Buyers of sex must be held accountable

Boston Police pick up around 10 women or girls for every one man, for a transaction as illegal for him as it is for her. But if she has had 10 buyers in a night, that means 10 men should be arrested for every one woman or girl, so the number should actually be 100 males to one female.

Women and girls selling their bodies almost never do so freely. Poverty, abuse, and a chaotic upbringing create a context where they can’t even begin to make a rational choice. The average age in which a female in the United States enters prostitution is 13. If a girl is sold to 10 men a night, six nights a week, she’s statutorily raped 15,000 times by her 18th birthday, when she suddenly “consents.’’ A buyer may say he has never purchased a child, but how would he know?

Our foundation, Hunt Alternatives Fund, recently funded a study on the commercial sex industry in Boston. We interviewed more than 200 men - both buyers and non-buyers - on their attitudes about prostitution. Two-thirds of both groups recognize that most prostituted women are lured, tricked, or trafficked into “the life.’’ Paying for sex, they know, is callous (of course, it’s also often violent and sometimes deadly). Still, most johns repress empathy toward those they are buying. In addition, since most buyers are functioning members of society (with wives and children), they have to live with their secret and many feel badly about it. Fifty-four percent used negative words (“dirty,’’ “depressed’’) to describe how they feel after purchasing sex, compared with 36 percent before. Counterintuitively, men’s self-esteem decreases as they insist on self-gratification.