Usually pimps get their claws into them as they are vulnerable, desperate or their protection is absent or severed in the case of children. It is not symbiotic, it is parasitic.

Funny about investigations. Police couldn't seem to do much for the girls who were abused in Rotherham and other places too. These victims who nobody can seem to identify, never mind help, seem to have something in common that I can't seem to put my finger on.

Many people trying to normalise this exploitation. What is that about?

Obviously people have different views on the topic of sex work, but Amnesty's approach seems atleast partly ideological and based on the idea that there can be a clear line between consensual and non-consensual sex work.

They say "You cannot enter this debate without recognising that it is often women and men who live on the outskirts of society who are forced into sex work. It may be their only way to earn a living. Decriminalizing their work does not mean condoning a world which leads them onto the streets. "

Others would say that they were not 'led', but pushed onto the streets, and therefore their work is not consensual and that paid sex work by its nature cannot be consensual. We could argue all day about the ins and outs of sex work, but the point is that Amnesty have clearly taken a side on a very contentious issue.

However, there is no 'pragmatic approach' defence for repeatedly tweeting 'Trans Women are Women' The slogan effectively says "Women must accept gender oppression and give up the language they need to protect their rights".

You can't claim to be protecting all human rights if you are espousing an ideology that limits the human rights of women.

Just for clarity, a 'sex based right' is a right that is relied on by one sex but not the other, for instance access to the MAP during a pandemic. You can argue about what those rights are, and you can argue that sometimes those rights need to be balanced against other's competing rights. That is the difficult path that people who work in Human Rights have to tread.

Amnesty just outright rejects sex based analysis.

It now just seems to be a lobbying organisation for a set of tribal beliefs.

Amnesty went off the rails when it stopped focusing on political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and started trying to set up a very particular and, to be completely frank, western set of ideological rights as being the only one that should be allowed.

And not really even a western view, but a very specific sort of western view, because actually quite a few of their ideological positions, including approach to sex work, are controversial even in western countries.

It's always interesting to me that this group - the woke left, or woke liberals, I don't really know what else to call them - are so upset by historical colonialism they seem willing to treat it as somehow deeply different than other historical interactions across time and space, and as completely morally bankrupt - but at the same time feel justified in using political pressure to impose their own ideological views on other cultures.