Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Biases; Surveys

I've been reading papers on prostitution again, both papers whose conclusions support criminalization and papers whose conclusions support decriminalization of prostitution. What I've gotten from that is not better arguments for the position I support (decriminalization), but a reminder of some of the ways in which researchers, and the rest of us, bias our data.

Surveys

Surveys are a good way to get biased data. Every one who conducts surveys knows that the answers you get depend on how you word the questions. One way of biasing a survey is to ask questions about an ideal world, and use the answers to support concrete action. For example, many prostitutes don't consider their job ideal. They would prefer to be doing something that paid more, or had more prestige, or was less dangerous. Ask them if they think prostitution should be eliminated, without giving the question any context, and they're very likely to put the question in the context of their own aspirations and say yes. In an ideal world there they would not have to practice prostitution.

However, ask them if they think they should be forced to give up prostitution and take up one of the currently available alternatives, and they would probably say no. In general, they are prostitutes because it is more attractive than any currently available alternative. If they've been forced into prostitution by the patriarchy, it's still better than any of the alternatives the patriarchy is offering. And if they're informed agents exercising free will, as liberal theory claims, then they've chosen prostitution because it's the best choice available.

Ideal world questions are fine if you want to create alternatives for prostitutes that are superior to prostitution. If prostitutes are generally satisfied with their jobs, creating alternatives isn't going to cause a lot of them to leave prostitution. Or if you create the wrong alternatives, prostitutes won't find them attractive enough to make a switch. So if you are creating alternatives, you want to know if prostitutes want alternatives, and what sort of alternatives they want.

However, I don't know of a single debate that hinges on whether to provide prostitutes with alternatives. In every case that I know of, the debate is whether to make prostitutes current jobs easier (decriminalization), or to try to drive prostitutes out of their current jobs without offering an alternative (increase penalties for prostitutes and/or clients). In that situation, ideal world questions produce misleading results. Prostitutes generally don't want to be driven from their current jobs when the job market isn't offering good alternatives. Even if they hate prostitution, they hate the best alternative more.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

1 In 5 Children Approached By Online Predators

I lied. So did ABC News when they announced this in 2006. In 2005, Jim Acosta reported on CBS Evening News that "when a child is missing, chances are good it was a convicted sex offender." And that's not true either.

According to an article on the Live Science web site, the real risk to children is not online predators and convicted sex offenders. Most crimes against children are committed by the victim's own family, church clergy, and family friends. And contrary to Acosta's claim, the least likely explanation is a convicted sex offender. More prosaic causes like running away, abduction by a family member, and getting lost are at the top of the list of explanations.

Live Science traces the "1 in 5" statistic to a study done by the DOJ in 2001 that reported that 19% of the children between the ages of 10 and 17 had received an unwanted sexual solicitation. The DOJ defined "sexual solicitation" as a "request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult." This could include one teenager asking another if they were a virgin. When only the sorts of contacts that were a threat to children were counted, the statistic dropped to 3% of teenagers in the age range receiving unwanted contact.

Anti-porn activists link porn to predators and child sexual abuse. Inflated statistics help scare up support. The sad, stubborn truth behind the sexual predator hysteria is that the greatest threat to children comes from people they know.

Friday, February 22, 2008

The following is quoted from an article in the English newspaper News Of The World.
How can he see himself as a politician and visit brothels at the same time?
While the newspaper is English, reporting and editing have apparently been outsourced to a parallel universe where English politicians never visit brothels.

The politician, Alan Boyce, was an unsuccessful candidate for Parliament. He visited the Big Sister brothel in Prague, where clients get free sex in exchange for allowing their activities to be videotaped and broadcast. So Boyce visited a brothel in the most publicly visible way possible. Politicians that honest are rare, and like Boyce, unelected.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Enlightenment 101

Two recent blog posts.

A stripper starts her career:
Evil Tart

And a middle aged pornographer almost ends his career:
Mike South

It happens, and we know we're not in control. After it's over, we tell ourselves stories about the experience that put us back in control. But it, the thing that happened, is completely us. There's no part of ourselves separate from the experience to be in control. When you're riding a tiger, is there some part of you that isn't busy trying to hang on?

People talk about being one with reality, but nobody seeks out the true experience.

Mirror

The following is a quote from an interview with Susannah Breslin at the clusterflock blog. She's talking about her unsuccessful attempts to sell the idea of a non-fiction book on porn.
My favorite rejection letter came from a well-known editor at a major publishing house who passed on it by stating that he would have to leave this project to those editors whose values were less influenced by the radical Protestant movements of the 16th and 17th centuries.
When he says "values", he's not talking about his personal morals, although these values may serve that purpose also. He's talking about the criteria he uses in his role as gatekeeper for books. These values help determine what information becomes publicly available.

I wish everybody were this honest.

Later in the interview, Breslin engages in some honesty of her own.
Interviewer: "Is there a unifying goal for the work you do?"
Breslin: "...I'm interested in exploring the heart of darkness in our culture, which can be seen by entering the American sex trade."
To me, the "American sex trade" is a mirror. I can look in the mirror and hold up my desires, my biases, my fears, the blender full of social messages, religious formulas, and acquired classification systems that constitutes my conscious thought; I can hold up an entire society, as I know it, and the mirror faithfully and honestly reflects it back.

Of course, I could find this mirror anywhere. I could look into the illegal drug trade and find my own face looking back. The fact that I've chosen sex work as a mirror says something about me, just as Breslin's choice of porn as her heart of darkness says something about her, and the editor's decision to identify his gatekeeper role with radical Protestantism says something about him. But in this case, all this honesty is a glimpse of something reflected in the mirror of sex work.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

News Bits Priestess Amanda Subverts Religious Piety

From the SWOP East News Bits:
A personal comment about what I see in my daily Google Alerts; it's really strange to me how many religious dblogs concern themselves with prostitution or use the word prostitution in their blog posts. Just sayin...
It's because our thoughts are so pure.

Really Amanda, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

All Work Is Like A Bad Simile

About a month ago, Audacia Ray made a post that ended with the sentence "And so help me, if anyone says that all work is like prostitution, I will scream."

I've been seeing this statement or statements like it, and if I see another I won't scream, but I will wince. The underlying argument is that everyone is a prostitute because everyone has to exchange something for money. Using the same logic, all workers are computer programmers because computer programmers exchange something for money. And all workers are lawyers for the same reason.

It's easy to see why some prostitutes make the argument that all work is like prostitution. Prostitution carries a stigma, and some prostitutes want to overcome that stigma by pointing out the similarities between prostitution and other work. That attempt is understandable but bound to fail because everyone recognizes the fallacy it's based on. People who aren't sex workers don't sell sexual services, and that difference is what creates the stigma. Pointing out the similarities won't make the difference go away or cause people to stop stigmatizing it.

When the "all work is prostitution" statement is made by non-prostitutes, it's generally less benign. It's usually made by someone who believes that some aspect of their job is morally dubious, and the "prostitution" statement is an attempt to claim that everyone's work is immoral in the same way. But instead of removing the moral stigma of sex work, this reinforces it by using sex work as an archetype of immorality. All in all, the "all work is prostitution" statement works against prostitutes.

However, there are ways in which all jobs are like prostitution. First and most obviously, all jobs involve the exchange of work for money. Secondly, workers, both prostitutes and non-prostitutes, wouldn't be doing their jobs if they weren't being paid. And all workers choose their jobs by comparing jobs that are available to them and ranking them based on pay, flexibility, prestige, security, and any of a large number of other characteristics. Or sometimes they pick a job because someone offers it to them when they need a job. So while different prostitutes choose their job for different reasons and through different processes, the reasons and possesses are the same as those that lead other people to choose other jobs. People opposed to prostitution argue that prostitutes are forced into prostitution, or that they choose prostitution because the lack the correct political consciousness, or because they are immoral; in other words, they try to explain prostitution by identifying what makes prostitutes different from other people. But the evidence indicates that people become prostitutes because they are like everyone else. Normal, ordinary decision making causes different people to choose different jobs, one of which is prostitution.

Prostitution is unlike other jobs for the same reasons that any job is unlike other jobs. In addition, prostitution has a socially determined stigma. Even if you don't agree that prostitution should be stigmatized, you have to acknowledge that the stigma has important consequences, and the stigma is therefore an important difference. However, prostitution also has similarities to other types of jobs, and those similarities stem from the fact that prostitutes are drawn from the same population as other professions. It's a fact that prostitution is unlike other jobs. It's a delusion that prostitutes are unlike other humans.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Driving With Your Cell Phone Is Like Selling Sex

I was driving yesterday, and came to a stop sign. Three cars, including mine, approached the intersection at roughly the same time from three different directions. I arrived second. I and the driver who arrived third waited for the driver who arrived first to go through the intersection. And waited. The first driver was talking on his cell phone, looking back and forth at myself and the other driver, and not moving. Eventually I got tired of waiting and put my car in gear, starting through the intersection. The first driver, still on his cell phone, decided to proceed at that point, cutting me off.

I made a post recently in which I talked about the Prisoner's Dilemma game in relation to strippers who sell sexual services. The Prisoner's Dilemma game represents any situation where people need to cooperate in order to protect some resource or to create something good, but it is to the advantage of each individual to cheat and not cooperate. It's widely understood that talking on a cell phone while driving makes driving less safe, not just for yourself but also for the people you could potentially have an accident with. But a lot of people talk on the cell phone while driving anyway, relying on other drivers who aren't using cell phones to compensate for the cell phone user's mistakes. As an example, the driver I encountered yesterday relied on me to brake and avoid hitting him when he drove into the intersection after I was already in it. In the language of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, he was counting on me to cooperate while he cheated.

The truth is that I also sometimes "cheat" in Prisoner's Dilemma situations. Drivers cooperate to keep the roads safe by driving safely and respecting traffic laws, but sometimes when I'm in a hurry my driving becomes less safe. I may cut in front of people and force them to brake, or I may rush through a stop sign. I try not to do this, but sometimes the short term, personal advantage dominates my thinking. And of course, the more I drive that way, the more likely I am to have an accident, even though the odds of having an accident each time I cheat are low.

We all think of ourselves as cooperators, but most of us cheat from time to time. People vary in the amount of cheating they do. Some people have specific areas of their lives where they never cheat; for example, I don't cheat on my taxes, although I sometimes pay them late. But as with my occasional unsafe driving, it's rare that someone never cheats. We almost always have some area in our lives where we don't think it's that important. Someone who never cheated would probably be considered obsessive.

As I mentioned in the previous post, strippers need a business that is licensed as a strip club in order to work. Most strippers cooperate to protect the strip club license. Those that don't cooperate may have one of several reasons. First, they may not expect to work at the club very long. In that case, selling sexual services in addition to stripping maximizes their short term income in a situation where the long term doesn't exist.

Something similar may happen if stripping is a part time job. A part time stripper may not value her job if she has another source of income, or she may feel that a second, part time job isn't worth while unless she can increase her earnings through prostitution.

If a stripper is bad at her job, she may need to sell sexual services in order to make stripping worth while. Or she may feel entitled to sell sexual services as a way to make up the income difference between herself and more capable strippers.

She may believe that all strippers sell sexual services.

It may have occurred to her that one stripper selling sexual services one time doesn't pose much risk to a strip club, but it may not have occurred to her that one or more strippers doing it regularly increase the risk a lot. So she may feel that she's not harming anyone.

She may be a prostitute who finds a strip club convenient for getting business.

And there are probably reasons I haven't thought of.

We all use this type of reasoning when we cheat. We do things in short term situations that we wouldn't do if we had to live with the consequences over the long term. Those of us who have worked two jobs know that we tend to make demands of our second job that we wouldn't make of our first job. Cheating is more likely to occur among people who are poor students than people who are good students, poor athletes are more likely to cheat than good ones, and so on in any situation where people can be ranked according to how well they perform.

In some cases, the decisions of strippers who sell sexual services may be perfectly rational. In other cases, they may be rational only from a short term view point, but we all sometimes fail to take the long term into account. In any case, the thought processes that lead them to sell sexual services are the same processes that we all use in various areas of our daily lives. Stripper/prostitutes are engaging in ordinary, human thinking. This ordinary thinking leads them to sell sexual services, just as it sometimes leads me to drive too fast. For most of us, having safe roads is much more important that regulating the behavior of strippers in strip clubs. Using the same logic as stripper/prostitutes, we do things that are a risk to ourselves and others.

And we wouldn't be human if we didn't judge stripper/prostitutes for taking foolish risks.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Valentine's Day Thievery

The Thieves

Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
'I and you are both away.'

After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.

Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves.

—Robert Graves

The point of Buddhism is this lost honor; the loss of "you" and "I". It occurs during orgasm, but it occurs many other times. There is no activity or exercise that leads to giving up "self". It occurs naturally and spontaneously, without any contribution from the fantasy we call "myself". You can't force it to happen, but it happens all the time.

"Zen" means meditation, and Zen Buddhists spend a lot of time meditating, but there's nothing special about meditation. Picking one activity and calling it spiritual and elevating it above other activities is a bit silly. After you have sex, you get up and you go about your life, and everything involves "you" and "I". The same thing happens after meditation. You're not more selfless now that you've meditated, or more enlightened.

A large number of Buddhists practice tantra. A very small proportion of Tantric Buddhists engage in tantric sexual practices. It's not very common, but it gets a lot of attention. A lot of Buddhists frown on it and call it "dark" tantra, but it's like meditation; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you don't imagine that it's more spiritual than washing the dishes. Go to the act without knowing who is doing it. Lose your honor, whether you are having sex, meditating, or washing the dishes. Don't try to advance spiritually, or gain insight, or progress to a higher level. These are all forms of honor, baggage carried around by the self. Instead of worrying about what you're going to get from the act, just focus on the act.

Lap dances, computer programming, scrubbing the toilet; they're all the same. Whatever you are doing right now is the gateway to liberation.

William & Mary President Resigns

The president of William & Mary College resigned today after controversy over his decision to allow a sex worker art show to take place on campus, according to the Washington Post.
Gene R. Nichol, whose resignation took effect immediately, sent a letter yesterday to the campus community saying that he had been the victim of a relentless and vicious campaign and that he had been offered money to not characterize his departure as a fight over ideology.
Here's the full article at the Washington Post website.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

The Real Belle de Jour

There's something odd about the controversy surrounding Belle de Jour. Ordinarily, a woman who's had sex with a lot of men tries to deny it, and people attack her by calling her a whore. In this case, the lady is loudly insisting that she's a whore, and people attack her by insisting that she isn't. And the truly fascinating part of this is that the prudes who are attacking her don't think she deserves to be a whore. True whores suffer for their whoredom, which serves as proof of their virtue. Since Belle hasn't suffered, she's not virtuous enough to be a whore. Either she's an outright fraud, or a whore manqué.

It's fairly common for celebrities to have their identities defined for them by members of the public. Us and People magazines and the tabloids make their money by telling their readers who the subjects of their articles are. They spin fantasies that their readers buy because they are based on a few facts and involve real people.

Belle gets the same treatment from a different class of professionals. The people who are spinning tabloid fantasies about her don't work for tabloids. They are respected feminists and journalists who work for top rank newspapers. And the fantasies that they've created don't merely tell us who she is, but whether or not she actually exists. As Ermine Saner summarized it in The Guardian,
There was much speculation that she had been created by a writer or a collection of writers; that she didn't genuinely sell sex; that she wasn't even female. Her experiences, said some people, including sex workers, didn't ring true.
Since Belle has succeeded in keeping her real name hidden, no one can talk to people she's known or worked with and confirm her stories. The only evidence is what Belle has chosen to say about herself. So let's look at that briefly.

First of all, while Belle may have drawn a lot of attention, she's not the first upmarket escort to write about her experiences. And the other escorts who have written about it have used their names and exposed themselves publicly, making it possible for anyone who has the means and the will to do some sleuthing and look for evidence of fraud. So far, there's no evidence that their stories are fiction. Furthermore, other escorts tell a similar story; they did it for the money and it was a job. Sometimes they enjoyed it and sometimes they didn't, but they weren't traumatized or seriously abused. And from personal conversations, I can say that prostitutes who don't want to publish their stories or expose themselves publicly say similar things. This is all anecdotal evidence, and it doesn't tell us what proportion of prostitutes feel that their work is just another form of paid labor, but it does tell us that there are prostitutes who feel this way.

It's this general story, sex work as a job, that offends so many people. Nina Hartley has experienced the same thing over the course of her career in porn. No one can deny that she exists or that she made porn; the evidence exists in too many videos. But while the facts are undeniable, her detractors deny her experience of those facts. They deny that a woman can experience sex work as anything other than degrading, and therefore Hartley's description of her experiences is inauthentic. If Hartley had published her experiences anonymously, her feminist opponents would have claimed that she was an invention. They would have claimed that no woman could have written Hartley's story and she could only be the product of a male imagination.

So while Belle remains anonymous, and her story remains uncomfirmable, the story itself matches stories that can be confirmed. The general outline of her story isn't inherently unbelievable or unrealistic.

In addition to attacks on the general story, Belle's detractors claim that the details are unrealistic. The Guardian brought in an ex-madame to say that Belle's clients weren't the sort of men that the madame had seen when she was in the business. The ex-madame had apparently specialized in lonely older men, which was clearly not the demographic that Belle appealed to. Belle's niche seems to have been younger men in search of a good time, as opposed to older men seeking companionship. Younger men are known to hire prostitutes, so while the details of Belle's clients may not have matched the ex-madame's experience, they do match what is known about one segment of prostitutes' clientele.

One columnist at The Guardian went out and found a prostitute whose experiences were very different from Belle's, and used this as evidence that Belle was lying. The basic line of argument was "my prostitute trumps your prostitute." As I've pointed out, there are other published accounts of prostitution that back up Belle's general story, just as there are other accounts that paint a picture different from Belle's. One story doesn't trump or cancel out the other. Different people have different experiences.

There are people who take the tabloid approach to Belle. They accept the facts as she presents them, but try to define her identity by giving the facts their own spin. For example, Belle likes mild BDSM. It's not particularly harmful, or dangerous, and it provides some extra stimulation that some people get off on. For some people, this is Belle's dark side. That's a value judgment. Everyone's entitled to their value judgments, and their entitled to publish them, but doing so establishes their own identity, not the identity of the person being judged. Calling Belle's kinks dark tells us that someone is frightened by them, but it doesn't give us any negative information about the kinks themselves. It doesn't tell us that they cause physical harm, or psychological trauma, or early senility, or an increase in the crime rate. It does tell us how some people perceive sexual practices different from their own. Attributing this perceived darkness to Belle is a form of fantasizing.

And some people criticize Belle's writings and associated TV show for glamorizing prostitution. The glamorization consists of not depicting the dangerous lives of streetwalkers and similar prostitutes, and of not telling about escorts who got into escorting, discovered it wasn't what they wanted to do, and want to get out. The situation would be similar if Karl Lagerfield wrote his memoirs of his career in the fashion business and was criticized for not devoting the book to the plight of ill paid and ill treated Guatemalan seamstresses. It's true that there are clothing factories where workers receive very poor, even abusive treatment. It's also true that some people have tried to break into high end fashion design and have failed, emerging bankrupt and shaken by the experience. However, if I bought a book with the expectation of reading about Lagerfield, I would be disappointed if it turned out to be about everyone else. The memoirs of successful people do tend to glamorize their professions by leaving out the stories of people who failed, but that's the nature of autobiography; it isn't about other people.

I don't know anything about Belle de Jour that everyone one else doesn't know. In spite of the title of this post, I don't claim to know who the real Belle de Jour is. And I'm willing to admit that I'm probably just as gullible as the London Times, who hired a supposed expert in writing style to analyze Belle's writing and published the results on the front page. (The expert's claim that the writer Sarah Champion was Belle turned out to be false.) I could be taken in by someone who researched prostitution and wrote a fictional account of her life as a prostitute. The point is not that my knowledge or intellect are superior to the people who cast doubt on Belle's story. The point is that we have no evidence that she isn't who she says she is, or that she didn't do what she said she did. A sustained attack made without evidence doesn't tell us anything about the person being attacked; we need evidence for that. But an unsupported attack is evidence that tells us something about the people making the attack.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Complexity in Comics

Amanda Brooks has discovered that getting involved with sex worker activists makes her more aware of diversity. I get my consciousness raised by the enlightened and ennobling world of comic strips.

The comic We the Robots reminds us that since there are different types of people, there must be different types of hookers to service those people.

Most of us view strippers as a stereotype. But now, thanks to Something Positive, we can choose between two stereotypes.
Stereotype A
Stereotype B

And it's only fair to let a stripper deliver the ultimate put down.

You can tell I'm all progressive n stuff, because I have three stripper stereotypes instead of just one or two. There's stereotypes A and B from the two links above, plus everybody's all purpose stereotype, the X with the heart of gold, where X is one of hooker, stripper, or corporate general counsel. My life is much better with three stereotypes, because I don't have to work as hard at pigeonholing strippers or corporate lawyers. No matter who they are, I can fit them into a predetermined category and make assumptions about them.

Facetiousness aside, we all deal in stereotypes and assumptions. It's a way of dealing with the fact that everyone is complicated, and there's only twenty four hours in a day, and most of them have to be spent doing something other than trying to understand a world full of complicated people. The problem is not so much that we use stereotypes as a time saving shortcut, but that we end up mistaking the stereotypes for reality.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Saving Miners from Mining

Coal mining, like prostitution, is a dangerous profession. The southwest part of the state I live in, Virginia, is dependent on coal mining for jobs. The area is underdeveloped, and a man who is willing the crawl around all day and get dirty can make $18 an hour, which is pretty good wages in that part of the state. The mining jobs vary in safety, depending on whether the employer is a large corporation and is careful to avoid dangerous mining practices, or a small local operator that gets the coal out by any means possible. As an example, when a large corporation mines a seam of coal, they leave pillars of coal in the caverns they create to support the roof. This prevents cave ins. When the seam is mined out, i.e. when the large corporation has gotten out all the coal it can safely extract, it stops mining the seam and a local operator takes over with his own crew of men. The local operator makes his money by extracting all the coal the large corporation couldn't safely extract, including the columns of coal that support the mine roof. Usually the operator is able to get his men out safely, but not always. Sometimes the roof collapses unexpectedly, trapping and killing miners.

Southwest Virginia also has an ongoing problem with narcotic addiction. We don't usually associate rural areas with drug abuse, but southwest Virginia was hard hit by oxycodone addiction when that became a national problem. When the Feds managed to clean it up, other narcotics took the place of oxycodone. There's even a black market for methadone, due to the large number of people who are in methadone maintenance programs.

Drug addiction affects all parts of society in southwest Virginia, not just the coal miners. However, there's a high rate of addiction among miners. Miners often suffer serious injuries on the job that are accompanied by debilitating pain. They are prescribed strong narcotics to control the pain. When you have large numbers of people taking powerful narcotics, even for legitimate medical reasons, it's inevitable that some of them will become addicted. So miners are exposed to narcotics along with everyone else, but they get additional exposure because of their injuries. Miners who are in a methadone maintenance program have to take jobs with the more dangerous local operators, because the large corporations administer drug tests.

I'm going to engage in a little counterfactual fantasy. Lets imagine that our society decides to treat coal mining the same way it treats prostitution.

First of all, criminalization won't end the demand for coal. A large portion of the electricity generated in the US is generated in coal firing plants. It's also used in iron and steal production and a lot of other types of manufacturing. Like the demand for sex, society's demand for coal isn't going to end any time soon. Just as there's a large illegal market for sexual services, there's going to be a large illegal market for coal.

The guys that were mining coal are going to need jobs. They were making $18/hr or better, and they've got kids to feed and truck payments to make. The available legal jobs start at minimum wage and, if they're really lucky, might go up as high as $10/hr.

The coal seams are there, the demand for coal is there, and the guys who know how to mine coal need jobs, so a black market for coal develops pretty quickly. Since the industry is now illegal, and since it generates a lot of money, it attracts other forms of crime. For example, miners are known to carry money, so they are frequently robbed. Miners make good robbery targets because they can't complain to the police.

Miners also become targets for violent crime, including serial murders. They now have to sneak into mines at night, making them vulnerable to attacks by armed criminals. Frequently, when a miner disappears, no one is aware of it except immediate family, who are afraid to go to the police. When miners or their families do complain about violence, they are told it is their own fault, or that damaging a miner's body isn't really a crime because miners allow their bodies to be violated by coal mining. Or that all miners end up injured anyway, so it doesn't matter if someone injures them.

Ten percent of the coal that is mined by illegal miners passes into the hands of individual police officers running small scale protection rackets. The miners are subject to intense police harassment unless they supply the officers with coal.

Periodically, local police departments round up known miners. If the police officers catch miners with safety equipment, for example hard hats, they damage the equipment is such a way as to make it useless. There's no reason for doing this, other than the police officers' entertainment.

While it's illegal to hire miners to work in your mine, mine owners are rarely arrested or prosecuted. Mine owners are generally wealthy, have good lawyers, and are well connected. While operating a mine is considered immoral, mine operators aren't seen as having the moral taint associated with mining. Someone who mines coal, even if they do it only once, is sullied for life.

Religious leaders condemn coal mining as immoral, while prominent figures in the men's movement declare that all mining is violence against men. When miners aren't treated as criminals, they are treated as mentally incompetent children. Their decision to mine coal for a living is attributed to lack of education and drug addiction. Programs are set up to help miners escape mining, without creating alternative jobs that pay as much as mining. Consequently, the recidivism rate is very high, which reinforces the contemptuous attitudes held by police officers and social workers.

While some serious academic research on coal mining occurs, researchers have trouble getting grant money, and their research is ignored. On the other hand, anyone willing to make sensational claims about human trafficking, forced labor, or drug use or childhood trauma as a cause of mining, gets immediate attention from the media and legislators. The assumption shared by all popular theories is that the problems miners face are inherent in mining, rather than being a consequence of the circumstances under which miners work. Since a small proportion of the dangers miners face can be attributed to mining itself, the argument is that all problems faced by miners are inherent in mining. Serious researchers have trouble attracting attention or funding because their research fails to support this assumption.

As the evidence of harm to miners and the increase in crime mounts, various organizations put pressure on legislatures to increase the criminal penalties for coal mining. New laws are passed that equate mining with human trafficking, make it illegal for miners to congregate in places where they can be found and hired by mine operators, and allow police to seize the assets of suspected miners.

Since miners no longer have health care benefits, miners who are addicted to narcotics buy narcotics from drug dealers, leading to a rapid increase in deaths from overdoses. Increased injuries lead to increased self-medication for pain, further raising addiction rates.

Sweden takes an alternate approach, decriminalizing mining but making it illegal to buy coal. This has the same effect as criminalizing mining; it drives mining underground and makes it more dangerous. However, officials in the Swedish government present the laws as a success to rights organizations and other governments by misrepresenting the data gathered to evaluate the new laws, For example, officials claim a reduction in human trafficking when Swedish government data actually show an increase in trafficking. Due to this and other misrepresentations, other governments start proposing similar laws in an effort to emulate Sweden's "success".

Miner's rights organizations argue that the crimes associated with mining are the result of the criminalization of mining, and not inherently associated with mining. They argue that the best way to protect miners is to treat mining as a normal profession, decriminalizing it, giving minors police protection, supplying adequate health care, and enforcing safety standards. They are ignored.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Prostitute Mortality & Homicide Rates

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry with the highest rate of job related fatalities is a miscellaneous grouping called Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, & Hunting, with 29.6 fatalities per 100,000 workers in 2006. A very close second is Mining, with 27.8 fatalities per 100,000 workers in 2006. Taxi driving, a sub-industry not broken out in the BLS's statistics, has been estimated by other researchers to have a homicide rate of 29 per 100,000 taxi drivers per year. Taxi drivers carry large sums of cash in their cars and are easy to rob, which makes them the frequent target of armed robbers and makes their job very dangerous.

The recent observance of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers got me wondering about how dangerous it really is to be a prostitute. It's impossible to accurately calculate job related fatalities among prostitutes for the US, for obvious reasons. As a proxy for an accurate estimate, I used a study done using police and health department records for Colorado Springs, Colorado, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2004. The records cover the period from 1967 to 1999. The rate of death among active prostitutes due to homicide was estimated to be 229 per 100,000 prostitutes per year. Job related mortality due to all causes for prostitutes was estimated to be 459 per 100,000 prostitutes per year. However, the authors of the paper said the following about their research: "It is likely that we underestimated mortality in our current analysis."

The authors cited a study done in Nairobi, Kenya, which estimated the mortality rate for prostitutes at 310 per 100,000, and another study done in London, England, with 401 deaths per 100,000 prostitutes. Three different Canadian data sets yield homicide mortality rates of 181, 112 - 225, and 127 per 100,000. A study of prostitute mortality in London, published in Sexually Transmitted Infections in 2006, estimates the overall mortality rate at 480 per 100,000 prostitutes per year. So the estimates for the homicide rates and the overall mortality rates in the US are in line with estimates from elsewhere in the world.

A complication is that the mortality estimates for prostitution is based only on data for visible prostitution: streetwalkers and other prostitutes who are known the the police and health authorities. The majority of prostitutes operate out of sight of public officials. These are prostitutes who work under safer conditions; escorts, for example. Given the fact that we have no empirical information on which to base an estimate of the total number of prostitutes, or the mortality rates for all prostitutes, there are only three things we can say with reasonable confidence.

First, that the visible prostitution sector has a very high job related mortality rate; 229 per 100,000 per year for homicide, and 459 per 100,000 per year for all causes. Very roughly, that's sixteen times the mortality rate for the two most dangerous industries tracked by the BLS.

Secondly, the mortality rates for the hidden prostitution sector are unknown.

And thirdly, while prostitutes who work in the hidden sector are less exposed to criminal violence, they are still more exposed than women in the general population. Prostitutes in general can't go to the police for protection because what they do is illegal. And prostitutes in the hidden sector spend time alone with clients they don't know, or don't know very well. That's less of a risk for escorts than it is for streetwalkers because escorts can screen customers and think about the information for a while before they make an irrevocable decision. Streetwalkers have to make instantaneous decisions with almost no information about the customer. But the risk for escorts still exists, and the real rates of both homocide and non-lethal violent attacks are almost certainly higher for prostitutes in the hidden sector than for women in the general population. We just have no way of estimating how much higher.

However, there's another problem with an overall estimate for prostitution mortality rates. The difference between mortality rates for visible and hidden prostitution is probably so high that, even if statistics for the hidden sector were available, averaging the rates across all types of prostitution would produce statistics that were too high for the hidden sector, and much too low for the visible sector. In other words, average mortality rates for all prostitutes wouldn't represent the actual mortality rates for any specific group of prostitutes, or the risk faced by any individual prostitute. Given the wide variety of conditions under which different groups of prostitutes work, meaningful statistics have to target specific groups.