News and Media Reports

[Honolulu1]

Hawaii becomes last state to ban sex trafficking.

Associated Press.

July 5, 2016.

Updated July 5, 2016 3:48 pm.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS.

Hawaii Gov. David Ige signs a bill banning sex trafficking as members of the Hawaii Women's Legislative Caucus applaud on Tuesday, July 5, 2016, in Honolulu. Hawaii became the last state in the nation to explicitly ban sex trafficking.

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Hawaii has become the last state in the nation to explicitly ban sex trafficking.

Gov. David Ige signed the bill into law Tuesday. It makes sex trafficking a violent crime and class A felony, expands the statewide witness protection program to include sex trafficking and provides victims access to criminal injury compensation.

"It's a historic day for Hawaii. Now, from sea to sea, the United States can say it banned sexual slavery," said Kris Coffield, executive director of Imua Alliance, which works with sex trafficking victims. "The most direct benefit for victims is that now, instead of being criminalized and put in a jail cell, and facing prosecution, they'll be placed in a support services network and treated as victims of violent crimes instead of accomplices to their own exploitation. ".

Before Ige signed the bill, Hawaii was the only state in the nation without a law that specifically banned sex trafficking. Human trafficking was banned, but people paid for sex work could be prosecuted under the law, regardless of how they got into the sex trade.

Advocates have been pushing for a ban for more than a decade. Last year, Ige vetoed a similar bill after prosecutors said it would make it more difficult to catch the perpetrators.

"Victims who come forward will have more protections, more ability to be protected from being forced to testify," said Kathryn Xian, executive director of Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery, who has been pushing the bill for a decade. "Sometimes it's very dangerous. ".

Ige also signed a bill that provides funds for law enforcement agencies to test untested sex assault evidence kits. The Honolulu Police Department had about 1,500 rape kits that had not been tested earlier this year.

With the passage of the bill, victims of sex assault will see that "their experiences matter, that they should be treated with dignity and respect, and that's something that's reflected in the law, that they can't be put on a shelf to collect dust," said Cathy Betts, executive director of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women.

[Boto Suk Suk]

What about adding that mongers are required to be registered on a monger's website with pic included as on your registration card?

While you're at it, why not include the address as well. Wait a minute. Isn't there such a registration now required for sex offenders? Hmmm.

[DangerBoy]

Cool story bro.

Even if this happened, there's still a lot of money on the table for guys who don't have your hypothetical card. Married men make up most of any working girl's clientele. Never mind the women who just want to make some side money who don't want to be taxed or who don't want to pay the fees associated with "being legit".

The police union won't let it fly. Too many cops are getting greased from the MPs. And the state has its head too far up its ass to do anything this progressive, especially if you're talking about a timeframe of four years from now. The year 2300 maybe.

Finally, the state of Hawaii loves sticking it nose where it doesn't belong, like making gun owners submit their names to a criminal database (never mind about the BS gun laws here to begin with). I don't know about you, but what I do with my money and who I give that money to is my business, not the government, even if it makes me a "legit" monger.

Sex is not a crime. What two consenting adults do, and if money changes hands is their business. The government has no right being involved in that transaction or to regulate that transaction.

This is how it will be in Hawaii when they decriminalize sex:

It's 2020 and prostitution has just been decriminalized in Hawaii. The Relaxation Control Board has issued three licenses for relaxation services on Oahu and one each on Kauai, Maui, Hawaii. No local mama sans could get a license because the burden was just too much. $100,000 non returnable application fee and proof of $1 mill in operating funds. All of slots were given to outsiders.

Some rules: No table showers, no food on premises. Operating hours daytime only and never on Sunday. Girls as well as mongers must register with the board and show proof of health checks. All mongers must show registration card at the door. Prices are set by the board and no tipping allowed. No cash transactions.

To get a card, a monger must prove he is single, std and drug free. This card costs $200 and must be renewed annually.

[Da One]

This is how it will be in Hawaii when they decriminalize sex:

It's 2020 and prostitution has just been decriminalized in Hawaii. The Relaxation Control Board has issued three licenses for relaxation services on Oahu and one each on Kauai, Maui, Hawaii. No local mama sans could get a license because the burden was just too much. $100,000 non returnable application fee and proof of $1 mill in operating funds. All of slots were given to outsiders.

Some rules: No table showers, no food on premises. Operating hours daytime only and never on Sunday. Girls as well as mongers must register with the board and show proof of health checks. All mongers must show registration card at the door. Prices are set by the board and no tipping allowed. No cash transactions.

To get a card, a monger must prove he is single, std and drug free. This card costs $200 and must be renewed annually.

What about adding that mongers are required to be registered on a monger's website with pic included as on your registration card?

[Bikini]

This is how it will be in Hawaii when they decriminalize sex:

It's 2020 and prostitution has just been decriminalized in Hawaii. The Relaxation Control Board has issued three licenses for relaxation services on Oahu and one each on Kauai, Maui, Hawaii. No local mama sans could get a license because the burden was just too much. $100,000 non returnable application fee and proof of $1 mill in operating funds. All of slots were given to outsiders.

Some rules: No table showers, no food on premises. Operating hours daytime only and never on Sunday. Girls as well as mongers must register with the board and show proof of health checks. All mongers must show registration card at the door. Prices are set by the board and no tipping allowed. No cash transactions.

To get a card, a monger must prove he is single, std and drug free. This card costs $200 and must be renewed annually.

[AwabiHunter]

Looks like dow has rebounded. As long as people don't panic like they usually do when they hear bad news market should be ok. But that's how the market is panicked sell market goes down than always goes back up.

Unless you are a legit "Trader" and your sole intention is to use various risk averse methods to capitalize the short and long positions that make the market go up and down then don't Fuck around my friend, traders will play every hand delt up and down, sometimes they win sometimes they lose, the stock market is no different than a casino my friend and we all know what happens in the end, if you are in the market now I would recommend to take your winnings and run for the door, that is unless you are a trader using various risk aversion tools and leverage etc. I wouldn't play with fire.

[DaViper]

Looks like dow has rebounded. As long as people don't panic like they usually do when they hear bad news market should be ok. But that's how the market is panicked sell market goes down than always goes back up.

[Memahu]

http://www.closerweekly.com/posts/ni...divorce-106338

Good thing that Nick Cage has the National Treasure map.

[AwabiHunter]

Knew there were still repercussions from 2008 fuck up. Didn't know the extent. 6000 seem might far but devastating.

Maybe I should ride the big names down short.

Or is it better to gamble on the small weaker ones to belly up? Seems a no lose proposition at this point.

I would stay out of the market completely and go all Cash or precious metals but if you are like some of my friends and are a true risk taker and adrenaline junkie and love to gamble in the markets then I would do as they are doing and double down on 2-3 x Leveraged Inverse funds, do your research their are a few good ones out there, very risky but you could make millions if you have the "Stones" to do it.

[AwabiHunter]

(Here's an interesting and quite intelligent article from Honolulu Civil Beat. It supports decriminalization of consensual adult prostitution. It was written by a female university professor, and in my opinion it should be required reading for all of our state legislators.)

Should Prostitution Be Decriminalized?

There's a growing belief that until the trade is completely legal among consenting adults, sex workers will continue to be unjustifiably punished.

It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about prostitution and sex work.

But with Amnesty International's recent unflinching policy recommendation to decriminalize all adult consensual sex work, including their takedown of the Nordic model which claims to punish only clients, it is becoming increasingly difficult for naysayers to ignore the well-documented ways that sex workers are harmed by criminalization.

Amnesty's position is based on many years of empirical research by leading health and human rights researchers, as well as calls by sex workers and advocates.

While much of the debate on sex work focuses on what is best for "women," an enormous diversity of individuals trade sex at some point in their lives. This includes not just cisgender (identifying with their birth gender) women from a range of age, racial, religious, disability and sexual identities, but also transgender women, cisgender men and GLBTQ youth. Yet even when taking into account the diversity of individuals involved and the many settings in which sex is traded and policed, Amnesty studied the accumulating body of evidence and concluded: "to protect the rights of sex workers, it is necessary not only to repeal laws which criminalize the sale of sex, but also to repeal those which make the buying of sex from consenting adults or the organization of sex work (such as prohibitions on renting premises for sex work) a criminal offense".

As Amnesty explains: "Such laws force sex workers to operate covertly in ways that compromise their safety, prohibit actions that sex workers take to maximize their safety, and serve to deny sex workers support or protection from government officials. They therefore undermine a range of sex workers' human rights, including their rights to security of person, housing and health".

Will Amnesty's recommendation lead to a change in USA policies?

The answer to how USA lawmakers respond to Amnesty's call will depend in part on their level of courage to fight other institutional and cultural pressures to maintain and even increase criminal penalties for clients and other individuals connected to the sex industry. But their reactions will also depend on their own personal beliefs.

As someone who has researched and taught about sex work and human trafficking for more than two decades, I know that for some individuals, no amount of evidence or logic will change their opinion that sex work is intrinsically wrong. For them, decriminalizing any form of sex work including adult consensual encounters would send the unacceptable message that sex work is a legitimate form of income generation. And it is in this emotional territory where the decision to decriminalize or not rests.

Because of the difficulty in evaluating evidence on emotional topics, my first assignment for students in my Sex Work, Human Trafficking, and Social Justice class is to document their current reactions to the issue of sex work.

I ask students to honestly reflect on how their life experiences might shape the way they approach the issue of exchanging sexual services for pay. At the end of the course I ask students to revisit their feelings. I have found that when given the opportunity to make space for their feelings and to evaluate the best empirical evidence (such as Alexandra Lutnick's "Domestic XXXXX Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains") most students conclude that adult consensual sex work should be decriminalized. They come to this conclusion even if they still personally do not "believe" in it.

Furthermore, students report that they understand how decriminalization can be one arm of a larger set of strategies to assist victims of structural and individual harms. These harms may include poverty, neglect, police violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

I wish that I could also give this assignment to all policymakers and anti-sex trade activists.

This includes organizations such as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, which described Amnesty's move toward decriminalization as a "willful and callous rejection of women's rights and equality," and Hollywood celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet who have joined CATW in their opposition to decriminalization. While I have previously written that "it is no longer acceptable to prioritize the opinions of celebrities over those of sex workers and the scientists who advocate for them" the belief systems underlying these opinions are still important to address.

As Barb Brents and I point out in our introduction to a special section of Sociological Perspectives on sex work and human trafficking, there has long been a serious decoupling between reliable empirical evidence and sex work policies in the USA. While there are complex historical and institutional reasons for this disconnect, the answer in part is because sex workers have long served as a trope, a symbol for other people's agendas.

Of course, sex workers have long been used as punchlines for misogynist jokes. But the symbol of the sex worker is also used by anti-prostitution activists who purportedly want to "help" them. For example, in a recent article discussing sex workers rights in The New York Times Magazine, Yasmeen Hassan, global executive director for Equality Now, expresses the following opinion about sex workers: "They're sexual objects. What does that mean for how professional women are seen? And if women are sex toys you can buy, think about the relationships between men and women, in marriage or otherwise".

In Hassan's statement and others like it coming from prohibitionists, a central "problem" of sex work is not what the best empirical evidence says, but what they believe sex workers symbolize. And when one is focused on one's own symbolic interpretation, it is difficult to listen to conflicting evidence.

Sex workers have long argued that criminalization and policing practices cause and/or exacerbate the worst harms to their well-being. Scientific evidence, as found in Amnesty's reports, confirms this.

But changing the laws requires policymakers (and to some extent, the larger public) to respect and humanize people who are currently both stigmatized and criminalized.

Sex workers have made some progress in bringing attention to the harms of criminalizing sex work policies. One example is the practice of police using the carrying of condoms as evidence of prostitution. With growing global momentum behind the sex workers rights movement, I expect many more successes to come. Yet now is also a critical time for everyday citizens both to check in with their own feelings about the issue and to read and evaluate for themselves the best available empirical evidence.

USA history is full of examples of public beliefs and norms lagging behind progressive institutional change. Examples include civil rights for African-Americans, voting rights for women and marriage rights for same-sex couples. Most individuals in the USA now believe that upholding the civil rights for those groups was the right thing to do.

Decriminalizing sex work will not on its own fix misogyny, racism and other forms of systemic oppression. But decriminalization of consensual sex work is one key step toward social and sexual justice.

Leave it to the fricken "Celebrities" to stand behind causes they know little about, these celebrities ruin industries by backing lobbies they know little about, they are actors not brain surgeons, it makes me disgusted when I hear a certain actor or actress behind some initiative they have no in depth clue about and only want to gain notoriety as a good guy, F them all.

Anyone worth his\her weight in Intellect knows very well that legalizing sex work would have a tremendous positive effect on the economy as well as safety of everyone involved in the activity. It is small minded people who don't really take the time to understand both sides of the argument and if they would take the time to understand the logic behind this authors point of view maybe they would realize they have actually been contributing negatively by their actions.

[AwabiHunter]

If and when this world economic bubble bursts, what do you guys think will happen here in Hawaii? Since we are so dependent on tourism. If it hits the Asian countries hard, Waikiki will be interesting.

It will be Awful, Tourism will die as everyone will be scrambling, most "Sheeple" have very short term memories and can be fucked multiples times before they eventually learn and even then some people never learn, what happened in 2008 is just a prelude of what is too come. Hawaii has advantages and disadvantages, it all depends what you are looking at, one good thing is you just have 1 million people to contend with should it play out "Venezuela Style" and you won't have mass migration from state to state like you would on the mainland, but we are isolated in the middle of the ocean and if shipping were to come to a halt which it could very well be then we are in a world of hurt. Google Venezuela and watch the videos of what's happening there right now, this was once the 9th richest nation on the planet and they have abundant resources and they people are starving and killing dogs and cats to stay alive as we speak, this is what happen when society breaks down, for all you who want Bernie sanders and his Socialistic bullshit that's what will become and hillary will take us straight to war.

[AwabiHunter]

With the British pound taking a beating (and probably the Euro), the yens value is surging. A strong yen means Japanese coming to Hawaii in droves and spending. So, in the short term, I think Hawaii will do okay. If this becomes a global recession, if any of you have money, buy depressed Oahu real estate.

You are right, but the key word is "Short Term" the Yen and the Dollar are typically viewed as "Safe Havens" in the FX market, all Fiat currencies are toilet paper and eventually will revert to their true intrinsic value which is zero. It's all about debasement of the currency, which is a hidden tax via inflation, all countries are in a race to the bottom via currency wars. Hawaii has been out performing the Mainland tremendously in virtually all sectors but Hawaii always lags behind so remember that, This will be a global recession, Too much debt and derivatives, the stock market as well as most other asset classes are hyper inflated.

[DeepShot]

Mr lose money, have a great lose money warren lunch, LOL.

I'm in for free.

100% cash now. See me in 2 years and I'm buying, LOL.

I'm having lunch with Warren at McDonalds this Friday. Want to come? Its free.

[DarthTyranus]

If and when this world economic bubble bursts, what do you guys think will happen here in Hawaii? Since we are so dependent on tourism. If it hits the Asian countries hard, Waikiki will be interesting.

With the British pound taking a beating (and probably the Euro), the yens value is surging. A strong yen means Japanese coming to Hawaii in droves and spending. So, in the short term, I think Hawaii will do okay. If this becomes a global recession, if any of you have money, buy depressed Oahu real estate.

[Da One]

You are right about 401 K's they will crash and crash worse than 2008, it is not the time to buy anything other than gold or silver, all asset classes will get wiped out soon as we are in one of the biggest Fed induced market bubbles in history, get out of the stock market trust me.

If and when this world economic bubble bursts, what do you guys think will happen here in Hawaii? Since we are so dependent on tourism. If it hits the Asian countries hard, Waikiki will be interesting.