NCJ Number
182860
Date Published
October 1999
Length
79 pages
Annotation
This study attempts to profile the clients of street prostitutes and looks briefly at several programs to reduce violence against women.
Abstract
Prostitution clients as a group differed from men in general in meaningful ways. They were less likely to be married, more likely to have unhappy marriages, more likely to have numerous sexual partners, more likely to use pornography, more likely to have sexual partners of both sexes and more likely to express sexually liberal attitudes. In addition, regular users tended to be more different from other men than first time or occasional users and tended to begin their forays into prostitution earlier in life. Men arrested for prostitution did not tend to be less educated than American men in general and, if education is used as an indicator of social class, they did not overrepresent the lower classes. Additionally, although men who had served in the military were more likely to have visited prostitutes at some point in their lives, men who had served were not overrepresented among arrested clients. Overall, study results tend to bode well for efforts to reduce prostitution by focusing on clients. Though arrested men differed somewhat from other men, the differences were not extreme and there were no indications that the group represents a severely deviant and perhaps recalcitrant population. References, tables, figures, appendixes