We hear a lot about human trafficking and sex slavery in poor, far-away countries. Yet this problem is occurring a lot closer to home.
The 2012 feature film Eden is based on the story of Chong Kim, a Korean-American girl who was abducted and forced into prostitution in warehouses in the U.S. Recently, CTV’s W5 program aired a documentary showing how the York Regional Police Drugs and Vice Unit is trying to shut down pimps in that part of Canada.
Obviously, prostitutes and pimps stay in business because they have customers. Who are they and why do they choose to pay for sex? A fascinating new article in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology sheds some light on this subject.
Lead author Martin A. Monto of the University of Portland pored over a U.S. national survey to conclude that “only about 14 per cent of men across the U.S. have ever paid for sex in their lives and only one per cent of those men had done so in the previous year.” The authors note that the difference between the lifetime and “last year” percentages may have something to do with men serving in the military where “paying for sex may be more a product of situation and availability than behaviour based on the peculiar qualities of the individual himself.”
In fact, researchers found that men who use prostitutes don’t stand out as having any “peculiar qualities.” They are “only slightly less likely to be married, slightly more likely to be working full-time, slightly more sexually liberal” than those who have never paid for sex.
The scientists did discover a “small group of highly active customers” who tend to be “married white men, (who) earn over $120,000 annually, have graduate degrees, and are more sexually liberal than any of the other groups in the study.”
Co-author Christine Milrod notes that these “privileged men are generally not marginalized or threatened due to their sexual behaviour.” They also seem to be making good use of technology such as “prostitute review websites.” Who knew that there’s an app for that?
The researchers shed some fascinating light on the generally affluent and well-educated Johns they call “Internet hobbyists.” They are “part of an online community that endorses indoor prostitution as a legitimate form of sexual activity and enforces some boundaries about appropriate customer behaviour from a moral standpoint.” They also generally believe “that prostitutes enjoy their work” and “their acceptance of prostitutes as potential marriage partners speak to a level of engagement that goes beyond satiating sexual desires.”
To read the full article by EVDS' Dr. Tom Keenan in the Calgary Herald, click here.
Image courtesy of Andreas Rentz , Getty Images.