Update, 18 December: An arrest has been made in this case. See comments.
On 2 December, police officers in Suffolk, England, discovered the nude body of Gemma Adams, 25, face-down in a brook some distance southwest of the town of Ipswich. Six days later, the nude body of a second young woman was found dumped in a stream not far away, and two days after that, a third in woodland to the southeast. Then last weekend the bodies of two more young women were found just a bit further to the southeast. All are now said to have died by asphyxiation, strangulation, or "compression to the neck."
To their credit, the people of Ipswich have grasped that the victims of their serial killer were women first of all, and that a serial killer of women is a threat to all women. All five of the young women whose bodies have been found were sex-trade workers, most of them believed also to have been dependent on expensive drugs. But in this excerpt from the Globe and Mail summary of the case so far, notice the interesting shift of focus away from that aspect of their story when a woman of Ipswich has her say:
Beneath the fear that another woman-hunting serial killer is roaming the laneways and city streets of England is a deeper sense of embarrassment and shame: In Ipswich, as in other cities here, girls who have fallen into drugs and prostitution have been driven out of the brightly lit centre of town into the dim outskirts — and, many now fear, to their deaths.The five corpses were found over the past 10 days along the A14, a secondary highway leading out of Ipswich. Police say the young prostitutes had been working the streets of Ipswich and its outskirts, after their purses and other belongings were found in an intensive police operation.
Some businesses also offered female workers special hand-held alarms.
“How is that going to stop someone trying to kill you?” asked Sally Townsend, 55, who works at Marks & Spencer and walks to her job each morning in the darkness that envelops this eastern English city in winter. Once inside the store, she told The Associated Press, she calls her husband to tell him she's safe.
Right on, Sally Townsend, and Mr Sally Townsend too.
Actually, attitudes in Britain towards these murders have become generally enlightened very quickly, as you can see by sifting through the growing collection of articles in the Guardian's special report. The Home Office is ensuring a massive professional investigation; the prime minister and the opposition leader have both spoken to the horror of the hunting of any human being. There have been some familiar gross missteps, but even the mainstream media seem to have caught up to the idea that sex workers and the drug-dependent are human beings first, and that when they are being murdered, it is the murderer who is the problem.
So recently in Canada we have seen police and the media criminally slow to react to clear and finally overwhelming evidence of serial killers at work -- in Vancouver's downtown eastside (the Pickton murders), in Edmonton, on the Highway of Tears in BC -- and it is hard not to conclude that the dismissive attitudes of the authorities, the media, and much of the public arise from a conviction, spoken or unspoken, that sex-trade workers and other marginalized people -- often, in Canada, aboriginal women and children -- have somehow brought their fate down upon themselves.
With its careful headline and introduction yesterday to the story of the murder of women in Ipswich, the Globe and Mail seemed to many of us to have joined the growing band of the enlightened. The story emphasizes the humanity of the victims and the human horror of living in a community where someone stalks women as prey.
And then we turned to the op-ed page, where Lawrence Martin was tumbling all over himself to rhapsodize Stéphane Dion as a figure from epic-heroic mythology :
... The Leader of the Opposition must find a way to resist the temptation to respond in kind to the cheap attacks and slanders. To succeed, to avoid being dragged down into the brothel, the rules of engagement are many: He must be a champion of principle. He must remain stoic, keeping the level of discourse high and noble, holding to his true character. He must, while letting other caucus members tackle the seamy questions, be seen as frequently as possible with the other tower of integrity in the Liberal thicket, Ken Dryden. Mr. Dion must avoid overexposure and he must avoid the big type of position change -- remember John Turner's accepting Pierre Trudeau's list of patronage appointments in 1984 -- that can be so damaging to the stature of a leader.
But one's prose can never be purple enough, eh, Mr Martin? So he closed his column with this little zinger:
Few have had the opportunity Stéphane Dion now possesses. He can do something greater than score a win for his party. He can bring respect to what Liberal Stan Keyes once fittingly labelled "a whore's game."
Listen up, Lawrence Martin: whores work for a living. A lot of them also die for it.
And maybe it's time you stopped sullying their deeply affecting human vulnerability and essential human dignity by drawing parallels between them and politicians -- or even purveyors of hackery like yourself.
Hat tip to brebis noire and many others at breadnroses.ca
Philobiblon comments on this, and argues for decriminalisation of prostitution.
http://philobiblon.co.uk/?p=1746
One of the comments says there are only about 40 sex workers in Ipswich, "so for five of them to be killed in such quick succession is just too horrible to think about."
A defence of prostitution? How unique. What are your views on the rights of the women and children of husbands and fathers who use prostitutes? $50 or $100 or $250 puts food and clothing on tables. Should a woman have a right to not expect her husband to accidentally bring STDs to her?
And for the rabid among you: no-one deserves to die for anything she's done, and no-one deserves to be beaten or mistreated for prostitution. My only point is that prostitution shouldn't be mischaracterized as straightforward "honest work" with no hidden costs.
IrC has a partial point: prostitution may very well have intrinsic hidden costs. However, the current approach to dealing with the issue haven't worked out very well. Certainly criminalizing the prostitutes themselves likely prevents them from accessing the tools to help themselves out of prostitution. Prostitution-advocacy groups differ on whether the purchasing of sex should be criminal, but they rarely differ on whether the selling of it should be criminal: no.
IrC wrote: "A defence of prostitution? How unique. What are your views on the rights of the women and children of husbands and fathers who use prostitutes? $50 or $100 or $250 puts food and clothing on tables. Should a woman have a right to not expect her husband to accidentally bring STDs to her?" So you are blaming prostitutes for the behaviour of the men who use them? Do you blame bars for existing when men waste their families' money on booze?
Um, guys, this isn't about how you characterise a profession according to its inherent risks. This is about how human beings are classified and treated according to what they do for a living - so some of us obviously come out at the bottom of the pile, eh?
So some people feel free to see those very same people as something less than human - something to be looked down upon, spit upon and...murdered. And then blamed for their own murder. In many places, a woman doesn't even need to be a prostitute for this to happen to her.
A little human solidarity is not a suspect thing. Nor does it make a person "rabid".
I. am. shocked!
Positively shocked.
I can not understand how you could possible write something in defence of these sirens who drag innocent men into their web of sex and degradation.
Here they are on their way home to their wives loving arms, ready give her their pay and buy something special for the kids when suddenly out of the shadows leans some harlot intent on sullying the poor innocent.
He could not possibly resist their evil charms.
Really skdadl for shame. Have you no thought for the children?
lrC: Where did I write a "defence of prostitution"? Where? I wrote about the essential humanity of the murdered women -- I wrote out of a sense of reverence for life, if you like.
What are your views on the rights of the women and children of husbands and fathers who use prostitutes? $50 or $100 or $250 puts food and clothing on tables. Should a woman have a right to not expect her husband to accidentally bring STDs to her?
I am trying and failing to follow your logic here. You seem to be saying that the prostitute is responsible for the behaviour of the john. So no man is ever responsible for his own behaviour? For betraying and, possibly, as in your example, impoverishing a family dependent on him, of whom the prostitute knows nothing? Such a jerk bears no responsibility?
Mandos: See my reply to lrC. I am appalled that you would agree to lrC's premise -- that prostitutes are somehow the cause of prostitution.
Oh, gee, hi. Look at all the cross-posting. ;-)
And for the rabid among you
lrC, this is a warning. On this site, no one addresses other members of the community that way.
I'm shocked that lrc is daring to question the wisdom of the market place and for individuals to do with their money as they choose.
I thought bull-headed consistency in a sterile moral code was his sould "virtue."
Personally, I'm managing to control my ingrained habit of using "whore" and "prostitute" as an ephitet. It denigrates the whole person of one who works in that trade.
I hope they catch that guy, and all the other "Bind, Torture, Kill" worms who need intensive therapy of incarceration.
"Mandos: See my reply to lrC. I am appalled that you would agree to lrC's premise -- that prostitutes are somehow the cause of prostitution."
Note that that's not the premise that I agreed to.
To clarify, I agreed to the idea that the *legalization* of prostitution has certain potential risks, and I also said that decriminalization (as opposed to legalization) may be beneficial to the well-being of prostitutes. Feminist defenders of this position aren't hard to find.
But I never said anything about blaming prostitutes.
However, I also agree that this is a digression into policy that perhaps could have been brought up later.
Mandos, thanks for the clarification.
I see irC is an adherent to the "Men are Microwaves" school of thought...how do you dudes cope in a world where temptation abounds!
heh, k'in.
Maybe they only have sex "accidentally"? (apparently this is true: see IrC's first post.)
Man: "Doo dee doo dee doo...whooops! I just had sex! Ooops! Doo dee doo dee doo...whooops again!
..."
Indeed thwap. It appears our pet libertarian has turned out to be nothing but "one o' them commienist agent provokers" as ol' Jim Bobby would say.
Soft headed prattle about prostitutes seen as "workers" does no useful service. They are part of the world of thieves. They are not workers. Ask a woman who does work how she feels about being classified as a companion worker to whores. Whores steal, lie, cheat, and wind up time and again in a police station; just like dope addicts, purse snatchers, pick pockets and store thieves. That does not make them any less worthy of protection from those who committ crimes of violence, like their pimps, but let us have a little realism. Ordinary women do not parade up and down streets late at night, dressed to suggest intimacy and readily climb into the car or go into a hotel room , with complete strangers. Just what do you want to do with it, put them in publicly funded hotels, inspected by publicly paid doctors, and equiped with surveilance to prevent them from favoring pimps? Do you think the public in any municipality will support that with their property tax? It is truly shocking to see what university thinkers will recklessly and selfishly propose for other people to be compelled to support.
"It is truly shocking to see what university thinkers will recklessly and selfishly propose for other people to be compelled to support." University thinkers? Get that chip off your shoulder ... Many people of many types - compassionate, religious, practical, poor or rich - advocate for the decriminalization of prostitution. Your cruel and sadistic description of woman coerced into this life reeks of sanctimonious self-righteousness.
For what it's worth, the question of prostitution was addressed by the National Post's quite libertarian editorial board today -- they're pro-legalization.
Mr. Hanger has had more to say on prostitution: "I don't think you can ever stamp it out, but you must control it," he claims. Yet the surest way to lose control is to surrender all the power over it to organized crime and other criminal elements, as Canada has done.
We don't approve of prostitution any more than we approve of other unwholesome practices. But wishing that people did not feel the need to buy and sell sex will not make the issue go away.
It is our hope the government chooses to be more constructive and forward thinking than the committee that was meant to direct it. There is a strong argument for legalizing the solicitation of prostitution. Too many women have already made that argument for us with their lives. Let's not let an anachronistic moral prudery prevent the country from making the most intelligent policy decision possible.
"They are part of the world of thieves" so says microwavable garhane. You've piqued my interest. You're saying that sex trade workers are in possession of the skeleton key that magically unlocks all men's zippers? That's pretty cool, but why not be a lazy thief (& avoid the trips to the police station) and use the magic key to unlock bank vaults and skip the
"work" aspect with "complete strangers"?
To heck with you all for even making me think about siding with IrC on anything, even a little, but here it goes.
The original article comparing politics to brothels and whores was right on the money. In politics, if you sell out, or compromise your principles for money or power, you are prostituting yourself. That is the right word for the behavior. That's what protitutes do, sell themselves for money. Attacking the author for calling a spade a spade does infer a defence of prostitution, at least, that's how both I and IrC read the post. If that was not your intent, then apologies.
Do I blame prostitutes for prostitution? I blame pimps, johns and prostitutes for prostitution. You can hold society to blame for almost all poverty induced crime, but that's really not very useful. In the same way, I hold drug dealers, addicts, and drug makers/smugglers to blame for their drug crimes, although I will admit illegal drugs to be more damaging to society as a whole, as well as to the individuals involved, than the illegal sex trade.
As for people being classified for what they do for a living, if you have sex for money to make a living, then you are a prostitute. Whore is a quicker word to say, and easier to type. It's also a synonym for protitute, just less polite. Prostitution is not a career path, it is not respectable, and people should be helped out of this life, not granted some phony respect for being a "working girl". Prosecuting more johns and pimps would help, as well as re-enforcing the social safety net.
Prostitution is probably unique in this society as the prostitute is often seen as both criminal and victim simultaneously. I am sure however, that the balance between the two can wiegh much more heavily on one side or the other depending on the individual prostitutes circumstance.
"In politics, if you sell out, or compromise your principles for money or power, you are prostituting yourself. That is the right word for the behavior. That's what protitutes do, sell themselves for money."
Everyone sells themself for money. There are professions out there that do alot more harm to society than prostitution.
What you really mean is they sell that special thing they should be saving for their one true love for money.
It is that factor that men especially cannot wrap their minds around.
That a woman is out there (whether through force or choice and the choice is another debate) unapologetically spreading her legs or opening her mouth for the next guy with the right amount of money.
For that she is called dirty. But what of the customer? Why is he not dirty? Why is he not scum? Why is he not the downfall of society?
Woman as keeper and destroyer of virtue is a mindset that needs quick and permanent burial.
garhane, did you eat something that disagreed with you?
Ask a woman who does work how she feels about being classified as a companion worker to whores.
Actually, Doug Saunders of the G&M did just that, and I quoted her right up front. Sally Townsend, 55, who works at the local Marks & Sparks, knows the one thing that matters: the dead streetwalkers were women and she is a woman. Some guy has a thing about women that drives him to kill women, and one is a woman ... Think about it. Women do.
Ben (The Tiger), that editorial would be a parallel to the NP's position on legalizing certain drugs, I think? I know that many traditional conservatives have long taken that position (William F. Buckley Jr, notably). I doubt that many of them have thought through the complexities of legalization, as Mandos and Holly Stick have hinted at. At least some are still thinking pretty dismissively of the underclasses that they should feel free to kill themselves as tidily and with as little expense to the state as possible (law enforcement costs money and prohibition encourages organized crime). My concern at leaving cheap snobs in charge is that they would probably do some variation on what Saunders reports the British have done -- drive the street people out of the centre of town to the more dangerous margins, which is partly what made these five women such easy targets in Ipswich.
Yeti, all I can do is echo April Reign's cogent reply to you.
The word "whore" doesn't just mean selling yourself for money, as Lawrence Martin's column so clearly proves. No one has ever suggested that Dion was on the take.
No, the word is a lot more loaded than that. It is sexually charged; it expresses deep disgust, revulsion, hatred, really, for someone who is believed to be doing work that is low or dishonest or dirty. Or in your parlance, Yeti, not "respectable." Yeti, I gotta tell you: "respectable" is a word that I try to keep out of my vocabulary; I don't have a lot of respect for people who enforce respectability.
If there is anything disgusting about prostitution, it is what is happening to the women (and sometimes the boys and men) who earn money that way.
But is that where we think the intense emotional loading of the word comes from? From the deep empathy that "respectable" men like Lawrence Martin have for the plight of exploited hookers?
I don't think so, Yeti. I think the disgust and loathing implicit in Martin's use of the word arise directly from the dichotomy April identifies, that dichotomy that "respectable" men project on to women -- she's a madonna or she's a whore.
In some of the comments to this thread, you can see the neurosis (I'm being kind) manifest. "Whores" bring out deep hostility in some, ah, people, really deep. That's not just sniffy moral disapproval, Yeti. That's deep hostility. Revulsion. Hatred. For women who are not madonnas.
Used as metaphors, whore or prostitute are specifically misogynist terms. They imply that special kind of atavistic revulsion that some men feel for any open expression of female sexuality. If you don't feel that revulsion yourself, Yeti, and I suspect you don't, then I would suggest that you drop that metaphorical use of those terms from your vocabulary.
Those words, Yeti, those loaded words, and the passion that lies behind their most common use: they are killers, Yeti. Quite literally, they are killers.
The reason "whore" is an epithet is the view that to sell one's body (in prostitution) or allegiances (in politics) is to sell one's own dignity or honour. The modern idea that sexual power politics have anything to do with it has occluded the underlying and long-standing ideals of personal honour and worth.
Heavens, lrC. You've been reading Dierdre McCloskey and the latest issue of the NYRB too! Small world.
Actually, I was going to write about that today, but fending off the moralizers here has been taxing.
Anyway, nice try, lrC, but no. Prostitution is either a fair trade or, if it is unfair, it is unfair to the prostitute. Cynical or crooked politicians expect to advance or profit from selling their allegiances. I am failing to see the parallel.
You don't have to defend prostitution to see that it has been demonized -- emotionally loaded -- beyond rational critical thought. A rational person looking for a metaphor for the dishonourable would not automatically land on terms describing the exploitation of women -- not, at least, terms that targeted the women rather than their exploiters.
But an irrational person might, or a man who had just never thought through his culture's contradictory responses to women's sexuality.
I'm not talking about power politics, lrC. I'm talking about neurosis, a generalized cultural neurosis that becomes, unfortunately and far too regularly, genuine psychosis in some individuals.
This culture copes badly with women as women (rather than idealized madonnas or demonized whores), and some guys end up internalizing that conflict deeply enough to kill because of it.
I happen to admire the epic virtues m'self. And I am sure that M Dion is an honourable man. But I still think that Lawrence Martin was writing purple prose up there, risibly inflating the importance of the subject and his own insights, and as he went over the top, he wrote with casual if deep disregard for the very humanity of other human beings.
Hardly an honourable way to behave where I come from.
>Anyway, nice try, lrC, but no.
I'm not trying to explain how things should be. The point is how people came by that view of "whore". Cast your mind back a bit and think like old-fashioned dead white men. You don't have to approve of what we inherited from them to acknowledge its origins.
>This culture copes badly with women as women (rather than idealized madonnas or demonized whores), and some guys end up internalizing that conflict deeply enough to kill because of it.
Oh...yeah, that must be it. The culture is mentally ill and it spills over. No irrational bitterness in any other quarters, though.
April, so much of what you said I agree with, and in fact agreed with in the post you replied to. Broken down-
"Everyone sells themselves for money and there are proffesions more dangerous to society than prostitution." Yes to the second, and hell no to the first. We diverge at one point, you from the position that prostitutes are selling sex, and me from the point that they are selling their bodies. There is a difference. I don't "really mean they should be saving themselves for their one true love", that's an opinion you've assigned to me, and I don't know how it was arrived at. I can wrap my mind around that women are, by force or choice, having sex for money, even as I type this. Her john (client/customer are words that tend to lend legitimacy to the transaction, so I will stick to "john" or "jon") is at least as wrong, and often more so, than the prostitute in engaging in money for sex. I put that position clearly in my first post, twice, but you seemed to ignore it in your haste to condemn me.
Skdadl, you are right that "whore" is much more emotionally charged than prostitute, which is why I stayed to the term prostitute when not refering to the "whore's game" that Martin quoted. To prostitute onself dosn't just mean selling yourself or your principles for money, you can also sell yourself for political advantage and power. Abandoning a long espoused belief or position in exchange for power (a cabinet seat in Government for example) can correctly be called postituting onself. That's proper english usage of the term, although it can (and you do) be argued to be misogynistic. Compromises, giving up on one cause to further another, whipped votes to support a postion a back-bencher may not like, happens a lot in the House of Commens, which is why it was called "a whore's game". It's not a phrase i have heard used before, and is perhaps over the top (I wouldn't use it myself). It doesn't suggest that Dion is "on the take".
Again, due to its emotional baggage, "whore" is not a term I use lightly. My disgust is aimed at the prostitution not the prostitute. The overwhelming majority of prostitutes are forced by circumstance, or coerced by others into doing what they do. A prostitute and her john are both at once addict and drug, engaging in mutually self-destructive behavior. I can respect a person for their intellect, for their work-ethic, for determination, for ability, and for their acheivements, and their gender or sexual mores is irrelevant to that respectability. To ask me, or anyone else, to respect someone for being a prostitute, to pretend their is something admirable about that activity is wrong. Prostitutes are due the same respect that is due every human being, but after that, they have my sympathy, and my hope that they find a way out.
finally, I hope I have made myself understood. I have always found it too easy to be misinterpreted when I post online, as it lacks the immeadiacy of response and correction that a face to face conversation would have. There is more to say, but I'm not sure how to say it, and this thread is already long. So I'll end with the fact that the "Madonna/whore" dichotomy has never had a home in me.
IrC, *you* are the one who is obviously irrational and bitter. Otherwise, why would you be wasting your time railing against people who are mourning dead women and pointing out prejudice and inaccuracies in language and reality?
You said it yourself - try to think like dead white men. Talk about irrational. We'd rather analyse them, and history, rather than repeat and continue the same mistakes and prejudice.
Update, 18 December:
A suspect has been arrested in this case. From the BBC:
And from the Guardian:
Just in case we think we are detached from all this:
"Highway of Tears
Dir: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
A sign on the Highway of Tears
Route 16 cuts through some of the most spectacular scenery in North America. But in Canada, Route 16 is also known as The Highway of Tears. Over the past three decades, dozens of young women have disappeared along the 700-kilometre stretch of road. Locals say a serial killer is on the loose. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police haven’t a clue to go on. Sharmeen Obeid-Chinoy traveled Route 16 and spoke to the families who still live in fear along the Highway of Tears."
This is a documentary we will not gets to see .. on a program called WITNESS - on the al Jazeera television network.
Oh my god.
Some of the talk on here is inspiring, and some is just mind-boggling.
I work in an office. I sit around this place 7 hours a day, talking nice to people whether I like them or not, applying policies I don't approve of, and generally indulging in hypocrisy. I do what I'm told and occasionally tell people what to do, devoting my mental effort to things I have no interest in whatsoever. I do all this for money. So, just how much of myself am I selling? Quite a lot if that's how you want to talk about it.
Does it make so much difference that my clothes are on? Prostitutes still have their bodies when they go home. They aren't selling their bodies, and they aren't "selling themselves" much more than I am. This kind of language isn't helpful.
Yeah, for a lot of people prostitution is a lousy job. Most of them, much like, say, nannies and a lot of garment workers and so on, are only doing what they're doing because they're vulnerable and have little choice. So, what, judging them is supposed to help make it less lousy? What's gonna help prostitutes isn't laws against them, it's better social policies; it's about class, not morality. If there's less inequality and less unemployment and less homelessness and so on, then prostitutes will have a lot more choice whether they enter or stay in the sex trade.
Garhane is evil, one of the sources of the world's misery. Its spew is part and parcel of the whole schtick, usually religious, where if a guy does something wrong it's because he "strayed", but it's not his fault--but if he did it with a woman, it *is* her fault; she didn't "stray", she "tempted him". Always the victim's fault.
"Everyone sells themselves for money and there are proffesions more dangerous to society than prostitution." Yes to the second, and hell no to the first.
Hell no to the first, really? So, you don't give over your time and labour to your employer in exchange for compensation in the form of money? How, exactly, do you get by in a western capitalist society?
And before you try and construct some ridiculous partition between selling 'your time' and 'your body', keep in mind that there are various exchanges that are interested in nothing more than your body; you can sell your blood, sperm, eggs or hair, you can sell yourself into service as a medical test subject, you can sell yourself as a body to stand in the background of a movie shoot, an extra, you can sell your body as a model or spokesperson or even stuntdouble. There are professions and transactions aplenty out there that are interested solely in purchasing, for a certain amount of time, control over your body. And none of them are imbued with the disreputability of prostitution.
I don't know which country you live in, but here in Canada we donate blood, sperm and eggs, as accepting money for them is AGAINST the LAW. Being a subject in a medical test gets you a "honourarium" intended to cover you own expenses, and selling pictures of yourself (covers the rest of you objections) hardly qualifies as selling control over your body. If you've got any better examples you should have used them, and you probably would have.
Prostituion is no more a "job" or a proffession than "drug dealer", "burgler", or "smuggler".
Legalization is not an answer, any more more than throwing them all in prison. Better social programs to give women (and men) a choice, help them get off the streets, get a real job, for those who need it - drug rehab, and protection from pimps and jons who think they "own them" and we will see a lot less prostitution on our streets. If after all that, there are still prostitutes out there by choice, those we arrest.
I don't accept the arguement that protitutes and jons are only hurting themselves. The same can be said of crack-heads and junkies, and possession of crack and heroin is a crime as well. If you want to legalize those activities as well, I have nothing to say to you, you are just too distant from reality to make you understand my point.
Just checking in with a further update. People probably already know that a second suspect was arrested on Tuesday, and the police say of him as they said of the first man arrested that they are holding him on suspicion of all five murders, although they appear to know of no connection between the two men. Curious.
In Tuesday's Globe, Doug Saunders reported a detail I haven't seen in the Guardian reports. In one of the interviews he gave last weekend, the first suspect to be arrested spoke of not having alibis "for some of the times," and then went on to say that he might not have firm alibis for any of the times the women were killed or disposed of. Saunders says that the police acted on the basis of those statements, since they had not released any information to the public or anyone they'd interviewed about precise times, other than the last time a victim was seen and the time her body was discovered.
Anyone who has read through the Guardian archives will have noted that there have been two well-remembered and similar unsolved cases in Norwich (1992, 2002), which is not far north of Ipswich, and where the first suspect to be arrested lived as a teenager. Today the Guardian reports that those cases as well as the case of a woman who disappeared from the Norwich red-light district in 2000 stand ready to be reopened.
If you've got any better examples you should have used them, and you probably would have.
Okay, here's one; pornographic films. It's perfectly legal to hire two people (or more) to have sex with each other, but illegal to hire one person to have sex with you. Care to parse that one?
Now Garnet, you have ventured into a particularly dark shade of grey, but I'll hand it to you, it's a much better example than anything in your first post. There are a lot of people who see no difference between porn actors and prostitutes, and that creating that type of porn should be illegal as well.
The difference lies in the creation of film, a story narrative, and the fact that it can be termed "art". Sex can be used very effectively, even when simulated in mainstream movies not only to evoke responses, but as necessary character developement. I would point to Cruel Intentions, starring Sarah Gellar as one such film, were the relationship between sex and the protagonists was essential to the story. Now the problem lies with the question of what is too far, what is art and what is not. Is "Shortbus" starring Soo-kyn Lee too far? A powerful social commentary were graphic sex scenes are not simulated, many decryed it as pornography.
Anyway, to get to the point, the creation of genuine art is a mitigating factor against the crime of prostitution, in a legal, ethical, and perhaps even a moral sense. I don't like it, but accept it as a necessary evil, a bad apple in the basket of Free Speach. This is where the line should, and has been drawn, this far, and no further.
I am sure this kind of splitting of hair will leave me open to charges of hypocrasy, and bizarre what -if scenarios, but I can live with that. I think we've exhausted this debate at his point, and I have little to add that won't be repeating myself. I will read any further replies, but don't be surprised if stop responding myself.
P.S. my spelling before 7 a.m. is horrible. Please overlook it, Thanx.
the creation of genuine art
Which has what, exactly, to do with ninety-nine percent of all pornography? And I'm not being snobby or elitist, I'm being entirely serious; most of the discs available for rent or purchase don't even have narratives, just a collection of individual scenes of more than one person doing something sexual. They don't tell stories, they don't create narratives, they don't explore characters. They're just sex, staged and filmed and packaged and sold.
And you're right, I do consider that to be a ridiculously tiny hair to split, though I'm not sure if hypocrisy is applicable here. Also? 'Thanx'? It burns, it burns! ;)
- i am not ready to say which art is legitamate and which art isn't, and I'm sure not going to let someone else decide that for me.