There are retweets of sex work abolitionist groups, @SharedHope and @RestoreCorps. There are also tweets like this one: https://twitter.com/RescueForensics/status/25676583846244352...
"We are building forensics to fight human trafficking online - abolitionists must bring the fight to the internet!"
It looks like Rescue Forensics has aligned itself with sex work abolitionist groups that pose as anti-trafficking groups. And who have huge incentives to inflate the problem by many orders of maginitude, to create government funding for their groups and for this kind of work.
An aisde: as of today, @RescueForensics has 6,231 followers but only 74 tweets. The first 6,000 or so of these followers look like they were bought. Some might say that gives some indication of the ethics of this company.
If you look at most human trafficking law enforcement efforts, the vast majority is arrests of adult men and women who are consensually buying and selling sex. This is incorrectly labeled "sex trafficking" by law enforcement and the media. But the federal definition of sex trafficking is coercion, or of someone under 18.
It is unconscionable for law enforcement and abolitionists to use stings to go after the large, easy targets of consenting adults to pump up the numbers and money, while the horror of real human trafficking takes real investigative effort, time, and money, but doesn't have large numbers to as easily justify this effort.
The real solution is to decriminalize consensual adult sex work (like in New Zealand and parts of Australia), allowing everyone to focus on the true horrors of human trafficking. But that goes against the goals of the religious-based abolitionist groups, which have hijacked the human trafficking discussion and funding to push their anti-sex agenda.
There are retweets of sex work abolitionist groups, @SharedHope and @RestoreCorps. There are also tweets like this one: https://twitter.com/RescueForensics/status/25676583846244352... "We are building forensics to fight human trafficking online - abolitionists must bring the fight to the internet!"
It looks like Rescue Forensics has aligned itself with sex work abolitionist groups that pose as anti-trafficking groups. And who have huge incentives to inflate the problem by many orders of maginitude, to create government funding for their groups and for this kind of work.
An aisde: as of today, @RescueForensics has 6,231 followers but only 74 tweets. The first 6,000 or so of these followers look like they were bought. Some might say that gives some indication of the ethics of this company.
There are two other projects that are doing similar work in scraping sex work ads in the US. The first is MEMEX - a DARPA project. http://www.wsj.com/articles/sleuthing-search-engine-even-bet...
The second is ASPASIA project, an academic project out of University of Washington. ASPASIA is very sex worker friendly, and understands the difference between human trafficking and consensual adult sex for money. https://github.com/uwescience/incubator/wiki/aspasia-project https://twitter.com/aspasia_project
If you look at most human trafficking law enforcement efforts, the vast majority is arrests of adult men and women who are consensually buying and selling sex. This is incorrectly labeled "sex trafficking" by law enforcement and the media. But the federal definition of sex trafficking is coercion, or of someone under 18.
It is unconscionable for law enforcement and abolitionists to use stings to go after the large, easy targets of consenting adults to pump up the numbers and money, while the horror of real human trafficking takes real investigative effort, time, and money, but doesn't have large numbers to as easily justify this effort.
The real solution is to decriminalize consensual adult sex work (like in New Zealand and parts of Australia), allowing everyone to focus on the true horrors of human trafficking. But that goes against the goals of the religious-based abolitionist groups, which have hijacked the human trafficking discussion and funding to push their anti-sex agenda.
For more information, see my blog https://www.escortingadvice.org, or follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/EscortingAdvice.