I have lived in the general area of what is now the Lux bar for over 10 years. I see this sort of thing happen every single summer in New York City. "J1" is what people call these girls and the story goes like this:
They come here on work sponsorships which are almost never really there (they often dont know that). Then one of three things happens -- or all. They end up working in the restaurant business as hostesses, bus "boy" positions, eventually waitresses. They start sleeping with some guy who takes them around, pays for everything, and possibly provides a place to live. If they want to make real money, they start dancing (strip or go-go). At the end of the summer their Visa expires and I'd say about 70% leave and 30% stay.
So... it probably wouldn't have been sex trafficking, this is all way too dramatized. The J1 girls who come here are often offered to dance to make more money. And they either refuse and struggle to find a job in some crappy lounge or restaurant or they go dance and make pretty decent money. I'm not saying that this is a wonderful situation, it makes me hate living in this city, but its so common and a far cry from being locked in a room to be sex slaves.
I known some of these girls that are still here and still dance, and know a few that are still here and still work at lounges. Last year, a friend of mine was walking her dog and met two J1 students on the board walk at Brighton Beach sitting on their luggage. They had to make the same trip from somewhere to New York for a job. Of course the job wasn't really there. My friend let the couple stay in her living room for most of the summer and they eventually found a job at a restaurant.
Living in Brooklyn, this is a fact of live. Its nice that these particular girls have gotten some help, but starting this week "the J1s are coming" and this sort of thing is going to happen a thousand times over in the next couple of weeks to a month. Non of it was surprising to read... which, I guess, is pretty depressing considering that I live in the middle of it.
Yeh, as I was reading it the same thoughts came to mind - not exactly trafficking but one step behind it.
If they had been trafficked they'd probably not stand a chance. It's possibly not as big a problem in the US as, really, flying girls out is pretty impossible but in the UK (and I guess the rest of Europe) there is a problem with girls being brought in from Eastern Europe etc. All with false papers. I'd say I see one, maybe two, cases a month where we are investigating visa forging. It's highly organised and "well" executed.
Being coerced (psychologically, physically, or otherwise) into sleeping with someone who "pays for everything" or into stripping for money is sex trafficking.
"Coerced psychologically" means precisely nothing. Everyone does everything because they are coerced psychologically to do it. If you object to this particular form of psychological coercion, explain why.
You seem to have deleted your other comment further down the thread (or maybe an admin did), so I can't respond to it, but I'll respond here instead.
Coercion is when you do something that you ordinarily wouldn't (or don't do something you ordinarily would) because you feel threatened. For instance, I am coerced by society into wearing clothes on a hot summer day; I might choose to strip naked, walk down to the river, and take a swim, but because I'm afraid of being arrested, I don't do such a thing.
Coercion can happen even when there isn't a direct threat of violence, however. You might make someone believe that they have no choice but to take the job you're offering at a strip club; even if in reality, there are other choices they could make that they might be happier with, if you convince them that it's your way or the highway, you've managed to coerce them.
This is a bad thing; it's a kind of fraud, something where you convince someone to do something on the basis of a lie, making them do things that they might not out of fear. Not everyone is a perfect, rational, utility-maximizing agent; everyone has fears, poor judgement about certain things, and the like. Manipulating that for your own ends is evil and wrong; and yes, there are sometimes small, mundane manipulations and coercions that you're never going to eliminate or are too small to be worth worrying about, but that doesn't excuse them, nor does it excuse more egregious coercion and fraud.
Fair enough, but in that sense, it's not clear that anyone was being coerced. I grew up in former USSR, and people in that part of the world are much more efficient utility-maximizing agents, and unfortunately things like social responsibility are considered of no utility. A girl might easily choose prostitution as a career path (so far so good), and when it suits her, make herself look like a victim to a bunch of pious Westerners.
I deleted my comments because on a closer look, what I object to is only slightly related to the topic. Namely, the idea that all prostitutes are victims, and all other people involved in prostitution are evildoers. My moral axioms probably aren't those of the HN majority, so I could get nothing out of this besides frustration.
Also, I didn't read the article. Also, thanks for the reassuring calm tone of your response. This is just the thing for bedtime :)
"Coerced psychologically" means precisely nothing. Everyone does everything because they are coerced psychologically to do it. If you object to this particular form of psychological coercion, explain why.
No, it doesn't mean nothing. No, everyone does not do everything because they are coerced psychologically.
The second claim - everyone does everything because they are coerced psychologically - is a great example of a statement that is either false or vacuous. False, if you interpret "coerced" in a non-trivial sense. Vacuous, if by "coerced", you mean no more than "because they have (some) desire or inclination."
Compulsion is real. Psychological compulsion is real. If you have never been driven to do something by fear or desperation, yet still very much against your will, I'm glad for you. But that doesn't mean everyone is so lucky.
It was amazing to watch this unfold, mainly because I continually get reminded of how varied and amazing MeFites are. One MeFite is at the US Department of State who works with J visas and does precisely this work.
A bit of a side-note, but Dan Reetz (the MeFite in question here) released a great album a few years back, it's free to download and well worth a listen: http://www.fakeproject.com/you_are_not_dead/
I'd also say that for anyone here that's considering it the $5 charge to join MeFi is the best money I've ever spent.
I actually was grandfathered-in from eons ago, so if you used MeFi a long time ago, you might still have an account sitting there. I didn't know about the $5 charge until a year or so back.
Anyone who wants to know what the future looks like, pay attention. We are going to see things like this happen more and more and on a larger and larger scale.
While it would be nice, I'm not sure this is true.
Meta filter is a pretty unique online community in that it is a very large group of people who are sincerely helpful in a almost unlimited number of subjects. As the article says, there are many much smaller cases of similar actions of humanity and helpfulness on askmefi on a fairly regular basis.
It would be great if the proliferation of this type of online community was the future, but Mefi has been around for a long time and, in my opinion, truly separates itself from the rest in terms of helpfulness of the commenters and consistent quality of the content.
HN and some other communities are equally helpful from time to time, but I have come across none that match Mefi in consistency and breadth of subject matter. (obviously HN isn't trying to match in breadth of subject matter.)
I guess what I am saying is that with most online communities I accept that the other people won't necessarily act with the same compassion as they would with friends they have IRL. Mefi has done a pretty extraordinary job maintaining a community in which this standard of human decency is pretty well kept.
tldr: Mefi is a unique online community in that it's community members act more like they would IRL in confronting one another's problems.
I think it's reproducible if someone building a web community wants to have a similar level of user community - but it requres doing the two things that typical web startups won't do - have paid, full-time moderators who are in the top tier of intelligent users, and don't just try and grow the site forever.
Reddit is a good example, the subreddits are often as good as any other web community, but the site as a whole is trending down to Digg-levels and worse.
(It was posted by someone who actually went to the club the young women were supposed to go to. I have no involvement in this at all, but thought HN would appreciate another voice.)
This is exactly the same principle as the Chinese Human Search Engines but with a infinitely better goals.
I think the next stage of the internet is fostering of the bleeding smart mob. That's powerful. I am so glad that MeFi was invigorated to save those girls because it might be that it was the only thing powerful enough to catch it so early.
Hey, does anyone here have the AirBNB founders' info? It'd be really nice of them if they could help to arrange a donation of an apartment(s) through July in NYC for these girls.
From the MeTa: "If you go through the thread and click on the links for the Lux Lounge, it's a sometime-strip joint, with soft-core ads, in Brighton Beach (a Russian mafia stronghold)--that they were asked to show up at, last minute after other jobs "fell through", at midnight, from Washington DC. This has so many red flags it's a marching color guard."
I know what this person is trying to say, but just to be clear, Brighton Beach is not full of mafiosi or criminals. It's like the rest of New York, except:
1. Rent is lower.
2. There are more Russians.
3. "Bathhouse" does not imply gay.
I wouldn't want a friend getting into the situation as described, but "It's in Brighton Beach!" is not high on the list of reasons why.
I come from an area which has a much worse crime (organized and otherwise) problem than Brighton Beach has ever had. I still see a lot of locals who refuse to acknowledge the problem. Not knowing much about Brighton Beach, it's hard for me to know whether you're right or just don't have first hand knowledge.
Have you read the original metafilter thread? There was someone from the State Department saying this was a textbook sex trafficking setup--and the loose connection to a strip bar was far from the main reason why.
To be sure, the original metafilter guy didn't like the look of it from the beginning.
The young women, however, thought he was full of it, until they found out it was a strip bar, at which point, they were convinced he was right, and had saved them. It's this sudden about face on their part that seemed strange to me, till I reread the part of them getting off the bus and dealing with all of these people who were trying to help them. That level of unexpected attention would lead anybody to assume they had narrowly avoided something terrible.
I agree that from the story told by the original metafilter guy, these women seemed to be potentially in real danger. The women had a different opinion, however, up until they were descended upon by police and others, which surely must have freaked them out.
In the judgment of the two people who this was actually happening to, the guy was overreacting. They continued to ignore him until they were freaked out by the people who met them at the bus. Why do we assume their original assessment of the situation was wrong, while his was right? Because they were "young girls, far from home". Meanwhile, young men of that same age, are leading fire teams in Afghanistan.
My point, I guess, is that, we don't know anything about this, except what this guy is telling us.
In any case, it's deplorable to promise two people jobs as lifeguards in Virginia Beach, only to bait-and-switch them into something that was, at best, a job in a disgusting strip club (as the google street view of the address would indicate) and at worst, enslavement as sex workers. I don't see what the point is in giving them the benefit of the doubt, given that what we already know about them indicates that they're total scumbags (and especially since experts, with years of experience in this area, posted in the thread to state with almost total confidence that it was an attempt at sex trafficking).
Also, there is a lot more info in that thread than what the one guy posted. There was at least one other Metafilter user who spent time with the girls, and it's certain that the police are going to investigate given the attention, so it's likely we'll know more soon.
In any case, it's deplorable to promise two people jobs
as lifeguards in Virginia Beach, only to bait-and-switch
them into something that was, at best, a job in a
disgusting strip club (as the google street view of the
address would indicate)
The guy in metafilter who furnished you that streetview, couldn't even get the city right. This club is on New York Ave, in DC, and that guy showed you an address in New York City.
It looks to me like a very nice place, and it's definitely not a "disgusting strip club". It's not even a "really nice strip club". It appears to be a regular club, with lines in the street of people (women and men) wanting to get in.
That isn't true; read the article. There's also a Lux Lounge in NYC, and that's where they were heading right up to the point where they changed their minds at the last minute (at which point they were in NYC).
They were in regular contact with the person they were supposed to meet ("George"), who told them to meet in NYC. They took the greyhound to NYC. Given that there is also a Lux Lounge in NYC, what would make you think the existence of the lounge in DC is anything other than a coincidence? Everything we know about this situation indicates otherwise.
I see, finally, in his original post, he mentions NYC at the very beginning.
Quite a coincidence, isn't it? They're in DC, there is a Lux Lounge, and it is on New York Ave., but they're actually supposed to go to a different Lux Lounge, in New York City.
We have people speaking their non-native tongue, and a guy who is texting and talking while driving. Can't wait to find out the real story.
They come here on work sponsorships which are almost never really there (they often dont know that). Then one of three things happens -- or all. They end up working in the restaurant business as hostesses, bus "boy" positions, eventually waitresses. They start sleeping with some guy who takes them around, pays for everything, and possibly provides a place to live. If they want to make real money, they start dancing (strip or go-go). At the end of the summer their Visa expires and I'd say about 70% leave and 30% stay.
So... it probably wouldn't have been sex trafficking, this is all way too dramatized. The J1 girls who come here are often offered to dance to make more money. And they either refuse and struggle to find a job in some crappy lounge or restaurant or they go dance and make pretty decent money. I'm not saying that this is a wonderful situation, it makes me hate living in this city, but its so common and a far cry from being locked in a room to be sex slaves.
I known some of these girls that are still here and still dance, and know a few that are still here and still work at lounges. Last year, a friend of mine was walking her dog and met two J1 students on the board walk at Brighton Beach sitting on their luggage. They had to make the same trip from somewhere to New York for a job. Of course the job wasn't really there. My friend let the couple stay in her living room for most of the summer and they eventually found a job at a restaurant.
Living in Brooklyn, this is a fact of live. Its nice that these particular girls have gotten some help, but starting this week "the J1s are coming" and this sort of thing is going to happen a thousand times over in the next couple of weeks to a month. Non of it was surprising to read... which, I guess, is pretty depressing considering that I live in the middle of it.