Police Massaging

The local police in four municipalities in the Lower Mainland here made a high profile crack down on message parlors on Thursday. All the spokesmen were giddy in front of the camera and everyone is padding their own back in congratulation. Well, nothing happens in years and happiness reigns when it finally happens once. And then, of course, the parlors are open again today. It is easy to talk about how the police are powerless against the criminals but this is the case of the police not really dealing with the criminals. The whole thing is a publicity stunt, produced to make the police departments look good. We cannot really call it a crime-fighting event. If they are truly concerned about the well-beings of the women and the enforcement of the law as they claimed, the police would act more often and provide better year round support to the women working in those places. What is more effective is to not only try to control the supply side but also the demand side, i.e. prosecute the clients and publicize the prosecutions. It is easy to say that the pimps are the exploiters in the equation but so too are the johns. Without customers there would be no business. In this transaction, the buyer and the seller should have equal culpability. In ethical sense, the johns are far more culpable because the women were making a living or being forced into the business and the pimps were filling a market need, it is the johns who are the market need. They wanted the service and they will pay for it. The question for an honest society is not to ask why there are so many prostitutes but why there are so many buyers of sexual services. The crucial point here that for both ethical and law-enforcement purposes, controlling the client side is far more important.