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Teaching Equality? “John Schools,” Gender, and Institutional Reform

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Polity

Abstract

Employing feminist institutionalism as an analytic framework, this article considers the First Offender Prostitution Program in San Francisco. The program allows men arrested for their first prostitution offense to pay a fine and to attend a day of classes about the consequences of participation in prostitution, in lieu of prosecution. Other jurisdictions in the United States and internationally have replicated First Offender, and supporters (particularly feminists) praise it for promoting gender equality. However, the findings in this article suggest that First Offender both replicates and contests competing and often contradictory gender ideologies and patterns of power. Specifically, the program’s enrollment practices and most of its content imply that men who purchase sexual services are rational sexual agents, while women who sell these services are (mainly) victims. Presentations by former sex workers complicate the program’s lessons about gender by demonstrating women’s capacity to exercise agency in sex work. The program thus illustrates the contested and contradictory ideological dynamics of gender-sensitive institutional reforms.

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Notes

  1. Annette Jolin, “On the Backs of Working Prostitutes: Feminist Theory and Prostitution Policy,” Crime and Delinquency 40 (1994): 69–83.

  2. Lenore Kuo, Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice through a Gendered Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

  3. FBI, “Crime in the United States Uniform Crime Reports: Table 33—Ten-Year Arrest Trends by Sex (2001–2010).” Washington DC: United States Department of Justice.

  4. See work by Valerie Jenness, “From Sex as Sin to Sex as Work: COYOTE and the Reorganization of Prostitution as a Social Problem,” Social Problems 3 (1990): 403–20; Making It Work: The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in Perspective (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1993).

  5. Paul Abramson, Steven Pinkerton, and Mark Huppin, Sexual Rights in America (New York & London: New York University Press, 2003).

  6. Kathryn Abrams, “Sex Wars Redux: Agency and Coercion in Feminist Legal Theory,” Columbia Law Review 95 (1995): 304–76.

  7. Elzbieta Gozdziak and Elizabeth Collett, “Research on Human Trafficking in North America: A Review of the Literature,” International Migration 43 (2005): 99–128; Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition,” The National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17 (Fall 2005): 64–87.

  8. Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” Signs 36 (2010):45–71.

  9. See, for examples, Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Catherine Mackinnon, “Not a Moral Issue,” in Pornography, Sex Work and Hate Speech, ed. Anita Morse and Karen Maschke (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983), 2–32; Catherine Mackinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  10. The following articles discuss the relationship between gentrification and prostitution: Phil Hubbard, “Revenge and Injustice in the Neoliberal City: Uncovering Masculinist Agendas,” Antipode 36 (2004): 665–86; Phil Hubbard, Roger Mathews, and Jane Scoular, “Regulating Sex Work in the EU: Prostitute Women and the New Spaces of Exclusion,” Gender, Place and Culture 15 (April 2008): 137–52.

  11. See, for example, Priscilla Alexander, “Sex Work and Health: A Question of Safety in the Workplace,” Journal of American Medical Women’s Association 53 (Spring 1998): 77–82.

  12. Jacqueline Lewis, “Shifting the Focus: Restorative Justice and Sex Work,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Crime Justice/RCC (June 2010): 285–301; Stephanie Wahab, “Evaluating the Usefulness of a Prostitution Diversion Program,” Qualitative Social Work 5 (2006): 67–92.

  13. Pamela Preston and Alan D. Brown-Hart, “John Court: Comparison of Characteristics, Sexual Behavior and Sexual Attitudes of Clients of Prostitutes,” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 3 (2005): 49–68; Lewis, “Shifting the Focus,” 289–90.

  14. Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act 2005, HR 972, 4 January 2005, 109–10.

  15. See Michael Shively, Sarah Jalbert, Ryan Kling, William Rhodes, Peter Finn, Chris Flygare, Laura Tierney, Dana Hunt, David Squires, Christina Dyous, and Kristin Wheeler, “Final Report on the Evaluation of the First Offender Prostitution Program.” Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates Inc, 2008. They note at page 95 that these locations include Cincinnati, OH; Fife, Lakehead, Pierce City, and Tacoma, WA; Fresno, CA; Kansas City, MO; Nashville, TN; Orange County, NY; Phoenix, AZ; and Pittsburgh, PA.

  16. On diversion programs in Salt Lake City, see Stephanie Wahab, “Evaluating the Usefulness of a Prostitution Diversion Program,” Qualitative Social Work 5 (2006): 67–92. For discussions of male accountability, see Lewis, “Shifting the Focus,” 290; and Martin Monto, “Female Prostitution, Customers and Violence,” Violence Against Women 10 (2004): 160–68. For a discussion of opposition to john schools, see Rosie Campbell and Merl Storr, “Challenging the Kerb Crawler Rehabilitation Programme,” Feminist Review 67 (Spring 2001): 94–108.

  17. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (2006): 675.

  18. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 2 (2004): 725–40.

  19. See the following for a broad discussion of new institutionalism: Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” The American Political Science Review 3 (1984): 734–49.

  20. As Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor note, new institutionalism is roughly divided into rational choice, historical, sociological, and discursive “sub-schools” of thought that “reveal different and genuine dimensions of human behavior and of the effects institutions can have on behavior.” Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 4 (1996): 936–57. For further discussion of these schools, see also Vivien Schmidt, “Institutionalism and the State,” in The State: Theories and Issues, ed. Colin Hay, Michael Lister, and David Marsh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 98–117.

  21. Susan Franceschet, “Gendered Institutions and Women’s Substantive Representation: Female Legislators in Argentina and Chile,” in Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism, ed. Mona Lena Krook and Fiona Mackay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 58–79; Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, “Stepsisters: Feminist Movement Activism in Different Institutional Spaces,” in The Social Movement Society, ed. David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 195–216.

  22. Eileen McDonagh, “It Takes a State: A Policy Feedback Model of Women’s Political Representation,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010): 69–92; Suzanne Mettler, “Dividing Social Citizenship by Gender: The Implementation of Unemployment Insurance and Aid to Dependent Children, 1935–1950,” Studies in American Political Development 12 (1998): 303–42, and “States’ Rights, Women’s Obligations: Contemporary Welfare Reform in Historical Perspective,” Women & Politics 21 (2000): 1–32.

  23. Fiona Mackay, Meryl Kenny, and Louise Chappell, “New Institutionalism through a Gender Lens: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism?,” International Political Science Review 5 (2010): 573–88.

  24. Ibid., 580.

  25. Ibid., 578–79. For exceptions, see Kathleen Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1994): 364–404. On Path Dependence, see Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, “Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science,” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Helen Milner and Ira Katznelson (New York: WW Norton, 2002), 693–721.

  26. Meryl Kenny and Fiona Mackay, “Already Doin’ It For Ourselves? Skeptical Notes on Feminism and Institutionalism,” Politics and Gender 5 (2009): 271–80, at 276.

  27. According to Georgia Duerst-Lahti, these beliefs can be characterized as “feminalism,” an ideology that generally prefers that which is associated with human females, and suggests female agency for self-definition; and “masculinism,” which generally prefers that which is associated with human males, usually giving advantages to them. See Georgia Duerst Lahti, “Gender Ideology: Masculinism and Feminalism,” in Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology, ed. Gary Goertz and Amy Mazur, Chapter 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 159–92.

  28. Ibid., 192.

  29. Mary Hawkesworth, “Engendering Political Science: An Immodest Proposal,” Politics and Gender 1 (March 2005): 141–56.

  30. Kenny and Mackay, “Already Doin’ It,” 276.

  31. Louise Chappell, “Nested Newness and Institutional Innovation: Expanding Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court,” in Gender, Politics and Institutions, ed. Krook and Mackay, 163–80.

  32. Fiona Mackay, “Institutionalizing ‘New Politics’ in Post Devolution Scotland: ‘Nested Newness’ and the Gendered Limits of Change.” Paper presented at the European Conference on Politics and Gender, Queen’s University, Belfast, 2009.

  33. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, “Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science,” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Milner and Katznelson, 693–721.

  34. Chappell, “Nested Newness,” 165; See also Kathleen Ann Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  35. Fiona Mackay, “Institutionalizing ‘New Politics’ in Post Devolution Scotland,” 7.

  36. Ibid., 4.

  37. Ibid.; see also Chappell, “Nested Newness,” 166.

  38. Chappell, “Nested Newness,” 165; Mackay, “Institutionalizing,” 7.

  39. Mackay, “Institutionalizing,” 10.

  40. Chappell, “Nested Newness,”179; Fiona Mackay, Surya Monro, and Georgina Waylen, “The Feminist Potential of Sociological Institutionalis,” Politics & Gender 5 (2009): 253–62.

  41. See Michael Shively et al.’s Final Report; and Michael Shively, Kristina Kliorys, Kristin Wheeler, and Dana Hunt, “A National Overview of Prostitution and Sex Trafficking Demand Reduction Efforts, Final Report.” Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates, 2012.

  42. See Elizabeth Bernstein’s, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and “The Meaning of the Purchase: Desire, Demand and the Commerce of Sex,” Ethnography 2 (2001): 389–420. See also Michael Shively et al., Final Report.

  43. Anne Jennings, “The Victim as Criminal: A Consideration of Prostitution Law,” California Law Review 64 (September 1976): 1235–84. See also Barbara Meil-Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

  44. Jenness, Making It Work: The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in Perspective, 49–51.

  45. For discussions of this movement’s limitations, see the following: Lilian Mathieu, “The Emergence and Uncertain Outcomes of Prostitutes’ Social Movements,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10 (2003): 29–50; Ronald Weitzer, “Prostitutes Rights in the United States: The Failure of a Movement,” The Sociological Quarterly 32 (1991): 23–41; and Jackie West, “Prostitution: Collectives and the Politics of Regulation,” Gender, Work and Organization 7 (April 2000): 106–18.

  46. Hubbard, “Revenge and Injustice,” 667.

  47. For a discussion of these strategies, see Steve Herbert and Elizabeth Brown, “Conceptions of Space and Crime in the Punitive Neoliberal City,” Antipode 38 (2006): 755–77.

  48. Cited in Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 62.

  49. Erin McCormick, “Giving Green Light to Red Light District,” The Examiner (San Francisco) 5 December 1993, A1.

  50. “The San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution: Final Report,” submitted to the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco, 1996.

  51. I interviewed Norma Hotaling on May 29, 2006, and she passed away in December 2008 from pancreatic cancer.

  52. See SAGE’s website: http://www.sagesf.org.

  53. Michael Shively et al., Final Report, 47.

  54. Ibid., 11.

  55. San Francisco District Attorney’s Office Representative: Interview, 25 October, 2006.

  56. Michael Shively et al. discuss this in Chapter 3 of their Final Report. However, this is almost impossible to confirm, as those arrested may simply seek the services of sex workers in more discreet locations.

  57. Ibid., 93.

  58. The police officers requested that I not use their names. So, I will refer to them as Officers A, B, C, and D. The material in this quotation is from interviews with Officer A, 17 April 2009; Officer B, 10 October 2012.

  59. Interview, Officer B, 10 October 2012.

  60. Interview, Officer B, 15 July 2010.

  61. Interview, Officer C, 21 November 2012.

  62. MOU from 2002, 2006, and 2010 from the DA’s office specified a minimum of fourteen, eight, and eight operations per month, respectively. To see copies of these Memorandums, please contact the author or the SFDA’s office at 850 Bryant Street San Francisco, CA 94103; (415) 553–1754.

  63. Interview, Officer B, 21 November 2012.

  64. Ibid., see also Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 30.

  65. SAGE, Sexual Exploitation 101: Myths and Realities of Commerical Sexual Exploitation (San Francisco: SAGE Project, 2006).

  66. The following articles raise questions about third-party coercion into prostitution: Nick Pinto, “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study is Junk Science,” The Village Voice (March 2011): 23; Ronald Weitzer, “Flawed Theory and Method in Studies of Prostitution,” Violence Against Women 11 (2005): 1–16; and Ronald Weitzer, “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade,” Politics and Society 35 (2007): 447–75.

  67. SAGE, Sexual Exploitation 101, 6–10.

  68. Michael Shively et al., Final Report, 47.

  69. Ibid., 44.

  70. Michael Shively et al. in their Final Report made similar observations at page 53.

  71. Ibid., 47.

  72. Chappell, “Nested Newness,” 164.

  73. The MOUs I obtained from the DA’s office from 2002, 2006, and 2010 required fourteen, eight, and eight First Offender stings per month, respectively. See also Michael Shively et al., Final Report, 31–32, and the author’s email correspondence with Jackie Martinez, a First Offender program administrator (1 November 2012).

  74. See Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, Chapters 2 and 3; Michael Shively et al., Final Report, 33; Officer D, Interview, 24 July 2010.

  75. Interview, Officer B, 21 November 2012.

  76. Jason Winshell, “San Francisco Police Say Special Victims Unit to Investigate More Cases for Evidence of Human Trafficking,” San Francisco Public Press 18 October 2011, available at http://sfpublicpress.org/node/1101, (accessed November 1, 2012).

  77. Interview, Officer B, 21 November 2012.

  78. Mike Aldax, “San Francisco Police Crack Down on Polk Street Prostitution,” The San Francisco Examiner 18 April 2011.

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  1. Department of Political Science, John Jay College/City University of New York,

    Samantha Majic

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The author thanks the many representatives from the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the SAGE Project, and the San Francisco Police Department for generously giving their time for interviews, and for allowing her to visit the First Offender Program. She also thanks Ernie Zirakzadeh and the three anonymous reviewers at Polity, Dr. Monica Varsanyi at John Jay College/CUNY, and Dr. Michael Zarkin and her fellow panelists at the 2012 meeting of the Western Political Science Association for their very helpful comments. This research was made possible with a grant from the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY Research Award Program (Grant #60072–40 41).

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Majic, S. Teaching Equality? “John Schools,” Gender, and Institutional Reform. Polity 46, 5–30 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.37

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