A School for Johns

The johns school attendees are mainly men who've tried to hire women who work the street—rather than those who have sought the services of the growing indoor prostitution trade (escort services, sensual massage parlors, etc.). The indoor trade is sometimes viewed as less perilous for the prostitutes involved, and the data on them is less comprehensive. However, a recent study by researchers at Columbia University found that while sex workers in this category experience lower rates of physical violence, these women are more vulnerable because assaults happen off the radar. These prostitutes, according to study authors Sudhir Venkatesh and Alexandra Murphy, tend to be "invisible" and often become isolated from their community and from other women in the trade who might provide a social network. That's one reason escorts find it hard to leave the business.

Some advocates say that legalization would help bring these women and others like them of the shadows and de-stigmatize the profession. And, according to San Francisco's Erotic Service Providers Union, decriminalizing the profession would allow these women to fight for better working conditions and pay and would make it easier for sex workers to report crimes without fear of prosecution themselves. But anti-prostitution activists point to studies indicating that legalizing prostitution may in fact create an environment that encourages human trafficking and pushes violence and abuse against sex workers even further underground.

A 2007 study by San Francisco psychologist and prostitution expert Melissa Farley found that in places where commercial sex is legal—such as Nevada, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands—illegal prostitution, as well as the number of rapes and assaults against prostitutes, has increased. Farley also found that more than 80 percent of the women working as prostitutes in Nevada's legal brothels "urgently want to escape." Both Germany and the Netherlands—country infamous for their red-light districts—are reconsidering their decisions to legalize the practice.

U.S. law-enforcement officials have also found a link between human trafficking and prostitution. The House passed an anti-human-trafficking bill in 2007 that would lower the barriers for prosecuting johns and traffickers, but it faces serious opposition in the Senate. (More than 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, according to U.S. officials. Of those, 80 percent are female and about 50 percent are children.)

The idea that some of the women selling sexual services might in reality be young girls is another concept that the johns school hopes to impart to its "students." District Attorney Harris estimates that there are as many as a thousand girls under 18 working San Francisco's streets.

One participant in the johns-school program, "Anthony," was getting a crash course in some of these truths. A 45-year-old paralegal recently laid off from his job, he wound up in the program after he tried to pick up an undercover officer working in the city's seedy Tenderloin district. He admits that he'd paid for sex before in Tijuana, Mexico. But after hearing a lecture at johns school about children in the sex industry, he swore he was finished. "I never thought that I could be picking up a child who looks 22 or 23 but is really under 18," he told NEWSWEEK. "The possibility of ruining a child's life ... I'm never putting myself in that situation again." [The men interviewed declined to provide their real names owing to the sensitive nature of the subject.]
"Marco," another arrested john in the class, didn't think he had much to learn at the start of the eight-hour session. "Aside from knowledge of the vice unit and how they operate, everything else I already know," he said. But at 4 p.m., the 23-year-old construction worker found himself leaving with more than the papers certifying his completion of the course; he also had a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting schedule tucked under his arm. "I was going through the list, and I fit a lot of the criteria of a sex addict," he said. " I thought it was a rare thing, but I might check out a class."

© 2008