Happy ending

Did you know that the police sometimes ask civilians to go undercover and have sex with masseuses to prove prostitution cases? It's allowed in Pennsylvania and several other states. I know a lot of guys who wouldn't mind having that job but most experts consider it unethical.

I found this snippet in an article about one such case:

Mary Anne Layden, a clinical psychologist with the University of Pennsylvania Health System ... said the debate over how prostitution investigations are conducted obscures a far more serious issue: the exploitation of women whose backgrounds, research shows, almost always include sexual and physical trauma.

Most prostitutes are forced into the lifestyle when they are little more than children and about 70 percent suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result -- a higher percentage than researchers have found among soldiers at war, she said.

Layden said the most effective way to stem prostitution and related crimes such as human trafficking is to ''flip'' the standard approach by treating prostitutes as victims -- giving them psychotherapy and job training instead of jail -- and targeting johns as criminals.

In Sweden, this approach was been credited with reducing prostitution by 50 percent within a decade. Conversely, Germany and Australia saw massive increases in prostitution after legalizing the practice, with increasing numbers of children forced into the lifestyle to meet the demand.

''You have to aim at the john,'' Layden said. ''Until we target the real source of the problem, the demand end, we're not going to make any headway.''

Sadly, I think this approach makes way too much sense to ever be used in the U.S., where most of the johns are middle class white guys and most of the prostitutes are poor and female and often not white.