Last call for sin

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Felicia Delgado is a sex-workers outreach specialist

and individual case manager for Revitalizing and Engaging Neighborhoods by Empowering Women (R.E.N.E.W.), a program administered by the Pawtucket Citizens Development Corporation (PCDC). R.E.N.E.W. provides a myriad of services that enable streetwalkers to exit the life, such as facilitating detox programs, jobs, housing and counseling. Delgado is omnipresent in Pawtucket’s Barton Street neighborhood, an area frequently mentioned on the Johns’ forum.

Solicitation is about a man expressing how he wants to be satisfied without having to look at the woman’s face again, says Delgado, who prostituted for two years to support a crack habit. “Maybe their girlfriend or wife doesn’t do it the way they want to. They get addicted,” she says. “There’s a thrill to the risk of picking up a prostitute, an adrenaline rush to doing it in a car or a back alley. It’s about freedom.”

Sullivan, who is divorced, confesses a taste for the “sluttishness” of sex with a stranger because “there is no romance, no real foreplay, just pure carnal pleasure.” When single, he spends about $3,500 a year on sex workers. “It is money well spent. I have thus avoided sexually harassing good platonic friends, colleagues and strangers,” he says. “I am free to develop
relationships without having the pressure to seek sex as a primary goal. I am also free to leave sex workers whenever I want, without having to spend half my assets on them and their lawyers.”

As Sullivan drives away from a date, a prostitute fades in his rearview mirror. He goes home, showers and taps a review of the encounter. When Delgado looks backward, she gets angry. Angry about the years she wasted on the streets — time that could have been spent in school and with her four kids, of whom she lost custody. She thinks about the taunts they ignored, the whispers they pretended not to hear.

While Delgado circles Barton Street in a gray Elantra emblazoned with It takes a community to transform a life, the forty-two-year-old reminds herself how far she’s come: the speaking engagements, PBS appearances, the prison class she teaches, the numerous boards she serves on. But prostitution stains. “You never can wash it off, and when you close your eyes you remember some of the acts,” she says. “You remember the despair, you remember the filth and, on top of that, you remember getting raped in the middle of prostitution.” Delgado is whispering now, shaking her head in slow motion. “Getting raped in the middle of prostitution.”

Some mornings she looks in the mirror and shame stares back. But when the Barton Street women meet Delgado, they see someone who looked like them. A woman who fought back after she was beat up by the streets. An ex-prostitute reunited with her children, earning a college degree, holding a steady job. They see hope.

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None of them acted like abused slaves when they and I were being happily ended. — Cruiser

Prostitution behind closed doors is not illegal in Rhode Island. Police can arrest a worker for giving a massage without a license, but they can’t bust her or the customer for a sexual transaction. According to the Loitering for Indecent Purposes statute of the Rhode Island General Assembly, “It shall be unlawful for any person to stand or wander in or near any public highway or street, or any public or private place, and attempt to engage passersby in conversation, or stop or attempt to stop motor vehicles, for the purpose of prostitution or other indecent act, or to patronize, induce or otherwise secure a person to commit any indecent act.”

The legislation was originally drafted to address prostitution at the street level, so only pimps, streetwalkers and the customers soliciting them as a passerby or from their cars can be charged. Singer and other Johns can evade the law by arranging indoor dates with streetwalkers or escorts; posters private message one another with women’s phone numbers. The offense is nebulous if a driver solicits from his car but there is no business talk or transaction until the couple is behind closed doors.
Last year, a bill that would have banned indoor prostitution was rejected by the Senate after criticism that it would pun-
ish the women, who — the Rhode Island ACLU objected — are already victims. Meanwhile, officials work to shutter the spas for massage license and building code violations.

Earlier this year, city officials presented revised legislative language that would make indoor prostitution illegal while addressing concerns of victim status. The proposal is pending General Assembly action.

Until then, Rhode Island remains an adult amusement park, an I-95 exit for New Englanders seduced by the wink of something illicit yet legit.

Providence has at least ten “spas” or massage parlors that operate as brothels and are scattered across the city. The workers are mostly South Korean women, rotated every couple of weeks among parlors along the East Coast. Streetwalkers bristle at the public’s perception that they are willing sex workers but massage parlor employees have been forced into the industry.

“Few women will enter prostitution if they have other choices,” says Donna Hughes, a women’s studies professor at the University of Rhode Island (URI) and an expert on sex trafficking (defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act). “So the women don’t make a choice, but there’s no debate that the Johns make a choice.” 

Prostitution is a hydra: sever one arm and it sprouts another. After a spa is shut down, it’s often business as usual by the next week; by logging onto a website, Johns know when the doors reopen. One monger growls that it’s greed, not altruism, behind anti-trafficking measures. He believes that prostitutes are detritus to be swept under the rug as officials roll out the red carpet for developers. “I hate the hypocrisy used to explain their busts,” he says. “Don’t give me any of this American Dream bullshit — they’re not going to do shit for these women after they get out of jail.

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I can’t understand how those cops could persecute the women. In my book, they are really bad men.  —Bestcustomer

It’s a seismic debate: Should officials concentrate on eradicating the supply or the demand? Choking the supply is a quick fix, but as Detective Wajda says, “If there were no Johns, the girls would be forced to get legitimate jobs.”

According to Lieutenant Thomas Verdi, head of Providence’s Narcotics and Organized crime unit, the department arrested thirty to forty Johns and 138 prostitutes last year. In 2005, they arrested fifty Johns and 165 prostitutes. If it’s an individual’s first offense, the crime of solicitation or prostitution is a misdemeanor punishable by up to $500 in fines and six months in jail, but a first-time offender is rarely jailed. Verdi notes a dramatic increase in the amount of indoor prostitution and escort services due to web advertising but says that his department concentrates on violent crime and doesn’t really monitor the sites.

In San Francisco’s First Offender Prostitution Program, first-timers can expunge the arrest by paying a $1,000 fine and
attending a day-long John school run mostly by ex-prostitutes. The initiative has become a worldwide paradigm. Of the 5,244 men completing the class between 1995 and 2005, only 217 have been rearrested for soliciting anywhere in California, for a recidivism rate of 4.14 percent. Rhode Island and national recidivism rates were unavailable; however, rates of re-arrest are generally low because getting caught in the act scares most men into abandoning the hobby or securing an escort instead.
Felicia Delgado is working with the Pawtucket police department to facilitate a similar John school that would involve
Barton Street neighbors. Her colleague Shandi Brown, a community organizer for PCDC’s Barton Street Neighborhood Revitalization Project, says that prostitution evicts residents or holds them hostage because parents keep their children indoors.

“Unlike the Johns — some people can’t afford a place in Westerly,” says Detective Wajda. “These residents and their kids should be able to walk down the street without some guy pulling up, asking ‘You wanna ride?’ or ‘How much?’ ”

Sullivan contends that no responsible parent would want their kids playing in those “slums” anyway, places frequented by drug dealers and their customers. “Maybe if the ‘community activists’ paint their houses, clean their yards, landscape their properties and walk around their neighborhoods,” he says, “the undesirable folks will move to other run-down areas and no ‘activism’ or legislation will be needed.”

He and many other Johns argue that prostitution is a consensual transaction between two adults that should be legalized. The men like to think they’re doing these destitute women a favor by keeping them in business, says Detective Wajda. “But if you really want to help, don’t make her have sex with you — just give her twenty bucks. Or when a woman tells you, ‘I’m hungry, I need $20 for some food,’ go buy her some food. The Johns know their money is going toward crack!”

Sullivan, a health researcher, says the problem is not his dollars but our state’s lack of affordable, available and effective drug and alcohol treatment resources.

Another monger concedes that while he may enable women with drug and alcohol problems, he is not forcing them to have sex.

Poverty is a pimp, says Delgado. Women who start prostituting to pay the bills often end up doing drugs to kill their minds during the act. She scoffs at the Johns’ consensual defense: “Am I consenting to have sex with you because I need money? Am I consenting because if I don’t have sex with you, I’ll get beat up when I go home? Am I consenting because if I don’t get this $20 for a heroin addiction my body will go into a seizure? Am I consenting because my kids don’t have nothing to eat? Am I consenting so I can get money to bring my people over here from Asia or Africa?”
“And,” Shandi Brown chimes in, “if someone is high, that’s not consent.”

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Simone has had a terrible life — her parents were junkies, her mother had her on the streets at thirteen. If you ever pick her up, go easy — she will do whatever you want for whatever you think is a fair price. — ConsumerReports

The Internet has changed everything, says Singer. He learned where to find prostitutes, how to approach one and the nu-ances of the law before his first solicitation. “The sites create a community that serves to legitimize their behavior because they think ‘It seems as if every other man is doing this, so I must not be wrong,’ or ‘Maybe I should try it as well,’ ” says URI professor Donna Hughes. “The forums enable men to prolong the experience and describe it in a way they prefer to see it and not as what actually happened to the women. Their descriptions have made me sick in the stomach…you can see their utter contempt for the women they buy. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be in the same room as men who have those kinds of attitudes toward women.”

Singer recently celebrated his twentieth anniversary and credits mongering with sustaining the marriage. “My hobby improves the relationship,” he says. “My wife isn’t as interested in sex anymore, so it takes the pressure off her. If I could be satisfied with just one woman I would stay with my wife, but I do this for the variety and frequency of the sex. When I was twenty-five, I didn’t have to go to prostitutes. I could meet girls and have flings. But now, women in their twenties don’t acknowledge I exist.” Besides, he adds, free sex is the most expensive kind.

Sullivan says that some of the women really do like him and vice-versa; on rare occasions, they really do like the sex. But many prostitutes brag about conning their tricks into thinking just that. “I hated every single one of the Johns,” says a former sex worker. “I was just an orifice to them. Prostitution took my soul.”

Johns have heard some of the prostitutes’ backstories of being raped by a stepfather or a brother. The vast majority of prostitutes report being sexually abused — primarily by a family member — between the ages of three and fourteen. Feminist author Andrea Dworkin calls incest “boot camp for prostitution.”

“My virginity was taken at six years old,” Delgado says, her voice dropping an octave. “That abuse continued until I was twelve. My self-esteem was gone. When a girl is molested, she thinks her body is a piece of property. A lot of women can say I been molested until they turned around and told their Uncle, ‘Now you got to pay me for it, I’m not gonna give it to you.’ From that comes the shame. If you’re a prostitute, you’re nobody. You’re never gonna be anybody.”


Singer decides to troll instead of battling the five o’clock commute. He hopes Carina is doing the Olneyville stroll as he cruises the cadaverous, plywood-windowed houses on Harris Avenue. He turns onto Valley Street, past Rising Sun Mills and Fidas Pollo Frito and Hot Wieners. No Carina. She’s an eclipse these days; he’s left three messages in two weeks, and guys on the forum haven’t seen her around lately. Singer circles Eagle Square, scanning Shaw’s parking lot. Nothing. As he pulls back onto Valley, toward 95 South by the mall, his cell phone bleats, flashing his wife’s number. He turns up his radio to drown the sound.