Decriminalisation of Prostitution: The Soros Effect

Heather Brunskell-Evans from FiLiA in conversation with the author Jody Raphael.

Heather: This is Heather talking with Jody Raphael, who's a Senior Research Fellow at DePaul University College of Law. I'm delighted to be talking to you and to hear your point of view about this, I'm going to come back a little bit later about an article that you wrote, which I'm fascinated by, but I thought I would first tell you a little bit about why I would be fascinated with that article. 

So what I'm interested in is the way that despite the amount of evidence there is that prostitution is dehumanising and exploits women and children, and that those involved in prostitution, if I dare say, have in some sense, been sexually abused or exploited before they even get into prostitution, what I'm fascinated by is the way that this sort of liberal argument about women consent to this, it's work like any other, how that has got a real hold on our society.

 I mean, I can analyse that myself, but I always feel very vulnerable in it. And the liberal argument always seems to be secure in itself. This has been well-funded. There is funding here from somewhere and I searched around for that. So this gets me back to you and your article, which is called Decriminalisation of Prostitution: The Soros Effect, which is in the journal Dignity, a journal of sexual exploitation and violence.

So if you don't mind, Jody, I'd like to concentrate on what the Soros effect is, and what's the Soros position on the decriminalisation of prostitution. 

Jody:  The Soros Foundation, which is located in the US headquartered in New York City is one of the largest Foundations in the world. And it's put together by Mr. Soros, who is the 30th wealthiest man in the world.

George Soros is a refugee from during the Nazi period from Hungary and he made his money in a trading of currencies. Because of his background, both by fleeing the Nazis and then seeing his country taken over by a totalitarian communism and now under a totalitarian regime, which is not controlled by the former Soviet Union, Soros has taken a very strong position and his Foundation is against government totalitarian control of government. But Soros has taken that even further in that he professes to want the free flow of ideas, but he wants to get government out of anything that individuals do.

And you can see, you can understand that because of the government control that he has seen his country being be subject to. 

So he and the Foundation, he makes sure that the Foundation takes a position, which is against government involvement in all kinds of things. He wants total freedom for individuals who are homosexual or gay, he wants total freedom for individuals to take and abuse and use drugs of all kinds. He doesn't want anyone prosecuted for either selling or using drugs. And he has extended this to the issue of prostitution. 

They see prostitution as, basically the sex trade industry, as a very benign institution. And anyone involved should not be criminally prosecuted. This would include the seller, the buyer and pimps and traffickers. 

And basically it's a sort of a sexual liberal position that this is really about sex and he does not see this like anything that you have just described.

He and the Foundation are totally blind to any issues of power and control in the industry and the exploitation of young girls and women in the industry and sex trafficking. They see nothing wrong with the buying and selling of bodies. 

Soros has a lot of money to spend. And he has basically been able to fund a lot of organisations all over the world to advocate for this position, when none of these organisations, or most of them did not exist before his funding came along.

So, we sort of bang our heads against the wall because of, not only the funding, but the strategies that the Foundation use, which I know we're going to talk about in a minute, have really made them somewhat effective in putting this decriminalisation idea into the air. 

It is not successful, actually. I don't think in terms of it's going forward at this moment, but the idea is really in the air.

 People who listen to these ideas, they really pat themselves on the back. I can't talk about Europe. I'm here in the United States. They think that they're sexually liberal, they're hip, they're progressive. 

Heather: Yes, can I just interrupt at this point and say absolutely the same in the UK. The idea that this is about progressivism, freedom, sexual freedom, and women's rights to choose whatever she wants to do with our body. It's absolutely here too. 

Jody: Yes, and I think that the problem is that it's what I call a very phallocentric attitude. It’s that women should be able to use their bodies, but basically it's men should be allowed to have sex whatever they want and however that they want it. And to equate to the sex trade industry with drug possession and gay rights. I think that is just a step too far, but for all the reasons that you talked about. Non-consensual sex is rape, and this is not a victimless crime.

Basically, if this isn't freely consented to, buying and selling is causing just tremendous, tremendous harm to the individuals in the industry and to equate that into prostitution is it's very difficult, but because it's so trendy to think that, you know, we're sexual liberals it's very hard to get people not to go down the path.

 And basically I support gay rights, but I don't support the sex trade industry. I can hold both of those in my mind at the same time. There's nothing that's incompatible there. 

Heather: Can I just interrupt for a second and play devil's advocate just for a moment?

 You said non-consensual sex is rape. The woke progressive group of people that we're talking about would say, of course, that is rape. But if you're in prostitution and they would call it sex work, it is consensual because the woman is in an economic contract. She sells her labour and somebody buys it from her and she's consented to that. And to call it rape would be using an extreme term. 

Jody: That gets to the only way to deal with this whole problem. And that is to get to the facts of what is really going on in the sex trade industry in the year 2019. If you stay abstract we're not going to get anywhere.

We have very, very good research now that is showing that with increased demand in the sex trade industry and for men wishing to buy sex, there are not enough fully consensual volunteers out there who want to service 20 men at night. So we have an unprecedented degree of non-consensual and coercion.

And even if a woman is doing this because she has no other job and needs to get off of the street and is doing it to survive, that is still a level of coercion. So we have to get to the facts. 

And I think that the amount of sex trafficking in the United States and in Europe, well, actually all over the world, is something we have to get those facts out and we have good research now we didn't some years ago, but now we have some very good research as these cases of sex trafficking are piling up.

Now the Soros grantees out there around the world are basically saying there is no coercion in the industry. I mean, they have a fairy tale view of what this industry is, and they basically don't cite any of this good research that is out there. And if they attempt to cite research, they misunderstand it.

So we have to really argue on the basis of the facts of what is going on in the industry now. I believe personally that we have always had coercion and sex trafficking in this industry. I don't think this is anything new at all. And I really don't even know that demand has really increased.

If you look at what's going on in Victorian England, in London, you see the organised kidnapping of girls and coercion of young girls, especially those from the rural areas into London, into the sex trade industry, you just see a tremendous amount of trafficking and you see a tremendous amount of paid sex with 11 12 and 13-year-old girls. And this has been documented by historians. 

So I personally don't think that this is anything new, but I think the way to combat these ideas is to say, okay, we've always had prostitution, but right now it's been taken over by sex trafficking because I think that’s really the way to get people's attention, even though, as I said, I don't think it's anything new. 

I wanted to say a word about how they use research since I mentioned it. They basically cite various reports to show that there is no coercion. And so I pulled down and read all of this research that they're citing. And I cite in my article. I show you that these articles do not say that in the slightest and I don't know if people can't read or understand research. I really don't know. These reports can be very difficult, but they don't approve anything of what they are saying. 

They do their own research and they basically interview women in the sex trade industry. And all the research finds that the police are very, very violent and so therefore they say the only answer then is to decriminalise, so we don't have the police involved because they are the ones that are causing all the violence. 

None of us would deny that the police can be very violent and un-protective of women in prostitution.

But if you only asked about that and you don't ask about all the other things that doesn't prove that they're not other actors here in the sex industry. And if you, thought that the police were causing all of the violence then why wouldn't you support the Swedish model, which basically decriminalises the women's side and the buyer and the seller side, but continues to try to arrest and curb demand on the buyer side. They can't go along with this because they want the total freedom to buy sex. 

The other thing that they do is they create research reports. Amnesty International has created this very well researched report and then basically all the other organisations and people who write a report quote each other's salacious reports back and back and forth. 

Those of us who are concerned about the violence and coercion and humiliation in the sex trade industry. We don't write these comprehensive reports. We don't have a strategy of creating what I call fake, it's fake news. It's fake science. 

It's like climate control and the people that are against climate control, putting out reports. 

We don't do a very good job of packaging our material, and we are not basically organised to create a movement to decriminalise.

So we are not organised in the way that Soros with its money has been able to build all these building blocks everywhere. They all, they sign each other's reports and their words. He's got a funding group practically everywhere. There's one in Ireland. There's one in Scotland. There's one in South Africa.

In South Africa: I was contacted by a professor in Johannesburg. And he's beside himself because the Soros Foundation in South Africa is pushing decriminalisation of prostitution. And when you think of all the violence in South Africa, the rape, the problems of young girls and women in South Africa, their freedom to sell sex in South Africa is so unrelated to the major problems of this country and they are trying to destroy this man who is trying to advocate against violence against women, and making his life extremely difficult on social media. So, you know they're, they're absolutely everywhere.

I don't know how many of your listeners know Steve Bannon who is one of the architects of our President Trump's various immigration strategies. He was kicked out of the White House and he's now active on the Brexit scene. He's in your country. He's in Italy working with the Northern Alliance on anti EU issues and in the New York times last week, Steve Bannon said he was borrowing all of the tools of George Soros, which I thought was really interesting. He doesn't agree with Soros position, but he agrees with his all approach that basically to have groups all over the world and creating all the research reports to back them up.

I saw a research report and the research reports will tell you now because they have to when they're published in the academic journals, that they're funded. If they're funded by an outside person and this one I saw, which appeared in a publication called PR medicine in 2018 and Soros funding along with funding from the UK Department of International Development. And they were interested in tackling the structural drivers of HIV. The purpose of this research was to show that if you decriminalise prostitution, you would get rid of HIV. Then the media says -  here’s the research. 

Heather: It's astonishing to me, the relationship between respectable institutions and lobby groups in this area and how the two get intertwined without anybody making it transparent somewhere, or even if it is transparent, nobody seems to care about that, which I find astonishing. 

This links me back to when you said we opposing decriminalisation, haven't got an organised approach that the decriminalisation lobby have. In a sense, I think we have been very organised. When Amnesty International said women's human rights would be furthered through decriminalisation. It didn't matter how much we pointed out that they came to that decision that they had interested people on the panel that made that decision. It didn't matter how much research we produced to say that this would not be a progressive thing in relation to women's human rights, but it's as if this alternative position just falls on deaf ears. So it doesn't matter how reasonable you are in making it. There's a lack of wanting to hear it. 

I suppose for me I think what the decriminalisation lobby have done, where they’ve been so successful, and I'd like to know what you think about this, is that because what they've done is, they've repackaged it, packaged their own arguments as if it’s about sexual liberation and they have cast our voices in terms of sex negativity, actually being anti-feminist, wanting to take away women’s rights.

And somehow or other that tanker has to be turned around, the tanker of thought as it were. The difficulty in turning it around is that we don't have the funds. We literally don't have this funding like the Soros Foundation gives. 

Jody: Yeah. And I think part of the problem is that these ideas are so captivating to the media and the magazines and the book publishers.

To follow up on what you were saying, which is so important. In the United States, we passed a law last March after eight years of trying. We had an internet provider named Backpage. That was a place for women to be advertised to be available and the National Runaway Switchboard said that 75% of the children who were missing had been advertised on Backpage, our internet law prevented any prosecution or any way to close down these internet sites. 

And there are plenty of people being advertised, trafficked people, thousands of these young girls that were on there, 11, 12, and 13 years old. And when they finally got away from the trafficker and tried to sue the website, the courts rejected it because the law gave immunity.

So our law finally passed after a bipartisan investigation by the Senate, which actually found and finally got documents from Backpage, which went all the way up to our Supreme Court before they released the documents, showed that the internet provider had been assisting people in their advertising. So if you put an ad up and you were clearly advertising a young girl, it would be rejected and they would tell you what terms to use. Remove this term, you know and so on. And then put the ad back up, and of course the age of the girl didn't change. 

So they were just caught in the act of basically helping in the sex trafficking of these young girls.

And so Congress finally closed that loophole and the results in the United States has been absolutely incredible. There's only nine of these providers, internet providers shut down and some of them move to Europe, but we'd have only about 5% to 8% now of the former of business is conducted. Backpage shut down; So we have really cut into the demand. 

So now Soros is funding projects to basically bring litigation against this law and to dismantle this new protection that we have.

I think some of this is just so unknown that basically they want to facilitate the sex trafficking of very young girls and boys.

But the point of this is, is that all of the media, after this law passed, all the articles that appeared were basically saying, oh, this is so terrible because these groups have gotten to them and saying, this is going to make our life much dangerous if we can't advertise on the internet, we're going to go out on the streets and we're going to be killed out on the streets by these customers.

And so basically all of the articles that appeared and I've got them all in my office, were quoting these Soros funded groups. And there was absolutely no mention of any of the reasons why this law had passed. And the worst offender in my opinion is The Guardian. 

I just still can't believe that again, The Guardian buying into this, a progressive publication buying into all the things that we have been talking about in terms of sexual liberalism. And I think every time one of these articles appears, we have to counteract that we've got to talk to the person who wrote it. The Guardian to me is so influential across the world.

Julie Bindel, who is an independent journalist and has made some inroads with them, but boy, it just takes a tremendous amount of time. 

We had an editorial last two weeks ago in a magazine called Teen Vogue, which I had never seen in my life, and the editorial said ‘sex work is real work’. This is a magazine for teens.

So this is how far the media has been co-opted in all of this, but it's so time consuming because I think. It took Julie, God knows how many hours and days to provide information and to get through to this one very prominent woman who's now writing all sorts of good articles. 

I had a student who came to one of my lectures on this subject and she was writing a paper and usually I don't spend a lot of time helping students write their papers, but I sort of took it as a challenge because she was very struck by what she had heard and all the facts she had heard about the violence and coercion in the sex industry. And she just couldn't believe it. She said to me, well, it's all over the internet. They're all saying the opposite of what you're saying. 

You were saying Heather we can't make any inroads. Part of the problem is, that we have women on one side and women on the other, and we have feminists on one side and feminists on the other.

And I think until all of us become convinced of the abolitionists’ position, we are not going to get anywhere. And that means that we have to convince a movie star, Susan Sarandon, for example, Melinda Gates, the wife of Bill Gates, who is on the side of the decriminalisation. We have the wife of the Mayor of the city of New York who has been tweeting about decriminalisation.

And so, I mean, these are all women and they're prominent women, and we've just got to change that. Now we have legislation in three states, New York, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island calling for decriminalisation of prostitution in the United States. And all of these are put forward by women legislators.

And I believe you had a proposition in Scotland and the Scottish parliament, again, the woman Member of Parliament from the islands, from the Isle of Skye and all of that sort of stuff. 

This is I think the number one priority. Women have to be united and they have to speak for all women who are out there. And I don't think we will make any progress if there's a bunch of women saying that we should decriminalise. 

Heather:  Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, on one hand you can see this as a sort of the proposal for total decriminalisation is just a men's rights movement. So if men feel that their rights to have sex available to them is going to be taken away from them, there wouldn't be any progress, but it would be very easy then to fall into the position that it's men against women, which it clearly isn’t, as you say, there are many women who support decriminalisation too as if it's an issue of human rights and freedom for women. So how we shift that. I don't know. I really don't know. I think it's going to be very difficult to shift. in which The other thing I think is to resist this categorisation of ourselves as being anti-sex sort of reactionary in terms of gay rights and so on, which clearly we're not.

They have branded us, and we have to sort of rebrand or repackage ourselves in terms of the message. I think you've probably run out of time now. 

Jody: We could go on for hours, but I do think that, I hope that people listening will, will get on the internet and at least read my article and read the other articles that are in the Dignity Journal.

It's interesting in that the speaker of the New York City Council is gay, Corey Johnson, and he has come out against the New York proposal. So the more I think we break apart, you know, not all gay people are going to be supporting this decriminalization and not all, not all women.

It can't mean men versus women. I think it's just extremely complex. We really have to go back to the facts.