in a lot of places, prostitution is illegal, and clients and "service providers" alike are worried about the repercussions of getting caught. some are regular people who are trying to make money, or like their side alter ego, but don't particularly want their friends or family to find out.
getting busted is scary for both parties. in order to protect themselves, they resort to ID verifications of sorts and a variety of other practices to help them increase the odds that the person they're spending their time with is not an officer of the law.
a busy linked in profile, business cards, and a drivers license that all point to the same person is a pretty good sign that that person ACTUALLY has the job they claim and they're not a cop.
source: i love hookers.
Can we at least call them prostitues if sex worker is too PC for HN?
"Hey, what's the problem with being a fucking whore?" (Street whore¹ in Dexter –forgot which episode.)
"I have a lot of respect for whores." (witness in a radio documentary —quite moving, by the way.)
[1] I swear I mean no disrespect.
I can imagine if I a few co-workers worked at a horrible oppressing conglomerate, perhaps Veridian Dynamics, and we referred to ourselves as "drones" to denote our feelings, if management said we were no longer allowed to use this term, it would not be uplifting, it would be yet another instance of management oppression by taking away another form of expression.
This example is, of course, extremely contrived, and I can see positives in removing a term from popular use as it may shift attitudes, but I wonder how that compares with the negatives to the group itself.
-- gandhi
No actual sex has to happen for a crime to be committed.
Solicitation is a crime. just agreeing to submit or receive payment in exchange for sexual activity is the crime.
So law enforcement officers can set up situations where they get sex workers to agree to do things in exchange for payment, then they're busted. Confirmation through linkedin, place of business, business cards, referrals, calling clients' mothers, etc can be used to mitigate the risk that their counterparty is a cop.
http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/solicitation-o...
It would seem almost trivial to create a believable linkedin profile that could fool anybody. I get linkedin requests all the time from people who I don't know who are trolling to build up a profile.
And "business cards"?
Obviously, cops can fake all that stuff. But if you're just an average sex worker, the law probably doesn't have it out specifically for you, and it's a lot lower hanging fruit to just go for the careless sex workers who don't even verify.
The amount of time/effort they would have to spend (while not necessarily a lot) wouldn't be justified by the probably non-existent increase in the total busts, unless they had an axe to grind against a specific provider for some reason.
source: i moonlight as a male prostitute. and i disappoint a lot of women.
Interesting thought. Almost similar to why cops don't do a better job of trapper speeders. And why they don't even catch speeders they sometimes just lurk in plain site to slow down traffic.
don't other families don't trash her as a bad mother, doesn't it affect their employment prospects, are their kids or parents not harassed etc?
if there is a country like that i want to live there.
I guess that seems like to much work but in a sense it might yield a completely virgin market (business people traveling who would never think to read an ad or make pro active contact.) Almost like the bar honeypot.
Add: And be able to charge a premium rate because those contacted don't have any clue of the going rate and they have been enticed before they are able to pull back (not having any viable alternatives).
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-still-searching-fo...
Have they had a real problem, or is it merely moralistic?
The 1st world global cultural gap (between e.g. the US and Europe, or even northern and souther Europe) may seem small when you stroll through your average mall to shop for apparel.
But it is often huge when it comes to views about morale and what is considered ok or not ok.
To someone from northern Europe who is living in a country where sex work is 'ok' in most people's view, legalized anyway and regulated in recent years, this LinkedIn stuff is one of these stories that sound like they're from another, previous century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
I guess LinkedIn don't want the ball thrown on their court and be responsible for checking who is a real prostitute and who is a slave or a scammer.
