Homeless Porn

Homeless Porn:

In 2008, all it took to secure funding for a homeless porn series in Toronto was a soundbite to a city councillor. Speaking at a city council meeting, Councillor Allan Thompson, a member of the city’s financial accountability committee, ranted about sex trafficking while sitting outside a nightclub on Queen Street. In the midst of an ongoing debate about how to fund Toronto’s ever-growing budget deficit, Thompson suggested that sex trafficking has been driving the city’s homeless population to extremes.

Dylan Bunn, a reporter with the Metroland West, sat in on the meeting and listened to Thompson’s debate with the story of “a troubled teen prostitute” about to be kicked out of her school. Thompson continued with this high-octane rant about the dangers of prostitution:

The kid’s just been found out of school. For the record, she’s been arrested by police, charged with prostitution. But her mom’s helping her. Her mother’s helping her, her mother’s finding her a room. So, all this stuff that’s going on out there right now. There’s a whole family out there. The dad’s in jail, he’s got multiple charges against him, he’s got multiple warrants. He’s not living with his family. But he’s living in his car. So, that’s the problem out there. And the poverty, the poverty that’s going on is what’s driving this.

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In January 2014, The Daily Mail reported the story of a 9-year-old girl from Burundi, who had been lured to Britain by a 63-year-old in the grips of a child-trafficking ring. In an article, titled, “A 9-year-old girl was kidnapped, forced into prostitution and subjected to horrific sexual attacks,” British police detailed how the girl was subjected to sexual violence and other horrific situations in order to convince her to stay in Britain.

The girl, whose name was not disclosed, had been living with her grandmother in Burundi until she was taken by her trafficker and family members. She was taken to Uganda to be sold to a man in England, where he was using her to “sell her for sex to men at three hotels,” according to police. Police said that the man “would often place her in a room in his car and lock her up. He would then go out and transact the sex acts.”

The 9-year-old girl, who is not biologically related to the 63-year-old man, escaped and was rescued by police, who searched his home and found the girl’s old school report cards. Police, who were considering charging the man with child trafficking, said the case was not a sex trafficking case but instead “a case of extreme sexual exploitation.”

For his efforts to explain the issue, Thompson was praised in the media.

“Mr. Thompson knows what he’s talking about,” a reporter from the Star told CBC News. “It’s not a debate about whether or not prostitution exists but about what causes it.”

The debate has been raging for decades: is prostitution a societal ill or the result of a vast system of mental biases and reactions that those on the margins of society have? What causes people to act in strange, often dangerous, ways in exchange for money? What justifies some of the greatest ethical dilemmas in the human world?

At the end of a January 2015 debate, a psychologist from Ottawa claimed that men react to sexual tension in situations involving sexual tension by exercising “cognitive control.” A man “can understand the physical situation, understand the emotional feeling, can take the information out of that situation and give one hundred per cent of his mental energy to the cognitive side of the situation,” he explained.

Thompson and another psychology professor in a debate were not impressed by this explanation.

“In terms of people walking around with their pants hanging off their butt because they’re mad because you just had a sexy conversation with someone, or their eyes are darting around constantly…this doesn’t seem like good cognitive control,” Thompson explained.

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