Before setting off for the Crusades seven centuries ago, Louis IX of France ordered the kingdom's bordellos closed. Uprooted but unfazed, many French prostitutes proceeded to join the Crusaders, traipsing along to the Holy Land as camp followers. Modern rulers have not had much better luck. When the French government cracked down on prostitution three years ago, the ladies of the night took sanctuary in churches.
Other European countries have learned to live more or less equably with the oldest profession. But in such matters the New World is less tolerant and straightforward than the Old. Although prostitution is officially a crime, the U.S. supports an estimated half-million hookers, while trying to put them out of business with an incredible hodgepodge of laws. Both in letter and spirit the laws entangle the states in ambiguous moral and constitutional questions, often with confusing results.
Just this month, for instance, New York began to apply its new "anti-john" law, imposing stiffer penalties for prostitutes' clients (johns) who in the past usually got off with the equivalent of a traffic ticket. Early hauls have included a 69-year-old man from New Jersey, let off in deference to his age. Other offenders will not get off so lightly. For patronizing a prostitute under age 11, the term can run as high as seven years.
The anti-john law is only the latest effort by New York to cut off the most baneful aspect of the trade—traffic in minors —and to get prostitutes off the street. The city is still trying to enforce, with some success, the stiff, two-year-old antiloitering law (not coincidentally passed on the eve of the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City). Prostitution is somewhat less visible now. But the wording of the antiloitering law, which allows arrests for "repeated beckoning," is claimed to be unconstitutional. Once upheld by the New York State Court of Appeals, the law is being tested again by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Police trying to enforce it, at any rate, have swept up along with the hookers a 25-year-old Radcliffe graduate on the way home from the movies and a church worker counseling prostitutes. Meanwhile, pimps, the most noxious corner of the prostitution triangle, often go untouched. Convicting them is difficult because prostitutes are frequently afraid to testify against them. The Manhattan district attorney's office will use most of $200,000 it just received from the state for combating pimps to change the prostitutes' minds and lives with protection and "travel home" money.
Chicago has also been zeroing in on pimps this year. Last year the emphasis was on customers, who were picked up at the rate of 40 a night. That campaign has been taken up by local volunteers who have formed the Broadway Hookers Patrol, roaming Chicago's northeast side streets and shining flashlights in the faces of embarrassed johns and copying down their license plate numbers. Out in Joliet, Ill., the local paper hopes to cut down on the trade by printing the names of arrested johns. Included thus far on the Joliet list: a priest and a judge.