I run a small museum in New York City, the Museum of the American Gangster. Perhaps the main theme of our museum can speak to this issue. In many Nations, we are caught between two concepts which are core to most western national political identities. We are trapped between our moral certainty and the ideal of liberty. In looking at how organised crime became what it is today, in the USA, many start with Prohibition, we do not. We begin with the Underground Railroad. Perhaps it is because, as many of you here know, I am a Quaker, but it is a perfect model for what is wrong with criminalisation and its repercussions. For decades Quakers and other social reformers and members of some other Utopian religions broke Federal law for their belief in liberty. Now that is a crime most would like to think they would have committed in those days. In fact, few, even few Quakers did break the laws against helping free our sisters and brothers in bondage. Those few who did, immediately upon winning the abolition of slavery, started both the Women's movement and the Temperance movement. Many were shocked when Prohibition led to extreme violence on both sides, a government acting on ideals of moral certainty mandating that industrial alcohol must contain deadly levels of poison, and the machine gunning of un-armed rum runners. As the pendulum of American history swung towards moral certainty we came very close to the pole of totalitarianism, when 10,000 Americans were poisoned and died from a Federal policy. On the other side of the equation the law breaking for liberty swung further and further towards the pole of anarchy with the introduction of the Thompson sub machine gun to that side of the pendulum swing.

So, in the face of laws of moral certainty, and the struggle for liberty, women in the sex industry find themselves without power, pulled between the anarchy of crime and the oppression of laws of moral certainty. Without the balance of worker's rights and respect for marginalized communities' right to liberty, the first victims will be disempowered women - those who are drug addicted and lost.

That seems to me to be the story here... AND NOW a word from our sponsor. When in NYC drop by the Museum of the American Gangster, 80 Saint Marks Place museumoftheamericangangster.org ... you will be challenged to think while having a grand old time.
All the best
Lorcan (InOBU) Otway