The interesting thing about the CIA study is the appendix, which reveals that between 1995 and 1998 the US government successfully prosecuted a handful of cases involving about 150 people, only slightly more than half in sex work. Furthermore, the average life-expectancy of a sex-worker smuggling ring was under 2 years before getting busted.

Pretty small potatoes, actually.

The problem is that getting the actual facts is just about impossible. When you bust a brothel, of course all the women are going to claim that they were forced to do it; the problem becomes trying to figure out if they are telling the truth. The claims that they came expecting to do one kind of work and were forced into another is also imponderable.

Another problem is that it isn't a black/white situation. Illegal immigration is a continuum, ranging from humanitarian activists helping refugees, to honest snakeheads smuggling people for a buck, to some pretty nasty characters engaged in something approaching human bondage.

The last is a low-yield, hard-work, high risk criminal enterprise, that consequently does not appear to make up a very big sector of the criminal economy.

And yes, stuff like the Shawn Hornbeck phenomena does happen, but not, from a criminal's point of view, reliably. And so far as we know, even in cases like that, it eventually does come to the attention of the authorities.

Personally, I've been involved in two cases: one was a group of Philippine women who the police discovered working in a massage parlour. They claimed that it was human trafficking and forced work; I didn't believe it. What most likely appeared to have happened was that wages that had looked pretty good back home no longer appeared so great in a Canadian context, and one of them ratted the operation out in hopes of staying.

The other one was a group of Eastern European strippers that got busted; of course, on arrest, it was all about how they had been forced into it and so on. It certainly did appear that they had been exploited and ripped off by the club ownership, but there was never any implication of violence or abuse. And I am also pretty sure they knew what they were coming into the country to do for a living.

So sure there is human trafficking, but it is a drop in the much larger ocean of illegal immigration generally. But it makes for lurid claims and good copy I suppose.

Zero Tolerance for PDAs are imposed by politicians catering to bitter misanthropes like DimBulb47. The obsessive DimBulbs of this world will always vote, while most of us don't pay all that much attention to school board elections, figuring outside of Creationist nonsense, how hard is it to fuck up really?

But the DimBulb33s of this world would almost certainly be shortchanged in the hugging games, and resent it most passionately, flooding the school board with thousands of repetitive messages, while the rest of us are going: "whatever" and what do you get? You get zero tolerance systemic cruelty.

And yeah, he's happy about this. Somebody else is suffering injustice, in his world that is a good thing. Maybe he will suffer less as he drinks the schadenfreude of seeing an 8th grader be stupidly punished and stigmatized.

Now I can see curtailing middle school hugging games, which will no doubt usually devolve into popularity hierarchies. But doing it with some gentleness and rationality and explanation, and personal responsibility rather than simply following the rules, rather than Zero Tolerance and suspensions might be a slightly more human way of going about it. Just saying.

Oh, and if I were a parent, I would suggest the kids organize no-contact hug-ins, miming a hug or a hand-holding from like two inches away with no body contact, just to see how ridiculous the administration could get. Two inches bad, three ok? Miming to be forbidden?

I rather like the nazi siegheil thing too. I can see pages and pages of rules of ever increasing specificity as to how you can hold your hands and body at the moment of greeting or leaving someone.

This has gone so far off topic that is shouldn't be contributed to, but I am so bored at work today that I gotta.

DimBulb55's endlessly repetitive points are easily summed up in far fewer words than he uses:

1. Women are less interested in casual sex than men are (I think Alleyoop & Oona the cavepeople figured this one out like a couple of hundred thousand years ago), and frequently select sex partners on very mysterious and bewildering grounds. (Men select romantic partners on equally baffling grounds.) Mostly they don't select him.

2. He thinks this is a new phenomena, attributable to modern feminism (whatever that is). He should have asked what some Victorian men thought about the situation at that time. (Which could hardly have been called feminist.) I don't think that particular game has changed all that much.

3. He thinks this has particularly affected him, that he has been done a great injustice. (Judging by his pleasant personality, other explanations spring to mind.)

4. He hates BroadSheet, hates feminists, hates reasonable people, and posts obsessively, often, and long, indicating that he really doesn't have much else to do with his time.

5. Obviously, he is desperate for attention, and will take whatever kind he can get, even if it is almost uniformly negative and hurtful, which is what he gets on these threads. He gets a lot of it anyway, which is probably why he comes back for more.