In a Shift,
Anti-Prostitution Effort Targets Pimps and Johns
Washington Post Thursday, December 15, 2005; A01
Excellent Balanced Major Article in Respected Newspaper Highlights Dave's comments: As I always do I scream what about the 90% of "prostitutes" who
are private consenting adult sexworkers that are not working for pimps, are not
14 year old children on the street, are not being trafficked against there will,
are not public nuisance street hookers!!! Yet in the minds of most of the
religious right who knows what is best for us and the Feminists, a prostitutes
is a prostitute, no matter what age and no women gives consent for such abuse as
prostitution. THAT is the issue we need to educate the public about!
In most all the world consenting adult private sexwork is legal with no big
negative issues! Yes outlaw street hookers, outlaw under aged and pimping as it
already is illegal. BUT STOP THIS NONSENSE that a the law should deny the rights
of consenting adult women to choose healthy private sexwork as THEIR CHOICE as
they do in almost all the world except the U.S. !! More at Decriminalize Private
Adult Sexwork Coalition at http://www.sexwork.com/coalition/index.html End of
rant - back to article:
The john peeked into the massage parlor. "Hi, sweetie," said Kim, the manager of
the Korean-run club in downtown Washington. The john, a tall man in his fifties,
stepped inside, smiling anxiously. He wore a chaste white shirt and sharply
parted hair, and he smelled as if he'd had a drink. "Look at his face -- very
tired," Kim said as he went inside. "Sad people come. Stress people. This
customer stay 30 minutes, then happy. Everybody happy."
Not everybody. A national campaign against prostitution has intensified in
political, nonprofit and law enforcement circles, so much so that yesterday the
House unanimously passed novel legislation, with the Senate expected to follow.
In the past, police sweeps have focused on the women. The new federal law would
grant state and local law enforcement agencies funds to investigate and
prosecute the men -- brothel owners and pimps. It would also target for arrest
customers like the one at Kim's parlor lurching toward a girl in a bikini.
"You're out of luck," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), summing up the bill's
message to the customers. "The johns use and abuse these young women," said Rep.
Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio). "And pimps -- you can call them slaveholders, the
masters out in the field."
The attitudes of Pryce, who introduced the legislation in the House, and Cornyn,
a sponsor in the Senate, reflect a shift in how the government and the public
respond to the sex industry. Traditionally, women have been blamed as the source
of the problem. But Pryce calls prostitution "modern-day slavery" in which
teenage girls are exploited and men fuel the crime.
Behind the scenes, an unlikely coalition of evangelicals, feminists, liberal
activists and conservative human rights advocates are pushing the issue. They
are trying to reframe the way people talk about prostitutes, calling them
"survivors" and signing off e-mails with the slogan "Abolition!"
On a local level, in the past three years, 12 states have passed
anti-sex-trafficking legislation, which says that women who are prostituted
through coercion, and minors who are sold for sex, are victims. In 15 other
states, similar bills have been introduced. Although prostitution is illegal
nationwide except in certain Nevada counties, advocates for the legislation said
that enforcement and penalties for pimps and johns have been weak, including a
tolerance for brothels that advertise as massage parlors.
"We want to drive a stake through the heart of these venal criminals," said
Michael J. Horowitz, a coalition leader and a senior fellow at the Hudson
Institute. "This is pure evil."
This is bad news for the john at Kim's parlor, who lumbered out the door 37
minutes after he entered. His smile had relaxed. He looked as though he had just
won a long-odds bet. Squinting in the afternoon light, he got into his car to
drive home to Virginia, as he does every month after having sex, he said. Then
he heard about the legislation.
"Do I look like a criminal?" scowled the man, who gave his name as "John." "I'm
a middle-class, law-abiding single white professional. Let me have my fun."
"John" said that the women offer a service to the community, that it is a
victimless crime and that lawmakers should concentrate on more important issues,
such as the war in Iraq.
"It's like going to a doctor. A love doctor," he said. He spread his fingers, as
if to show his hands were clean: "Is this a problem?"
Penelope Saunders, director of Different Avenues, which works with marginalized
communities, said that "according this bill, all the men who are buying
commercial sex are monsters -- and that's simply not true." Some johns help sex
workers by reporting violent pimps, she said. Scaring away regular customers
would force prostitutes into riskier behavior. Saunders said that calling these
women "victims of sexual slavery" is inaccurate, patronizing and a "thinly
veiled effort" to promote a conservative moral agenda.
But to Barrett Duke, a coalition member and vice president at the Southern
Baptist Convention, the comparison to slavery is apt. He draws inspiration from
19th-century Christians. They fought the slave trade in England by working with
"people of good will, who were not Christians, who understood that trade of
human flesh was an abomination."
Frundt, now a counselor at the Polaris Project, said that the average age of
girls who enter the sex trade is 13. Like victims of domestic violence, she
said, the girls are afraid to leave their pimps. They call their pimps "Daddy."
If they report a pimp -- "He's going to beat your butt." It was stories such as
Frundt's, said Cornyn, that convinced him he should fight for the legislation.
"A victimless crime?" he said. "Yeah, right, that's a lie."
And yet for Frundt and for others in the coalition, it is hard to believe that
anyone would care. Norma Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project Inc., a drug and
mental health program for women in San Francisco, has a metal plate in her head
with wires and screws from a pimp who delivered a "bitch slap" when she refused
to work.
About 50 detectives were watching a training video on human and sexual
trafficking at the Washington Fraternal Order of Police Lodge. Men with shaved
heads who were chewing on toothpicks, burly men in leather jackets -- recoiled,
appalled. A 14-year-old girl, the narrator said, had been locked in a room and
was forced to have sex with 30 men a day.
In cities around the country, U.S. attorney's offices, the FBI, local
prosecutors and nongovernmental organizations are developing similar task
forces. The new legislation would assist them because, in addition to funding
shelters for ex-prostitutes and sponsoring a statistical survey of prostitution,
it would authorize $25 million a year to law enforcement to reduce demand.
Techniques would include using female decoys, posting pictures of johns on the
Internet and establishing "john schools" to reeducate sex clients.
I omitted a lot in this summary, full article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121402539_pf.html |