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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDNA Database of Men Who Pay for Sex?
http://www.alternet.org/sex/153918/dna_database_of_men_who_pay_for_sex_the_strange_push_to_make_cops_collect_dna_from_suspected_johns/DNA Database of Men Who Pay for Sex? The Strange Push to Make Cops Collect DNA from Suspected Johns
For the last six years, police across the United States have been empowered by federal and state law to collect DNA from the people they arrest in order to build a government DNA database. The database includes those who have yet to face trial as well as people who are later found innocent. Now a group of researchers, law enforcement and conservative campaigners want to exploit people's concerns about being included in such a database in order to scare people out of involvement in the sex trade. By threatening people with the possibility of being marked for life in a government database, these well-funded campaigners -- with allies in law enforcement, including the Department of Justice -- are using a questionably legal policing practice, a combination of "scared-straight" strategies that became a signature of the war on drugs and the extension of the surveillance state propelled by the war on terror.
DNA databases have the power to extend government surveillance to the cellular level. In 2005, a provision added to the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act permitted the collection and indefinite retention of DNA from, as the Center for Constitutional Rights understood at the time, "anyone arrested for any crime whether or not they are convicted, any non-U.S. citizen detained or stopped by federal authorities for any reason, and everyone in federal prison.
In the intervening years, there have been several challenges to pre-conviction DNA collection and retention, with some courts divided as to whether or not DNA collection is a violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
RKP5637
(67,084 posts)rfranklin
(13,200 posts)No more dealing with those sneaky Chinese. Prison labor USA!
Joe Shlabotnik
(5,604 posts)shcrane71
(1,721 posts)The average age for GIRLS who become prostitutes is 13. Let me reiterate, that's the AVERAGE age. It is highly probable that a prostitute "chose" his/her profession prior to being able to even legally work (due to child labor laws) in most states. Clearly, most prostitutes were introduced into their profession via human trafficking.
For some it's hard to fathom, but many liberals can logically deduce that a demographic which buys human beings for sex have a higher incidence of committing rape, assault, kidnapping, human trafficking, and murder. Convicted Johns are exactly the group of people you want in a DNA database when there's a serial killer, rapist, child molester on the loose.
It would be nice if this free market mentality that so many Pimp/John apologists have would consider -- even for a second -- the human rights violations that often coincide with pimping a child or adult out to Johns.