Sunday, May 18, 2008 | News, In this Issue...
Schooled

Atlanta takes step toward anti-prostitution program aimed at johns

Actress Kim Basinger holds up her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “L.A. Confidential.”
HAL GARB/AFP/Getty Images

By Diane Loupe

On film, hookers are often portrayed glamorously. Jane Fonda and Kim Basinger won Academy Awards for portraying prostitutes, and there have been no fewer than 16 Oscar nominations for actresses playing hookers, including Elisabeth Shue in “Leaving Los Vegas,” Sharon Stone in “Casino” and Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.”

The truth, like Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning turn as real-life serial killer/prostitute Aileen Wuornos in “Monster,” is far less attractive. Most prostitutes are raped and beaten, and they keep little of the money they make from selling their bodies. In Atlanta, many are underage and forced into a kind of sex slavery.

Customers of Atlanta prostitutes will soon learn the truth about the trade, and they’ll pay for that education. The city of Atlanta is readying a “school for johns” program modeled after the First Offender Prostitution Program (FOPP) in San Francisco. A recent groundbreaking study found that men who attended the school were far less likely to patronize prostitutes again. Moreover, the program’s tuition—$1,000, paid by the johns—financed the entire cost of the San Francisco program and generated nearly $1 million to subsidize recovery programs for prostitutes, as well as police vice operations and the screening and processing of arrestees.

This week, Atlanta officials will begin mapping details of Atlanta’s school for johns. Representatives of the mayor’s office, the Atlanta Police Department’s vice unit, the municipal court system and the Georgia Network to End Sexual Assault will meet with criminologist Michael Shively, a consultant with the firm Abt Associates. Shively conducted the recent study of the effectiveness of San Francisco’s program on behalf of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

“With all the stakeholders together in one room, we’re going to talk about how we’re going to create the best john’s school in the country,” says Stephanie Davis, Mayor Shirley Franklin’s policy advisor on women’s issues.

Mayor Franklin was the face of the “Dear John” publicity campaign, launched in 2006, aimed at reducing the demand for prostitutes. City officials have been considering a prostitution-fighting program aimed at johns for several years.

“The timing finally came together,” says Davis. “The city needs to find new sources of revenue, and johns represent a great new revenue stream. It’s going to mean turning attention to johns who can afford to pay for this program.”

Does it work?

Nearly 5,800 men attended San Francisco’s FOPP, which has been successfully replicated in 12 other cities. Atlanta and Los Angeles are among 50 communities considering establishing similar programs. Shively’s firm studied the re-arrest records of johns who attended the San Francisco program with the arrest records of 75,000 other johns who did not attend the program. Those who attended the program were less likely to be arrested for soliciting prostitutes again.

Unlike programs that have aimed to shame johns by publicizing their identities, programs like FOPP pursue what Shively calls “restorative justice.” The fees johns pay go to programs that support survivors of sex trafficking. And in some cities, johns pay up to $1,500 to attend an all-day program that exposes the seedy side of prostitution and the women who are often forced to ply their trades. Usually, the local district attorney agrees to drop misdemeanor charges against johns who pay for and attend the program. There, they hear about the legal consequences and health risks of patronizing prostitutes, and meet a former hooker.

“The San Francisco program has been really successful at presenting the problem of street prostitution in a different way,” says Shively.

Men who patronize prostitutes also trade information, which may contribute to the reduced recidivism.

“There’s a whole cyber world that has to do with prostitution,” says Shively. When local police do a sting, within an hour, an alert will go up on sites such as www.myredbook.com, a Web site offering information and reviews of escort, massage and strip club services in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Business, not pleasure

Although some women who sell sex are doing it “much like we sell our labor working for a newspaper, working for a research firm or washing dishes in a restaurant,” the luxury-apartment-dwelling hookers like those used by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) are a minority in the sex trade, says Shively.

Most don’t have the wealth of Lisa Ann Taylor, the so-called Mansion Madam charged with running a high-priced call girl service from her estate at Sugarloaf Country Club in Gwinnett County. Taylor, who performed as “Melissa Wolf,” put the mansion up for sale for $1.2 million after her arrest on drug and prostitution charges.

Men who pay for sex on the street are dealing with women who invariably have been beaten up or raped. “They’re being exploited, pimped or trafficked and are getting little or none of the money that they generate,” says Shively. “The vast majority of women only go into prostitution after some sort of dire hardship, such as being abused sexually or otherwise,” he continues. Many are destitute. Though male prostitutes are not uncommon, runaways and women with drug addictions or other health issues are the ones most likely to be turning tricks.

When prostitutes are interviewed by researchers, “very few women say they would do it if they had other options,” says Shively. “The vast majority of women want a way out.”

And hookers aren’t the kind of independent businesses that neighborhoods welcome. Most police departments start prostitution sting operations at the request of residents who want the girls off of their streets.

“They don’t want to be walking a child to school and have an intoxicated, destitute prostitute soliciting them, or have the street littered with used condoms and syringes, or have a girl giving oral sex on their doorstep,” Shively says.

Men also expose themselves to victimization by patronizing hookers. Two thirds of prostitutes interviewed in Atlanta and New York admitted to having robbed their clients, according to a 1990 study conducted by Georgia State University sociologist Kirk W. Elifson and Claire Sterk, a Professor of Public Health at Emory University.

Details of the Atlanta program haven’t been determined. Atlanta might institute a “sliding scale,” based on a man’s income and assets, in determining the tuition for the Georgia version of FOPP, says Davis.

Atlanta officials will study Shively’s report and determine what is likely to work best here, says Davis. She’s pushing for more than a one-day program.

But advocates for programs like the johns school admit that they won’t eliminate the world’s oldest profession.

“Clearly there’s no single magic bullet to make the problem vanish,” says Shively, “I don’t think anyone who’s deeply involved in this expects prostitution to get eliminated.”

Carol Leigh, a former sex worker and spokesperson for the Sex Workers Outreach Project, a national group based in San Francisco, says that police efforts to curb demand for prostitutes just makes street life more dangerous for women.

“If you’re working on the streets, and there’s fewer clients, there’s much more pressure to get in the car fast, less opportunity to check things out,” says Leigh. “This makes it less safe for the women on the streets…[according to] feedback that I get.”
 
She also points out that because men are paying $1,000 for the FOPP, the program impels the police to make more arrests, even on flimsy evidence.
 
“I get so many calls from clients who were improperly arrested, with no or little evidence,” says Leigh. “But they’re intimidated, they don’t want their family to find out. So they will participate in the program so their family won’t find out. It works as blackmail.”

But, says Shively, that doesn’t mean efforts to reduce demand aren’t worth pursuing.

“Prostitution is held to a different standard than any other social ill,” he notes. “You never hear the same questions about assault or theft. We haven’t made it go away, so why don’t we make it legal? No one says that about murder.” SP