John school takes a bite out of prostitution
Every two months, Valentina visits about 30 men enrolled in San Francisco’s “john school” to tell them a sex story they don’t want to hear.
The men are part of the city’s First Offender Prostitution Program because they’ve been arrested for soliciting a prostitute, usually in the Mission or Tenderloin. If they agree to pay a $1,000 fee and spend a Saturday afternoon listening to sex-trafficking experts, neighborhood activists and doctors who subject them to photographs of venereal diseases, the district attorney’s office will drop the misdemeanor charge.
(snip)
“The punch line is, these programs work,” said Michael Shively, a criminologist at Abt Associates, a Massachusetts-based research firm and the primary author of the two-year study commissioned by the National Institute of Justice. “Some men are probably responding to the appeal of their own self interests, which in the class emphasizes the personal risk they face if they continue to involve themselves in prostitution. And some men may be responding to the information conveyed about the harm they are causing the women they hire, and to the communities where the prostitution takes place.”
The programs work? Then that is a punch line. This means that, if this article is telling the truth, there are some adult men in San Francisco who didn’t know that sexual promiscuity spreads certain diseases. This is something that most people learn by the 7th grade.
