Monitoring Cyberspace: The Internet's Love Affair with Sex (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Internet and the Global Prostitution Industry
1998
The Internet has become the latest place for promoting the global trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children. This global communication network is being used to promote and engage in the buying and selling of women and children. Agents offer catalogues of mail order brides, with girls as young as 13. Commercial prostitution tours are advertised. Men exchange information on where to find prostitutes and describe how they can be used. After their trips men write reports on how much they paid for women and children and give pornographic descriptions of what they did to them. New technology has enabled an online merger of pornography and prostitution, with videoconferencing bringing live sex shows to the Internet. Rape videos are broadcast over the Internet.
Trafficking Internet Brides, Information & Communications Technology Law
This article critically examines the world of international marriage agencies who operate on the Internet, selling women for profit to men to buy from one end of the world to the other. It examines the relationship between capitalism and choice with coercion and misogyny, as expressed on Internet dating sites. It highlights the role governments play in facilitating trafficking of young women and girls from economic poor areas to advanced economies, arguing that states underwrite this type of violence against women and children, profiting in the process. It concludes that there is no dignity for humanity in trafficking women and girls in order to (sexually) exploit them for profit.
Gender, Place and Culture, 2015
The aim of this article is to explore the complexity of the online sex trade and work by analysing sexuality-related commercial websites, with reference to three European states, France, Greece and Slovenia. The article compares websites in each specific sociocultural context, in order to provide insights into the various types of networks and services that emerge, and to explore how they operate, how they communicate and how sex is being merchandised. We have conducted a two-tier analysis: The first part discusses results of a quantitative macro-analysis exploring 149 websites, while the second part is a micro-analysis analysing the visualisation of egocentric network of three selected websites. The focus is on understanding how gender relations develop in digital environment and how within cyberspace sectorial and national divides are dealt with. While there is evidence to suggest that in some sectors the Internet has opened avenues for sex workers to work independently of the control networks, there are also many forms of exploitation that arise from new media. We observe that sex commerce online is not particularly attentive to the agency of sex workers but is, to the contrary, oriented to provide opportunities and a forum for businessmen and clients.
Human Trafficking and Online Networks: Policy, Analysis, and Ignorance
Antipode, 2016
Dominant anti-trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, illegal migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti-trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro-analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking-related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on 'new' technology and exceptionalist claims about 'modern slavery' towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism.
The Internet and sex industries: partners in global sexual exploitation
Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, 2000
s a part of globalization, women and children are increasingly becoming commodities to be bought, sold, and consumed by organized crime rings, tourists, military personnel, and men seeking sexual entertainment or non-threatening marriage partners. Through financial and technological interdepen-A dence, the sex industry and the Internet industry have become partners in the global sexual exploitation of women and children.
Journal of Law and Society, 2019
Drawing on the largest study of the United Kingdom online market in sexual labour to date, this article examines the legal and regulatory consequences as aspects of sex work increasingly take place within an online environment. Our research shows that while governmental policy has not kept abreast of these changes, the application of current laws (which have, since the 1950s, focused on public nuisance and, more recently, trafficking and modern slavery) are pernicious to sex workers and unsuited to recognizing and responding to the abuses and exploitation in online markets in sexual labour. These injustices are likely to be exacerbated if policies and policing do not better align with the realities of these markets in the twenty-first century. This demands a more nuanced regulatory approach which recognizes that people may engage in sex work of their own volition, but which also addresses conditions of labour and criminal exploitation.
Crimes and Safety in the Online Sex Industry
Internet Sex Work, 2017
In this chapter, we explore the types of crimes that Internet-based sex workers' experience, and the rise of new forms of crimes such as harassment, stalking, unwanted contact and misuse of information and images. We assess the role of the Internet and technology in safety strategies, uncovering some of the ways in which technology benefits sex workers' ability to keep safe, but at the same time, technology generates some additional risks. Alongside crime, risks in this sector relate to additional privacy issues for online working-something which is an everyday concern for many working through online spaces. This research adds significantly to the literature on crime and safety in the online sector and also highlights how current UK laws can restrict rather than promote safety for people working in this sector.
Internet and Prostitution Activities
Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Internet and social media increasingly play a role in prostitution activities in Indonesia. Prostitutes are already utilizing internet technology to launch their activities, especially Indonesia is the fourth largest country of internet users in the world. This article discusses two of them are about, the use of communication technology in prostitution activities and Optimization of internet technology for prostitution providers and users. Data were collected based on qualitative research methods, conducted in Bandung and Banjarmasin. The theoretical research is based on the opinion of Mark Poster (1995) predicted, the Internet as a new media will change the society order. According to Littlejohn (2008) New media can provide open and flexible usage, but can also lead to chaos and confusion. New media has a positive aspect, but it also raises its negative aspect. The results show, the use of the Internet made it easier for prostitution activities, transactions become easier, cheaper, practical and efficient in terms of time and energy. Optimization of technology, for the lower class it became a promotional tool, while for the upper class, internet is also used for reservation of airline tickets, hotels and transfer payments for prostitution services.
Escorts Online: Effects of Policy on Sex Work through Digital Spaces
2021
In April 2018, the Trump Administration approved two acts that frame sex work as human trafficking. Subsequently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized popular adult personals site, Backpage.com, used by Canadian and American sex workers. This led to the increase in censorship of online spaces, which sex workers require to safely conduct their independent business through advertising, processing secure transactions, and maintaining safe communication with clients and the sex work community. My work aims to understand how these changes have explicitly impacted sex workers as they advertise and communicate their services, working predominantly as escorts in Canada and the United States. Governmental documents and laws like Bill C-36/PCEPA and SESTA/FOSTA, which claim to save exploited populations, may harm autonomous citizens making a living through stigmatized labour by seizing their resources and forcing them to use outdated, unsafe methods of business and communication. Most, ...
Reformulation of the Criminal Liability as an Actor of Online Prostitution: A Normative Study
IJCLS (Indonesian Journal of Criminal Law Studies)
One of the rational efforts used to tackle online prostitution activity is with the approach of criminal law through criminal law formulation as a concrete form of criminal responsibility to the perpetrators of online prostitution. There is no provision that regulates the criminal to the users of online prostitution services because of the maximum prevention of online prostitution itself. If there is no national regulation governing the matter, online prostitution users will feel secure and remain free to buy services for their satisfaction alone, while it is contrary to various aspects of norms in the ethical norms of society. Therefore a criminal law is required, related to criminal liability for users of online prostitution services. The method used is normative juridical, ie by examining or analyzing secondary data using basic materials, with legal sense as a set of rules or positive norms in the legislation system that regulates prostitution online, as well as using secondary l...