City, state leaders join forces to end sex trade
This is going on nationwide including in Phoenix led by Ms. McCain and many others.
(As usual children implied when most all arrests are consenting adult that have nothing to do with any children or any forced "trafficking" Under current trafficking guidelines, you can even be charged with trafficking yourself as happened to a woman in Fairbanks, Alaska.)
"Demand Abolition’s objective is so explicit it’s quite literally in their name; they seek to completely abolish all commercial sexual exchange, including the voluntary exchange that comprises the vast, vast majority of the industry."
Article:
With the sex-for-hire trade increasingly shifting to the Internet, a Cambridge advocacy group brought together dozens of high-tech volunteers for a series of weekend workshops aimed at giving law enforcement new tools to combat human trafficking.
Tasked with developing software programs and apps for everything from monitoring John chat rooms, compiling Top 100 lists of prostitution customers and promoters and enabling police to record real-time arrest information on their cellphones, approximately 100 techies broke into nine teams at District Hall on the waterfront Saturday and yesterday as part of an initiative run by Cambridge-based Demand Abolition and sponsored by Attorney General Maura Healey and Mayor Martin J. Walsh.
Cici Gordon, head of operations for Demand Abolition, part of a movement to eradicate the country’s illegal sex trade by targeting the customers, said the volunteers hard at work on their laptops included businessmen, students and even just people “interested in the issue.”
Healey said most people likely don’t realize there are sex slaves in Massachusetts as young as 12 years old.
“For those who are buying sex, I just want you to know, you are exploiting somebody’s mother, sister, daughter, brother. ... It’s as simple as that. We need to end the demand,” Healey said during a break in the event. “As we do our investigations and prosecutions, we will benefit from some of the technological innovations.
“One of the problems we have is this is such an underground industry. So much of it happens online,” she said. “It is different these days. It is not the case that there is a physical location, like a Combat Zone, in one area of a neighborhood or a city. Instead, a lot of the sex buying is happening online, which makes it in some sense harder to track. You’re dealing with fake profiles, fake names ... real efforts to disguise identity.”
Walsh, who has gone as far as the Vatican to speak out against human trafficking, told the crowd at the Social Justice Hackathon, “This isn’t treated as a joke anymore and this isn’t a victimless crime. It’s exploitation and abuse.”
Reader Comment:
I'm disappointed this article doesn't even mention the huge online backlash against the premises of this event. The organizations behind #hacktrafficking4good are known within social justice circles to spread misinformation as well as squelching dissenting, but informed voices. There are also a great number of us within the civic tech scene who are extremely uncomfortable creating what amounts to surveillance and pre-crime tech for policing due to the unintended consequences that almost always come from these kinds of projects. Lives are literally at stake and it's important that our technological interventions don't put even more people at risk.
Furthermore, the theory of change put forward by organizations like Demand Abolition are majorly problematic and opposed by organizations such as Amnesty International, the ACLU, the World Health Organization, and others. Human trafficking is a real and serious issue, but it's unlikely that truly effective efforts were served this weekend. #hacktrafficking4change, and the larger CEASE Boston initiative it's a part of, may in fact be a step backwards towards ending human trafficking.
Here's a well informed blog post that bubbled up this weekend with supporting links to a great many articles and data from reputable sources: http://tinabringmetheaxe.kinja.com/h...ood-1754851808
Dave notes above link is excellent exposing the nonsense game of the victim and end demand industries lies.
http://www.bostonherald.com/business..._end_sex_trade