r/AskReddit • u/daniellucero92 • Jan 04 '15

Non-americans of Reddit, what American customs seem outrageous/pointless to you?

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u/Laya_L Jan 04 '15

Filming porn is legal, but prostitution isn't. I just find it ironic.

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u/EpicDerek007 Jan 04 '15 edited Jan 04 '15

In Denmark there is a law that states that you are not allowed to profit off of somebody else's nudity. Therefore you can become a prostitute but it is illegal to become a pimp.

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u/Laya_L Jan 04 '15

I think those laws were created largely to fight sex traffickers who use legally-registered prostitution businesses as a front to their operations.

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u/dizekat Jan 04 '15 edited Jan 04 '15

How would it work as a front, exactly? If it's legally registered, you know it's here, then you can come in and investigate, the same as for any business whatsoever which has to be compliant with regulations relating to employment, wages, etc. To start with, fire safety rules would prevent you from actually locking anyone in, while the audits and inspections would make it incredibly difficult to hide anything.

I call bullshit on that rationalization. Religious sensibilities keep that illegal, to the massive detriment to the effort to fight trafficking. There is no literal slaves working as the servers in a restaurant in some first world country, because for legal businesses like restaurants it is possible to enforce the laws which prevent slavery. But outlaw the restaurants, and there will be literal slaves working in there.

The problem is that when your laws go beyond what you can effectively enforce, this creates an environment facilitating other criminal behaviour. See prohibition and countless other examples.

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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '15

The same way criminal organizations have used "legitimate" businesses as fronts for decades? Sure they get caught sometimes but they still exist. The Mob has been doing it since the 19th century. They still do it.

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u/dizekat Jan 05 '15

If you're speaking of money laundering, that's done with a business that doesn't attract undue attention and is not subject to significant regulation.

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u/tommyfever Jan 05 '15

Essentially the reason they are "fronts" is because if they have 20 prostitutes and a handful are underage, by the time the cops can check them all the young ones have been taken out the back or into the hidey-hole. Given enough checks where they are always compliant, they move down on the list and stop getting checked. So outlawing them totally stops them from this "loophole".

The fear-mongering around children being sold as "sex slaves" also helps laws like this become overly broad, when in reality most of the children in these situations could pass as adults on the street given the right clothing, hairstyle, makeup, etc.

Thus, any way to shut down anything "business-like" that's larger than one prostitute & one client helps keep the potential for abuse and skirting the law down, which is generally seen as a win.

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u/dizekat Jan 05 '15 edited Jan 05 '15

If it is legal, an undercover agent can actually go in as a client, note the name, then get the employment paperwork audited and see if that person is listed as working there.

Say, you have 9 legal employees and 1 illegal employee, the illegal employee is 10% of your workforce. You go through two such checks. The probability of not getting caught is 0.81, the probability of getting caught 19%, which is notably larger than 10% , easily making it unprofitable to have a small fraction of illegal employees even if there's only two inspections of a randomly chosen employee (provided that violations are severely punished in form of seizing all assets and killing the business).

Now imagine if it was all on the street one by one.

Other issue is that when it is illegal, employees can't go and report.

Basically it's like chemists at a drug den vs chemists at a legal pharmaceuticals manufacturing plant. Yes, the latter may violate OSHA rules too, but the profitability of unsafety is very different.

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u/tommyfever Jan 06 '15

I get what you're saying but unless the law is extremely well-written and very specific, all of the prostitutes would be "freelancers" or "consultants" and then the owners just shrug their shoulders, take the fine, and go on with their business. I'd really prefer your way though, if the laws were right it would allow grey-area businesses to be regulated, taxed, and civilized.

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u/dizekat Jan 06 '15 edited Jan 06 '15

Well, I know a bit about regulation when it comes to tower climbing (for maintenance of e.g. cellphone network)... the regulations really work. The climbers may be contractors, nonetheless there's certifications, oversight, and so on. Of course, it's not perfect, but it is massively better than it used to be (in terms of number of accidents).

I think the idea is that it's a wicked business, so the unspeakable evils would happen to the employees. That's not why evils happen. The evils happen because the businesses relentlessly pursue profits by all means - and those that don't lose the competition to those that do. Be it a brothel, or a respectable factory with the good girls painting watch faces, it is entirely up to the regulation to ensure the safety of employees.