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My understanding of 'sex trafficking' was roughly 'to get someone through either false pretenses or outright violence into a different country with the intent of using their helplessness in that country to force them into prostitution', which seems despicable enough.
If 'paying for travel accommodations for your escort' is sex trafficking, why do we need a law against it?
Also, here is something I don't understand: why would anyone ever hire a 17 yo as a prostitute? I mean, I can understand why some pedophile might risk a lengthy and well-deserved prison sentence to fuck some kid instead of an 18 yo, but if you are into young adult women, why risk a prison sentence? Is that some jailbait fetish I don't get?
Why I am sure that the law is written in a way that puts all the risks of the prostitute being unable to legally consent firmly on the person buying sex, this sounds like we could say that the wrong Matt Gaetz did intentionally was to pay for sex, which does not seem like a moral failing to me. (If it turns out that the prostitutes in question were foreigners who barely understood any English and were obviously physically abused and scared, then I would revise my judgement, but from the facts you mentioned that was rather not the case?)
There are I think about a half dozen statutes which are pertinent at the federal level for "sex trafficking"; e.g., in the case of a minor, it's defined as illegal sex trafficking of a minor to pay a person who you know to be a minor or one you showed reckless disregard as to whether or not they were a minor for a sex act
others, for e.g., 18 USC ยง 2421, simply require someone pay for the transportation of a prostitute to cross state lines for the purposes of engaging in prostitution and most states have laws which define the same conduct as "sex trafficking"
Greenberg was charged with the former. The crossing state lines is required because in a bygone era long ago, the federal government had to demonstrate someone crossed state lines for a court to claim it satisfied the "commerce clause" of the constitution which allowed justifies federal government jurisdiction, but now we barely even care and "affecting interstate commerce" is enough
they don't, they almost always believe the 17 year old to be over the age of 18 for various reasons, mostly because the 17 year old doesn't mention it or she lies, but many state and federal laws do not in practice care if the person actually knows the prostitute is 17 years old
the typical tactic is for the honey-potter to find 17 year olds, give them fake ids, and then pay them to have sex which someone, and then they claim, to their horror, to find out the person was actually 17 and now you're both guilty of federal sex trafficking and subject to 10 year mandatory minimum sentences on federal trafficking
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You misunderstand. One of the reasons the AOC is higher than is realistic/appropriate is specifically so that it may be used as a gotcha in this way, in combination with...
His crime was that, through this action, he made the price of sex legible. That is the true crime of prostitution.
Merely putting a price on sex devalues sex, and thus is an offense against the sex whose entire evolutionary-biological specialization revolves around selling themselves to the highest bidder, regardless if they need to use that capacity or not. Trads and progs understand that intuitively, as they both agree that the social role of men is to work hard so they can buy sex from women, and the social role of women is to be maximally deserving of that price (certain progressives will even just outright state they "don't owe you femininity" as a direct attempt to re-negotiate "maximally deserving" in their favor- contrast the well-trod stories of how 19th-century traditionalists extracted owed, outstanding femininity from women they have
an exclusive prostitution agreement withmarried, usually with the same pimp hand).Younger women are more feminine, thus more desirable, thus the AOC is very literally a minimum wage. Therefore, hiring one, either knowingly or not, is now explicitly violating the [female] labor laws as well as implicitly doing so as explained above- it's a natural focus point, and over-emphasized because what women [and men] actually want punished is devaluing women [and daughters] that way, but it's also not something they can realistically make illegal (compare why Al Capone gets maximally prosecuted for tax evasion where the actual crime was "he was a gangster", or why Tesla gets maximally prosecuted for a black guy saying 'nigga' in some meeting where the actual crime was "being disliked by Blue tribe").
Sex trafficking is bad because it means domestic women lose out to more-feminine-for-cheaper foreign women, just like how other illegal immigration is bad because it means domestic men lose out to more-masculine-for-cheaper foreign men. This is why women prefer illegal immigration and hate purchased/captured (by some constraint of reality, financial in this case) brides, and the ones that rent themselves hourly are far more destructive because of the above.
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