Cambridge Brothel Case: What's the Point?
Abandoning the "sex slave" narrative exposes the hollowness at the center of cases like this.
Massachusetts is in the midst of prosecuting people who patronized a fancy sex business near Harvard University. It's been big news in certain corners, spawning salacious stories about the doctors, politicians, and tech executives who were on the club's client list. But the most novel thing about this prosecution is what it's missing: a wild yarn about sex slaves.
The framing of this story is refreshing, after more than a decade of similar stories getting starkly different treatment. Despite many of the sex workers involved being Asian—a fact that greatly increases the odds of a prostitution bust being called a "human trafficking sting"—news reports have largely refrained from trying to portray the women involved as hapless victims of sexual servitude.
Yet the absence of a trafficking narrative lays bare the hollowness of such prosecutions. Why are we doing this? Who's being served?
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Who Benefits?
So far, the people who ran the business—including a 42-year-old woman named Han Lee—are the only ones who have been sentenced. Lee pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to induce women into prostitution and money laundering and was sentenced in March to four years in prison. The main charge here is part of the Mann Act, a 1910 law (then referred to as the "White Slave Traffic Act") passed in response to last century's moral panic about immigration, urbanization, and women's independence.
"Born into poverty in South Korea, she was a sex worker for years before becoming a madam," reports The Wall Street Journal. She thoroughly screened clients of her business, and "she allowed women to keep more than half the proceeds and decline to perform services if they chose, wrote Scott Lauer, her federal public defender."
Lee is obviously harmed by this, and it seems like those she employed may be harmed, too.
If the sex workers' identities are known and they are immigrants, they could be deported. Even if they escape authorities, they're out of jobs—and may be forced to turn to more dangerous or exploitative forms of sex work.
Lee's prosecution does benefit one group here: federal authorities. She had to forfeit around $5.5 million to the U.S. government.
Naming and Shaming
Now, state and local authorities are busy prosecuting former clients of Lee's business. Their prosecution has become big news in part because of their fight to keep their identities private. Lawyers cited the "adverse and embarrassing collateral consequences" that could come from their identities being revealed publicly. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court said too bad.
The charges they face—"sexual conduct for a fee," a misdemeanor—and the potential legal consequences are relatively minor. It seems clear that the shaming is the point.
"I would hope that them getting named makes others think about twice what they're doing," Ivette Monge of the nonprofit Ready Inspire Act told the Journal.
The paper details not only the name and occupation of one particular client but how often and how much he paid for sex. Other media outlets have devoted whole articles to outing particular customers, one being a Cambridge city councilor.
Americans like to pretend that we're way more enlightened than our Puritan ancestors, but here we are, hundreds of years later, putting people through public ridicule and official sanctions over their consensual sexual choices.
Discrepancies
Commentary about the case has showcased Americans' absurd attitudes toward sex work.
Customers texted with "the brothel purveyors…at least 400 or more times," says a Boston Herald staff editorial. "That's obscene. This isn't a case about a few randy guys. It's prostitution on a giant scale."
So…a "few randy guys" paying for sex would be OK? How many is too many, then? Or is the number of texts they sent the problem? What is the editorial's point here? (The extremely poorly written piece also includes baffling, context-free lines like this: "Only in Cambridge can one differentiate between human trafficking and illegal immigration. Too often, the two are conjoined.")
At least the clients involved in this care merely face misdemeanor charges. In another Massachusetts case involving prostitution customers, authorities are trying to get sex trafficking convictions for men who contacted an undercover cop posing as an adult sex worker.
In that case—Commonwealth v. Garafalo, which came before the state's supreme court in January—prospective customers responded to online ads and agreed to meet at a hotel and pay $100 for sex. The state has since argued that every person who pays for sex is guilty of sex trafficking.
But prospective customers in the Cambridge brothel case—which involves higher fees, more upscale settings, and at least some prominent clientele—were not charged with sex trafficking.
That's good—the state's attempt in Garafalo to expand the definition of sex trafficking to include all prostitution is despicable on its own. However, the difference in treatment between customers in these two cases highlights yet another harm: the expanded charges and punishments being disproportionately applied against lower-income defendants and/or those deemed less likely to fight back.
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