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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A program for first-time johns lets offenders off the hook in exchange for their attendance at a daylong session taught by ex-hookers.
Oct 17, 2000 | When she spoke as a prostitute, Norma Hotaling was like a ventriloquist's dummy or a pet parrot. "They pay you to say certain things," she recalls in a phone interview, launching into examples of prompt and response. "'Do you like that?' 'Oh yes, I like that'; 'Am I the best?' 'You're the best'; 'Did you come?' 'I came so good'; 'Are you my bitch?' 'I'm your bitch'; 'Do you love me?' 'I love you.'"
Hotaling left the streets in 1989, and now she tells her story to rooms full of johns. To one such group, she described her old self as "homicidal and suicidal. I was waiting for one of you to take me out somewhere and act a little crazy or ask me to do something I didn't want to do or push my head a little bit harder down on your dick, and I was going to kill your ass. And I had a plan and I had weapons and I had a deep desire to do that, because I was so full of rage."
Her captive audience was attending "john school," the most celebrated branch of a diversion program Hotaling developed with the San Francisco Police Department and the district attorney. Under the First Offenders of Prostitution Program (FOPP), charges against first-time johns are dropped if they pay a $500 fee and attend a daylong educational session. During the seven-hour class, health department officials, police officers, the D.A.'s staff and former prostitutes detail the ways prostitution reverberates beyond the trick.
Most of the fee money goes to FOPP's parent organization, Standing Against Global Exploitation, which Hotaling founded to help women leave -- and recover from -- prostitution. Thus the johns fund job training, therapy and other services for former prostitutes, in effect paying for the damage they've done, Hotaling says. "It's a restorative justice program."
Eleven years ago, Hotaling was a homeless streetwalker who'd been addicted to heroin for 21 years. Then she turned herself in at the nearest precinct, insisting she be put in jail. She stayed there for six weeks and almost died during drug withdrawal. When she got out, she started doing AIDS outreach work, motivated to stay straight and useful by "rage at the system and love for my sisters."
"People talk about prostitution, for some reason, like survival of the fittest," she says. About "the girls with sexual abuse, the girls that are on the street, the girls who are drug addicted, society says, 'Oh well, they got eaten up; they weren't the strongest of our herd.' This is a group of women nobody cares about." In 1993, Hotaling founded SAGE, which now has 22 full-time staffers and 30 therapists who donate their services. Of the full-timers, 18 are former prostitutes.
New York filmmaker Bill Shebar is making a short documentary about SAGE, and he showed me his footage of Hotaling and two other former prostitutes speaking to rows of men at john school. "Sue" says calmly from the podium, "I have duct-taped and pistol-whipped and robbed people and left 'em to die -- because you get to a point where you get tired of being abused and you want to be the abuser."
