7 CASE STUDIES ON SEX WORK/SEX TRAFFICKING
This is a short list that you can read through that looks at 6 different cases of our celebrities, wealthy people, non profits, the media, and other powerful forces look at sex work and sex trafficking. This is what I came up with at the top of my head. I will try to focus more on my blog, redraft certain things, and add some powerpoint presentations going forward.
Border Patrol threatens a 14 year old boy and tries to convict him of sex trafficking his 9 year old sister
Imagine how much trauma these children will now live with.
Galexia's 9-year-old daughter, Julia Isabel Amparo Medina, attends fourth grade at Nicoloff Elementary School and her 14-year-old son, Oscar Amparo Medina, attends ninth grade at San Ysidro High School. Both are passport-holding U.S. citizens.
Galaxia says CBP officers accused her daughter of lying about her identity. Officers told the girl she didn’t look like the girl in her passport card picture.
Julia Medina told NBC 7 that CBP officers accused her of being someone else, her cousin Melanie. The children said officers also accused Oscar Medina of smuggling and other crimes which he said he didn’t understand.
“My daughter told her brother that the officer told her that if she admitted that she was her cousin, she would be released soon so she could see her mom,” Galaxia said.
“I was scared. I was sad because I didn't have my mom or my brother. I was completely by myself,” Julia Medina said. She said she woke up several times throughout the night, sad because she wasn’t with her family.
Galaxia said officers made Oscar Medina sign a document that said his little sister was his cousin.
“That is not true,” Galaxia said. “She is my daughter. He was told that he would be taken to jail and they were going to charge him for human trafficking and sex trafficking.”
Oscar told NBC 7 he felt terrible for signing the document. He said he just wanted to see his sister.
https://reason.com/2019/03/22/border-agents-detained-a-9-year-old-us-c/
Layleen Polcano
This is what “reform” and treating sex workers like “victims” looks like. The “diversion court” is still criminalization, requires police to still rape women/teens in order to arrest them and “prove” prostitution. It demands and fines sex workers to get counseling, and if they don’t they are imprisoned. This is what “end demand” mostly fights for. This is the reform they have accomplished over the years.
TOO LITTLE IS known about the death of Layleen Polanco. This we know: The 27-year-old Afro-Latina transgender woman was found dead in solitary confinement last Friday afternoon at Rikers Island Jail. Polanco was being held on $500 bail owing to misdemeanor charges for a prostitution-related offense, in addition to the lowest-level drug charge. The New York medical examiner has not yet determined the cause of her death.
Polanco’s death sits at the intersection of some of the criminal justice system’s worst excesses.
These sparse details alone are enough to know that Polanco’s death sits at the intersection of some of the criminal justice system’s worst excesses: the criminalization of sex workers and the policing of trans women of color that it entails; the cash bail system; the use of solitary confinement; and the fact that institutions like Rikers exist at all.
……..
“[A]ll of these supposed reforms didn’t do anything for Layleen,” saidJessica Peñaranda, director of movement building at the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center and a Decrim NY steering committee member, in a statement. “The clients we serve view diversion court and criminal court as one in the same: The trauma and violence of interacting with court officers, police officers, judges and district attorneys who have authority to send you to jail, all of that is no different.”
Read more https://theintercept.com/2019/06/13/layleen-polanco-death-rikers-trans-woman-sex-work/
https://twitter.com/mynameisjro/status/1138220447240269826
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/13/justice_for_layleen_polanco_community_demands
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xgdyq/layleen-polanco-sex-work-rikers-trans-woman-death
MoreThanMe
Propublica has been following this story and I recognize EVERYONE TO DO THE SAME. Research human trafficking organizations, find what what they did, demand answers and accountability. DO NOT JUST BELIEVE THEIR PRETTY WORDS. The cause of human trafficking is VERY PROFITABLE and often NOTHING IS DONE TO HELP THE PEOPLE THEY CLAIM TO WANT TO HELP.
https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-me-founder-and-ceo-katie-meyler-resigns
https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-me-shuts-down
Katie Meyler, the former CEO of this organization was actually homeless when she decided to create the organization. She used a underaged black girl in her ads to make money and spread her message. She was promoted by celebrities and the media. She won awards. She became rich from the organization.
Her partner in the organization raped the girls, and had HIV. He gave some of the girls HIV. She knew and did NOTHING. She told people that it was what the girls were used to anyway. The “school” she set up to “save” the girls from prostitution was not accredited and they didn’t work with local officials in Africa. Abigail, (the girl in the video she used) was forced back into the streets to support herself.
This is exploitation.
https://youtu.be/EMALaKlNJ0Q?list=PL8_lN8JGpWGwZvYx_q5zTbr_kVNlfM6V_
Border Patrol Agent MURDERS 4 sex workers
As a child migrant, I can tell you border patrol has a culture of violence against migrants. Juan David Ortiz who was a border patrol agent, murdered 4 sex workers for being sex workers. Ortiz understood that the job of police IS to eliminate prostitution aka sex workers. Ortiz has worked for the agency for 10 years….To give you an idea of how long that is… Border Patrol has only existed for 16 years.
Sex workers are often told to shut up. The police will “eliminate demand” and save us. We are supposed to be grateful despite the history of violence and rare, almost ZERO accountability from law enforcement.
Prosecutors say that Ortiz thought it was his duty to clean up the streets of Laredo, a border town in Southwest Texas. So he began picking up alleged sex workers, driving them to remote areas, and then shooting them in the head, prosecutors say.
"He deemed them to be the scum of the earth, and he wanted to move forward and clean the streets of these types of people," Webb County District Attorney Isidro Alaniz said at a news conference last month announcing the charges.
Ortiz thought law enforcement wasn't doing enough to stop prostitution in Laredo, so he believed he was "doing a service" by killing the women, Ortiz said.
NYPD Prostitution Ring
7 New York police officers (three sergeants, two detectives and two officers) were caught protecting and running a prostitution and gambling ring. Police (under criminalization) benefit, because they can profit from turning the other way. Sex workers remain silent because they and their labor are still criminalized…..even if you were to criminalize the “buyers” and “pimps” and “traffickers”, they would do the same thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/nyregion/nypd-gambling-prostitution.html
The leaders of the operation were retired NYPD detective Ludwig Paz and his wife, Arelis Peralta, who is a former prostitute……
Paz is not the first NYPD officer to run a prostitution ring. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has done extensive research on officers who have either solicited prostitution or ran their own operations.
https://reason.com/2019/05/23/a-retired-nypd-pleads-guilty-to-running-a-prostitution-ring/
Yang Song
https://twitter.com/emma_a_whitford/status/970830713040842753
NYPD later said that Yang fell from an apartment building on 40th Road while police were attempting to arrest her for allegedly engaging in sex work. These were among the sparse details they released after Yang’s death the following morning. She was 38. The NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, assigned to deaths in custody, would investigate
…….
Vice stings targeting so-called “massage parlors” exploded in recent years, primarily in Chinese immigrant neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn. According to a 2017 report from the Urban Institute and the Legal Aid Society, arrests of Asian-identified people in New York City charged with both unlicensed massage and prostitution increased by 2,700 percent between 2012 and 2016. Yang herself was arrested and charged with prostitution on September 27th, two months before her death, during a vice operation in the same building. That case was open when she fell, the next court date scheduled for December 1st.
….
Yang confided in her mother about reporting the assault to the police, Shi said. Yang also described the assault to attorney Mingli Chen, her immigration lawyer and informal legal consult, and told him that she filed a complaint against the man with the NYPD. “She was asked to go to precinct to point out a person in the lineup,” Chen told The Appeal. “She told me immediately she was able to point out the guy. Seemingly she never received any follow-up.” The NYPD denied the existence of a formal complaint filed by Yang.
Chinese massage parlor workers in Robert Kraft Case in Florida
The women were all charged with prostitution after the police went public to tell everyone that they were “human trafficking victims”, and that they had “saved them”. They had told the establishment that there was a bomb threat, they installed cameras. And for 6 months watched them. Police went in and out and got handjobs on the tax payers dime. These police officers had been trained by “sex trafficking organizations” how to “save them”, they have been trained on the “end demand”/nordic model. They did asset forfeitures of their property and the money of the women. They took away their phones, and jailed them. They threatened to release the sex tapes they illegally got of the women to the public. They gave the women’s photos and full names for the media to post.
https://deadspin.com/when-the-robert-kraft-case-fell-apart-the-women-were-l-1834857778
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/robert-kraft-sex-work-trafficking-florida-823153/
https://thinkprogress.org/releasing-robert-kraft-tape-would-harm-sex-workers-ffa106b5a689/
https://reason.com/2019/02/22/robert-krafts-prostitution-arrest-is-par/