
'My Airbnb flat was turned into a pop-up brothel' - kristianc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39528479
======
illuminati1911
What's the problem here? Did they leave the apartments uncleaned or...?

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.

~~~
vosper
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.

~~~
bambax
> _they left used condoms, tissues, and empty bottles of wine all over the
> apartment_

No. From the article:

> _I found used condom wrappers under the bed, I found the bin was overflowing
> with tissues and condoms._

Not sure what "overflowing" means exactly in this context, but you can't read
in the article that there were _used condoms all over the apartment_.

A condom wrapper is just a piece of clean plastic, very different from a used
condom.

Also, what's the difference when people are having sex in your bed, whether
they're married, friends, or engaged in pay-for-sex?

~~~
johnchristopher
> 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.

~~~
pharrlax
>criminally associated with unlawful behaviour

This is a crime?

If a prostitute brings a john back to a hotel room, the police can arrest the
hotel owner?

~~~
johnchristopher
I don't know about UK laws but where I live you would be suspected of helping
and being active in a prostitution ring.

But you are misquoting me a little bit.

~~~
foldr
>I don't know about UK laws

Probably best not to comment then?

This thread is already full of people making the inaccurate assumption that
prostitution is illegal in the UK.

~~~
johnchristopher
> >I don't know about UK laws

> Probably best not to comment then?

Quite the contrary.

------
sauronlord
Hotels have been used like this forever.

People run their homes like hotels and are shocked to find that people treat
it as such.

------
dandare
The only problem I see here is the criminalization of prostitution.

~~~
anjc
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.

~~~
gambiting
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?

~~~
anjc
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.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
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...

~~~
gpvos
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.

~~~
stevekemp
(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.)

------
al_chemist
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.

What?

~~~
M_Grey
Danny Dyer built a new home and then promptly sold it because he believed that
it was haunted. People are really, really irrational much of the time.

------
logicallee
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?

~~~
aphexbr
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.

~~~
logicallee
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...](http://www.devonlive.com/love-sale-exeter-escort-appears-
channel-4/story-21028598-detail/story.html) ). Thanks.

------
camus2
> (...) 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.

~~~
watter
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.

~~~
draw_down
No, apparently, when money is exchanged between parties, that's when sex
becomes wrong and bad.

------
vertex-four
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.

------
Mz
_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.

------
anjc
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.

------
tnr23
cry me a river. you have to take this into account if you rent out your place.

------
return0
All i see is airbnb disrupting the real estate market. No more shady 'red
light' districts, brothels can be everywhere.

------
vmateixeira
I see no different behaviour from what can happen on an hotel... and I don't
see hotels complaining...

~~~
DanBC
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.

------
devdoomari
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')

~~~
GavinMcG
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.

------
BlindWanderer
Can confirm. No hotel wants this, increased chance of breakages and noise
complaints. Parties are worse.

Airbnb is pretty ideal.

------
curiousgal
>And until we decriminalise sex work, sex workers will never be safe by not
being able to work in pairs.

This is probably the most ridiculous argument I've heard for the
decriminalization of prostitution.

~~~
robryk
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.

~~~
DanBC
It's even legal to sell sex for money in a brothel, so long as you're not the
one operating it.

[http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/prostitution_and_exploita...](http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/prostitution_and_exploitation_of_prostitution/#a14)

> 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).

~~~
robryk
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?

------
vezycash
The flat was used to shoot porn videos - most likely.

------
AlexAffe
Pinot Grigio, Prosecco, bin overflowing with used condoms... Let this guy give
me their contact, I could use a night like that.

