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Comment by pergadad | Hacker News Reader

95% seems like an awfully wrong guess. There is a lot of forced prostitution, then a huge great area of those that for various reasons have no other option (from abusive boyfriend to immigration status to economic factors) and then a very small crust of voluntary sex workers, mostly at the high-end of the market. The ratio between these three will vary massively between country/region/city but in any case it is often difficult to identify who is victim and who is voluntary because the world is complex. (Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?)

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Could you cite sources for these claims?

The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know.

You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities.

I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.

As someone who spent 10 years in the business trafficking is indeed rare. In my experience it is mostly through organized crime in LA, SF, and NYC.

Almost all Asian AAMPs are trafficked women. They are snuck in on ships and forced to work to pay their “debt”.

Outside of this women work in prostitution because they need money. A lot of people demonize this work saying how terrible it is, but the reality is an hours work is a days wages at a normal job. That’s very tempting.

Internet ads and online advertising got women off the streets and made things incredibly safer. Women could focus on screening clients instead of attracting them, increasing safety.

Yes, the world is complex, but OPs argument is pretty specific: That anti-trafficking rhetoric and anti-prostitution activism is largely overlapping, that it denies, by and large, the very gray areas you refer to, that it conflates the idea of consensual sex work with trafficking, and in the process has little regard for either consensual sex workers or sex trafficking victims.

> Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?

The first case is distinct because it's a real case of illicit external force. For the other two, it's worth pointing out that in the US, the baseline is still "arrest", "criminal charges", and "publishing your name and picture online". This happens with the silent consent of both the US public as well as anti-trafficking activists, who neither speak out against this kind of policing, nor stop cooperating with police departments.

The life of a woman needing to pay for diabetes medication for her daughter does not not improve by being arrested, nor does she welcome her source of income disappearing because of restrictive laws.

Have a look at local news reports of "anti-trafficking stings". It's always the same story. Dozens unnamed woman arrested, rarely even a claim that a victim was identified; and OP is right; the definition of what counts as trafficking is wide enough that even in those cases where it is claimed that a victim was found, it needs to be questioned whether the person actually welcomed the rescue.

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