Sex News: Rentboy plea deal, revenge porn legislation, Uber rapist, internet killed the pimp

• “California is changing the way sexual assault is prosecuted. In the wake of the allegations that Bill Cosby drugged and raped dozens of women, the state assembly passed a bill on Thursday to end the time limit for prosecuting rape and felony sex crimes. The bill passed the assembly unanimously.”
  * California Votes to Remove Time Limit on Prosecuting Rape Cases (New York Magazine)

• Warning for survivors of assault and trauma. “Police in Florida have arrested a man who worked as an Uber driver and accused him of sexually assaulting three women this year.” Police believe there are other victims. “An email to Uber was not immediately returned, but a spokesman told the Palm Beach Post that Mtsitsha began driving for the company in February, a month after the first assault is alleged to have occurred. The spokesman also confirmed that he has been banned from the app.”
  * Uber driver ‘terrorized’ women, tried to exchange rides for sex, police say (Washington Post)

• “Sex workers are at greater risk of violence and ill health due to substantial cuts to specialist NHS health and support services across the UK, according to experts, service providers and rights groups. An editorial in the British Medical Journal, published this week, warned of “avoidable harms and disastrous long-term costs” of ongoing funding cuts to services available to sex workers.”
  * Cuts to NHS services for sex workers ‘disastrous’ say experts (Guardian UK)

• “The federal government is sitting on a ton of data about sexual violence in the United States, but most of the statistics cannot be compared to each other because of wide variations in how they’re measured, a new review from the Government Accountability Office concludes.”
  * Federal Research On Sexual Violence Is A Mess (Huffington Post)

• This is a really well balanced and interesting article, which has left me with many questions. “A new study purports to show that married people who start watching, as the authors put it, “X-rated movies,” have an increased chance of divorce. But some outside researchers and couples therapists who reviewed the study raised questions about its methodology and suggested the findings contradict what they see with clients.”
  * Study Links Watching Porn To Divorce (Voactiv)

• “Ten of the programs had at least one lesson on gender and power, and 80 percent of them saw significant decreases in pregnancy or STIs compared with a control group. Of the 12 programs that did not address these issues, 17 percent led to those positive outcomes. Teaching about power and gender roles was a consistent predictor of better health outcomes, even when Haberland accounted for other variables like sample size and whether the studies were longitudinal.”
  * When Sex Ed Discusses Gender Inequality, Sex Gets Safer (Atlantic)

• “Jeffrey Hurant, the former owner of Rentboy.com, is finalizing a plea agreement with federal prosecutors after his indictment for promoting prostitution, his attorney told the court this week. … The site, which opened for business in 1997, carried disclaimers saying its advertisements for escorts were for companionship and not sexual services.”
  * Former Rentboy.com CEO Finalizing Plea Deal (XBIZ)

• “Stings and busts are not deterring so-called “pimps” from using the internet to facilitate the sale of sex, according to a new study. … Sex work advocates, however, are skeptical of the paper’s findings and its focus on “pimps,” whom they say are increasingly less common, thanks in large part to how the internet has democratized the sex trade.”
  * Study: “Pimps” Are Doing Business Online, Despite Stings (Voactiv)

• “With this continued boom in Hong Kong’s digital age, compensated daters are enjoying certain benefits of being their own bosses—namely, they’re no longer subjected to the sexual and physical abuse from gangster agents. Also, they don’t have to give away money for an agent fee, which means they’re making more. Forums and chat apps, for the most part, are putting the power back in the hands of the sex workers.”
  * Hong Kong’s Sex Workers Are Ditching Their Pimps for iPhones (Motherboard)

• “In July 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended to its nationwide membership, that they must educate children and teens about sex. They joined countless other groups of experts, physicians, and educators, all of whom oppose abstinence-based education.”
  * Repairing the Damage of Abstinence-Based Sex Education (Psychology Today)

• “Jay Franzone is on a mission to bring attention to the U.S. ban on blood donated from men who have sex with men. As part of that mission, he is remaining celibate for a year in order to meet the requirement set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which prohibits men from donating blood if they have had sex with another man in the past year.”
  * This man is abstaining from sex for a year so he can donate blood (PBS)

• “Officers put him in the back of a police car and spoke with the woman who called police. She told them she saw the man standing near a parked van at 805 St. Nicholas Street. She went on to explain she saw Henson pull his shorts down and place his genitals in the front grill of the van that was parked on the street.”
  * Ohio man arrested after trying to have sex with a van (NBC4i)

• “Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation that would patch the holes in the federal system governing nonconsensual pornography, also known as revenge porn. … Speech advocates say the bill is too broad and could sweep pornography that should be permissible into the category of the illegal. They also worry about a chilling effect on those who wish to post or re-post content that is clearly allowed, from snapshots of family and friends on topless beaches to photos in adult magazines.”
  * We need national legislation to combat revenge porn (Washington Post)

Main post image via Dangerous Minds.