Is prostitution repugnant if the sex workers are robots?

The Guardian has the story:
Houston mayor pushes back against proposed 'robot brothel'
Sylvester Turner said the city is reviewing ordinances after Kinky S Dolls said it intends to open a ‘love dolls brothel’ there

"A Canadian company wants to open a so-called “robot brothel” in Houston, but is getting pushback from officials and community groups, with the mayor saying the city is reviewing its ordinances to determine if they address public safety and health concerns potentially associated with the business.

"Mayor Sylvester Turner says he’s not trying to be the “moral police” but that this is not the type of business he wants opening in the city.

"Kinky S Dolls says it’s opening a “love dolls brothel” in Houston. It opened a similar venue in Toronto in 2017.
...
"Elijah Rising, a Houston-based not-for-profit focused on ending sex trafficking, has started an online petition asking the business be kept out of the city. "
**********

The expressed concern about sex trafficking reminds of cases in which people have been prosecuted (in England and Canada) for importing sex dolls that resemble children, under laws against child pornography that are intended to fight trafficking in children.

I'm further reminded of the Mencken quote defining Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having fun. (Apparently what he actually wrote is very slightly different from what I remembered.)  Perhaps this applies in some cases to the definition of repugnance also.

Repugnance in Malaysia: sex and punishment

Malaysia is a complicated place: here's a story from the Guardian, of judicial caning in Malaysia, and objections to it, partly because the caning was semi-public.

Women caned in Malaysia for attempting to have lesbian sex
Rare punishment was carried out in a courtroom and witnessed by up to 100 people

"Two women found guilty of attempting to have sex have been caned in Malaysia’s conservative north-eastern state of Terengganu, in the first punishment of its kind.

"The two women, aged 22 and 32, were caned six times each in the Terengganu sharia high court just after 10am, after the sentence was read out.

"The caning was carried out in the courtroom and was witnessed by up to 100 people, including the public.

"While women in Malaysia have been caned for sexual offences in the past, such as adultery, rights activists say this is the first time two women have been caned for attempting to have sex.

“The punishment was shocking and it was a spectacle,” Thilaga Sulathireh, an activist from the Malaysian rights group Justice for Sisters who was in court on Monday told the Guardian, “For all intents and purposes it was a public caning.”

Prostitution, brothels and police corruption in NYC

The NY Times has the story:
Brothels, Gambling and an Ex-Detective Mastermind: Officials Detail N.Y. Police Scandal

"It was a sweeping and complex criminal enterprise: brothels in Brooklyn, where 15-minute sexual encounters added up to more than $2 million in profits in a 13-month period, and nail salons in Queens, where managers, runners and agents placed bets in an old-school numbers racket.

And the mastermind was a retired New York City police detective who recruited at least seven police officers acting as foot soldiers, according to court documents charging the group on Thursday."

...

Here's an example of the strategic cat and mouse game that used the inside information of the "ex-detective mastermind":

"He knew that undercover officers investigating prostitution are not allowed to expose their genitals during their interactions with suspects, and so he made a rule to check new customers of the brothels: He insisted that the men “undress and allow themselves to be fondled to pass the brothel’s security screening,” the Queens district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the officers and dozens of civilians, said."

Politico summarizes the Backpage story

Here's an article for those who haven't been following this first amendment/prostitution/human trafficking story...

The Sex-Trafficking Case Testing the Limits of the First Amendment
How a couple of crusading journalists made a fortune selling adult escort ads and in the process became unlikely and widely reviled First Amendment advocates.
By PAUL DEMKO July 29, 2018

Many of the people quoted focus on the motivations of the protagonists (get rich, versus defend the First Amendment press freedoms...). I wonder what role if any those questions will play in the legal proceedings.


Here are my other posts about  Backpage and related matters.

Repugnance watch: referendum proposes to end (some) legal prostitution in Nevada

The November ballot will have a referendum on prostitution in two Nevada counties where it is currently legal. The WSJ has the story:

Is the Party Over for Nevada’s Legal Brothels? Possibility of a Ban Looms
Referendum measures, if passed, would outlaw nine bordellos in two Nevada counties as women’s advocates take on working conditions for prostitutes

"A coalition of women’s advocacy groups in Nevada has undertaken referendum initiatives against legal prostitution in Lyon and Nye counties, opposite corners of the state that are home to about half of the state’s brothels.
...
"Nevada began legalizing prostitution on a county basis in 1971, the only state to have done so. Seven of the state’s 16 counties have licensed bordellos; prostitution remains illegal in populous Clark County including Las Vegas, and Washoe County including Reno.

"Women’s activists said they began seeking the bans last year after hearing about prostitutes being assaulted at the brothels. “These are all areas of sexual harassment and assault within the workplace, which is why this is a part of the #MeToo movement,” said Melissa Holland, executive director of Awaken, a Reno women’s nonprofit that teamed with other groups to push for referendums.
...
"Frederick Fabian, manager at the Desert Club brothel in Battle Mountain, Nev., which hasn’t been targeted for a ban, said illegal prostitution is a dangerous profession while legalized prostitution isn’t. “The cathouses and brothels are regulated by the county sheriff and the health facilities,” he said."

Technology, diversity and money in modern pornography

The fashion section of the NY Times recently ran a story on how technology such as webcams has democratized the pornography industry, in part by allowing people to produce their own material:
‘Who Gets to Be Sexy?’
Technology has made it possible for just about anyone to shoot, direct and star in their own porn films. Women are leading the new guard.

The url is as informative as the headline:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/style/porn-women-nonbinary-queer.html

Given the concern about how monetary payments interact with various kinds of  transactions to make them repugnant (e.g. money is what turns sex into prostitution), I was struck by this quote, about money's coercive power:

"It’s harder and harder to argue that porn performers are desperate people lured in by easy cash and coerced into submission. There’s just too little money in it — and women have to work too creatively to make it — for that to stand."

The article--in the fashion section of the newspaper no less--is itself a signal of changing views about pornography as a repugnant market.

Abelard and Heloise and sexual harassment in the Academy...

At the same time as some sexual repugnances are diminishing (e.g. same sex marriage), other kinds of sexual liaisons, such as those between college faculty and undergraduate students  now meet with increased disapproval and regulation.  A recent article in the Boston Review tries to put that in historical perspective:

The Erotics of Mentorship, by Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran

"In twelfth-century France, the prominent logician and theologian Abelard and his pupil Heloise famously struggle, in a series of letters, to determine whether the bond between them is intellectual or romantic."
**********

Here's Wikipedia on Abelard, and on Heloise. I hadn't remembered the details of their affair, but the outcome was quite drastic for both of them. Abelard continued to teach for much of his life, which wasn't so easy.

See my earlier post

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Faculty-student liasons repugnant at Yale

From the Yale alumni magazine: University bans faculty-student sex 

More Backpage (.com) news

From the Washington Post:
Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleads guilty in three states, agrees to testify against other website officials
"Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com whose name was conspicuously absent from an indictment of seven other Backpage officials unsealed Monday, has pleaded guilty in state courts in California and Texas and federal court in Arizona to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. In addition, he agreed to testify against the men who co-founded Backpage with him, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who remained in jail Thursday in Arizona on facilitating prostitution charges.

Backpage, in addition to hosting thinly veiled ads for prostitution since 2004, was accused of hosting child sex trafficking ads on its site and even assisting advertisers in wording their copy so they didn’t overtly declare that sex was for sale, federal investigators allege. In a remarkable three-paragraph admission in his federal plea agreement, Ferrer wrote that “I conspired with other Backpage principals … to find ways to knowingly facilitate the state-law prostitution crimes being committed by Backpage’s customers.

...

"Ferrer’s sudden capitulation launched a wild seven days for Backpage. A day after Ferrer’s first secret plea, the federal government arrested seven of Ferrer’s former colleagues, including Lacey and Larkin, and shut down Backpage’s websites in the U.S. and around the world. ...

"Then on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law “FOSTA,” the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, a bill inspired by the stories of children being prostituted on Backpage..."

**********************

And here's a story from Quartz that follows the work of economists researching the (not all bad) effects of internet marketplaces for prostitution.

The unintended consequences of a crackdown on sites selling sex work

Backpage.com, seized by the FBI and indicted by the Department of Justice

The latest development in the legal battle of Backpage.com, an online marketplace for sex and, apparently, trafficking in women and children, has resulted in the closing of the site.

On April 6 2018 the content of the site was replaced with a notice beginning “backpage.com and affiliated websites have been seized as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, with analytical assistance from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.” 
The accompanying indictment (https://www.justice.gov/file/1050276/download )suggests that the proprietors of Backpage.com may have helped write the site’s content, and thus not be protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act. 

In a parallel development, in March (of 2018) the Senate passed (by a vote of 97 to 2) and forwarded to the President for signature the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, as previously passed by the House of Representatives. It amends the Communications Act of 1934, “to  clarify  that  section  230  of  such  Act  does  not  prohibit  the  enforcement  against providers and users of interactive computer services of Federal and State criminal and civil law relating to sexual exploitation of  children  or  sex  trafficking…” https://www.congress.gov/115/crpt/hrpt572/CRPT-115hrpt572-pt1.pdf .  

Ninth Circuit rules that laws against prostitution are not unconstitutional

The Washington Post has the best headline:
They argued that prostitution is a constitutional right. Nice try, said federal court.

"The Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in the case Lawrence v. Texas is one of its best-known in recent memory. In a 6-3 decision, the justices invalidated every remaining sodomy law in the United States, rendering the country’s archaic and largely unenforced bans on same-sex sexual activity unconstitutional. “Intimate conduct” between consenting adults was a fundamental right protected by the Constitution’s due process clauses, the high court found.
...
"The Erotic Service Provider Legal Education and Research Project, or ESPLERP, filed a lawsuit in federal court in 2015 claiming that, under the Supreme Court’s ruling, California’s anti-prostitution law violates the constitutional rights of prostitutes and clients to engage in consensual sexual activity. They even went so far as to say that the ruling barred laws criminalizing prostitution among adults and that paying for sex was a form of protected commercial speech.
...
"On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based court threw out the lawsuit, ruling that paying for sex didn’t count as the type of “intimate conduct” that Supreme Court justices had in mind.

“There is no constitutional rights to engage in illegal employment, namely, prostitution,” Judge Jane A. Restani wrote for the three-judge panel."
**********

Here's the story in the SF Chronicle:
Sex for sale is not a constitutional right, court rules

"Three former prostitutes, a would-be client and the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Educational and Research Project had argued that the high court, in striking down state laws against gay or lesbian sexual activity, recognized an adult’s right to engage in consensual sex without state interference. They maintained that the ruling extended to adults who consent to sex for a price.

"A panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco seemed receptive to that argument at a hearing in October, suggesting that the 1872 state ban might need closer scrutiny.

"One panel member said prostitution had been historically subjected to the same sort of moral disapproval that had once condemned gay sex, and might be more acceptable under the Supreme Court’s current view of individual rights. Another asked why it should be “illegal to sell something that it’s legal to give away.”

"But in a 3-0 ruling Wednesday, the panel ruled that the Supreme Court had not legalized prostitution with its 2003 decision.

"Although the scope of the ruling was not clear, the Supreme Court specified that the gay sex case “does not involve ... prostitution,” Jane Restani, a judge of the U.S. Court of International Trade temporarily assigned to the appeals court, wrote in the panel’s decision."

Change in Swedish law about sexual assault

From The Guardian:
Swedish rape law would require explicit consent before sexual contact

"Sweden is moving closer to making changes to its rape laws that would require people to get explicit consent before sexual contact.
...
"Under current Swedish law someone can be prosecuted for rape only if it has been proved that they used threats or violence. Under the proposal, rape could be proved if the accuser hadn’t given their explicit verbal agreement or clearly demonstrate their desire to engage in sexual activity.
...
"The proposal is part of a series of initiatives being put forward. Others would make it illegal for Swedes to hire prostitutes abroad, and increase sentences for offenders. Buying sex in Sweden is already illegal."

Legal prostitution and crime in the Netherlands

Here's a new paper on the relationship of legal prostitution and crime.

Street Prostitution Zones and Crime 
Paul Bisschop, Stephen Kastoryano, and Bas van der Klaauw,
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2017, 9(4): 28–63

Abstract: "This paper studies the effects of legal street prostitution zones on registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where these tippelzones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. Our difference-in-difference analysis of 25 Dutch cities between 1994-2011 shows that opening a tippelzone decreases registered sexual abuse and rape by about 30-40 percent in the first two years. For cities which enforced licensing in tippelzones, we also find reductions in drug-related crime and long-term effects on sexual assaults. Effects on perceived drug nuisance depend on the regulation system and the proximity of respondents to the tippelzone."
**********

See my earlier post, about a paper drawing similar conclusions from a different kind of natural experiment.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island

Repugnance watch: Appeals court in SF allows challenge to state law banning prostitution

The SF Chronicle has the story: Appeals court in SF allows challenge to state law banning prostitution

"Advocates of legalized prostitution took their challenge to California’s 145-year-old ban on commercial sex before a federal appeals court Thursday and appeared to get a hint that they’ll have another chance to show why the law should be cast aside.


The case was brought by three former prostitutes, a would-be client and the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Educational and Research Project. They contend the law violates the right to engage in consensual sex, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2003 ruling overturning criminal laws against gay sexual activity.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of Oakland rejected their argument last year, saying the high court ruling protected only intimate personal relationships, not commercial sex. He said the state had adequately justified the current law as a deterrent to violence against women, sexually transmitted diseases and human trafficking.

But at Thursday’s hearing, members of a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco suggested that the law might need closer scrutiny, given today’s less restrictive standards, as recognized by the high court, on sex between consenting adults.

“Why should it be illegal to sell something that it’s legal to give away?” asked Carlos Bea, one of the court’s most conservative judges.

Another conservative, Judge Consuelo Callahan, pointed out that prostitution, like gay sex, had historically been “subject to moral disapproval.” Just as in 2003, the current case, she said, “deals with individuals’ rights,” so why wouldn’t a ruling for the right to engage in prostitution be “a natural extension of Supreme Court precedent?”


Deputy Attorney General Sharon O’Grady, the state’s lawyer, responded that the difference is in “the commercial aspect ... the commodification of sex.”

“The state is not telling anyone who they can sleep with,” O’Grady said. It is prohibiting only a harmful category of business transactions, not intimate or enduring relationships, she said.

But Bea said the 2003 Supreme Court ruling might require the court to send the case back to White for another review, and perhaps even a full-scale trial, in which the state would have to show a compelling need for the law.

California made prostitution a crime in 1872, defining “every common prostitute” as a “vagrant” subject to a $500 fine and six months in jail. The law was updated in 1961 to reclassify prostitution or soliciting prostitution as disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

The Ninth Circuit left the state law intact in a 1988 ruling that said the relationship between a paid escort and a client “possesses few, if any, of the aspects of an intimate association.” H. Louis Sirkin, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the current case, argued that the ruling is no longer binding.

The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision established “the right of individuals to make their own individual choices as to how they want to behave” in consensual sexual relationships, Sirkin told the court. “If people put a dollar amount on it, that should not alter the intimate relationship.”

The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island

A scholarly paper and an easy to read-or-listen-to NPR report recount the period in which indoor prostitution was legal in Rhode Island.

The paper (forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies):

Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution:Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health  by Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah

Abstract:
Most governments in the world, including the United States, prohibit sex work.Given these types of laws rarely change and are fairly uniform across regions, our knowledge about the impact of decriminalizing sex work is largely conjectural.  We exploit the fact that a Rhode Island District Court judge unexpectedly decriminalized indoor sex work to provide causal estimates of the impact of decriminalization on the composition of the sex market, reported rape offenses, and sexually transmit-ted infections.  While decriminalization increases the size of the indoor sex market, reported rape offenses fall by 30 percent and female gonorrhea incidence declines by over 40 percent.
***********

And here's the NPR report and podcast:
Prostitution decriminalized: Rhode Island’s experiment

It's worth reading, with lots of interesting bits, and links.  Here is a section of the transcript that struck me:

"So, what did she and her colleague, Scott Cunningham at Baylor University, find?

The obvious: sex work exploded.

But then, the not so obvious: female gonorrhea rates statewide plummetedduring the overt decriminalization period.

"It goes down by around 40 percent," Shah said. "We spent a lot of time beating up the data and estimating these things in different ways, and we just can't get the results to go away, regardless of what we do, they're there.

A forty percent drop is a big deal in the world of public health. Shah thinks one of the reasons for this positive outcome is that legalization empowered sex workers to say no to riskier sexual behavior. She also wonders if newer people were entering the market and didn't have as big of an STD risk.

Still, perhaps even more surprising than the decrease in gonorrhea was another public health development. Sexual violence, or rapes, dipped dramatically. And this wasn't just amongst sex workers. It was across the board, according to FBI crime reports and jurisdiction level data.

"Reported rape offenses decreased by about 30 percent," Shah said.

That's another big decrease. Shah says, if anything, you'd expect rape to go up as when prostitution is decriminalized, sex workers are more likely to report rapes. She compared this to neighboring states, too. The drop was only in Rhode Island. So she examined other crime data in Rhode Island, like burglaries and murders, to see if there had just been a drop in crime generally.

It didn't match. So what happened?

That, she says is harder to answer. She has a theory, though, in that while she knows for some men rape is about power, "I think the argument that we're making is that that might not be true for all men, and for some, these activities could be substitutes."

In other words, for some men, rape may be just about sex. And if there's a legal and accessible market for it, the number of rapes in a community may go down.

This has not been a popular theory or study. And for many, it challenges the notion that rape is about violence and power, and not sex.

"So I consider myself a feminist, but I think this finding angers a lot of feminists," Shah said. "It is a very controversial idea."

And then there's that other controversial area: could decriminalization fuel sex trafficking and sexual exploitation?

"I definitely worry about that," Shah said. "It's an area that I would love to, to be able to do more with."

Still Shah believes there's no solid evidence yet that decriminalizing prostitution does lead to an increase in trafficking women and forcing them into prostitution.

"There is not good empirical evidence for this either way, and part of that is because it's just very, very hard to collect good data on numbers of human trafficking."

*************
Scott Cunningham has been studying black markets for some time, and I'm a long time fan of his work. Here are some of my earlier posts covering it.

Is it repugnant to write books for children and young adults that deal explicitly with sex?

Is it repugnant to write books for teenagers that deal explicitly with sex?  How about for four year olds?

From the NY Times:
Want Teenage Boys to Read? Easy. Give Them Books About Sex.
By DANIEL HANDLER
"I write books for children under the pen name Lemony Snicket, and I’ve noticed that when I go to Lemony Snicket events, the crowds are about evenly split between boys and girls. But I also write young adult books, and if more than one boy shows up at one of my teen book club events, it’s notable, if not a miracle. Something happens once a young man hits puberty.
...
"It is a gross generalization, of course, to say that what young men want to read about is sex — or to imply that the rest of us aren’t as interested — but it’s also offensive to pretend, when we’re ostensibly wondering how to get more young men to read, that they’re not interested in the thing we all know they’re interested in. There’s hardly any real sex in young adult books, and when it happens, it’s largely couched in the utopian dreams or the finger-wagging object lessons of the world we hope for, rather than the messy, risky, delicious and heartbreaking one we live in."
************
And from Haaretz:
Israelis debate: Is it okay for a children’s book to say sex is pleasurable?
The latest work by celebrated Israeli children's author Alona Frankel tells preschoolers how their parents do it. Israeli lawmakers are worried

"About two weeks ago the Knesset Committee on the Rights of the Child held a discussion on sex education for preschool children. The reason was the Hebrew-language book by the author and illustrator Alona Frankel: “A Book Full of Love – How Naftali Came Into the World.”
In the book, Frankel describes how people meet, fall in love and have sex – in one case leading to the birth of Naftali, the curly-haired protagonist of her stories whom every Israeli knows from her popular book published 40 years ago and since translated, “Once Upon a Potty.”
But MK Yifat Shasha-Biton (Kulanu), who heads the Committee on the Rights of the Child, said "How Naftali Came Into the World" raised many questions for her, including whether its descriptions were “a little too much for 3- and 4-year-olds.” Shasha-Biton objects mainly to the description of the sex act in the book, which was published two years ago by the Steimatzky publishing house.
As Naftali’s mother puts it in the book, “When people love each other, they want to be very close. We embraced, we caressed, we kissed, and it was sweet and pleasant. We were wrapped around each other and very close, when the penis on the body of Naftali’s father slipped into my vagina. And inside my body it was warm, enjoyable and exciting. A flood of sperm was ejected from him and became attached to a tiny egg that was waiting in the uterus, a special place inside my tummy.”
During the discussion, Frankel was attacked by the committee’s chairwoman, Shasha-Biton, who although she did not deny the importance of sex education for children, worried about the way it was being presented to preschoolers."

The (criminal) repugnance of even child-free child pornography

Sex with children is so abhorrent that a lot of things that look like sex with children are also illegal.   Here's a story from the Guardian that raises some interesting questions (although it is complicated by the fact that the defendant in question was convicted of several offenses. However the main one was importing a doll that looked like a child.

Man who tried to import childlike sex doll to UK is jailed
Doll ordered by [the defendant] from Hong Kong was seized at airport, sparking one of first prosecutions of its kind in Britain

"[the defendant], 49, was sentenced at Chester crown court on Friday to two years and eight months behind bars after pleading guilty to importing an indecent object, two counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing indecent images of children.

"Border Force officers, acting under the direction of the fast parcel joint border intelligence unit, identified a parcel labelled as a mannequin, but which was found to contain an obscene childlike doll.
...
"During his interview, [the defendant] admitted buying the doll to use for sex and for his own sexual gratification.
...
DC Andy Kent, of Cheshire constabulary’s paedophile and cyber-investigation unit, said: “Knowing child sex dolls exist and are available for sex offenders to buy is sickening.
...
"“This conviction is the first of its kind for Cheshire. Cases like these are also very rare across the country. However, I want to make it clear that importing a child sex doll is a criminal offence.

“Dobson should serve as an example to those who think they can also commit this crime for their own selfish needs.”
...
"Importation of the lifelike dolls is a relatively new phenomenon and there is no offence of possession, only importing an obscene article."
**************

Update: here's a similar case from Canada
Canadian court to determine whether child sex doll constitutes child pornography
The court case was brought after a man ordered a doll from Japan four years ago

Overturning old convictions (for being gay) in Germany

Here's the story from the Guardian (in the "better late than never" category):
Germany to quash convictions of 50,000 gay men under Nazi-era law
Parliament votes through measure overturning conviction and offering compensation to the estimated 5,000 men still alive

"Germany’s parliament have voted to quash the convictions of 50,000 gay men sentenced for homosexuality under a Nazi-era law that remained in force after the second world war.

After decades of lobbying, victims and activists hailed a triumph in the struggle to clear the names of gay men who lived with a criminal record under article 175 of the penal code.

"An estimated 5,000 of those found guilty under the statute are still alive. The measure overwhelmingly passed the Bundestag lower house of parliament, where chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition enjoys a large majority.

...

"Germany’s article 175 outlawed “sexual acts contrary to nature... be it between people of the male gender or between people and animals”. Sex between women was not explicitly illegal.

"Although it dated from 1871, it was rarely enforced until the Nazis came to power, and in 1935 they toughened the law to carry a sentence of 10 years of forced labour.

"More than 42,000 men were convicted during the Third Reich and sent to prison or concentration camps.

"In 2002, the government introduced a new law that overturned their convictions, but that move didn’t include those prosecuted after the second world war.

"The article was finally dropped from the penal code in East Germany in 1968. In West Germany, it reverted to the pre-Nazi era version in 1969 and was only fully repealed in 1994.

************

See my earlier posts on Turing's Law, named for Britain's 2003 posthumous pardon of Alan Turing.

Does criminalizing the purchase of sex endanger sex workers?

A lawyer who is also sex worker brings suit to overturn the law that makes purchasing sex a crime, on the grounds that this endangers prostitutes.

Northern Ireland sex worker bids to overturn ‘dangerous’ ban on hiring escorts
Laura Lee brings legal challenge to law that makes women ‘vulnerable to abuse’

"Sex worker and law graduate Laura Lee is steeling herself for a battle in Belfast’s high court that she believes could make European legal history. The Dublin-born escort is now in the final stages of a legal challenge to overturn a law in Northern Ireland that makes it illegal to purchase sex.

Not a single person in the region has appeared in court charged with trying to hire an escort, though Public Prosecution Service figures show that three are under investigation. The region is the first in the UK to make buying sex a crime. The law was introduced in 2014 by Democratic Unionist peer Lord Morrow and supported by a majority of members in the regional assembly.

But Lee will enter Belfast high court with her team of lawyers aiming to establish that the criminalisation of her clients violates her right to work under European human rights law. Since the law was established, Lee insists that the ban has put her and her fellow sex workers in more peril from potentially dangerous clients.

Just before flying out to address an international conference on sex workers’ rights in Barcelona this weekend, Lee told the Observer that most men currently seeking escorts in Northern Ireland no longer use mobile phones to contact her and her colleagues.

“They are using hotel phones, for example, to contact sex workers in Belfast rather than leaving their personal mobiles. This means if one of them turns violent there is no longer any real traceability to help the police track such clients down. Men are doing this because they fear entrapment and arrest due to this law.

“So in a sense the law is actually putting sex workers at greater risk than before, when there was some ability to trace and track down any client that was violent and abusive. The law to protect women in the sex trade has done the opposite of what it was intended to do. Every escort I know working in Belfast now insists on working side by side with another woman for protection. The law has not in any way reduced demand and supply, which is still the same. It has only driven the business further underground.”

...

"Lee’s Belfast legal battle is only the start of a Europe-wide campaign to overturn the model in which Scandinavian countries pioneered the outlawing of men buying sex. Lee’s next target is the Irish Republic, which, under new anti-trafficking laws, has introduced a similar ban aimed at criminalising clients.

“A win for us in Belfast will have a knock-on effect and set a precedent across Europe. If successful up north there will be a challenge in Dublin and sex workers across Europe can use the precedent to overturn the so-called ‘Nordic model’ in their countries,” she said."

An unconvincing denial of police murders of gay men in Chechnya

The Guardian has the story. File this under "unconvincing denials."

Chechen police 'have rounded up more than 100 suspected gay men'
Russian newspaper says it has evidence that at least three men have been killed 

"The report was denied by the spokesman of the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov, who suggested there were no gay people in the Muslim-majority region.
Ali Karimov said, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti: “It’s impossible to persecute those who are not in the republic.”
“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Karimov added."

Germany en route to annul historical convictions of gay men

Deutsche Welle has the story:
Germany set to annul historical convictions of gay men

"German men convicted on the basis of a 19th century law criminalizing homosexuality now have a chance at getting late justice in the wake of an expert study commissioned by the Anti-Discrimination Agency.

Their supposed crime was the same during the Nazi era as it was in the federal republic founded in 1949: They loved other men and had homosexual sex.

Those who were caught engaging in homosexual acts or who were denounced as homosexuals were spared no mercy by the state. The law containing the infamous Paragraph 175 outlawing sexual relations between men dates back to the 19th century, but it was applied especially zealously under Nazi rule. The law remained intact even after 1945. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, but Paragraph 175 was not abolished until 1994.

By that time, more than 50,000 men had been convicted for being gay, something that "violated the very core of their human dignity," said Christine Lüders, the head of the government's Anti-Discrimination Authority, in Berlin on Wednesday. At her side was Martin Burgi of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The legal expert has compiled a study on the rehabilitation of homosexuals convicted under the law. He's confident it can be done, saying there's no legal barrier to rehabilitating the men.

...

"For laypeople, it's hard to understand why men convicted under Paragraph 175 by the Nazis have been rehabilitated since 2002, while verdicts handed down in the post-war era are still being upheld. The logic is as appalling as it is banal: The Nazi dictatorship was declared an unjust state; the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, is based on democratic principles. That means the men who had the misfortune to be found guilty of homosexuality in the post-war era still have criminal records.

But Burgi says that "collective rehabilitation" of those affected by the law can be achieved with the help of social and democratic principles."

*************

Here's the Associated Press story from ABC: German Cabinet OKs plan to annul homosexuality convictions

"Germany's Cabinet on Wednesday approved a bill that would annul the convictions of thousands of gay men under a law criminalizing homosexuality that was applied zealously in post-World War II West Germany.

The decision also clears the way for compensation for those still alive who were convicted under the so-called Paragraph 175 outlawing sexual relations between men.

The legislation was introduced in the 19th century, toughened under Nazi rule and retained in that form by West Germany, which convicted some 50,000 men between 1949 and 1969.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969 but the legislation wasn't taken off the books entirely until 1994.

The bill approved Wednesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Cabinet of conservatives and center-left Social Democrats still requires parliamentary approval. "
********

This echoes recent events in England: see my earlier post on that

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Turing's law: UK posthumously pardons thousands of gay men