Craigslist erotic services ads: AJC get it so, so, so very wrong
By now you might have heard that Craigslist is ending its erotic services section.
This is a little confusing to me, since they are replacing the category with a new category called “adult.” How this is not a simple renaming of an existing category still defeats me. Oh, right: because Craigslist employees are going to “review” the ads in the adult category. Well that makes me feel so much better. Because requiring sex workers to fork over their credit card information in order to post an ad wasn’t enough.
The ending of erotic services ads comes on the heels of the murder of a masseuse who advertised on Craigslist in Boston. Which is a bit like shutting down banks and opening new institutions where you store your money, but which are not called banks, because there are bank robbers out there.
Naturally, coverage from mainstream media has been what you would expect: sensationalistic, inaccurate, in many cases wildly irrelevant, and with a deafening lack of sex workers’ voices.
The AJC did a particularly stellar job with this article on the matter. Have a look at this lede, why don’t you:
Atlanta children will be a little safer now that Craigslist will no longer post prostitution and other “erotic services” ads, but additional precautions are needed, an Atlanta anti-child prostitution group said Wednesday.
WTF???????
Where to even begin?
When Rusty showed me this article in his Google Reader, I was all inspired and motivated to take Dacia’s message from this weekend about getting our voices heard in the media to heart and write a letter to the editor. I could do this! Short, to the point. On message. 150 words or less.
Then I read the full article and the WTF-ness of it was just so overwhelming that I felt paralyzed at the prospect of trying to condense a response to the necessary length for a letter to the editor.
I feel shitty about that because I do think it’s important to respond to the media in the media’s space. But all too often the media doesn’t offer space that’s meaingful, and so, I’m doing what I always do: using the space I’ve carved out for myself to spell out exactly what the hell is wrong with this, in way more than 150 words.
Looking just at the lede… I really don’t know what goes through people’s minds. Atlanta’s children will be safer? What?? Do these people truly believe that traffickers – yes, actual child traffickers, not adult sex workers posting ads for their own services – are going to go, “Oh, Craigslist shut down its erotic services section; shucks! Now there’s nothing we can do! Oh well, no more trafficking!” Because that’s what that line seems to be saying. And for anyone who believes that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Here’s the deal. Actual traffickers? Scary, dangerous, powerful people. Tough to go after. Lots of risk involved. And you know what else? Usually not posting on fucking Craigslist!! But of course (as Ren has pointed out) it’s far easier to make a big show of “cracking down on child prostitution” by arresting a bunch of adult sex workers, a situation wherein the state essentially becomes a pimp (for another nice dose of irony there) and keeps that door revolving, than it is to go after actual traffickers. Because that doesn’t titillate readers or make enticing headlines.
Like many cities, Atlanta had been doing police stings to “crack down on child prostitution.” What ended up happening? Law enforcement dollars and resources were devoted to giving criminal records to adult women simply trying to make a living, while violent crime continues to rise. The AJC played a nice role in that, too, by posting the full names and photos of many of those workers arrested (not linking to an article because I do not want to contribute to further outing of those women).
I feel so much safer now, don’t you? Now that those dirty whores aren’t earning money (and subsequently paying taxes) somewhere off in a hotel room?
It’s for the children!
These stings have been equally successful in protecting the children elsewhere across the country. Chicago, for example:
Perhaps you’ve heard about Operation Cross Country, a three-day, nationwide FBI operation that was supposedly targeting child prostitution trafficking. I didn’t realize it had happened right here in Chicago. “Of those arrested in the Chicago area, 5 were charged with running prostitution operations, 34 were charged with prostitution, and 5 were customers, according to the release. No minors were found.” (Emphasis mine)
In that case, SWOP-Chicago put it well:
To target child prostitution and trafficking is one thing. To scapegoat sex workers and crackdown on prostitution in the name of preventing trafficking is a horse of a different color. It’s a waste of money and it’s a waste of tax-payer resources. And if you really care about “rescuing” sex workers, why the fuck are you giving them felony records?
Operation Cross Country is not about ending the exploitation of children and those who are trafficked against their will. It’s using this exploitation as a smokescreen for persecuting sex workers on the altar of sex panic.
But back to the AJC article. I have a serious problem with this line:
As recently as February, 176 girls were prostituted for sex on Craigslist, she said.
There is no sourcing for this. Where did they get that information? Police reports? If so, of what nature? Or maybe sources other than police reports? And if so, what were those? I have seen all too often how “facts” like this are crafted in order to fit an agenda. Without knowing where this information is being drawn from, I don’t trust it one damn bit. Those 176 prostituted girls might very well be escorts who are legal adults. We don’t know.
The above was attributed to Kaffie McCullough, director of the anti-child prostitution group A Future. Not A Past. This group takes an “end demand” approach to ending child prostitution, according to their web site. Yet all the red flags are there. The conflation of exploitation of minors with consensual adult sex work. The vague and brief language on their web site. The lack of support for decriminalization of prostitution (which would be a huge help in the fight against trafficking of both children and adults, because far too often when either children or adults are “rescued,” they are entered into the criminal justice system; some rescue). Oh and did you know, according to A Future. Not A Past.’s web site, this is one of the warning signs that a minor might be a victim of trafficking:
Inappropriate dress, including oversized clothing or overtly sexy clothing
?????
Yeah. If she dresses like a slut or a weirdo, she must be trafficked! It’s that easy to spot!
How out of touch with reality are these people?
Furthermore, when someone who claims to care about children says something like this (again quoting from the AJC article)…
“I’m glad because with all the press Craigslist had been getting it was just way too easy for someone to buy an underage girl on the Internet,” McCullough said.
…well I have a major problem with that, too. Another red flag. You’re talking about trafficking victims having a future and yet you use incredibly dehumanizing language. Buy a girl? Are you fucking KIDDING me?
I’m exhausted. I’ve written over 1200 words and there’s still so much more that could be said about the AJC article. It really depresses me sometimes when I realize, yet again, that this is how much of the public at large views sex work. They think these tactics are okay. They think, I guess, that Craigslist truly is overflowing with ads for underage girls. I don’t know what they think, exactly. But I know it’s fucked up, seriously wrong, and perpetuates harmful conditions for sex workers and victims of trafficking.
I don’t know what else to say. I’ll leave you with words of wisdom from Jill Brenneman:
When I did need help, when I was facing violence and coercion in the sex industry, none of the current anti trafficking measures would have applied or helped, I couldn’t go the cops or the justice system because in the US being a prostitute is illegal, the clients getting arrested,,, so what??? Great so the whole thing which was underground in the first place just moves farther underground. Not to mention I went into the sex industry for a reason. To make money to survive. I didn’t need the clients arrested because they were clients, I was there to make money to eat, to live, there was a need for the clients. I needed the ones arrested that beat the shit out of me, or raped me, or forced me to do things without my consent. I needed them arrested for rape, for assault, not on some minor misdemeanor that they could wash away with a visit to “John School” in some lame ass plea bargain. I needed labor and human rights so that an abusive, sadistic pimp, didn’t have criminalization to use against me to keep under control. As long as the whole thing is illegal the cops were more his allies than they ever could have been mine as I was more afraid of being arrested, or worse, being blown off because I was a prostitute and sent back to him to face a very angry pimp. I needed human rights.
Seriously, sometimes I wonder what it’s going to take to get through to some people.
Oh, and on that note: I might as well publicly state right now that I want to bring the Speak Up! media training seminar to Atlanta, and I am going to work to make it happen.
Repost in observance of Int’l Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
Duly noted: the AJC will print “drinking game material for bloggers” tripe like this in their Opinion section, but they won’t print that fresh! new! (gag) content they claim to crave so badly. Anyway, I thought today would be an appropriate day to repost the op-ed I wrote several months ago. Here it is:
Shaming tactics not effective against prostitution
Currently, the Atlanta Police Department’s Web site includes mug shots of women convicted of prostitution and escorting without a permit (“City adviser: ‘Johns’ get too little scrutiny,” Metro, May 21). This tactic is dangerous and ignorant.
Sex workers are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, especially rape and sexual assault. The concept of shame perpetuates the widespread view of sex workers as disposable. Further, the illegality of their profession prevents sex workers from reporting violence perpetrated against them.
How does posting their mug shots benefit women arrested for prostitution? Even if we assume that a woman may be successfully “shamed” out of sex work by having her photo posted, she is still an open target for potential harm by anyone who sees her photo, since the mug shots remain on the Web site for 3 to 6 months.
The current debate, however, does not address the dangers of women’s mug shots being publicly displayed, nor does it advocate for the photos’ removal. Instead, the conversation is centered on the question of why there aren’t any photos of johns on the Web site.
Some cities have adapted a tactic of “shaming” johns by posting their photos online, on television, or on billboards. Stephanie Davis, the mayor’s policy adviser on women’s issues, believes this would be a good solution in Atlanta. But will it work?
In 2005, Oakland, California launched a campaign called Operation Shame, with the same goal as that which Davis suggests for Atlanta. The Oakland campaign displayed johns’ photos on 10 by 22 feet billboards.
After eight months, the billboards disappeared amid protests from constitutional rights activists. The prostitution rate in Oakland did not fluctuate.
Proponents of “end demand” programs claim that these campaigns reduce prostitution without harm to sex workers, deterring men from purchasing sexual services. According to Norma Hotaling of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), the developer of San Francisco’s John School program, 98% of men going through the program were “rehabilitated.” However, a 2002 study published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology found that such programs have little or no long-term deterrent effect.
In many cases, these programs exemplify misplaced good intentions fraught with paternalism. In the late 1990s, Vancouver stopped arresting street prostitutes and began focusing on johns. The rationale behind the change was that the johns were predators, and the prostitutes were victims. But Andrew Sorfleet, a sex worker and founder of SWAV (Sex Workers’ Alliance of Vancouver), disagrees. He points out that the real predators are men who pretend to be clients in order to rape, beat, or rob sex workers, and adds that the campaign was motivated by “the misconception that sex workers need to be ‘rescued’ – with or without our consent.”
Besides, the idea that shame will discourage a non-desirable behavior isn’t realistic. This is the fundamental flaw behind Davis’s proposal. She believes that posting johns’ photos online “would contribute to the shame that any man who buys sex should feel.”
Adults paying for sexual services from other adults should not be a crime. As the Oakland example shows, shaming does not deter people from paying for or accepting payment for sex. It just makes people stealthier and drives activity further underground, thereby elevating the risk to all involved.
The double standard is at work here – the concept that women who sell sexual services are worthy of public contempt, but the men who pay for those services are not. Davis seeks to address this inequity, but her motivations are based on an assumption that any participation in the sex industry – whether as client or service provider – is contemptible.
In all of this, though, there is one very important set of voices that is missing: the voices of actual sex workers. Policy advisers, APD officials, and op-ed writers can talk ad infinitum about what should or shouldn’t happen. But the people we most need to hear from are the ones whom these policies actually affect on a day to day basis.
Loving this post
From Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels, via Rachel Kramer-Bussel; and I’ll tell you up front, they were riffing off the AJC’s “Woman to Woman” column, which should prep you for exactly what kind of stupidity they were dealing with.
The funny thing is, the sorts of people who love to blame romance novels for the breakdown of the family are usually the ones who go on ad nauseam about the importance of personal responsibility, especially when it comes to social issues. Pregnant with an unwanted child? Gay? Brown and po’? SUCK IT UP, BECAUSE IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT TO BEGIN WITH, AND IF YOU TRIED HARD ENOUGH, YOU WOULDN’T BE ANY OF THESE THINGS. But once something like, say, violence in video games or the manly (but sensitive! Don’t forget they’re so sensitive!) heroes in romance novels rear their heads, they’re all for warning people off lest the poor, unsuspecting victims shatter their fragile psyches against the ramparts of oiled man-titty. As soon as blame can be attached to something that directly affects them, you won’t see a group of people so eager to pass on the buck. God forbid that the kids do awful things because they had shitty parents or because they’re being, y’know, kids, or that the woman left her husband because he’s a terrible spouse.
The rebuttal didn’t get my dander up quite as much as it did Sarah, but the derailment into Pornolandia made me raise my brow. I tend to question studies that claim violent porn increases propensities towards sexual violence–my gut feeling is that people who voluntarily seek out violent porn (not kinky BDSM stuff–I’m talking snuff porn and rape porn) on a regular basis probably are inclined in that direction to begin with. Linking causality for this sort of thing is incredibly tricky.
And all this clucking and flapping over female porn always makes me wonder: are female orgasms so terrifying? Seriously, why are people so damn worked up over women getting turned on and rubbin’ one out? Every time a woman masturbates, are TWO kittens killed instead of just one? I want to know, because I’d like to know how many kittens I’ve killed last week.
Sarah and Candy win at life.
Mainstream media splatters here and there
What Grayson said, about the Creative Loafing “five shining swallowed pennies in the overflowing toilet bowl that is the Atlanta blogosphere” story:
This piece was just wrong on so many levels, Andy. But essentially, you missed the ENTIRE story. To single out a few blogs (and they’re all great blogs… that’s not the issue here) and give the readership the impression that those five blogs are somehow BLOG FUCKING ATLANTA is such a slap in the face to the entire social media community here.
The many bloggers, academics in citizen media like Leonard Witt at PJNET.com, podcasters, the techno entrepreneurs, videobloggers like Amani Channel for instance, who have worked long and hard, and those who have helped organized social media events and conferences like PodCamp Atlanta and SoCon07 were reduced to five blogs you want to make a teen style, MySpace style list over. You and Ken should be ashamed of yourselves for trivializing and reducing an entire new direction in media to five blogs with this “starter piece” on social media.
It’s just lazy, uninspired journalism really. Just look to the state of the music industry to see how long you have to “get it.”
While we’re on the subject of traditional media, I should mention that Rusty, Grayson, and I went to the Social Media Club event last night where a guy from the AJC and a guy from WSB were there to, ostensibly, converse about how they’re embracing social media. (Har har.) You can listen to our podcast review of the thing, if you’re so inclined.
And I didn’t even mention all the sexism. We tried to keep it to about a half hour. This was after the full-on rant session at Central City Tavern… be glad you got the “toned down” version. (Yes, it’s all relative.)
It’s hard to say what my favorite part of the night was, but I think I’ll have to go with WSB’s Steve Riley saying to me, “What you’re doing seems more… artistic.”
…
*blank stare*
Obvious notes: 1) he has no idea what I’m doing; and 2) artistic? the hell?
Clue Phone ringing… it’s for you, Mr. Riley!
On a completely unrelated note, the next time I hear some asshole ask plaintively, “What crime is not a hate crime?” I’m going to verbally eviscerate them while assuring them that no, don’t worry, this is not a hate crime.
Op-Ed
A couple days ago, I wrote an op-ed in response to this AJC article. Since I haven’t heard back from them and it’s almost Friday, I’m guessing they’re not going to run it. So, I’ll just post it here.
Note: if you feel like there are points and angles I didn’t address – you’re right. That’s what sucks about having to stay within a certain word count. In order to get it under 700 words, I had to cut out an entire section about economic need, for example.
—
Shaming tactics not effective against prostitution
Currently, the Atlanta Police Department’s Web site includes mug shots of women convicted of prostitution and escorting without a permit (“City adviser: ‘Johns’ get too little scrutiny,” Metro, May 21). This tactic is dangerous and ignorant.
Sex workers are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, especially rape and sexual assault. The concept of shame perpetuates the widespread view of sex workers as disposable. Further, the illegality of their profession prevents sex workers from reporting violence perpetrated against them.
How does posting their mug shots benefit women arrested for prostitution? Even if we assume that a woman may be successfully “shamed” out of sex work by having her photo posted, she is still an open target for potential harm by anyone who sees her photo, since the mug shots remain on the Web site for 3 to 6 months.
The current debate, however, does not address the dangers of women’s mug shots being publicly displayed, nor does it advocate for the photos’ removal. Instead, the conversation is centered on the question of why there aren’t any photos of johns on the Web site.
Some cities have adapted a tactic of “shaming” johns by posting their photos online, on television, or on billboards. Stephanie Davis, the mayor’s policy adviser on women’s issues, believes this would be a good solution in Atlanta. But will it work?
In 2005, Oakland, California launched a campaign called Operation Shame, with the same goal as that which Davis suggests for Atlanta. The Oakland campaign displayed johns’ photos on 10 by 22 feet billboards.
After eight months, the billboards disappeared amid protests from constitutional rights activists. The prostitution rate in Oakland did not fluctuate.
Proponents of “end demand” programs claim that these campaigns reduce prostitution without harm to sex workers, deterring men from purchasing sexual services. According to Norma Hotaling of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), the developer of San Francisco’s John School program, 98% of men going through the program were “rehabilitated.” However, a 2002 study published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology found that such programs have little or no long-term deterrent effect.
In many cases, these programs exemplify misplaced good intentions fraught with paternalism. In the late 1990s, Vancouver stopped arresting street prostitutes and began focusing on johns. The rationale behind the change was that the johns were predators, and the prostitutes were victims. But Andrew Sorfleet, a sex worker and founder of SWAV (Sex Workers’ Alliance of Vancouver), disagrees. He points out that the real predators are men who pretend to be clients in order to rape, beat, or rob sex workers, and adds that the campaign was motivated by “the misconception that sex workers need to be ‘rescued’ – with or without our consent.”
Besides, the idea that shame will discourage a non-desirable behavior isn’t realistic. This is the fundamental flaw behind Davis’s proposal. She believes that posting johns’ photos online “would contribute to the shame that any man who buys sex should feel.”
Adults paying for sexual services from other adults should not be a crime. As the Oakland example shows, shaming does not deter people from paying for or accepting payment for sex. It just makes people stealthier and drives activity further underground, thereby elevating the risk to all involved.
The double standard is at work here – the concept that women who sell sexual services are worthy of public contempt, but the men who pay for those services are not. Davis seeks to address this inequity, but her motivations are based on an assumption that any participation in the sex industry – whether as client or service provider – is contemptible.
In all of this, though, there is one very important set of voices that is missing: the voices of actual sex workers. Policy advisers, APD officials, and op-ed writers can talk ad infinitum about what should or shouldn’t happen. But the people we most need to hear from are the ones whom these policies actually affect on a day to day basis.
Save the Book Review Read-in
Hope it’s not too late for this… those of y’all who can, should go downtown and check it out.
—
WHAT: ATLANTA Save the Book Review READ-IN! Bring a book (or many books!) you love, and let’s create a critical mass of readers to put the pressure on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to reverse its
terrible decision to “reorganize” its book review out of existence! They got rid of the book review editor, and without an official champion for books within the paper, the quality of books coverage is endangered! It will become disorganized and sporadic, if not simply perfunctory, until, worse, it’s no longer there.
TIME: 10:00 AM until…you decide!
DATE: TODAY, *rain or shine
LOCATION: Converge in front of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at 72 Marietta Street. Hold open your book and read aloud or to yourself. Trust me, you won’t be the only one. Picture hundreds of people doing the same thing! [*directions below]
WHO: Open to any and all readers and lovers of books, newspapers and literary discussion. Come one, come all Atlantans (or ATLiens), Georgians, and maybe even some of you hardcore out-of-staters. On hand to say a few words: Atlanta novelists Joshilyn Jackson and Joseph Skibell, bookseller Philip Rafshoon of Outwrite Books, George Weinstein of Atlanta Writers Club, and Shannon Byrne of Little, Brown.
WHY: Because the city of Atlanta wants a robust, reader-friendly, intelligent book review, not just a section run on auto-pilot from above. Teresa Weaver has created and run exactly this kind of section for almost ten years now and we want the AJC to reward her expertise, not eliminate her job. Again, if you haven’t signed the ‘Protect Atlanta’s Book Review’ petition yet, here’s the link to it: ‘Protect Atlanta’s Book Review’
DIRECTIONS: MARTA: The MARTA stop is Five Points. Exit onto Marietta St., the AJC building is less than two blocks west (left). For an online Citysearch map, look here.
—
Originally posted at Bookslut; thanks to Rachel for letting me know. Between her and Dacia, it seems like I’m far too often finding out about local happenings from people who live in New York.
Literally in the AJC
Check it out: Literally, A Weblog was featured in the AJC yesterday. December 2, 2006, page D-1, “@issue” opinion section, subsection “Noted.” Pat has a color-adjusted hi-res scan of the page on Flickr.
Myopic
Why is mass transit mentioned nowhere in this article?
Dumbasses.
Stick it in me
Abstinence wasn’t good enough for me, so two days ago, I got the first round of the new HPV vaccine. (Gotta go back in 2 and 6 months for the second and third shot.)
AJC article via Pandagon – go read Amanda’s post.
Wherein I question a major news publication
The AJC’s Woman-to-Woman column is a steaming pile of shit. I’ve known this for several months, yet I admit I still sometimes visit it for the trainwreck factor. The latest debate* debacle, “Does what women wear contribute to sexual assault?”, is no exception.
I’m not going to waste my time or yours picking apart the asinine and disturbing blame-the-victim attitude the “right-leaning” columnist takes. Instead, I decided to have a go at one comment (by a person named Wiley) that I plucked from among its 500+ mostly-useless peers:
The focus needs to be on raising boys correctly. Not suppressing our daughters.
It starts with manners. Teach your boys early that it is NOT ok to verbally harrass a female you do not know. It is not OK to approach a female & comment on her body parts. It’s not ok to sleep with muliple women at the same time. It’s not ok to hire a women to dance naked at a college party, it does not make you a man. It makes you look like a fool.
First of all, let me say that from what I can tell, Wiley is one of the few commenters to leave truly thoughtful and sensible comments. So I’m not picking at him/her specifically (how could I, since I don’t even know who s/he is). From his/her comments I believe that s/he pretty much has the right idea, but I only point this out because I think there are plenty of people out there who have mostly the right idea.
Obviously the first sentence is spot-on. Recently I was reading a blog (unfortunately I don’t remember where, or I’d post a link) where a guy wrote about talking with some friends of his who were all relatively new fathers. Some of them were saying stuff like, they’re not going to let their daughters leave the house til they’re 30, because they don’t want them getting raped. The guy said, “If you don’t want your daughters to be raped, you should teach your sons not to rape” – and slowly watched the lightbulbs go on over their heads. So, in summation: yeah.
Now, as to the rest. Let me repeat, s/he has the right idea in general. But a few things stuck out at me.
[I]t is NOT ok to verbally harrass a female you do not know.
Probably just a typo, but that had me asking, “So, it’s okay to verbally harass a female as long as you know her?” I know, that one’s kind of nit-picky. Moving on.
It is not OK to approach a female & comment on her body parts.
No quarrel with this one. Obviously in terms of certain relationships, it’s a different story, but it’s pretty clear here that she’s not talking about those circumstances. E.g., you are not entitled to go up to any random woman and say shit like, “Hey, nice tits.”
It’s not ok to sleep with muliple women at the same time.
And that is where I put the brakes on. Reading along, and then… whoa! What? Which of these things is not like the others?
It bothers me that a lot of well-intentioned people conflate obviously abusive behavior such as verbal harassment with, well, having multiple sex partners. To me, it’s apples and oranges, the two don’t even come close to being in the same realm for comparison. But I understand that for a lot of people they are, because their ideas are based on a lot of underlying, unquestioned assumptions – ones that I held myself for a while, until I was in my late teens and began to really question and examine all that stuff.
The major difference here, of course, is agency. If a man verbally harasses a woman, she has had no choice in the matter. She didn’t invite him to harass her; he imposed his sense of entitlement on her. But as for having multiple sex partners? By that same logic, the women in the scenario are denied any agency – and that is the definition of objectification. (So yes, I am saying that Wiley’s statement objectifies women.) What is the assumption here? That the women in the scenario don’t want to have multiple partners? Or maybe, that they don’t want to have sex with this hypothetical man who has multiple partners? (That, of course, would be rape.) Now, if Wiley meant, “It’s not okay to be in a supposedly monogamous relationship and run around on your partner behind her back,” then I can get behind that. But the issue there is dishonesty, not sex.
Well, now I’ve expended a bunch of energy writing about all that, and I don’t feel like writing about the last sentence, about hiring a dancer. The multiple sex partners statement was the main issue that was a red flag for me, anyway.
Maybe Wiley hasn’t given a lot of thought to why s/he holds those views about sex; maybe it was a knee-jerk reaction. Or, maybe she honestly believes that having multiple sex partners is wrong. Whatever the case, let me also point out that a disagreement such as this one isn’t something that would prevent me from standing in solidarity with such a person to oppose violence against women, restriction of rights, objectification, and so on. But it’s something that bugs me because I don’t think enough people question these commonly accepted assumptions or acknowledge the potential they have to do harm (see Bitch | Lab for more).
* Ed. note: If this is 10th grade debate class, Diane and Shaunti get a B- and a C-, respectively