The John School

Our team needed to be in two places at once yesterday; we had a few interviews scheduled in Los Angeles and we also had an invite to sit in on a "john school" in San Francisco.

By the votes of the majority, I was chosen to take a 9 pm flight out of LA on Friday to attend the school. I wasn't looking forward to a late night adventure on San Francisco's public transportation but it ended up not being as bad as I thought. The train (BART) was full of European travelers and our complete ignorance of San Francisco bonded us.

The john school was incredible. San Francisco has a re-education program for johns who are first time offenders. (If you don't know, the term "john" refers to the clients of prostitutes). Instead of slapping the johns with a bunch of punishments the idea is to educate them on the entire scope of prostitution-- how it feeds and funds exploitation and how it adds to the greater world of human trafficking.

The program is a great success. The number of guys going back out there doing the same thing drops dramatically.

It was a little weird for me to walk into a room full of johns. There were 21 of them there yesterday; some were Caucasian, some African-American, some Hispanic and some were foreigners. Some had been caught in bars lured by an undercover cop, some inferred that they were victims of their own sexual addictions and some had prowled the internet looking for a good time. They were old and young and every age in between.

What they all had in common was that they had been caught and were charged with agreeing to, or actually engaging in sexual acts in exchange for compensation or money.

At the beginning of the day the atmosphere in the room was a mix of shame and attitude. Their dark, dirty secret had been revealed to the world, exposed to the light of day and it made them uncomfortable. And yet, wasn't it their right to go to a prostitute? After all, she was out there asking for it. Wasn't this kind of behavior a sign of being a true man?

What surprised me the most was how the guys were treated. They weren't condemned and they weren't judged. Their actions obviously were but not who they were as people. There was a genuine atmosphere of helpfulness and a true desire to help these guys understand the damage their actions cause. The guys responded to that openness and really listened.

By the end of the day their attitude has shifted dramatically. There was much more of an understanding of the implications of their actions, for themselves (the dangers of STD’s and HIV, what happens if they are caught again) and for the women (exploitation, violence, depression). Will some of these guys go back out there and seek out prostitutes? No doubt they will. Will some never again engage in that sort of activity? Definitely. And that’s pretty awesome.

Stopping human trafficking by stopping demand is a pretty great way to go about it.

--Ro