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Our room is filled with burly cops in baseball caps and T-shirts, badges hung around their necks, watching TV and joking around. The bedspread smells like old cigarettes and the air conditioner is acting up. Our first sting starts in an anonymous hotel room near a Chicago airport. But in this case, I observed women as sex workers and men as buyers, so that’s how I’ll describe it here. It’s important to note that all genders buy and sell sex, and trans people are often over-represented in the sex industry because of workplace discrimination elsewhere. I went along with Dart’s team on two stings: one in a hotel, one on the street. Cook county does johns stings year-round, but the national initiative happens a few times a year. 60% of the money collected from johns’ fines goes to support the Women’s Justice Program, the other 40% goes to juvenile justice programs.

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But since 2011, Sheriff Dart’s office has organized the “National Day of Johns Arrests,” now re-named “National Johns Suppression Initiative,” a series of stings coordinated with other jurisdictions over the course of several weeks, aimed at encouraging a permanent change in police practices.ĭart’s office now arrests just as many johns per year as sex workers, and with a radically different agenda- while clients are hit with a ticket and fine that can reach $1,300, sex workers are arrested and then offered counseling and job training through the Sheriff’s Women’s Justice Program, which is run by sex trafficking survivors. have focused their energy on arresting prostituted women- according to records from the Department of Justice, more than 43,000 women were arrested for prostitution-related offenses in 2010, compared to just over 19,000 men (this number includes johns, pimps, and male sex workers). Until recently, most jurisdictions in the U.S. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, led by Tom Dart, has been the driving force in a national push to make it harder for pimps to sell sex and johns to buy it. All of them were slapped with a citation and a fine for buying sex on Sheriff Tom Dart’s turf. Another expressed incredulity at his arrest, arguing that cops should be going after rapists and child molesters instead. One, a man so wide cops needed two pairs of handcuffs to arrest him, sat on the bedspread shaking his head slowly. Some sit motionless with their hands over their eyes. The men are all different races and ages, from all walks of life– the only thing they have in common is shock. How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex Watching guys get caught is like watching that fantasy get destroyed over and over.

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Sex stings aren’t glamorous-they’re grim windows into the loneliness and desperation that motivates some men to grasp at the sexual cornucopia they think they are owed. We thought it would be like an adrenaline-pumping episode of Law & Order SVU, but we were wrong. While Amnesty International members were considering whether to recommend decriminalizing sex work altogether, I was with a TIME video team on two buyer-focused sex stings in Cook County, Ill. But some human rights organizations, most recently Amnesty International, advocate for the decriminalization of all aspects of sex work, including buying sex. Some police and scholars say that focusing law enforcement attention on sex buyers reduces demand for prostitution, which strangles the sex industry and curbs human trafficking. No one had died, no national tragedy had occurred- they had just been caught trying to buy sex.Īcross the country, cops are implementing a strategy that has long been debated in Europe: targeting the men who buy sex while trying to help the women who sell it. But in a cigarette-scented hotel room near a Chicago airport, more than a dozen men come and go with wet cheeks and quivering lips. *Some names have been changed to protect the safety of the individuals involved.