So the internet's not just made for pron.
It's also made for sex.
Yeay.
I'm betting this is what Government Ministers really mean when they talk about "The gig economy."
Brit escorts: Without the internet to keep us safe, we'd be totally screwed
A study into the effect of the internet on professional sex workers has shown the online world keeps them safer, happier in their job, and more able to weed out creepy customers. Researchers at the universities of Leicester and Strathclyde in the UK interviewed 641 courtesans – with a roughly 80/20 per cent female to male …
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Thursday 25th January 2018 13:37 GMT ravenviz
Re: So the internet's not just made for pron.
On a side note I'm always surprised how many people use their work email for private communication, mixing it all together. There are plenty of free online email accounts that people can use, not even if they have anything to hide, just to keep work and play separate.
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Thursday 25th January 2018 10:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
>So is the real world... but I guess it depends on your definition of what is weird or perverted
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Thursday 25th January 2018 19:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
"And yet there was a weekly TV documentary about one in Leeds(?). Plod should watch more TV."
Sounds to me that provided the women were there entirely voluntarily, it's something the Plod would do well to ignore. Policing should be purely about reducing harm, and I don't mean harm to the susceptibilities of the control freaks that like to get into office.
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Thursday 25th January 2018 22:45 GMT Graham Marsden
@leaway2
The Leeds Tolerance Zone operates with Police knowlege, however the BBC 3 "documentary" has been strongly criticised by sex workers for its allegations that most women got into prostitution because of drug habits instead of the need to make money because of government Austerity.
https://www.rt.com/uk/364310-sex-prostitutes-bbc-documentary/
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Friday 26th January 2018 17:20 GMT Ian 55
That "Prostitution is legal in the UK, but not in a brothel or via a pimp" is somewhat misleading.
In England & Wales, prostitution is indeed legal and it's only the people owning or running (or allowing on property they control or assorted other things) a brothel who break those laws: both clients and prostitutes there are still behaving legally.
Similarly, when it comes to agencies, it's just those running them who are 'controlling prostitution for gain' and thus behaving illegally.
(There is an offence of paying for sex with someone who is coerced, but as far as I can see, no-one's ever been charged with it.)
Despite those, there are plenty of brothels and escort agencies. Why? The police have better things to do, such as dealing with street work (where soliciting both ways is illegal). If you don't annoy the neighbours, some forces will invite brothel owners onto a committee to discuss how to run them better rather than charging them.
Scotland used to be more or less the same. When all its police forces were combined, the one in Glasgow - which hated prostitution - ended up in charge and so they've done things like harass people working legally.
Northern Ireland has made buying sex illegal, as a pointless bit of gesture politics. Hurts the people it pretends to protect, but makes the law makers feel happy.
I don't claim sex work law makes sense. Especially as no money need be involved for somewhere to be a "brothel", just more than one person being sexual with a variety of others.
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Thursday 25th January 2018 10:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
This isn't news, there have been these sorts of things around in the escorting world since it discovered the Internet in the late 90s. I set one of these things up in 2001 or thereabouts, the girls thought it was an excellent tool, much better than the ones they usually had to deal with :)
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Thursday 25th January 2018 16:55 GMT Nick Kew
Re: Not so bad
"Over a third of those questioned got online threats in the last year, primary from people threatening to expose them to their community."
That kind of threat is usually called blackmail, and it's not necessarily a threat at all ("publish and be damned"). Not in the same league as Jack the Ripper.
Any idea how many prostitutes suffer from blackmail, compared to the numbers who make money from blackmailing their own clients? I guess that's not the kind of statistics anyone has readily to hand!
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Thursday 25th January 2018 22:53 GMT Graham Marsden
@Nick Kew - Re: Not so bad
"That kind of threat is usually called blackmail, and it's not necessarily a threat at all "
Really? There are sex workers who have been forced to move home by landlords who have found out what they are doing and demanded free sex. Even worse, some landlords are now offering "sex for rent" to vulnerable tenants who can't afford to pay or find other places to live.
Similarly there been people sacked from jobs because some prodnose has decided to "out" them to their employers (even if the person is no longer actively working in the sex industry).
However the number of actual examples of sex workers being convicted of blackmail of their clients over the past few years can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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Thursday 25th January 2018 13:37 GMT spold
>>an independent escort providing BDSM services. "If you didn’t have that internet … everything would have been underground and everybody would be scared."
As a result only five per cent of workers said they had been physically abused in the last year, although online abuse was fairly commonplace. <<
I'm guessing all the BDSM customers have been abused (much to their satisfaction).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
