It’s rare to see an adult boy crying. But in a cigarette-scenting hotel room near Chicapass Airport, more than a dozen men come in and pass with rainy cheeks and trembling lips. No one had died, a national tragedy had not happened, they had simply been stuck looking to buy sex.
Across the country, police officers are implementing a strategy that has long been debated in Europe: addressing men who buy sex while searching for women who sell it. Some cops and academics say that focusing the police’s attention on sex buyers reduces the call to prostitution, strangles the sex industry and reduces human trafficking. But some human rights organizations, Amnesty International, recently called for the decriminalization of all facets of the sex trade, adding the procurement of sexual services.
While Amnesty International members planned to recommend the complete decriminalization of sex work, I was with a TIME video team about two buyer-centered sex injections in Cook County, Illinois. We thought it would be like an episode of the Law and Order SVU. However, we were wrong. Sexual stings are not glamorous: it is the dark windows of loneliness and depression that motivate some men to master sexual cornucopia that they think is due. Watching kids get caught is like watching this fantasy be destroyed over and over again.
Men are of other races and ages, from all walks of life: the only thing they have is not unusual shock. Some are sitting motionless, their hands on their eyes. One, a guy so wide that the cops needed two pairs of handcuffs to avoid it, sat on the quilt and shook his head slowly. Another expressed disbelief at his arrest and said police officers attack rapists and child molesters. They all received a quote and a fine for buying sex on Sheriff Tom Dart’s property.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, led by Tom Dart, was the driving force behind a national crusade to prevent pimps from promoting sex and consumers from buying it. Until recently, the maximum number of U.S. courts. She had focused on her power to arrest prostituted women: According to Department of Justice records, more than 43,000 women were arrested for prostitution-related crimes in 2010, compared to just over 19,000 men (this number includes clients, pimps and sex workers). But since 2011, Sheriff Dart’s workplace has organized the “Johns National Suppression Initiative,” now renamed the Johns National Suppression Initiative, a series of coordinated attacks with other jurisdictions over several weeks, with the goal of encouraging ongoing change. police practices
Dart’s workplace now arrests so many consumers a year as sexual staff, and with a radically different schedule: with consumers fined and fined up to $1,300, sex personnel are arrested and presented with referrals and vocational education through the Sheriff’s Women’s Justice Program Matrix that is run through sex traffickers. 60% of the cash taken from consumer fines goes to the women’s justice programme, the remaining 40% goes to youth justice programmes. Cook County bites consumers year-round, but the national initiative takes position several times a year.
I accompanied Dart’s team in two stings: one in a hotel, one on the street. It is vital to note that all genders buy and sell sexual facilities and that other trans people are overrepresented in the sex industry due to discrimination in the office elsewhere. But in this case, I have observed women as sexual staff and men as buyers, that’s how I’ll describe it here.
Our first shot begins in an unnamed hotel room near a Chicago airport. The quilt smells like old cigarette and the air conditioning works. Our room is full of tough cops dressed in baseball caps and T-shirts, badges hanging around their necks, watching TV and joking. In the room across the hall are undercover agents dressed as sex workers. A bright pink tank top, leopard print leggings. Just a few hours earlier, they had placed ads on a site called backpage.com advertising sex – already, the kids are calling them to get to know each other. “Yes, that’s my genuine image,” Agent Meg says, as she turns her hair as she talks on the phone. “I train. Do you need to party? His colleague, Agent Lisa, says to be asked, “How do your breasts look? What does your ass look like? »»
When a guest arrives at the hotel, undercover agents text their colleagues to make sure everyone is out of the lobby. Cops gather near the door, hunting through the keyhole and waiting for a signal from the undercover officer. For a few seconds, all the jokes are avoided and everyone is surely silent. Once an agreement has been reached for sex, the undercover officer provides an electronic signal and the other cops rush and handcuff the buyer. The total procedure takes less than a minute. (To protect the protection of undercover agents, we agreed to use pseudonyms).)
After being handcuffed, consumers are temporarily transferred to a third room, where they are wanted for weapons. If they are not armed, officials take off their handcuffs and the situation. They will be fined at least $500 and, in many cases, their car will be towed, which is an additional $500, plus a towing payment usually between $200 and $300. This will not result in a criminal registry and will not serve any criminal sentences unless there is an open arrest warrant for some other charge. And you’ll have to watch a short video from “Johns School” about how women are exploited in the sex industry.
Every visitor who got caught said it was their first time, however, the police don’t buy it. “You’re the luckiest guy in the world or you’re lying,” says Deputy Director Michael Anton, who led the stings. Their logic is that cops are rarely out there and that only other people who buy normal sex are more likely to get stuck. “It’s going to have to be humiliating for those boys.”
A student came here sobbing, “My parents are going to kill me.” She told the cops, and TIME, that she had a girlfriend, but that her appointments had been more serious recently and she had said she sought to abstain until the wedding. He says that’s how he ended up looking for a prostitute. “I’m going to fail in life now, ” he said, he fired.
Deputy Anton rolled his eyes and winced at a whimpering baby, but let the boy leave with just the ticket, without towing his car. “I say it’s never his first time, but maybe it was his first time,” he said.
Dart’s team isn’t the first to target men who buy sex. Sweden criminalized pimps and buyers (but not sexual personnel) in 1999, in a policy now known as the ‘Nordic model’. Government reports imply that this policy would possibly have led to relief in street prostitution and trafficking in vulnerable women in poor countries. According to the Nordic model, which also followed in Norway and Canada and was approved through a non-binding solution from the European Parliament, sexual personnel are not arrested, only their clients do so.
Versions of this technique are slowly spreading in the United States, but the highest jurisdictions continue to arrest prostitutes even when they turn to sex buyers. New York established a special justice formula in 2013 to treat sexual personnel and trafficking victims to provide them with counselling and social services, the same year, Nassau County, New York, caught more than a hundred clients and posted their photos. online in a debatable article called “Operation Flush the Johns.” Orange County, California, takes strong action against pimps and clients instead of prostitutes, reducing women’s arrests as men’s arrests increase. Seattle had some early successes on its “Beware Buyer” program, and in 2014, Seattle police first arrested more sex buyers than prostitutes.
“We make things very unpleasant for the user who buys sex,” says Captain Eric Sano of the Seattle Police Department, “because we think there would be so much source if there was no demand.”
Dart has jurisdiction in Cook County, but encourages agents across the country to verify the buyer-oriented approach. Some cities, such as Seattle, have developed their own versions of this strategy, but have exchanged notes with Dart. Others, such as Phoenix, Cincinnati and Houston, have followed the dart elimination example. More than 70 agencies have participated in at least one of Dart’s operations, with more than 2,900 buyers arrested in all jurisdictions since 2011.
“What has been favorable in Cook County is to highlight this challenge and combine law enforcement across the country to combat it,” said Jonathan Phoenix Police Sergeant Howard. “They took the lead in helping us locate other tactics to fulfill the call to prostitution.”
Some human rights teams dispute this approach. On 11 August, Amnesty International voted to present the complete decrookization of prostitution for buyers and sellers, saying that corrupt legislation opposed to consensual industry violated the human rights of sexual personnel. While UNAIDS and the World Health Organization have in the past called for the decrookization of sex paints for reasons of public fitness (to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases), and other teams have advocated for the same reason, Amnesty International is the first foreign human primary rights organization. organization to take into account comprehensive global public policy advice for the lifting of legislation opposed to the acquisition and sale of sex only for human rights reasons. Amnesty cannot enforce legislation or enforce legislation, however, its advice has foreign influence. “It’s not just about saying that sex workers want rights to prevent the spread of AIDS,” says Molly Crabapple, a prominent artist and journalist who has long advocated for sex staff. “It is a popularity that the rights of sexual personnel are human rights.”
But Amnesty’s resolution has been heavily criticized by some who say full decriminalization would allow pimps and customers and could contribute to an explosion in sex trafficking. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote a heavily worded letter to Amnesty members urging them to vote against politics, and Gloria Steinem and Lena Dunham were among a bunch of feminists and human rights activists who signed a letter alleging that decriminalization of sexual shopping would lead to more sexual exploitation of society’s most vulnerable women. After Germany legalized prostitution in 2002, police said it was much harder to attack abusive pimps, even when social workers claimed prostitutes were running in even worse situations than before, according to a 2013 article in German mag Der Derigel. And a 2012 report published in world development magazine found that, as a general trend, countries where prostitution is legalized tend to have more human trafficking.
“If we need to end sex trafficking, it’s very transparent that we want to do something for buyers,” says Brad Myles, CEO of Polaris, a global anti-trafficking group. “Leaving a thriving market spot for sex buyers and assuming that no pimp and smuggler will enter this market spot is not valid.” Sheriff Dart said he was open to any solution, but skeptical of the “naivety” surrounding legalization. “The pimps and the traffickers aren’t going to say, “Oh, now it’s legalized, we’re bankrupt,” he says.
Then, two days after the hotel bite, we go back looking for guests, this time on a stretch of road near Chicapass’s O’Hare airport, where prostitutes are known to gather. It’s 6:30 in the morning and it’s already hot. The buyers are men who depart a night shift at the airport, men who leave their wives for a trip, men for a quick dust before work, explains Dart’s team.
“I was stopped through preachers, with the Bible in hand, who, after completing the preaching of her sermon, will ask me for a sexual act,” says Officer Kate, who pretends to be a street prostitute. “They’re just men. If they see him, they need it and they think they’ll get caught.”
During the bitees at the hotel, female agents dressed as civilians dress as if they were going to a party, but on the street they will have to look different. They wear stained clothes, shoes and leave their hair dirty, as they say that the maximum of women who paint in the street have touched bottom. “You need to mingle with the thing you’re running with,” Agent Kate says.
“I wash my nails every two weeks, so I use anything where I can get my hands on,” says Agent Lisa, who also plays street operations. “I put on shoes to hide my pedicure.”
In a street operation, the female undercover officer stands on the corner in full view of a fellow officer, Officer Dan. He’s responsible for watching her every move. When a car pulls up to her, Officer Dan radios the make and model to his fellow officers waiting in an arrest car. As soon as she makes a deal for sex, usually only a few seconds after the car pulls up, Officer Kate make a special gesture and moves away from the car. That’s when Officer Dan radios the order:“it’s a go.”
The guest stops in seconds and is taken to a waiting area, where he goes through the same procedure as the boys caught in the hotel bite. When a $10 pipe costs you $1,250 and you don’t even get it, you yourself, says Deputy Chief Anton.
Sheriff Dart not only seeks to catch clients on the spot, he also seeks to prevent prostitution before it happens, preventing pimps from doing business. He introduced a high-profile crusade opposed to Backpage.com, an online page commonly used to position sex ads, and effectively traverses Visa and Mastercard to remove his cards as an adult-only advertising payment method of the site. Backpage sued Dart in federal court, saying his crusade violated his free speech, and an approved federal ruling issued a transitional restraining order opposing Dart. But Visa and Mastercard have not yet returned to the site, and Backpage has not responded to requests for comment.
Despite the new focus on pimps and clients, a lot of sexual staff continue to be arrested in the United States, and even human rights defenders who oppose Amnesty’s decriminalization stance do not punish prostituted women. Cook County has arrested nearly 900 sex buyers and more than 2,000 sex employees since 2008, however, that hole is shrinking, and now, according to dart’s team, the arrests are almost equivalent: this year, only 240 sex employees have been arrested so far in Cook County, compared to 258 customers.
Prostitutes are charged with misdemeanors (if they are charged), and clients are slapped by the appointment and the fines discussed above. Although applying for a prostitute is technically a misdemeanor under Illinois law, Dart’s team said they saw men pay $100 bail and then faint and buy more sex. Even if a quote is more lenient, heavy fines deter sex buyers more than a misdemeanor charge. Sexual staff can attend the sheriff’s women’s justice program, which includes suggestions and social acts, rarely serves a criminal sentence if they are arrested through the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. But it is still a long way from the Nordic model, where customers pay the fine while sexual staff is free.
Not everyone who paints in the sex industry is a victim. And advocates of decriminalization argue that arrests, even if they are made with the goal of providing social services, are inherently harmful. Arrest records can be the ability of sex personnel to locate paintings or dwellings, and being removed with handcuffed hands only reinforces the stigma around sex paintings. “Arrest is not a form of consciousness,” says Katherine Koster, communications director of the Sexual Workers Outreach Project.
However, a significant proportion of women running in the sex industry are forced in one way or another. And sex trafficking (usually explained as recruitment, coercation or transportation for sexual exploitation) is endemic. According to a 2014 report by the UN-backed International Labour Organization, 4.5 million other people are trafficked for sexual purposes, generating $99 billion a year as a source of income from forced sexual exploitation. Of the 208 human trafficking lawsuits filed through the Department of Justice in 2014, 190 were for sex trafficking, according to a State Department traffic report released in July. That’s more than 91%. Dart authorities say they can’t get these women if they don’t have the right to take them off the streets. Marian Hatcher, a traffic survivor who now coordinates national coalitions for Dart’s office, calls the cops who arrested her “handcuffed angels.”
In some cases, callly in the United States, the line between trafficking and consensual sex paintings would possibly become blurred. “I feel between traffic and choice,” says Kimmy, a former prostitute serving a sentence at Cook County Jail on unrelated charges. She says she received support from her ex-boyfriend and we replaced her first call to protect her from imaginable retaliation. “I didn’t know I was being sold or that I was a pimp … He wasn’t dazzled with rings, a fur coat and a big car. He was just an ordinary person.”
“Prostitution is cunning,” he continued. “I’m so wise I didn’t know, you know? I didn’t know prostitution.”
But even victims of trafficking who think prostitution deserves to be illegal say they don’t help arrest. Caprice is a former prostitute who says she was forced to sell sex for a pimp from the age of 17. She is in the Cook County Jail on unrelated prostitution charges, but said she was arrested for prostitution 10 to 12 times in other jurisdictions, and “I didn’t feel at all that there had been positive results.”
Many decriminalization advocates cite the well-documented police abuse of sexual personnel as justification for lifting all anti-prostitution laws. “It would no longer help arrest victims of trafficking to help them, as it would help the arrest of abused women,” says Molly Crabapple.
Despite his delight in the arrests, Caprice still believes something can be done for the sex trade. “When you have sex with someone, you give them a component of your soul,” she says. “So I don’t think, I don’t think it’s something that’s sold.”
Kimmy agrees. “If I know it’s legal, I’ll feel like I can still do it,” she says. “It’s a legal way to dedicate suicide.”
But despite promising reports from Sweden and Norway, it is unclear how well tactical paintings are required in the United States. Dart’s team bravably admits that it’s hard to quantify the effectiveness of their program because it’s very unlikely to measure how many men are discouraged from buying sex (and it’s hard to locate fake figures in the sex industry), but they say I don’t have one. has noticed a repeat offender since they imposed serious fines. But some researchers argue that the latest call to tactics can have accidental consequences, and that the higher consequences for “organizing” sex paintings can inadvertently be sexually personally personal that are not pimps, simply concerned about others. Sex staff rights advocates argue that attacking shoppers actually makes street staff less secure because consumers are nervous and the painter has less time to eliminate them.
“They are on a stage where they are forced to pay their customers,” says Margaret Huang, Assistant Director-General of Amnesty International USA. “So if a customer becomes violent, he’s afraid to report it.”
Sitting in the small apartment she has with her big cat on Chicago’s West Side, former escort Samantha Acosta says she feels more like a victim of existing politics than her clients. She says she doesn’t believe the police take violence against sexual staff seriously, making women more vulnerable. “They don’t mind saving the lives of prostitutes,” he says of Dart and his team. “They care about ending prostitution.”
Once consumers have won their dates, watched the “Johns School” video and towed their car, agents asked them if they would ever look for a prostitute again. Everyone says no, and Deputy Chief Anton thinks that’s the moment when they tell the truth: “We haven’t noticed the same thing twice.”