Sex worker rally in London against Policing and Crime Bill

Morning Star online.co.uk
Sex workers rally against new Crime Bill
Tuesday 31 March 2009 – Paul Haste
Sex workers smothered London’s Piccadilly Circus in red umbrellas on Tuesday to protest against the criminalisation of their profession.
Scores of workers from the nearby Soho district gathered at the Eros statue in the heart of the capital, stopping traffic to highlight [...]

Las Vegas: NO TRESPASSING: Prostitute targeting hits mark

Mar. 22, 2009
Police initiative on Strip results in first conviction
By ALAN MAIMON
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Amanda Rose Teig’s nearly 100 misdemeanor arrests and citations in the past three years have yielded only a handful of convictions and no jail time.
When it comes to prostitution-related cases, that’s been the norm.
Police and court records examined by the Review-Journal [...]

NY: VICE SQUAD’S BIG ‘NET LOSS

By LARRY CELONA
March 27, 2009 —
The NYPD quietly shut down its highly successful Vice Squad operations on Craigslist without any explanation to the officers, The Post has learned.
The move came after five years of targeting sex-for-cash ads on the site, which led to arrests in all five boroughs, sources said.
Craigslist was [...]

Iceland to Ban Stripping and Prostitution

18/03/2009 | 12:31
Minister of Social Affairs Ásta Ragnheidur Jóhannesdóttir presented an action plan against human trafficking yesterday, which includes placing bans on operating strip clubs and purchasing sexual services.
It is hoped that the ban will take effect before the parliamentary elections on April 25.
“Human trafficking is the most disgusting form of international and organized crime [...]

UK: Migrant workers don’t undercut wages

LABOUR RESEARCH DEPARTMENT
Published weekly by LRD Publications Ltd, 78 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HF. 020 7928 3649
www.lrd.org.uk
The populist impression given by groups on the right of the political spectrum (underlined by newspapers, such as the DailyMail and DailyExpress, certain academics and the pressure group Migration Watch) that migration is undercutting the wages of workers already [...]

More women needing cash go from jobless to topless

By KAREN HAWKINS, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, March 22, 2009
(03-22) 21:01 PDT Chicago (AP) –
As a bartender and trainer at a national restaurant chain, Rebecca Brown earned a couple thousand dollars in a really good week. Now, as a dancer at Chicago’s Pink Monkey gentleman’s club, she makes almost that much in one good night.
The tough [...]

Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy

Economic hardship, discrimination, and violence have driven millions of women to work in the sex sector around the world, and their numbers will increase as a result of the current global economic crisis. Unless the underlying factors pushing women to opt for selling sex to support themselves and their families are remedied, many women will [...]

LV: Pimps, Metro’s coming for you

Cops’ focus shifts from prostitutes to the hustlers whose tools are manipulation and brutality, and whose goods are people
Thousands of prostitutes are arrested in Clark County every year. Their mug shots flip past like school portraits from the Mean Streets Academy, a few smiles but more slack stares, asleep with eyes open.
They’re criminals, but they’re [...]

Pecah Lobang

[Reposted from Racialicious]
by Guest Contributor Monica Roberts, originally posted at TransGriot
Pecah Lobang is a documentary by 24 year old filmmaker Poh Si Teng about Muslim transgender sex workers.
Pecah lobang means ‘busted’, and Malaysian transwomen because of Sharia law increasingly find themselves harassed by fundamentalist adherents to the faith and negative attitudes from Christians as well.
One [...]

TX: A lawyer responds

A lawyer’s response to Houston arrests.