Good for Bulgaria

From Novinite

Bulgaria's interior minister has suggested that the state could legalize prostitution.

Georgi Petkanov insisted that the new Parliament should draw a legal framework on sex services in order to bring them under control.

One way would be to ban prostitution, Minister Petkanov said. Another option is to pass special laws and make sure they are observed, Petkanov said, apparently hinting at possible decriminalizing of commercial sex services.

Prostitution has been a major problem in Bulgaria, involving a lot of young girls as well.

Police efforts to clamp down on the problem have been rather inefficient. Poor living standards are considered a key factor for the flourishing of the activity.

  China Dildos

From The Guardian

Sex is China's latest boom industry. From vibrators to plastic vaginas, the country supplies 70% of all 'adult toys'

The Shaki adult toy factory in Shenzhen is an orgy of production. And though nothing could seem less erotic to the workers, their output is testimony to the growing passion of consumers for China's latest boom industry: sex. The country now provides 70% of the world's sex toys.

While the bulk of the equipment is destined for export, a growing share is now being sold domestically, to a population that has never had as much money and freedom to experiment. Thanks to a sharply expanding economy and the liberalisation of many aspects of private life, attitudes towards sex have undergone a sea change.

During the cultural revolution men and woman were often segregated, overt sexuality in dress or behaviour was frowned on, and kissing in public could bring condemnation.

Today, conservative values remain strong in the countryside, but in the cities young people canoodle openly on park benches and try out the alternative sexual behaviour they see on the internet and on pirated western DVDs. A survey by the Family Planning Agency found that almost 70% of Chinese were not virgins when they married, compared with 16% at the end of the 1980s.

Prostitution, the target of a fierce and successful crackdown during the Mao Zedong era, is once again a huge business. In places like Shenzhen, brothels are so tolerated by the authorities that street upon street of massage parlours and karaoke bars display a selection of girls in their shop windows.

On weekends, gay and lesbian bars, once unimaginable, draw packed crowds in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other large cities throughout China.

The sex toy industry is also going from strength to strength. In Beijing, it was not until 1993 that the first adult health retailer, as such outlets are euphemistically named, opened. Now the capital is estimated to have 2,000 such shops. I feel my business is standing on the front lines of a sexual revolution," Meng Yu, who runs the G-Spot, told the domestic media. "I believe all adults have the same right to enjoy sexual pleasure. There should be no difference between the orient and the west on this point.

At the company's factory in the People Love Technology Park in Shenzhen, products are tailored to meet the different demands of major buyers in Japan and the US. Casting an expert eye over a range of blow-up dolls, he said westerners preferred large realistic figures with lipstick and wigs, while his Asian customers tended towards petite inflatables with cartoon faces. "I think Asians emphasise the fantasy element of play, while westerners think more in terms of realism and utilisation," he said.

Given China's 1.3 billion population, he said domestic sales were relatively small, but were growing fast. At a sex toy fair last year in Shanghai, the organisers estimated that the business was already worth 100 bn renminbi (£6.6bn) and expanding at the rate of 30% per year. It takes time for people to accept such toys, said Mr Fang. But Chinese people are like any other human beings. When consumption levels rise, so does the interest in things like this. I think Chinese people are having more fun.

  Dance On

From The Peninsula

The Indian state of Maharashtra’s contentious move to shut dance bars received a setback with Governor S M Krishna returning an ordinance in the absence of a plan to rehabilitate girls employed in these establishments.

The state government submitted an ordinance seeking the cancellation of licences of all dance bars for the governor’s approval on June 3. Krishna’s endorsement was needed to implement the decision. The government was hoping to get the governor’s approval after his return on Friday from a trip to Europe.

But instead of giving his assent, Krishna returned the ordinance to the government, seeking clarifications about the rehabilitation plan for bar girls and the status of a litigation filed in a local court challenging the ban order.

In fact later on State governor S.M. Krishna refused to approve the move for now, saying in a statement on Friday he saw "no immediate reason" to do so.

A home department official said the government was looking into the issues raised by the governor and a detailed report was likely to be submitted over the next few days. This is not the end of the road for us. We will clarify all the issues raised by the governor and we are quite hopeful the ordinance will be approved after that, said the senior official who did not want to be named. It is prudent to address all the concerns before the ban order is implemented since it has become a very contentious issue. We have to prepare solid legal grounds before we go ahead and start implementing it, he said.

The dance bars, euphemistically called ladies’ bars, usually have women entertaining customers looking for food, liquor and sometimes sex. In many of these places, dancers don skimpy outfits and mingle with the customers while dancing to film music.

The government had in March announced its decision to shut dance bars across the state on the grounds that they promoted prostitution and adversely affected society, especially the youth.

The long-awaited decision to shut down the bars, many of which are alleged to be a front for prostitution, was cleared at a cabinet meeting on June 1.

  The Devil is in the Detail

From Forbes

Is your Internet browser a little less polluted with porn today? Are you seeing fewer banner ads promoting hard-core sex? If so, thank U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. Largely unnoticed in the mainstream world, his new porn record-keeping regulations went into effect today, causing fits of apoplexy among much of the porn world.

The adult industry prepares for a legal battle that may determine whether it can survive against the onslaughts of the Bush Administration's anti-adult agenda, intones a recent story in AVN,

This is an attack, we are back to the dark ages of witch hunts and instead of burning innocent people at the stake they are putting them in jail and ripping apart their businesses and families, says the Web site of Lisa S. Lawless, whose company specializes in videos featuring female orgasms. Casualties so far, if anyone will miss them, include the aptly named Bound & Gagged, which describes itself as The world's greatest male bondage magazine. At least it was: Its Web site shut down on Wednesday.

The new rules, which are updates to regulations that date back to 1992, require porn promoters and distributors to maintain records proving their models and actors are over the age of 18, instead of signed forms and other loose documentation. In an announcement last month, Gonzales said the new rules "are crucial to preventing children from being exploited by the production of pornography." Although seemingly innocuous and for a good cause, the rules have suddenly forced the freewheeling trade to either find and organize legal documents for every performer engaging in sex, remove the pictures, or face jail time of up to five years for the first offense and up to ten years for additional offenses.

Easier said than done. The only acceptable identification is government-issued "picture identification" cards or documents, copies of which must be available on demand from the feds, according to a guidebook circulated among big porn clients by Paul Cambria Jr., one of the trade's top lawyers. Oh, that includes any photos or movies shot within the past ten years. Good luck tracking down all those once-naked people, many of whom are foreigners or use bogus names.

And the industry only had 30 days to get the records together from the time the regulations were announced.

The new regulations will likely drive law-abiding adult businesses out of the industry not because they ignored the minimum-age requirements, but because they simply cannot afford to maintain the extensive records required under the new rules, Cambria tells his clients.

While compiling such records is hard enough for the actual producers of porn, they constitute the minority of much of what is distributed over the Internet. Most Internet porn sites are run by small-time independents who agree to distribute porn made by photographers and film producers, in exchange for a cut of as much as $70 for every purchase directed back to the originating sites. These so-called "secondary producers" now must also keep age documents for every performer, a near-impossible task that is being hotly disputed by the industry.

The Free Speech Coalition, a front group for the porn trade, filed a motion for a temporary restraining order on Monday in Denver federal court, in which it argued that the extension of the rules to the secondary producers contradicts a 1998 federal court ruling (in the same court district) that porn distributors can't be held responsible for porn produced by someone else. A hearing scheduled for today was canceled pending a resolution of a complaint filed in the same case. In the meantime, the plaintiffs in the case (including members of the Free Speech Coalition) won't be subject to records inspections, although the new rules will be enforced for everyone else.

In theory, that means the record-keeping rules could also affect cable companies such as Comcast (nasdaq: CMCSA - news - people ) and Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ), which provide porn via pay-per-view, or even Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), whose image search engines provide porn photos and links to the originating sites (see: "Sex Sells").

Private Media Group (nasdaq: PRVT - news - people ), a porn producer and distributor, told its U.S. Web site distributors on Wednesday to remove the company's hard-core content, despite the fact that the company is based in Barcelona, Spain, outside the reach of the U.S. Department of Justice. The company says it doesn't want to jeopardize the "privacy and safety of its models" by distributing their personal information and records to outside Internet distributors.

In the separate complaint filed last week against the attorney general in the same Denver court, the Free Speech Coalition and two co-plaintiffs who produce porn argue that the rules violate their First Amendment right to have sex on camera. They also claim the attorney general's contention that this is all for the benefit of protecting children is dubious at best, since performers older than 60 must now also provide proof of age.

That may likely explain the motivation for at least one of the co-plaintiffs, David Conners of San Diego. Under the stage name "Dave Cummings," the gray-haired and balding 65-year-old touts himself as "the oldest active male porn star in the business," with a repertoire that includes Sugar Daddy (volumes 1 through 23) and Grandpa Dave's Bedtime Tales.

  Land of the Free to Treat People as Shit

From CNET News

The Chicago Police Department began posting on its Web site on Tuesday photographs, names and partial addresses of people who were arrested on charges of soliciting prostitutes in a move intended to embarrass offenders and deter people from committing such crimes.

If we can do anything to get a john to think twice about coming into Chicago communities to solicit a prostitute, we think we're addressing the problem, said Dave Bayless, a Police Department spokesman. By Wednesday night, photos of dozens of men who had been arrested in the last month were posted. The photos will be updated daily and posted for 30 days. Bayless said he was not concerned about posting photos of people who had been arrested but not convicted of crimes.

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois said it had not taken a position on the issue and had no comment.

But Patti Buffington, the executive director of Genesis House, a social service agency that provides shelter and outreach to prostitutes, said she worries that the postings could have repercussions for some people at home. Is it possible for a spouse or a child to come upon that picture? What does that do with family dynamics, and will that result in domestic violence? I don't know. That's where my concern lies.

  Nutter Zones

It seems the same the world over that councils given licensing or zoning powers often misuse them to impose their own nutter inspired morality on others.

From tvnz

Councils around New Zealand are keeping a close eye on a court case that could result in the sex industry moving into neighbourhoods.

A law change in 2003 gave councils the power to restrict where brothels can operate, but a Christchurch brothel owner is challenging the local council claiming its bylaw is unjust.

Terry Brown is associated with two Christchurch inner city brothels and along with the Willowford Trust he is involved with he wants to open more brothels. However their proposed locations fall outside the zone for brothels.

Brown's lawyer, QC Barrister Gerard McCoy, says the area is too restrictive and the legal challenge is the first to local government powers since the prostitution law reform act was introduced. It inverts a central principle of the act, namely that sex workers ought to be able to practice in a safe, open and secure environment, says McCoy.

The Prostitutes Collective is supporting those claims, saying the bylaw denies the very rights given to sex workers by the new act. It immediately takes away the personal choice, autonomy and dignity of these individuals, says McCoy.

The bylaw puts sex workers who don't want to work from a brothel in the inner city out of work, because the inner city rent is far too high for them.

The Willowford Family Trust's lawyers also said the council must have been out of its mind when it drew up its bylaw restricting brothels to an area containing the council's own city chambers, the law courts, a creche and 14 churches.

It is repugnant that the Christchurch City Council could have drawn its own brothel bylaw to encompass premises such as these, says McCoy.

Councils around New Zealand are watching the case. If the trust is successful it could affect every council's power to control the location of brothels.

The hearing will continue in the high court on Tuesday.

  Protection Protection

Based on an article from Taiwan News

Starting today, consumers will be restricted to purchasing condoms at drug stores or shops that are licensed to sell medical supplies.

This announcement came after a Department of Health decision to tighten regulations on the sale of prophylactics after health officials discovered many of the condoms in the market were supposedly substandard and did not undergo official inspection, a Chinese language newspaper reported yesterday.

The government stressed that since condoms are categorized as medical supplies, wholesalers, supermarkets, convenience stores or sex shops that do not have a permit to sell medial supplies are forbidden to display and sell the product effective today, the United Daily News said.

The government has now determined to tighten the rules for the sale of all kinds of condoms after officials discovered that many products were substandard, but sold well thanks to attractive design or packaging. The department announced that from now on every condom sold in the local market will have to be registered with the DOH after passing government inspection to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the product.

The new rules are expected to deal a heavy blow to sex shop owners, most of whom do not have a license to sell medical supplies. These shops are usually frequented for their vast line of prophylactics which include specially designed condoms. The DOH will order all shops to remove brands of condoms that have not passed government inspection from shelves today.

Condom manufacturers are also prohibited to change the packaging of their products without official permit from now on as part of the new rule ordered by the health department, the United Daily News said. In addition, manufacturers of condoms for import into Taiwan must be GMP-qualified factories, the DOH said.

However, other businesses, including sex shops and supermarket operators, railed against the new plan. They said this latest restriction just makes it inconvenient to purchase condoms, and criticized the announcement as "backward," saying it does no good to government's consistent propaganda of using condoms for safe sex.

  Hard Tacks

From Money Plans

Italian lawmakers have voted not to impose a heavy tax on pornography.

The government had proposed a levy on the manufacture, distribution and sale of pornographic magazines, films and video tapes.

But the Chamber of Deputies voted by 250 to 57 not to impose a 25 per cent tax on the material.

When Premier Silvio Berlusconi`s conservative government announced the proposal last month it sparked a debate among those opposed to such a high levy.

Others said the government should ban porn outright and not make money from it.

  Mobility Comes to Istanbul

From Money Plans

The sign on the front of the bus read "Come try something different with us" but police in Istanbul say the four people running Turkey's first brothel-on-wheels may be breaking the law.

The woman owner of the bus, her driver and two prostitutes were detained on Sunday for questioning for running the traveling sex tour, the Sabah newspaper reported Monday.

Prostitution is legal in Turkey but only in registered brothels.

The four had been roaming along a national highway near Istanbul for the past two months, making several stops to greet passenger-clients in the bus' four small rooms, each equipped with a bed and shower.

  Land of the Setting Red Light

It has become easy picking for nutters to mix the issues of prostitution and trafficking to add extra weight to the anti-prostitution argument. I consider that trafficking is clearly a crime and as such is not considered further on the Melon Farmers. However I consider adult consensual prostitution a non-crime and will continue to highlight those that persecute working girls 

Based on an article from Kentucky.com

Angel Kiss, Zeus and cabarets that offer "live love" still beckon customers in Kabukicho, Tokyo's infamous red-light district. But near-daily police and immigration raids have banished the women who once openly solicited potential customers on the street.

Humiliated by international criticism of its commerce in girls and women, Japan last year began to clamp down on prostitution. Yet the tougher laws that are expected to pass next month face huge obstacles. Japan must reorient a slow-moving bureaucracy, overcome widespread social acceptance of sex for hire and take on the powerful sex industry and the criminal groups that control it.

Thousands of women, desperate to earn money for their families, slip into Japan on short-term visas or with falsified passports. Until now, police dealt with the problem by arresting the victims as illegal aliens, jailing them and deporting them as soon as they presented enough money for airfare home.

Two months ago, the government began cutting back on entertainer visas, which last year were issued to 80,000 people. Those were a sham, said Hidenori Sakanaka, a former head of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau. The women often become hostesses, even though they are invited as singers or dancers, and end up in prostitution.

After his agents embarked on an aggressive campaign 10 years ago, arresting illegal entertainers, club owners and brokers, he received irate phone calls from politicians and anonymous threats on his life, he said.

Will the new campaign meet less resistance? For more than a year, immigration and police officers have been arresting thousands of undocumented workers, including trafficking victims. Officers are working to live up to an October 2003 pledge to cut in half the population of illegal foreigners in Tokyo, then estimated at 125,000.

To have an impact, authorities will have to tackle the most difficult problem of all: challenging the Japanese yakuza, or mob, and their foreign partners who profit from the business.

Extreme Prejudice

From the BBC

Police in the eastern Malaysian state of Sarawak say they want the local government to prevent single Chinese women from travelling to the state. Police have asked for the new laws in an attempt to reduce vice.
According to Sarawak's deputy police chief, officers are struggling to curb prostitution in the area.

Many of the women working in karaoke bars and nightclubs - which in Malaysia are often thinly disguised fronts for the sex trade - are from China. However, the police find it difficult to prosecute the vice bosses who run the clubs, as they simply deny any link to the prostitutes working there.

According to the police, about 40 young women arrive in Sarawak from China every day. The police hope that by refusing them entry, it will force the clubs to close.

However, Malaysia's tourism ministry is urging Sarawak to think carefully before imposing a blanket ban. More visitors travel to Malaysia from China than from any other country outside South-East Asia. The federal government will also be concerned that a ban could affect relations with Beijing.

However, the terms under which Sarawak joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 stipulate that it retains control over immigration issues, so the government in Kuala Lumpur has no power to block such a move.

  Doing Bird

I wonder why they use the tourist police to do raids. I would have thought that it would be good for Thailand if the tourist police were to be seen as generally helping visitors. Thailand could always send the regular police to act as kill joys and do the dirty work.

Based on an article from Pattaya City News

Last year, the Blue Bird Club in North Pattaya which caters mostly for Asian Tour groups, was closed down after it was found to be conducting sexually explicit shows. The venue is back open but somebody snitched to the Tourist Police that these explicit shows were once again taking place.

Acting on instructions received from Police Major General Banya, the National Chief of Tourist Police, undercover Tourist Police Officers from Bangkok’s Tourist Crime Suppression Unit secretly filmed the show. Sexual intercourse was said to have taken place and performers are seen to be removing razor blades from their vaginal cavities. Both are illegal activities and as soon as the officers saw what was going on, they entered the premise and immediately closed it down and arrested the performers and the manager, Somshai.

They were taken back to the Pattaya Tourist Police Station where they were joined by Police Major General Banya who came down from Bangkok to oversee the case. Pattaya’s Police Chief and Police Colonel Supapon, the Regional Tourist Police Chief. The evidence was shown to the arrestees who initially denied the allegations. A report of the evening’s events will be sent to the Governor of Chonburi who will decide if the gathered evidence warrants a permanent or temporary closure of the venue. In the meantime, the manager and performers were charged with a variety of offences relating to performing and permitting sexually explicit acts in a public place.

From About

A prominent news magazine once said that Singapore was a fine city, and then went on to explain that you could be fined for almost anything in Singapore. But in this squeekiest of squeaky clean cities, prostitution is legal -- and relatively well regulated. And if you're not careful you could walk right into a brothel in some of the city's shopping malls without even realizing what you were opening the door to...

Prostitution in Singapore is restricted to designated redlight areas (DRA's) ; some sources say there are five of these, others say six. But since they are all fairly close together, it's probably irrelevant. There are a total of about 400 brothels in the city with an estimated 10 to 20 prostitutes each. That's about 6000 prostitutes in the city...

Prostitutes carry a yellow health card in Singapore. They must report in "regularly" for health checks. And while prostitution and brothels are legal, solicitation is not. Even in the DRA's, there are no (legal) street walkers.

Many of Singapore's prostitutes are from Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The locations for some of the city's Designated Red light Areas is a little surprising, in as much as they exist in the heart of the city's commercial and historic districts. Orchard Towers is one of the DRA's. Angel's Disco (formerly Club 392) in Orchard Towers is a sister-club to the Angel's Disco in Bangkok's famous Sukhumvit area.

Orchard Towers is also home to several escort services. The ironic thing about the Orchard Towers set up is that Singapore has managed to squeeze escort services and bar front brothels onto it's most fashionable shopping street, and managed to build them into a plaza with dry cleaning services, foot doctors, jewelers, golf stores, pharmacies, flower shops, etc. Open a door on  he wrong floor and you're in a different world from the touristy, commercialized bustle that most people think of when you say "Orchard Road."

Some of Singapore's DRA's are pretty seamy. Deskers Road, in the words of one sources, is "the classic low-end red light district." But it is within easy walking distance of the City Hall MRT station. The "Deskers Report" goes on the describe the area. The DRA is in...the back alley between Desker Road and Rowell Road. Here you will find a teeming mass of humanity milling along the alley, looking in at all the doorways. Inside the doorways you will see 1 to 6 women sitting around looking bored and contemptuous in a bare room with cane chairs. Posters on the wall advise the use of condoms...

Deskers Road and the nearby Flanders Square DRA's can be reached by foot from the Little India section of Singapore. The most popular DRA is in the Geylang area of Singapore - which is not a normal tourist hangout. Geylang is the land of cheap accommodation and immigrant housing in Singapore.

From Ireland On Line

Eleven people accused of running China’s biggest pornographic website went on trial today in the midst of a nationwide crackdown on online pornography, a news report said.

The website was set up in 2003 to sell photographs, articles and films, and had more than 100,000 registered users, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The site was run from the eastern province of Anhui but based on a server in the US, Xinhua said. It received more than 35 million hits before it was shut down by police in November.

The report didn’t say what penalty the defendants might face if convicted. But the operator of another website was sentenced to 15 years in prison in November on charges of peddling pornography. The government says thousands of people have been detained and hundreds of sites shut down since the anti-porn crackdown was launched last year.

From USA Today

The 1,400-year-old practice of Pleasure Marriages, or muta'a "ecstasy" in Arabic, is as old as Islam itself. It was permitted by the prophet Mohammed as a way to ensure a respectable means of income for widowed women.

Pleasure marriages were outlawed under Saddam Hussein but have begun to flourish again in Iraq. The contracts, lasting anywhere from one hour to 10 years, generally stipulate that the man will pay the woman in exchange for sexual intimacy. Now some Iraqi clerics and women's rights activists are complaining that the contracts have become less a mechanism for taking care of widows than an outlet for male sexual desires.

The renaissance of the pleasure marriage coincides with a revival of other Shiite traditions long suppressed by the former regime. Under Saddam, we were very scared, says Al-Zaidi, a lawyer from Sadr City, a Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. They would punish people. Now, all my friends are doing it.

A turbaned Shiite cleric who issues wedding permits from a street-side counter in Sadr City says he encourages permanent marriages but gives the OK for pleasure marriages when there are "special reasons." The cleric, Sayid Kareem As-Sayid Abdullah Al-Mousawi, says he grants licenses for muta'a in cases where the woman is widowed or divorced, or for single women who have approval from their fathers. I can assure you, these (muta'a) marriages are flourishing in (Shiite cities) Najaf, Karbala and Kadhamiya in an amazing way. There are a lot of hotels (patronized) by Shiites who approve of such marriages.

Shiites and Sunnis both permit men to take more than one permanent wife, but the rival branches of Islam are deeply split over pleasure marriages. Most Shiite scholars today consider it halal, or religiously legal. Sunni Arabs and Kurds, who are mainly Sunni, oppose the idea. But the practice is growing among Sunnis and Shiites alike. Sunni scholars fear that giving official sanction to pleasure marriages — many of which are only verbal agreements between the couple — are little more than legalized prostitution that could lead to a collapse of moral values, especially among young people.

A woman agreeing to a pleasure marriage that involves a one-time encounter might be able to count on about $100. For a muta'a that runs longer, she might be paid $200 a month, though the amounts vary widely and can depend on whether she has children.

Zeinab Ahmed lost her husband in a car accident five years ago. She says she has considered entering into a muta'a contract with a man, but the stigma attached has kept her from doing so.All my friends who have done this have told me they got married in this way just to meet their sexual desires, but later on they started to love that man, and he does not accept to get married permanently. ... Most of the men, at the end of the contract, they feel contempt towards the woman.

Married women can't enter a muta'a, although a married man can. Men can void the contract at any time; women don't have that option unless it's negotiated at the outset. The couple agrees not to have children. A woman who unintentionally gets pregnant can have an abortion but must then pay a fine to a cleric.

From the Hindustan Times

The US has reiterated its insistence that a country getting USAID to fight HIV/AIDS must condemn prostitution.

Brazil has rejected the offer of US funds for that purpose because it has a highly successful AIDS programme, which it attributes to the cooperation of prostitutes' associations that are legal in Brazil.

Asked about Brazil's stand, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that the US has a legal requirement under the Leadership Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003 that requires the administration to make sure that no funds under the act are going to organisations that do not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking: So, consistent with that provision of law, we have asked partners in these efforts to sign documents that describe their commitment. It's our responsibility to comply with the act, (so) we do carry this out and we don't provide assistance to any group that can't explicitly tell us that they have a policy opposing prostitution and sex trafficking, and that is an important provision of the law if you look at the bigger purposes of the law in terms of fighting AIDS.

Based on an article from CTV

A weekend anti prostitution operation resulted in 51 arrests in Ottawa and police invited news cameras along, hoping to gain public support for stricter penalties in existing solicitation laws.

Under Canadian law, prostitution is not illegal. The offence is communicating for the purpose of prostitution. We are going to educate Canadians on the realities of prostitution, the problems of decriminalization and legalization with the assistance of the media being here today, says Cst. Robert Stocki, the coordinator of Project Escapade.The average person doesn't get the opportunity to see what prostitution is really all about, Stocki adds.

Police say it's obvious many "johns" or clients are family men. For Ottawa Police Constable Leanne Smith, this was her third time posing as a prostitute during a sweep of city streets. She says she's learned there is no typical "john" or customer. I'm always stunned at who I am seeing in front of me, It could be your best friend's father, it could be your neighbour . . . it can be anyone, all walks of life.

Police say the health concerns are serious. The women who work the street trade are almost always supporting a drug habit. Sharing needles and crack pipes facilitate the spread of diseases like hepatitis and HIV. Many customers will pay extra to avoid using a condom.

The parliamentary Subcommittee on Solicitation Laws has been considering changes to Canadian laws, and held hearings in March in six Canadian cities. One of the ideas explored was the possibility of legalizing bawdy houses, to move the sex trade off the streets and into brothels.

Based on an article from The Prague Post

Prague city council members passed an ordinance to take effect in June which bans the currently ubiquitous handing out of pamphlets that invite visitors to sex clubs and striptease shows.

Groups of such touts gather nightly on Wenceslas Square to draw foreign tourists to sex shows. Club owners interviewed last year reported a surge in British clients due to an increase in low-cost flights from the UK.

In recent years the heart of the city has seen an explosion in nightclubs officially operating as strip bars that frequently double as brothels. Prostitution falls into a gray area in the Czech Republic because there is no law that prohibits it, although profiting from a sex worker, or pimping, is illegal.

Starting June 1, erotic clubs that distribute flyers face a fine of up to 200,000 Kc ($8,613). The promotion of erotic shows, peepshows and striptease performances is shameful, said Deputy Mayor Rudolf Blazek, who sponsored the new ordinance. Some flyers, he added, contain material that contravenes good manners, an ambiguous phrase he nevertheless made sure was included in the ordinance.

Robert Naughton, owner of Rocky O'Reilly's bar in Prague 1 and a critic of flyers for erotic clubs, said a bulk of his clients are young British men typically targeted by the touts. By the time they go back home even they are sick of the flyers. One customer said to me, 'I'm 42. I have been all over the world — I don't need some guy in my face with a piece of paper to tell me where I can find sex.

The flyer ban does not, however, do anything to address the larger issue of Prague's growing reputation as the brothel of Europe, as some critics have observed, in wake of its reputation for sex tourism. Mayor Pavel Bem has said in the past that he would like to move the sex-tourism industry out of the city center, but so far the council's efforts to regulate prostitution through zoning have been ineffective. We have dealt with the issue of zoning and these clubs many times but to no avail. We are waiting for a national law on the regulation of prostitution that could help, said Jiri Wolf, spokesman for Prague City Hall.

For more than two years the Interior Ministry has been discussing a law that would make prostitution legal, regulating where it's practiced and producing billions in tax revenue for the state. The draft bill has not been submitted to Parliament because current deputies have indicated they are unlikely to pass it into law.

Jan Slajs, the spokesman for Prague 1 City Hall, which administers the district where many of the clubs are, said they are actually migrating from the outskirts of Prague to the center. There are 12 erotic clubs in the Wenceslas Square area, according to Slajs, who said four new ones have opened in the past three years.  Slajs is not sure that a ban on flyers will reduce their popularity. There are so many of these places the police don't even know about because as the law stands they can just register as a business.

It doesn't strike me as surprising that decriminalisation would lead to an increase in the industry. It just shows that more people have the opportunity to enjoy sex....and why not

From Stuff

A 40% leap in the number of sex workers, along with a sharp rise in those working the streets, is concerning critics of the law decriminalising prostitution. Opponents of the Prostitution Law Reform Act are pointing to evidence in a new report that the number of sex workers on the streets and in unlicensed brothels is growing.

The Prostitution Law Review Committee's benchmark report on the state of the sex industry in New Zealand, tabled in Parliament yesterday, will be used by lawmakers to decide whether changes to the act are necessary in 2007 or 2008. The review committee's report estimated there were 5932 sex workers operating in New Zealand in April last year, 10 months after the act was passed – up nearly 40% from the 4272 identified in a 2001 police survey.

Canterbury was identified after Auckland as the second-largest district of sex workers, with 211 massage parlour workers, 50 employed by escort agencies, 75 on the street, 50 working illegally and 132 privately. The report said Canterbury had 25 sex businesses, compared to Wellington's 15 and Auckland's 243.

While it found the largest group (44%) continued to work in licensed massage parlours, it identified a growing trend nationwide towards street work (up from 3% in 2001 to 11% in 2004) and "rap" parlours or unlicensed brothels (up from 1% to 10%). There was also a marked jump in the proportion of sex workers operating privately from their homes, from 16% to 24%. Escort agencies registered the greatest decline, from 32% to just 10%.

However, the report's authors urged caution in interpreting the results, saying it was possible the number working in the sex industry was much greater and that some workers may use more than one place of work.

The architect of the act, Christchurch Labour MP Tim Barnett, said yesterday that the law could not be blamed for the spike in sex workers or the numbers on the street because it had only been in force six months at the time of the survey. He said the select committee would consider changing the law if police could come up with evidence it was not working. I think the challenge in the law for police is to come up with new models of policing, I'm sure the pressure on the streets will cause them to come up with new models.

I lived in Penang for a few months. there were apparently a few streets where there would be girls awaiting customers. But in reality they were 100% lady boy. I was told at the time that the Malays had written severely strict laws against street prostitution but had only banned girls. Lady boys could work in complete legality.

From The New Sunday Times

Penang has the dubious reputation of being the country’s No 1 State for vice, the Penang chief police officer since three months ago, talks about how he will tackle the problems.

Q: What about prostitution?

A: Like anywhere else, prostitution will prosper if there is demand. There are syndicates bringing in girls from China, Thailand and Central Asia. They abuse their travel papers and ply their trade here. Many use Penang as a transit point as well. One of the reasons why there is demand is that Penang has a huge Chinese market. We have enhanced enforcement and seen the results with more foreign girls, especially those from China and Thailand, arrested.

Again, I have to admit that there is plenty more that needs to be done. We need to make the trade non-lucrative. But again, there is always two sides of the coin. One way or another, the syndicates will continue to operate. It’s got to do with lust, too. That’s why it’s called the world’s oldest profession.  Since it happens behind closed doors, it is difficult to detect. It’s not a street crime. It is actually a white collar crime. But we will do the necessary.

Q: What would be the best way to project respectability in night entertainment outlets?

A: We must project the industry as a healthy one where people with some standing in society would love to patronise. In the West, they take horse racing as a very noble sport. Society people go to the Ascot or the Melbourne Derby to socialise. It is not directly associated with gambling. But here, when you talk about horse racing, it is gambling. It is not a sport.

So, why must our night entertainment outlets be dark, eerie and a meeting place for drug peddlers. We are giving the wrong picture of the industry. Why are lights in these outlets dimmed? Is it because you want to create the mood? That shows you are hiding something. You can still enjoy your drink with the lights on. Probably the local authorities can make it mandatory for these establishments to light up. There should be no cubicles.

Q: How do we monitor their activities more effectively?

A: Installing CCTVs will be good. But you cannot force people to do it. Even car park operators refuse to install them. They want it free. I have recommended that we install CCTVs in high crime areas as well as places frequented by the public. I did it when I was Malacca CPO. These CCTVs can be maintained by the town council and linked to the nearest police station.

Let us ponder, why do banks install CCTVs? It’s for security. Likewise, if you have CCTV, it should make you more confident because the police are keeping an eye on the place. You only need to fear if you are doing something wrong. Through CCTVs, you can also do e-patrolling, e-surveillance or e-policing. The power of e-policing means you can monitor 24 hours and you can react and respond even without people calling you.

From AVN

The first lawsuit against Missouri's onerous anti-adult billboard law will go to trial on September 27, according to one of the plaintiffs involved in the suit, but the statute now faces more than one challenge.

The day after the law passed, we filed a federal suit in the Western District of Missouri, explained Nellie Symm-Gruender, co-owner of plaintiff Passions Video, which has two stores in the state.

Also pressing the suit in the Western District is Gala Entertainment of KC Inc., which owns Satin Dolls, a Kansas City strip club. But in early April, Dr. John Haltom, owner of 10 adult stores in six states, filed his own suit in the federal district court for the Eastern District of Missouri on behalf of his Johnnie 'O's stores in the St. Louis suburbs of Florissant and Fenton.

Haltom terms his stores "lingerie boutiques," and notes that adult materials take up less than one-quarter of his display space. Haltom and his attorney, Andrew McCullough, acknowledge that the displays at the Johnnie 'O's stores contain more than 10 percent adult-oriented items, but McCullough said it should take more than that for a store to be considered adult.

The law, introduced by the infamous state Sen. Matt Bartle and passed last year, prohibits billboards and other signs for adult businesses to be located within one mile of state highways, and gives adult businesses which already have such signs three years to bring their existing billboards into compliance. By 2008, an adult-oriented business located within a mile of a highway could have just two signs: One showing the business' name and operating hours, the other noting it is off-limits to minors – not exactly the haute couture of advertising messages.

The law applies to any business where more than 10 percent of display space is used for "sexually oriented materials." Those are defined as any textual, pictorial or three dimensional material that depicts nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or sadomasochistic abuse in a way which is patently offensive to the average person applying contemporary adult community standards with respect to what is suitable for minors.

We shouldn't have a situation where we have to explain to our children what 'XXX' means or what an 'adult toy' is," Bartle explained after the bill's introduction.

Their basic plan is to eliminate our advertising and put us out of business, Haltom said. The citizens of Missouri have to realize it's the adult stores today, but what's it going to be tomorrow?

From KansasCity.com

The world's most wired country, South Korea, is raiding cyberspace's red-light district in a campaign pitting Confucian morals against modern technology.

Since January, the main prosecutor's office in Seoul has issued arrest warrants for about 100 people charged with spreading obscene material under South Korea's telecommunications law, a crime carrying penalties of up to a year in jail or a nearly $10,000 fine.

In a highly publicized case last month, police in the southern city of Busan arrested the operator of a Web site that offers a forum to arrange swaps of sex partners. The unnamed man is charged with spreading obscene material and remains jailed while the investigation continues.

The campaign comes amid a wider moral crackdown starting last year, when penalties for prostitution-related crimes also were doubled. Korea has an active sex trade - both online and off. According to the Korean Institute of Criminology, the amount spent on prostitution alone amounted to $23.6 billion in 2002, the last year for which figures were available.

In a country where more than 70 percent of homes have high-speed Internet connections, access to cyberporn is easy. That means traditional taboos in Korea's conservative, Confucian-based society have quickly shattered, said Lee Mee-sook, a sociology professor at Paichai University in the central city of Daejeon: The code of ethics became weak, and people started satisfying their sexual desires through the Internet - anonymously

On a busy street in the center of the South Korean capital Seoul, "adult" Internet cafes aren't hard to find. In the cafes, customers can surf the Web in private booths, as opposed to the open rows of computers found in typical cybercafes.

Authorities can't really control it because it's the Internet, it's impossible, said Lee, a worker at the Red Box adult Internet cafe: We should have the freedom to see whatever we want.

Web operators insist that adult content appearing on mainstream sites has been rated by the Korea Media Rating Board, the agency responsible for setting age recommendations for everything from films to computer games, and complain that prosecutors have overstepped their authority.

The portal sites are being accused for what they thought was legal, said Lee Yeun-woo of Kinternet, an organization that represents popular portals such Yahoo Korea, Daum and Naver. The fine actually isn't that much. But we want to prove what those sites did wasn't illegal and want the prosecutors to prove what was wrong.

To get around laws regulating Web site content, some sex sites are based on Web servers outside South Korea. The Ministry of Information and Communications is asking Internet providers to block access to them as well.

Many Korean Web sites require users to enter their national identification card numbers to confirm their age to access adult content. But tech-savvy children can use programs to create false numbers or simply use their parents' IDs instead.

South Korea's constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but contains the caveat that such expression should neither violate the honor or rights of other persons nor undermine public morals or social ethics.

The law doesn't define obscenity, but Jun Ji-yun, a law professor at Seoul's Yonsei University, said it was understood to be something that brings sexual disgrace to people.

Given the sheer volume of Internet pornography, prosecutors realize they face an uphill battle. They are focusing on larger Web portals and other well-known sites first, in hopes that their investigation will draw attention to the issue and serve as a warning, said Kim Dae-hyun, a Seoul prosecutor: There are so many crimes and so many pornography sites out there. We cannot deal with all of them with such a limited amount of people here.

From The New York Times

During the last two years, X-rated shops have made a quiet but pronounced comeback in New York City, with dozens of new businesses opening in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Greenwich Village and even near Times Square.

But strict new zoning rules now reaching the final stage of a nearly year long legal battle could force most of them to close, bringing highly visible changes to the neighborhoods in which the stores have clustered.

What they've done is made it impossible for these guys to stay in business, said Herald Price Fahringer, the lawyer for a coalition of about 75 video stores and X-rated theaters challenging the restrictions in court. If this law were to be upheld, 85 percent of all the stores would have to close.

Last week a state appellate court upheld the stricter regulations but issued an interim stay of the ruling until later this month, when the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, will consider whether to grant a permanent stay and hear a further appeal. If the stay is not granted, the new rules would go into effect immediately, sewing up loopholes to zoning regulations enacted by the city during the mid-1990's.

Under those earlier regulations, stores or clubs that devoted at least 60 percent of their inventory or space to non-X-rated material were not considered "adult entertainment" establishments at all, allowing owners who were attentive to the letter of the law to open up sex shops in residential and commercial neighborhoods where they would otherwise have been banned. Strip clubs simply put more space aside for nonsexual entertainment - one opened a sushi bar - and video stores offered action thrillers and comedies as well as sex DVD's.

The new regulations, said John Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, would establish a "common-sense test" for whether a business qualifies as a sex shop. Peep shows, signs excluding minors, and other features would all qualify a business as a sex shop and subject it to the more stringent regulations that govern such establishments, he said.

Under those rules, established in 1995, sex shops are banned from residential and most commercial zones. They are allowed in industrial zones and some commercial ones, including parts of Eighth Avenue, the garment district in Midtown, and the West Side of Manhattan. But there is a catch: No sex shop may sit within 500 feet of another such business, of a zone from which they are prohibited, or of "sensitive receptors" like schools or houses of worship.

Feinblatt said that should the new regulations go into effect, the city would immediately begin reinspecting sex shops to see if they were in compliance.

The 500-foot requirement could prove particularly nettlesome for a large number of the stores.  It was in part to crack down on such "clustering" - which some community leaders say drives out potential high-end tenants and retards economic development - that the 1995 rules were established.

But it would not be so great for the store owners, some of whom have spent years trying to stay open legally. Not all the video stores and strip clubs would be in danger. A few were exempted when the 1995 changes were made. And some stores may move to an industrial zone or comply with the new law, though that would render them all but unrecognizable as sex-themed businesses.

From AVN

Adult businesses in New York City won a temporary reprieve Wednesday when an appeals court judge agreed to bar the city from immediately enforcing a decision allowing it to shut down scores of establishments, the New York Daily News reported.

Appellate Division Justice Eugene Nardelli issued a stay of the unanimous decision he wrote enforcing strict new zoning laws that could close about 100 sex-related businesses, according to the report.

Herald Price Fahringer, attorney for about 75 of the businesses, said the stay would be in effect while a full Appellate Division panel decides whether the case will go to the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals.

Fahringer and another attorney, Martin Mehler, who represents three strip clubs, said they are confident the Court of Appeals will hear the case, according to the newspaper.

We are saying this is a First Amendment issue. This is a constitutional issue, Mehler told the Daily News.