Prostitute patrons can't hide their faces anymore
Source: Associated Press
Prostitute patrons can't hide their faces anymore
LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press | Saturday, October 13, 2012 | Updated: Saturday, October 13, 2012 10:33am
Gone are the days of the nameless, faceless "john." Men who buy sex are now likely to end up with their faces splashed across the Internet or the morning newspaper.
A Maine tourist town shaken up by authorities' promises to reveal the identities of dozens of clients of a fitness instructor accused of prostitution is just the latest place to enlist public shaming as a preventive measure.
Fresno, Calif., sponsors a website called "Operation Reveal" that features mug shots of suspected johns, while Oklahoma City has the vigilante-style "JohnTV." In Arlington, Texas, a highway billboard declares "This could be you" under the picture of four suspects.
In Maine, the small-town scandal has literally put Kennebunk on the map — it's now part of a database tracking more than 870 municipalities that have launched initiatives targeting men who hire prostitutes.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/article/Prostitute-patrons-can-t-hide-their-faces-anymore-3945447.php
= new reply since forum marked as read
Why go after the real criminals when you can roundup these poor schleps, keep the jails full, and collect needed revenue from fines.
...Sure easier than keeping our streets safe from scary guys with guns & stuff. 
DAs and sherrifs in electable positions love doing this to show they're "tough on crime" (in a way sure to make the local news) just before standing for re-election. That goes double if, instead, it's a DA running for state AG or Congress. 
If they've been actually found guilty that's one thing,
but ruining someone's family and career because someone
"suspects" them of being a John.
Not ok. 
solves everything.
It's the 'Murican way!
One good slut shame deserves another, I say.
..."when they pry her from my cold dead fingers!"
Every few months, there's a high-profile bust of one or another local "massage parlor" in the area. Even when they publicize the arrests (which they inevitably do), I've never seen a single charge relating to underage "sex workers." In fact, the latest one I read about involved prostitutes in their late 50s and early 60s. 
Still, I can see that a reasonable response would be that mentioned above. If you want to do away with underage prostitutes, human trafficking and the like, it would make sense to legalize prostitution and regulate it, making sure that such abuses don't occur.
nice try though
you his protector now?
i know how he works that's all. i'm not getting goaded into a stupid argument. "hurling accusations" my, aren't we all worked up.
to which you replied: well, not with an answer.
So you then are in favor of legalizing prostitution?
Because you never actually said yes to that. You answered another question but left yourself some wiggle room to deny it later ("I never said prostitution should be legal!"
Why do you consider it so difficult to simply give a yes or no answer to a simple question?
you are trying to pick a fight about the status of prostitution. you are very obvious.
and you are having a little tantrum because i'm not playing your game. you asked a question, i answered it. you claimed it was a non answer and then asked a separate question ... not playing your game. i don't need "wiggle room" but you apparently need some twisting space, eh?
stomp your feet and demand answers all you like. you just prove my point, you are simply trying to start an argument ... oh, then your little buds will join in, then the alerts will start. uh huh, butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, would it?
not playing your game get over it.
to be "picking a fight" then perhaps you are in the wrong place.
and you are having a little tantrum because i'm not playing your game. you asked a question, i answered it. you claimed it was a non answer and then asked a separate question ... not playing your game. i don't need "wiggle room" but you apparently need some twisting space, eh?
A separate question. So you acknowledge the these are two different things?
stomp your feet and demand answers all you like. you just prove my point, you are simply trying to start an argument ... oh, then your little buds will join in, then the alerts will start. uh huh, butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, would it?
not playing your game get over it.
Simple questions are games to you?
You realize you could have saved yourself a lot of time and embarrassment by simply answering my question? Why do you think it is you find yourself unable to do so?
that adult prostitutes are a gateway to child prostitutes, are a deliberate attempt to make normal sexual urges out to be pathology.
Anti-porn, anti-prostitution, and fundamentalist groups all use the same basic argument: if we allow men to do X (look at porn, engage an adult in consensual sex, have sex at all) that is a gateway to further perversion, usually child molestation and rape.
There is no evidence to back it up. It's the same logic that says if we allow homosexuals to marry we'll have to let people have sex with animals because that's totally the same thing (
obviously). Take something normal and healthy and imply that this is a gateway to something awful.
That's how you get otherwise sensible people to support bans on things in the absence of any evidence of harm.
Pot doesn't kill but what if it leads to bath salts?
There's nothing wrong with porn but what if it leads to rape?
Prostitution might be ok but what if it leads to child sex-trafficking?
And so on.
Asking for proof is generally sidestepped by the counter reply of "oh so you're ok with those outcomes?!?!?!"
Not just that, but (estimating from this chart) that's one in every 54 people in the age group 5-29. Everybody below 29 would have either have a classmate who worked as a teen prostitute, or been one themselves.
Plus, I'll mention that the number of births in 2010 was 4 million. That means that 1 in 8 of those kids would end up in the sex industry. It can't possibly be that huge. Parents would be in total everywhere, and for good reason. That can't happen without everybody noticing.
UN recently estimated that there are 1.8 million "trafficked" children (read underage prostitutes) worldwide. That's about 1 in 39,000 people. How could the US have a half million of those? How could it be 1 in 600? We're not that different.
End of afterthought.
On the bottom of p-1 in my source, (Kristen Hinmen's Lost Boys article), it gives a mathematically valid estimate there are about 4,000 (3,946) underage prostitutes working in New York City. NYC has a population of 8.25 million. Now, given the population of NY, its cosmopolitan nature, its central role in US commerce, and its inflated cost-of-living, there are likely many more working there per 10k population than most cities. But, if you do the math, take 4,000 underage prostitutes in a population of 8.25 million and extrapolate to a population of 314 million, the number of underage prostitutes nationwide you come up with about 150,000. I would consider that a maximum number that could be working nationwide. The very highest it could be.
Now, I think NY has more per capita, but even if it's actually half that, 75,000 nationwide. If 10 percent of them have pimps, and let's say some pimps have more than one girl enslaved, that's still about 6,000-12,000. That's perfectly consistent with the arrest numbers given in your article.
(Now, 75,000 might sound like a low number, but let me tell you why it isn't: that's 225,000 people per decade, who either work as teen prostitutes, or have worked. It's higher than you think. It's something I'll write to VVM about. They might realize how high 75,000 is.)
However, let me tell you how your article really agrees with me. First, 2200 cases over 9 years comes out to 240 a year. Nationwide. In fact, look back at the Lost Boys article for this detail:
So, evil VVM article I cite uses the exact same source your Dallas news article cites. It seems the legal system has taken it up a notch since then, making about 600 more rescues between April 2011 and June 2012.
But add 79 more, (for the 10th year? I'll keep it in the 9th) and that comes out to about 248 per year. Nationwide. That's absolutely consistent with what was found in Atlanta: 31 underage cases in 4 years.
One thing I will admit: since 600 rescues were made in a 14 month period, it does suggest maybe law enforcement was under-performing before. Maybe.
The Dallas News link you give is almost devoid of any information. The reporter has written what the FBI has given him, apparently without any question at all. I also observe that journalists are usually diligent in saying "alleged" when there's an arrest but no conviction. That's been completely dispensed with in your source.
I follow the FBI link it gives, and it's almost, but not quite as bad. It reports that the Bureau with state and local authorities made a 72-hour sweep of truck stops, called Operation Cross Country.
From that, you can conclude this wasn't investigative operation. They simply went out and found out how many arrests they could make for soliciting (and presumably, only that, though truck stops also feature a lot of drugs) in three days. No word on how many convictions. They might all fall through. They might all be false arrests. It does say the operation recovered 79 underage prostitutes and arrested 100 pimps. And they wanted an impressive number. Than how likely are those arrests to stand up in court? (What do the mean by "recovered" underage prostitutes. Do they mean arrested them? Arrested an reunited with their families? If so, what's the count of those detained and not "recovered."
However, there's a fishy thing about those numbers: on a 72 hour sweep without any deep investigative work, how did they find 1.2 pimps per prostitute? Did 21 of the prostitutes have partnership pimps? Were the pimps soliciting agents more than the prostitutes? It would almost indicate that they arrested pimps without finding the enslaved prostitutes, which would seem to be something that would undercut the cases later.
Or, maybe some prostitutes were adults and weren't reported here at all because of that, but if so, how many of the pimps total were actually arrested for having adult prostitutes employed? Which raises the question, how many of those 73 under-age prostitutes actually had pimps?
Have any of these been verified in court? Are all of these arrests really for prostitution? Or were the kids there for drugs? Both websites are very scant of any detail here. Given some of the shenanigans in the drug war, I'm very distrustful that these arrests are all on the up-and-up.
Another suspicious thing, the linked FBI site gives the number of convictions for pimps at 1,019. Except this isn't the number of pimps. This is "pimps, madams, and their associates. I presume pimps and madams are the same thing practiced by different genders. But the "and their associates," part invalidates the entire stat for judging the number of pimps. Including them in here looks like a sneaky way of inflating the number arrested seemingly for pimping.
It's this kind of sloppy reporting that makes the whole thing difficult to judge.
Yes, I know about Village Voice Media. However, do you dispute any of propositions presented in the article? The researchers methods, or reputation, or any of the data? It would be one thing if VVM couldn't back it up, or self-financed some study and did it here, or did some other monkey business, but the main study, the Curtis-Dank study is reportedly federally funded.
On the face of it, the article is sound journalism (unlike something by Fox News.) Unless VVM is bare-face lying about what these researchers have found, your ad hominem attack doesn't invalidate the article. If VVM is simply falsifying sources, or these researchers are disreputable, or whatever, it's up to their opponents to vet this article, its facts or sources.
Does it occur to you that maybe the Village Voice behaves the way it does because their inquiry has found exactly the facts given in this article? If I were in their position and truly believe the information they've given in the Lost Boys article, and people were attacking me, I would dig my heels in, too.
Really, if you want them act differently, you should find out what's wrong with the research they've given, rather than launching another ad hominem attack at them.
For myself. I want to be right more than I want to keep the belief I have now. Talk me out of my position. Other people have in the past.
And I want to protect children, too. I just want to make sure that they're real children. It's an important point because measures taken to defend against fictitious crime do have real world consequences. Erring on the side of extreme caution is not good in this case. Some people are still serving sentences for the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria in the 80s and early 90s, for crimes that weren't even physically possible. Meanwhile, it didn't protect or punish crimes against one child.
......I just walked my mouse over to the Redbook-Fresno site and all of my "friends" are still there. Yeseree...all 500 of them, and even a few new ones, too. And ya know the most amazing part? There isn't one of them that doesn't in some way, remind me of Mary Magdalene, as taught to me in my school by the Good Sister WrainBash.
Viz:
