This smells like a bait and switch. It dangles ‘think about the children’ and subtly moves on to what looks like a general prostitution ban with no reference to age.
Also it calls for accelerating current practice among feminist activists to get law enforcement to shift blame and start to exclusively punish only men for prostitution. Which is funny because some of the same people will turn right around and insist that only the purveyors of drugs should be punished.
Regardless of how you feel about prostitution, (I personally feel we have no business going on a crusade with feminists against it with all the other things we celebrate) I would recommend against helping groups which use such shady tactics
Just a thought. If an adult male 18 years old, solicits sex from a 21-year-old prostitute, it used to be prostitution and both would be arrested if caught, now it’s sex trafficking - the man gets arrested and the woman gets counseling, a place in a shelter and food stamps, but if that same 18-year-old male solicits sex from a 17-year-old prostitute, it’s not only sex trafficking, now it’s child sex trafficking and he is forever branded as a pedophile. Same situation when an 18-year-old high school student gets a boob pic from his 17-year-old girlfriend – he’s now guilty of child porn as is sometimes also the girl who took and sent it, both are often branded as sex offenders and kiddie porn purveyors for life.
OTOH, hand if an 18-year-old man goes to the Bunny Ranch in NV, it’s perfectly legal, not necessarily right mind you, but legal. An adult male can also go to any of the so called “Gentlemen’s Clubs” (they used to call themselves strip clubs but I guess calling their patrons “gentlemen” gives it a veneer of respectability) and get a “lap dance” that is nothing less than a “dry hump” and it’s legal.
And if you own the New England Patriots….. jeeze IIRC, some people here tried to defend it as a nothing burger.
Don’t misunderstand that I am in anyway defending prostitution or sex trafficking - it’s a nasty soul crushing enterprise with the women, teenagers being the most vulnerable – runaways sometimes escaping physical and or sexual abuse at home and or with existing drug addictions being exploited, given false promises of a “better” life, promises of lots of money and all the drugs they want and being taken care of, or illegals, especially from China who thought they were coming here for a real job but end up in a “massage parlor” that is nothing more than a bordello where they are pretty much kept as prisoners. And of course child sex abuse, child prostitution and porn involving actual children is a very real problem but calling this a “a massive child sex trafficking sting” is not entirely accurate.
I have bouts of insomnia and sometimes am wide awake in the wee hours and find myself turning on the TV and channel surfing. Between 3 and 5 am you see a lot of sketchy stuff on cable, infomercials, televangelists, and other outright scams, but also commercials for phone sex and sex toys.
But one commercial really stands out. It is for a website called “We Are 18”. The commercial starts out with very young looking women in skimpy bikinis frolicking in a pool and the voice over saying something like “when my parents are out of town, I invite my friends over and things can get kind of wet and crazy”. The girl goes on to say “we are 18” but “wink-wink”, the inference is they are hot horney girls pretending to be 18 but are likely younger as they are still living at home with their parents but when their parents aren’t home….
This airs every day on cable TV.