At the Intersection of Loyalty, Rights, and Legitimate Reasons

Jennifer Worrel

Jennifer Worrel is a transplant from the Great Plains raising two sons and a husband in Metro Atlanta. Extremely likable until you get to know her, she remains a great invite to a dinner party. She prefers peeing in the woods to peeing on private planes and was once told by her husband that she is “way funnier online.” Writes about whatever interests her, she knows a little about a lot. For fun, she enjoys cooking from scratch and watching old Milton Friedman videos on YouTube. Jennifer's thoughts are her own and do not represent the views or position of any firm or affiliate she is lucky enough to associate with.

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32 Responses

  1. Damon says:

    I’m sure that the corporate effort was a massive success. Of the 30 plus years I’ve worked, I think I’ve had business cards for 1 job, maybe 2. Frankly I consider a “female centric” sex worker policy as sexist, and the probability of you, as you described yourself, as being a sex worker, is rather low. As to vax passports, well, welcome to the club. Did you not thing that that was going to be a “thing”? Wait to your car starts reporting data back to the cops. Many already do to the manufacturer and advertisers.Report

  2. CJColucci says:

    the probability of you, as you described yourself, as being a sex worker, is rather low.

    How ungallant. And how narrow a view of what people are into.Report

    • Damon in reply to CJColucci says:

      “probability dude, PROBABILITY. But maybe you’re more for “lets screen everyone”, you know, like they do to little old ladies at the airport? Sure COULD be terrorist’s, let’s give em an enhanced pat down! The receptionist was following a checklist, once that did not allow for any deviation, because people aren’t suppose to think and evaluate, just do what they are told.Report

  3. Dark Matter says:

    For a few years, whenever I went to the doctor I was asked if I have a safe place to stay and various “check for domestic abuse” questions. I’m huge, healthy, a guy, and have no symptoms of that. I’m the polar opposite of that profile.

    Ergo they were asking everyone. No matter how wildly inappropriate.

    We saw this in stores with carding people for alcohol for a while. Card everyone. No matter how stupid. After a while they changed it to “card if looks less than [x]”.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Dark Matter says:

      They’re asking everyone because of stories like the OP; because of people who get very, very upset at the idea that someone thinks they look like a hoo-er and that’s why they’re asking her specifically about it.

      If they ask everybody, it means that they aren’t profiling, they aren’t assuming, they aren’t being racist or gender-essentialist or heteronormative.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Dark Matter says:

      But it is also important to recognize that the profile isn’t absolute. There are large, healthy men who could be the victims of physical abuse. And who may be even more reluctant to report it or pursue help because of how atypical they are among victims.

      That doesn’t necessarily mean this approach is the right or best away to approach that… just that asking people outside the profile isn’t necessarily “wildly inappropriate.”Report

    • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

      Domestic abuse isn’t only something that happens to non-huge people or women, and it isn’t ‘wildly inappropriate’ to ask someone because they aren’t those things.

      You can perhaps make a bigger argument for ‘they shouldn’t ask if the patient has no symptoms’, but it is incredibly silly to complain about ‘doctors asking questions of their patients in an attempt to make sure everything is fine’. That’s a thing that needs to happen much more often, not less, as many people are much more likely to come forward with a concern when directly asked about it as opposed to vague ‘Do you have any problems I should know about?’.

      Having an actual checklist of ‘things that could be wrong’ and working down it is not a _bad_ thing, even if it does result in seemingly ‘inappropriate’ questions.Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    Dumb question: Are there numbers for how successful these questions have been?

    Like, if we’ve found that 100,000 people get asked this and there have been a grand total of 0 trafficked humans freed, then that’s one calculus.

    If we’ve found that 100,000 people get asked this and it uncovered a ring that freed up 20 trafficked humans, then that’s another.

    On a purely utilitarian level: Has this been demonstrated to have worked somewhere?Report

    • Den in reply to Jaybird says:

      Although you can easily flip that around by saying “do you really want to tell twenty people that we could have freed them from sex slavery, but didn’t because we didn’t want to inconvenience some white women”?Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

      A larger point is that sex slavery would be easier to combat if prostitution wasn’t illegal. Fear of going from the frying pan into the fire is a big part of how such slavery perpetuates.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        A larger point is that sex slavery would be easier to combat if prostitution wasn’t illegal. Fear of going from the frying pan into the fire is a big part of how such slavery perpetuates.

        Legalized prostitution really wouldn’t fix that.

        Prostitutes, in general, would be much better off if it was legal because of what you said, the obvious fact that prostitutes can’t currently go the police and have a rather large problem vetting clients. (Especially since we’ve decided to go after payment processing for them.) If it was legal, their business would be almost entirely safe.

        But people in sex slavery…can’t go to the police even if their ‘job’ is legal. Not just because they often are physically unable to, but they are often in countries illegally or have organized gangs that would go after them or their relatives, etc. Prostitution becoming legal doesn’t really fix their problems.(1)

        Prostitution being legal, however, would somewhat reduce the _demand_ for sex trafficking to start with. Right now, a good number of people visiting prostitutes don’t know or care if they are visiting someone who is in sex slavery. Make it legal, and…that changes things. Most people will, rather obviously, pick the legitimate business.

        Some people will not, because it’s cheaper, or they can get underaged people, or all sorts of reasons, but the demand _in general_ should go down. How much, I’m not sure, especially when we’re just talking about demand in the US.

        And in addition to that, it will stop letting sex slavery hide as prostitution. So…spotting it is easier.

        But will it stop it? No.

        1) And the same problems apply to people who are consensually prostitutes, but in the country illegally. Honestly, it applies to most people in the country illegally, but prostitutes would be exceptionally vulerableReport

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to DavidTC says:

          Fair point, having an immigration policy that did not penalize victims brought here against their will would also go a long way towards helping.Report

    • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

      On a purely utilitarian level: Has this been demonstrated to have worked somewhere?

      No, because it’s, very very obviously, being asked of the wrong people.

      Hotel rooms are not rented by people being sex trafficked. They are rented by the sex traffickers. Who travel with them. Duuuuh. (And plenty of the people being sex trafficked are obvious minors and in the country illegally and have no ID or credit card or money and all sorts of things that would make it extremely hard to rent a hotel room to start with, even if their owner allowed it.)

      To catch sex trafficing, the hotel would need to speak privately to the ‘thirteen-year-old daughter’ of the man renting a room, to make sure she’s not being trafficked. Not an adult woman by herself. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not, but it’s the actual place any such checks should be directed.

      So how could the hotel get it so wrong?

      Well, that’s what was asked of them by the organizations pushing this stuff.

      So why did those organizations get it so wrong?

      They didn’t. This sort of stuff is being pushed by conservative anti-feminist organizations who are trying to stop all prostitution, and honestly aren’t that bothered if it impacts woman traveling freely, and the entire ‘stopping sex trafficking’ is just their respectable premise.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

        When I’m traveling with my daughters and renting rooms, I have them stay in the car while I figure out where we’re going to be.

        If you’re serious about asking questions, either you don’t ask them at check in or you somehow force everyone to talk to the front desk. Not sure if that latter is even possible without a re-write of the fire codes which will occasionally result in lots of people dying.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Oh, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to try to ask questions like this. I was just saying that the hotel is asking literally the wrong people.

          And plenty of hotels are set up with controlled access into them where you always walk through the lobby on the way in. However, ‘plenty’ just means traffickers will use hotels that _aren’t_ set up that way, duh. In fact, they probably already do! Or just use motels, which this actually is. The less they have to haul victims through public spaces the better for them, I assume?

          So you can’t really do what I said, I was just saying that, even if questioning people worked, you’d need to question the likely victims, of which the person renting the room is not one of them!

          You also often would need to question them in _a language besides English_, so, uh…good luck with having staff to do that.

          If I had to come up with an idea to reduce sex trafficking, it would be to put up messages, in multiple languages, inside the hotel rooms on the wall, telling them a number they can call on the phone or a thing they can say to any member of the staff that will alert the hotel what is going on.

          In fact, I’d argue such a thing should be required by law. Just like businesses have to post ‘Here are your rights as workers’ and ‘here is our elevator inspection’, hotels should have to post ‘here is who you get in touch with if you are being trafficked or just kidnapped in general’.

          Of course, this assumes there actually _is_ someone that people could call, which I kinda doubt. What happens when some sex trafficking victim who only speaks Korean calls a local 911? Or is there some sort of national number or something with translators on hand?Report

        • Murali in reply to Dark Matter says:

          When checking into hotels, nowadays in Singapore, I’ve noticed that they ask for everyone’s IDs. So, everyone has to show their face to the concierge. But then, I don’t do motels in Singapore. Hotel stays in Singapore are for fun and motels aren’t.Report

  5. Oscar Gordon says:

    At some point, the hotel will have so few positive hits, they will get lax, either because of human nature (it’s a pain to run through the script, especially when it’s busy), or because they are tired of business women getting offended at the sexist nature of the questions.

    Alternatively, the hotel, or the brand itself, will notice that it is losing business to females traveling alone, and they will drop the script.Report

  6. InMD says:

    The low key moral panic over human trafficking has always seemed to me like an astro-turfed issue promoted by opaque and highly self-interested NGOs along with politicians in search of a crusade. As much as it’s treated as a feminist issue it and the efforts to combat it rely on some pretty sexist assumptions.

    I’d say a good rule of thumb is to be skeptical of anything that seems to unite moral majority types with some subsect of the progressive activist industrial complex.Report

    • pillsy in reply to InMD says:

      I’d say a good rule of thumb is to be skeptical of anything that seems to unite moral majority types with some subsect of the progressive activist industrial complex.

      Let’s see: ’80s anti-porn crusades, anti-prostitution, TERFs…

      …checks out.Report

  7. Chip Daniels says:

    The panic over sex trafficking is of a piece with the panic over drugs, which stems from the overall panic over OUTTACONTROLCRIME.

    Fear sells, and motivates, and turns out votes.Report

  8. DensityDuck says:

    “Then, replace my business card with a Covid-vaccine card. Are the responses consistent?”

    I do wonder how many people will read all the way down to that line.Report

    • Philip H in reply to DensityDuck says:

      I did. And I admit it was a turn I wasn’t expecting.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to DensityDuck says:

      Well, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.

      Is everyone being asked for the vaccine passport? Or just women traveling alone?

      If everyone is asked for the vaccine passport, there is no profiling going on. There may be a level of discrimination if non-vaccinated people are excluded, though it remains to be seen if that remains a thing (to the extent it even IS a thing… very few places required the passport and some, like NYC, are about to do away with it).

      I mean, flip it the other way… “Replace my business card with photo ID. Are the responses consistent?”Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Kazzy says:

        “Is everyone being asked for the vaccine passport? Or just women traveling alone?”

        I didn’t write the essay; why are you asking me?Report

      • JS in reply to Kazzy says:

        I don’t have a business card and frequently travel for business alone.

        Why would I need a business card? Heck, my company doesn’t even provide them. If you want some, buy your own, and we’re a Fortune 500 company. There may be exemptions for some groups (sales, I’d imagine, and of course upper management) but not us. And while we don’t sell our product, we meet the customers who pay good money to have a say in where we focus our developmental efforts each year regularly. To train them, to discuss goals and developmental focus, etc.

        I do have a COVID vaccine card, because they gave me one when I got vaccinated, and also Walgreens can send me another, and I needed it for my medical records with my PCP. I carry it with me because we’re in the middle of a pandemic and “mask or vaccine, mask, recent test, or card” is a common question.

        Seems a weird comparison TBH.Report

  9. DensityDuck says:

    As for “why are these companies making such a huge obvious deal over this”, it’s because it’s the law.Report

  10. Michael Cain says:

    I drive for much of my regional travel, and often, the best place to stay is near a freeway exit, simply because I’ll be up and on the road early the next day.

    My city recently annexed the area around another of its interstate exits. The city council was very unhappy that the county cops had a very low priority on dealing with the drug traffic and violent crime that was frequent in the hotels and their parking lots. Some of that is no doubt situational: I-25 runs from El Paso to Buffalo, WY and there are no other major north-south highways for at least 300 miles in either direction.Report