It's the Johns, Stupid

ARIZONA JOHNS ARRESTED FOR SOLICITATION IN 2003

In response to the recent campaign in the UK asking johns to report suspected victims of trafficking via a confidential hotline (see April blog entry: Well, It's a Start...), Brenda Power of The Sunday Times--Ireland says: "give me a break!":

Full marks for optimism to those European governments that have cooked up an imaginative, but doomed, initiative to liberate trafficked prostitutes. A number of EU states have introduced confidential phone numbers for male clients who suspect the woman they've just hired for sex has been working against her will.

Unless I'm interpreting this incorrectly, the man who has just paid a woman to have sex is expected to view her not as a piece of meat but as as a vulnerable human being and show some concern for her welfare. How could it possibly not work?

Perhaps the reason the measure is doomed is because it flies in the face of the central male conceit that has kept prostitution flourishing for millenniums. Men couldn't keep using the services of prostitutes if they hadn't managed to convince themselves that (a) they are actually pieces of meat, (b) they are making a really good living from it, and (c) they definitely love it.

It's this same comforting sequence of joined-up delusions that has kept governments through the ages from acting on their stated abhorrence of the world's oldest profession and introducing the one measure that would crack down hard on it, once and for all: criminalising the clients.