Clearly you didn't read the article at all: they left used condoms, tissues, and empty bottles of wine all over the apartment. The owner had to clean it up, which was probably quite gross for him. That actually seems to be a big part of his complaint - he even says that if they hadn't made a mess he wouldn't have known what had happened, and would have probably accepted a repeat booking.
I agree with your points, but consider reading TFA at least.
> Also, what's the difference when people are having sex in your bed, whether they're married, friends, or engaged in pay-for-sex?
In the grand scheme of things there isn't but I suppose the plaintiff worried about being criminally associated with unlawful behaviour.
People aren't machines, they have feelings and sometimes they project those on their belongings. I consider it normal to feel something upon learning you have been deceived by people not coming upfront about what they really were going to use your home for.
I believe this has nothing to do with one's stance on prostitution.
Hotels have legal protections, Airbnb frequently violates the rules and I wouldn't want to be the person caught in the middle when a local prosecutor wants to make that point.
Yes, most places where either prostitution or brothel-keeping is a crime, the owner of a property used in it is potentially (mental state is an issue) committing a crime as well.
> If a prostitute brings a john back to a hotel room, the police can arrest the hotel owner?
In the US, Aside from that risk (which is real but attenuated by the low probability of a conviction because of the high criminal burden of proof) prostitution-related offenses are second only to drug-related offenses in the eagerness of law enforcement to use civil asset forfeiture against properties, including real property, used in the offense.
For a regular commercial hotel, law enforcement would probably just use the possibility of such action as one among many tools to get the owner to actively cooperate with law enforcement, and it probably wouldn't get to actual seizure in a normal case.
Whether similar technically noncriminal consequences associated with criminal activity apply to this situation (in the UK), I'm not sure, though I wouldn't be surprised.
There have been cases in the US where a hotel gets a bad reputation mostly because it's in a bad area and the police use civil asset forfeiture to take the property away from the owner.
I found the "overflowing" part a bit strange - either they had a particularly tiny bin, or that was a helluva party and they actually did a decent job cleaning it up then. Or the owner slightly exaggerated - which I find understandable, cleaning up those disgusting things is no fun. But doesn't Airbnb allow to charge for that? I'm pretty sure I've been charged cleanup fees even though I never left a mess in Airbnb apt.
"... he even says that if they hadn't made a mess he wouldn't have known what had happened, and would have probably accepted a repeat booking."
Seems odd that they wouldn't have made an effort to clean-up since having a good profile is more or less essential to being able to rent another airbnb appt?
Where did you get that implication? The article talked about them being in/on the trash can, and zeroer made no implication they had done anything different.
Well, strictly speaking AirBnB is not a hotel. Likewise, you're supposed to abide by house rules. I have no idea what the author had set for their rental, but I have yet to see an AirBnB posting that didn't ask that you please keep the place tidy.
Given the enthusiastic response I got from my last host when my partner and I took the time to give the apartment a once-over when we left, I'm guessing that this is a persistent problem where guests just leave a place trashed. Some cleaning is obviously anticipated by the cleaning fees; you wash the linens, still give the place a good scrubbing between guests, etc., but I think it's fair to expect the guests to tidy up a little if you're upfront that this is part of the agreement on the listing.
Likewise, even hotels will charge for outrageous damage or messes to their properties. Security deposits in the US for even really cheap hotels are pretty common, usually requiring a credit card with a $100 charge that is cancelled/returned later.
Some do - I'm not really sure why it's relevant though, if you agree with the host that you'll keep the place tidy, and you don't, you're in breach of your agreement. It's not just a matter of throw money at it since it can impact business, especially for popular destinations or high tourist times when the places are booked solid for a few months. Having to be out a few days can throw off the schedule, which is crappy for the next guest and crappy for the host.
It's not just about the initial money - really bad messes can affect more than just the host and cause problems you can't just solve with money. Too high of a deposit and no one will rent, but if someone's mess disrupts, then the deposit isn't enough to cover losses.
AirBnB has a concept of a cleaning fee that can be set by the owner. A reasonable cleaning fee, however, significantly raises the price for short-term stays (while amortizing better for longer stays), which leaves the AirBnB hosts with two choices:
1) Hire a professional cleaner, set cleaning fee, lose some short-term customers.
2) Do not set the cleaning fee, expect to do cleaning yourself, complain loudly in public when this turns up to be the case.
But it's not a hotel. This is a dynamic entrepreneur, imaginearing to a better future. Rentiers don't do work like picking up things. They just collect the profits.
If the owner envisioned a family coming to stay, perhaps from out of town for a holiday etc, but then instead realized on return that it has been used by a prostitute and a series of men had walked in repeatedly to have sex on the bed one after each other and with each one everyone cleaning themselves up in the bathrooms I can understand how it would feel like a violation. That said, this can always happen and you can't control what someone does once they have your apartment so he's only got himself to blame really, I would not rent out my apartment because I can't deal with knowing someone was in there even taking a simple shower but I understand that about myself and don't care about any income I'm missing out on having it be empty when I'm away.
Surely that's more a lack of proper regulations and enforcement. Things designed to keep safety and standards instead of punishment and determent.
Elaborating: If there is sufficient /convenient/, legal, not over-priced, service for the clients that clearly do exist then underground (criminal) fulfillment is much less profitable. Making onerous (for no good reason) regulations are one form of increasing the price of legal services and thus making it more profitable for unwanted fulfillment to occur.
What makes "journalistsresource.org" a credible resource?
It's located at Harvard Kennedy School of Government which is basically an "elite factory" for the (re-)production of the US political elite -- just look at their alumni [2] and faculty [1]. The US's official policy is extremely anti legalisation of prostitution. In this context, "journalistsresource.org" looks like an instrument of projecting soft power [3], a mechanism to communicate US government policy, but obscuring the origin. I recommend being a little bit more reflective on the nature of your sources.
I also recommend to be suspicious of the term "trafficking" in this context. It's an attack term that is intended to appeal to your emotions, you are expected to think of 7 year old girls being 'stolen' from some destitute 3rd world country and being 'sold' into prostitution in a country where prostitution is legal (eg. Holland). However to a pretty good approximation this doesn't happen. Where prostitution is legal, essentially all (to a pretty good approximation) women who work in prostituion are adults and choose their job, in the same way that others become lorry drivers or carpenters.
Regarding work, almost nobody does "what they want", we find some compromise between our interests, abilities, and available work opportunities. Work is often understood to be that which we don't do voluntarily.
you have pimps.
I'd appreciate it if you could be more precise.
1. What do you mean by "pimp"? Is it the same as a co-worker, or is it
the same as "boss" or something else?
2. For your chosen concept of "pimp", could you explain which of the
following you belive to be true, and what the credible,
methodologically controlled evidence you have for your belief:
- All prostitutes in all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
- Some but not all prostitutes in all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
- All prostitutes in some but not all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
- Some but not all prostitutes in some but not all legislations have one or more "pimps"?
For all the "some"s, I'd appreciate quantitative data, are we talking about 99.9% or 0.1%. And:
is there a systemic difference w.r.t. "pimping" between legal systems where prostitution is legal, and those where it is not?
Finally, I'd be interested to learn why -- for your chosen notion of
"pimp", having one or more "pimps" is good/bad.
Have you learned something? Hmmm. I think you are defending a belief system against a principled challenge by looking away. That is a labour saving device and convenient.
The rhetorical device you've used in the last reply include "argumentum ad auctoritatem" and "non sequitur".
And it's perfectly rational and advisable for prostitutes to move from legal systems where prostitution is illegal (hence dangerous) to legal systems where it is legal (hence safe).
It probably wouldn't in the long term if done correctly, though it's quite obvious why it wouldn't the short term, especially when significant political effort has gone into assuring that all the tools used to fight human trafficking are intimately tied into the prohibition of prostitution because the whole purpose was to use outrage against humanity trafficking as political cover to bolster prohibition of prostitution.
Yes, the article should be named "Airbnb guests fail to clean up after themselves, owner outraged". But then I guess it'd be hard to sell it as something worth an article on BBC.
All the rest - the fact that people had sex in the apartment (not exactly out of the normal unless one rents exclusively to monastic orders) or that money may have been exchanged (totally not owner's business) - sounds completely irrelevant and an attempt to foment moral panic.
The writer of the article does not make a judgement apparently, instead presents the two sides of the issue. I 'm not even sure it's considered a 'problem'.
The legal issue is that his apartment became a brothel illegally, but it seems the fault is with the prostitutes, since he did not run the business himself.
If they opened a pop-up restaurant or nightclub, I'd be pissed too; this wasn't a contract to sublet a space for commercial use after all. You can get libertarian about sex work, while ignoring the abuse of an agreement between to parties.
I don't think a brothel serves as many people as a restaurant in an evening? Those other examples are skewed toward obvious wear-and-tear and traffic problems.
While the brothel example might not be distinguishable from a couple on vacation having a party, except for the money-changing-hands angle.
Lets admit, its the moral angle at issue. The rest is after-the-fact arguments pasted on to make it seem like an objective thing.
I don't know if it's moral or "squigged out". The former I have no patience for, the latter... I'm human too, and I like spiders, but they repulse me. Sometimes we don't make a ton of sense, but when you don't agree to rent out your home as a brothel, you shouldn't have to worry about it being used as one.
As to wear and tear... it's a brothel... and not in a movie; you might be surprised at the turnover.
Edit: I realize that "have no patience for" sounds pretty snotty... I've been a little sleep deprived lately and it isn't bringing out the best in me, sorry.
Edit 2: I also realize that the issue of the brothel, totally aside from the homeowner's feelings, might represent a property value issue, in the same way as a previous murder. It doesn't have to sensible for it to hit him in the pocket; obviously sex work doesn't leave some kind of "spiritual residue" anymore than violent death, but people are often irrational.
If I understood article correctly - problem was that there were 2 women renting his place. Afaik - prostitution is legal there, but brothels are not, and place with more than one "escort" persons is considered brothel from legal point of view, so owner of the property was afraid that he'll be considered part of that.
The problem is that you can disagree with laws, yet refuse to be lured into infringing them. Personally there are plenty of laws I disagree with, yet I comply because I don't want to go to jail.
You could say the same with minimum wage laws, in that they prevent people from from accepting a lower payed job.
Why would the government decide what job you can and can't accept ?
I definitely want to live in a world where someone's body can't be monetized for any reason. It's the buyer who should be punished though, not the seller.
Yet consider the case when your spouse engages in sex activities. Should it still be not your business? That points that there is a pressure to control sex that lead to laws that try to regulate or restrict that.
2) It's a matter of incentives. If you make murder illegal, people are still going to kill people but you disincentivize murder thus reducing its numbers.
Buying and selling sex in a private space in England isn't illegal. But two or more women selling sex in a single property constitutes "brothel-keeping" which is a criminal offence.
Owning a "brothel" is also a criminal offence, which I believe is part of the reason the owner was upset.
He could have used gloves or held the bin with a cloth. And besides, anyone can leave a mess and prostitutes should be fully capable of not leaving a mess.
You of course are so open minded that you see no problem in cleaning up stranger's piles of used condoms, or having them strewn about your house. Just part of a regular day in dandare's world.
Edit: Look at everybody pretending that cleaning up dozens of men's bodily ejections after they used your house as a brothel is just one of life's little chores. You've all spent too long on Reddit.
I'm all for legalization, but if you run a brothel out of my place I'm going to be seriously pissed off and not just get all libertarian about it. I will after all, have rented under non-commercial grounds anyway; I'd be pissed if you ran a pop-up restaurant there too.
Hep C is more than able to survive outside of the body (especially in a little pocket of nutrient-rich fluids) for quite some time (as in weeks). I grant you the odds of contracting it from even sexual contact, never mind casual contact with a condom is extremely low, but it's still a fucking biohazard you shouldn't have to deal with. The odds of being struck and killed by a bullet fired up into the air is vanishingly small too, but it's happened, and since it's unconscionable to randomly discharge your firearm into the air, it's unacceptable too.
Needless to say, when you don't intend to rent your home out as a business, it's equally unacceptable if someone decides to use it as one.
Edit: I... just realized how Freudian my analogy of "discharging firearms into the air" is. I really should get more sleep.
...It's an insignificant risk that a reasonable person renting their home under AirBnB contract should neither expect, nor tolerate. As to the rest, I've talked about the other reasonable concerns a homeowner might have in other parts of this thread.
Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. If the risk is insignificant then of course the owner should tolerate it. All the stuff about STIs is transparently just a post-hoc rationalization of people's disapproval of prostitution.
I specifically am for legalization of prostitution.
So... time to rethink your position; I'd be absolutely furious in this guy's position, and "The risk is incredibly low," would frankly piss me off even more. Your argument is about as weak as someone smoking a ton of pot in someone's house, then bitching about prohibition. I'm against prohibition, and also against you stinking up my house.
If you try to pigeonhole all of the people you disagree with, you will turn into a caricature no less absurd than the ones you're trying to create.
But you wouldn't be furious because you were worried about getting HIV or Hep C from handling a used condom. If you want to be furious for some other reason, fine.
Plenty of people who think that prostitution should be legal still disapprove of it, by the way.
I truly don't care; the notion that somehow fucking someone makes you a bad person, while fucking an economy or a nation doesn't, never sat well with me.
Sure, I just don't understand why you're insisting on this point about STIs. Disposing of a used condom with gloves is a zero risk activity. Without gloves the risk is still too low to be quantifiable.
Regular AirBnB guests would never partake in anything involving alcohol, perfume, or...god forbid...sexual congress and spillage/transfer of bodily fluids while holidaying in my apartment!
Because, not to be too snarky, yes, that actually does seem like a regular day in the operation of an accommodation business.
I've even heard it rumored guests might leave the toilet in a less than pristine state...
> Regular AirBnB guests would never partake in anything involving alcohol, perfume, or...god forbid...sexual congress and spillage/transfer of bodily fluids while holidaying in my apartment!
At least you can track who they are. That's entirely different from a guest setting up a gang bang in an apartment rented on Airbnb.
If a tourist rents a room, goes out to have fun and brings a girl back, you can still track only 1 person (and that's assuming they provided their real ID).
If you rent your house to strangers then you're obviously okay with those people having sex at your place, in your bed, anywhere really where they fancy it.
What's different if it's prostitution or if it isn't??
(Personally I would really prefer not having anyone I don't know engaging in any normal activity in my home, and that's why I will probably never be an Airbnb host; but if you are then surely you have to accept the consequences?)
The quantity of the cleanup; the increased risk of infected product; the increased risk of complaints from neighbours; the increased legal risk of running a brothel; etc.
In this specific case it's not illegal for a woman to sell sex; it's not illegal for a woman to sell sex from a brothel; it is illegal to keep a brothel; or to let a property be used as a brothel.
In short: the increased risk of making your home available on Airbnb.
The whole concept of "sharing economy" seems to be based in large parts on the idea that individuals who got unlucky take the damage for the herd and are somehow expected find solace in knowing that the fearsome zero star retaliation rating they gave will maybe help someone else. A bit like mixed cost calculation, where the easy customers subsidize the difficult case, but reversed: the happy path transactions reap the benefits.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Patronizing a business comes with a risk of defective products or bad service. Running a business comes with a risk of bad customers.
Doing it in a more peer to peer fashion using a website improves the flow of information about these kinds of risks, but can't eliminate them. No reasonable person would think renting out their apartment overnight to strangers is risk-free; it's just a question of whether the risk is worth the reward.
You think people should be sympathetic in the case that somebody chooses to put their health at risk via infection, just because the perpetrator is gay?
Somebody has faulty reasoning here and it's not the poster you replied too.
Never thought I'd agree with yummyfajitas on anything, but you are missing his point entirely.
Statistically, gay men are more likely to be HIV+ than the general population.
Thus if a gay couple who were having safe sex in your apartment left behind lots of used condoms, there would statistically be a higher probability that those condoms contained HIV+ semen than with a couple chosen at random from the whole population.
It has nothing to do with people deliberately engaging in risky behavior. For the sake of argument, we might say that the HIV+ person in the couple contracted HIV as the result of a date rape. (Not that I in any way endorse your judgmental suggestion that most people who get HIV somehow deserve it.)
Well it's difficult to assess something like this as a matter of probabilities and generalisations. It's completely rational to be more wary of your health when dealing with the refuse of a brothel (be it gay or not) versus dealing with the refuse of, say, your teenage son/brother/friend/whatever.
Consider a comparable headline: "My Airbnb flat was turned into a pop-up bathhouse, because my gay renter had gay sex with a man he met on the gay app Grindr."
Would this headline be deserving of a similar level of sympathy/moral weight/etc?
A person underhandedly uses somebody else's house as a gay bathhouse and the owner's upset that they have to clean up after the men? Yeah I think it's ok to be sympathetic to that situation...
You're not going to make me change my viewpoint by making it about gay people
Bro if you will happily clean up the sweat, spit, blood and semen of people who use your house as a brothel or bathhouse then maybe there's an app idea in there for ya. Most people would not be happy doing that.
Of course it is, and rightly so. It's completely underhanded to use someone's premises as a brothel without their say-so.
Hotels are facilities which cater for all sorts of people and can cope with all sorts of eventualities. When you rent your house out for the night to a couple, you do not expect them to have used it as a base for prostitution, and should not be as happy to clean up as everybody in this thread seems to be.
It's literally the bread and butter of working in a hotel. I don't see hotels complaining that their rooms are being used for sleeping with prostitutes or sex in general.
I wouldn't expect guests of AirBnB to not do anything they would do in a hotel - after all you are attracting the same audience.
Bottom line - if they left a mess, then call a cleaning company and charge the guests a cleaning fee. Pretty much every AirBnB has a cleaning fee in terms of rental.
Would the reaction here be any different if an actual couple left the host with a pile of condoms? If yes,why? If no, why?
That would be yet another reason why regulations around hotels exist. A proper hotel will know how to deal with that stuff safely for both its employees and future guests.
BTW. I wonder what's the chance of getting infected when cleaning up used condoms after someone who's infected?
>I wonder what's the chance of getting infected when cleaning up used condoms after someone who's infected?
If we're talking about HIV, then it's roughly zero. In theory I guess it could happen if you had a cut on your hands, but then, it's easy enough to take the appropriate precautions if that's the case.
In England you can't give blood if you've ever received money for sex, and you must wait for at least 12 months if you've paid for sex.
Ahhh, lovely England. I spent about 9 months there, about 35 years ago. And now I can't give blood in the USA. Because of mad cow disease (the human name is too hard to remember).
So, either all the English are giving each other mad cow disease all the time by giving blood, or nobody in England who was alive 35 years ago can ever give blood, or the USA is over-reacting. Truth be told I'm happy I can't give any more, because it made me feel tired.
Cleaning up after a prostitute's night of work is not the bread and butter of working in a hotel, and I'm sure that you would see staff and owners complaining about it if you talked to them.
Front Desk Jockey here, cleaning up after them is par for course (at least for the housekeepers). It's just part of the selling spaces at huge markup. The only issue with prostitution is when it start effecting other guests or causes damage to the room (the reason cash-only rooms are damn near non-existent). Making noise all night is going to get a eviction warning from the FD, regardless of how it was created.
Management isn't a fan of it, but unless you can prove something concretely what are you going to do? The money is as good as any other and if the escorts are respectable to the property and rules, why not?
Personally I'm on good terms with a few of the local escorts, they always have great stories and are fairly personable. Not a fan of their line of work, but hey revenue!
I had a friend who worked the front-desk of several hotels during university in Canberra. He gave the impression that he was not only aware of the prostitutes, but was on pretty good terms with the regular ones.
Albeit, granted I'm sure the regulars weren't generally in the practice of wrecking the rooms... but cleaning up after the horrible things people do in their rooms is pretty stock standard for the hotel industry...
No one "likes" it, but no one likes cleaning toilets either, and that still needs getting done and people do it and its stock/standard of being a cleaner...
And if you're not hiring a cleaner to clean your rooms and doing it yourself, you can bet 100% you'll be cleaning up some pretty horrible stuff in the accommodation industry. If they leave the room in a bad state, that just makes them bad customers...
Does the prostitute use the hotel room as a work room and invite several guests throughout the night, or is she taken along by (a) "normal" guest(s) who rented the room and bought her services for a night? That makes quite a difference.
(I used to do a lot of work photographing escorts.)
A little of both, depending on the "class" involved, and the location.
You might be surprised to learn that a lot of prostitution happens during the day-time. In largish-hotels a bloke going up to a room, spending 30-60 minutes there, and coming down wouldn't stand out. Even if the same host entertained 5+ people in her day.
(Unless you get involved in high-end work you'll virtually never have an overnight booking. Average duration amongst the people I knew was 60-90 minutes.)
I was not under the impression it was common for several clients to be booked during the one night.
I believe the girls would either use the hotel room for:
a) A place of work for regular specific bookings: it has the benefit of not being at a brothel/not at their home if they aren't comfortable with that, and it can become a familiar place and you'll be "reasonably" safer than going out to a clients house.
b) A way to work if you're in a different city/having another girl coming from another city.
Obviously, if you remember your freakonomics, there are levels to the prostitutions market. So there is the possibility of:
c) Its a place to drum up new business. I imagine places like hotels in Washington/Canberra where people are there on business, have money, and are away from their families, is, in the prostitution business, a place of relatively high demand. So the clients might have a room there that they're already paying for...
Now to be fair, this is at the relatively upper-end of the prostitution market.
Ironically, in the context of my other discussions in this thread, in this country at least, if there's a super low-end part of the prostitution market, i'd expect it to be operating out of illegal brothels...and probably out of unmarked houses out in the burbs...
Yes, that seems like the most reasonable objection, as if it's then used by multiple other guests then it's effectively subletting and (presumably) not what the owner agreed to.
The state of the flat is unfortunate but goes with the territory for AirBnB / hotels etc.
You wouldn't believe what I sometimes saw in the toilets when I worked as a bartender. I also know some hotel workers, and I can tell you that picking up condoms under the bed is a regular occurence. The really nasty things are when the guests are more into... sexual fetishes involving fecal matter.
Surprise: not the escorts book the rooms, but the clients, and the most weird stuff is usually found within the wealthier client groups.
Cleaning up rather horrible messes of things people would rather not touch is, in fact, normal, albeit not the norm (i.e. it happens on a regular enough basis that it's not anything special, but most rooms are relatively ok).
Oh yeah of course, but I'm sure hotel owners and staff don't just tut and laugh and go "the prostitutes again haha", and don't particularly enjoy cleaning up after people who've used your facilities to make a lot of money illegally. As in...they'd turn down the custom if they could.
Sure, but if you have facilities open to the public you're going to get... the public. It's hardly just prostitutes that leave rooms in a state, after all. It's something you plan for, and you don't get to whine about having failed to plan for it.
The hotel management doesn't give a flying fuck about what the cleaning staff laughs about; as long as the customers don't disturb other customers and the room isn't an expensive mess (think broken beds and chairs), the customers get served and rooms get cleaned afterwards.
Cleaning weird stuff is a regular thing in hotels and hostels; and condoms aren't even weird, they'd be probably the most common stuff found in hotel room trashcans.
Bin overflowing. A wrapper under the bed. Hey, we're not talking about used needles and shit stains on the wall. This was a civilized night, they used protection, had some good wine and Prosecco... There is really nothing wrong with that, other than it might be a grayzone in airbnbs terms and the criminalization of prostitution...
I wouldn't give two shits whether they used protection or not and couldn't care less if they ruin their life with drugs.
They underhandedly used a person's house for illegal activity and left the owner to clean up afterwards. There's really no excusing it by trying to make it seem like a bunch of kids having a cool fun time.
And the criminalisation of prostitution isn't a grey area, it's the law in that jurisdiction.
The prostitute might not be culpable for the sexual act itself but every activity surrounding prostitution is illegal. Soliciting, using a brothel, pimping, paying a prostitute etc. There's no getting around the fact that this guy's place was used for illegal activity.
Yeah the legality section just repeats what I said above...it's only a grey area in that case because of the configuration and usage of the premises. In this case the guy's house was used as a brothel by multiple prostitutes...illegal, those prostitutes solicited customers...illegal, if they have a manager...illegal, if they have a manager and they were paid...illegal...
It's not a grey area at all. And paying for prostitutes is illegal full stop in NI and Ireland, and is illegal in the case that they have a pimp in Great Britain
The legality section doesn’t repeat what you said above. You made the inaccurate assertion that paying for a prostitute is illegal in the relevant jurisdiction, which it is not. I have no idea why you’re bringing up Northern Ireland and Ireland now, as this event didn’t happen in those jurisdictions.
We have no way of knowing that the prostitutes engaged in soliciting. “Soliciting” doesn’t just mean “finding someone to pay you for sex”, it has a specific meaning to do with advertising for sex in a public place. If the prostitutes met their clients by, e.g., chatting to guys online, then that would not count as soliciting.
Similarly, we have no way of knowing that more that more than one woman actually had sex on the premises, or that the prostitutes have a pimp.
So this is at worst a grey area in terms of legality. And it’s effectively straight-up legal, given that the police have made no attempt for decades to target this kind of prostitution via laws against pimping/soliciting/whatever, since it’s impossible for them to construct a prosecutable case.
You said that it wasn't illegal to pay for prostitutes in the UK. NI is in the UK which is why I mentioned it. It's illegal to pay for prostitutes in NI full stop.
And again, it IS illegal to pay prostitutes in the entire UK under certain circumstances (they have a pimp, they were trafficked, they're under duress).
He said there were two prostitutes listed as guests, and that they advertised their services and rates online, which can be classed as solicitation.
>He said there were two prostitutes listed as guests, and that they advertised their services and rates online, which can be classed as solicitation.
You have a kind of genius for spreading inaccurate information. Advertising yourself as a prostitute online is not illegal in Britain and is not classed as solicitation.
To prove that a crime was committed, the police would have to show, at minimum, that both of the women actually had sex with a client in the same property. That is obviously not going to be possible.
Rent your house like a hotel, expect it to be treated as such. This isn't some family-friendly, socio-do-gooder website - it's AirBnB. They rent, they stay, they leave. Nothing was damaged in the apartment, I don't see the issue. If you don't like the mess, give a bad rating.
Cleaning up reasonable trash is pretty much part of AirBnb host's job. So if a women throws her sanitary pads/tampoons in the trash will you call them names too ?
Maybe yeah. It would rightly depend on how correctly and securely she disposes of her waste. Why are you trying to finagle a woman's analogous example as if that'll shame me into changing my mind...these prostitutes were women.
What about the clients? do you really think it's a great environment for families? Once a place becomes a well known prostitution hub, it attracts a specific kind of people, and not the good ones.
The physically disabled? Nervous silly college kids?
Cheaters? Low lifes? I've got news for you, they might visit the brothels, but they live out in the burbs near you :P They live near all of us.
Perhaps I'm just jaded/acclimatised from having worked in the suburb of Fyshwick in Canberra (where operating a brothel/in-home prostitution is quite common), knew there were prostitutes regularly working out of hotels/their own houses, and I'm pretty sure there's probably a couple of brothels around where I live.
Honestly, I can't say I keep track of them...I can't say they're even on my mental radar...
Don't misunderstand me, i know there are a significant number of people who wouldn't want to raise children in such an environment. But it doesn't bother me, nor the other families living here, and the general property prices around here suggest it doesn't sufficiently bother most of the people who live here :\
But I also knew prostitutes were working frequently out of suburban homes and hotels, so i'm a bit "you're not actually that far from prostitutes..." to all my suburban friends.
Sex work is legal/decriminalised in Sydney. If you come from a country where it is illegal, you might be surprised how open it is around here. And right next to family friendly establishments, residential areas.
It's pretty safe actually. Or at least no more dangerous than other parts of Sydney. I've never heard of any crimes or violence related to sex workers in Sydney. I'm more worried about alcohol and drug related violence. If there are any unsavoury characters about they are much more likely to be at a night club. Ban night clubs (they kind of did that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_lockout_laws and it worked).
And why would anyone care if it is great environment for families ? Are US suburbs great environment for families where Ms. X who has 4 kids all from different people living with her boyfriend ? Is that a good environment ?
I agree that it's not as big a deal as the host is making it out to be. People drink and have sex in hotels and AirBnB listings all the time. But it's worth pointing out that AirBnB requires that you declare the number of people using the apartment (because it affects pricing). The house rules might also state that only registered guests are allowed in, though it's hard to say without seeing the house rules for this specific listing.
tl;dr Guy rented his apartment then he was horrified that someone had sex and drunk alcohol there. He called police and since they didn't call him back, now he want to sell whole place, because while he loves it, it's not worth it anymore.
Kudos for the BBC for finding this second subject (the bottom half of the article) and presenting both sides, as well as the inset "What is the law in the UK?" which I didn't know. This is a really strong and extremely balanced story where two sides speak for themselves through quotes. (I'd tell the author myself but I can't see a byline.)
Does anyone here know, what does Charlotte mean at the end with "I would never go on tour on my own to a new place that I've never been to before. No way. Because there is no safety agency or union out there that I can tell where I am or what I'm doing."
What are these unions or safety agencies, formal or informal? (And why can't Charlotte find one in a city she tours in?) If the reason they can't be found is that they're kind of operating outside of the law, like informal "protection" services then this would explain why she can only find it in a city she knows well - but that is not what "safety agency or union" means to me at all. So what are these things?
I presume she means there's no such thing for the type of work she does. That is, if she did something else those things would be available to her, but they aren't for her line of work. So, she has to depend on pre-existing relationship with people who can protect her where she is.
Oh, you are right - I think that I misread it. They must have meant that there is no such thing as a safety agency or union - not on tour, not anywhere. It is kind of weird that she has such a specific term in mind ("safety agency or union") for something that doesn't exist -- you would think she would phrase it as, "It's not like there are unions or anything else protecting workers." Perhaps she would like to see such institutions. (The article says she was part of a documentary, which the article links here -- http://www.devonlive.com/love-sale-exeter-escort-appears-cha... ). Thanks.
> (...) my next-door neighbour saw it, made a complaint against me and I was evicted from my family home.
I would do exactly the same thing as her neighbor. Why? because even if I know that person , I don't know how fucked up the clients are and I wouldn't want to live in a building where people come and go to have sex with hookers, especially if there are kids around.
Would you have the same problem with a single person who is sexually active? I've been single most of my adult life so you'd basically be calling the cops on me for being a regular citizen doing legal things.
Could I point out that this is the dreadful sort of "display two viewpoints, provide almost no commentary, and call it balanced" article the BBC is known for.
And basically what I had to do was pick all that up with my hands.
Because England has yet to get up to speed with surgical gloves or similar. They just cannot be found. At all. Sure.
The way this part is written:
Looking at both their ads, some of the rates were about £1,300 a night. So if they were fully booked for the two nights that's £2,600 each - £5,200 in total.
The feeling was a bit like when I had to rush home from work a couple of years ago because I thought I'd left a tea towel on the hob. It felt like the place was burning down.
This reads to me like he was basically horrified at the idea of two women making excellent money, probably a lot more than he makes. That is how that part reads to me.
I love it when people think they have a simple solution to something, but gradually converge onto the complicated solution that they were trying to avoid. Like "why is this C++ sockets implementation 30k LOC....I could write that in 300 lines. Oh wait better add some error checking. Hm I wonder if I should test for endianness" etc etc.
They should have security for this Airbnb thing for situations like this.
Hotels do complain about sex workers, because they're in some legal risk if they allow it to happen.
There's also a slightly increased risk of infected material from sex workers rather than the general population.
The core activity (people exchanging sex for money) probably doesn't need to be illegal (and isn't under English law). But the English law is a mess, and criminalises a bunch of stuff around this activity, while still leaving vulnerable people unprotected.
does airbnb have options like 'no-uh-oh-ing'?
Even apartment rents have options like 'no-pets', so it's quite straightforward to have hosts enforce some rules. (and have search option with 'without-uh-oh-forbidden')
Is "uh-oh" slang for sex? I've never heard it, and while it's a clear guess from context what you mean, I'm having a hard time connecting the typical meaning of "uh-oh" with sex.
>If more than one person is available in a premises for paid sex, then that is a brothel - however, if a sex worker works alone, they are not keeping a brothel
The law in the UK discourages prostitutes from having anyone else nearby when they are with their clients. This makes them less safe.
> the definition of a brothel in English law does not require that the premises are used for the purposes of prostitution since a brothel exists wherever more than one woman offers sexual intercourse, whether for payment or not.
This means that sex workers who want to charge people for money (a legal activity in England) can't do it by sharing a property (illegal), but have to do it on the street.
Whatever your views on sex work it should be clear that street sex work is more dangerous than that offered in a private residence.
According to the article in UK it's legal to offer sex for money, as long as you're the only person doing it in a particular location (because otherwise the location is a brothel and operating a brothel is a criminal offense). In light of this that statement makes much more sense.
> It is not illegal to sell sex at a brothel provided the sex worker is not involved in management or control of the brothel. A house occupied by one woman and used by her alone for prostitution, is not a brothel (Gorman v Standen, Palace Clarke v Standen (1964) 48 Cr App R 30).
So what happens if two people independently rent rooms in the same apartment and sell sex there?
Neither the owner of the apartment nor any of those two people need to be aware of that being a brothel, and the sex workers themselves are arguably not operating it either. Does the crime of operating a brothel not require mens rea?
One of the biggest human rights insults around the world is making prostitution illegal.
1) It's not governments business what people do with their bodies.
2) People are going to do it anyway (even in countries where it is punished with a death penalty)
3) ...and therefore women and men working in this industry won't have access to unions, healthcare, safety etc.