Child Predator Crackdown: City Goes After Johns Who Have Sex With Kids
by Alison Soltau, of The Examiner staff
Originally published by The San Francisco Examiner, July 14, 2003
Men who have sex with child prostitutes in San Francisco will be prosecuted as sex offenders in a landmark attempt to halt The City's growing problem of youth exploitation.
Cops have arrested one alleged john and say there are more to come.
The City has always had laws on the books to prosecute men who solicit child sex workers, but in the past they were never enacted because the men were hard to trace, and the children reluctant to testify because they were under their pimp's spell, said Insp. Ken Stocker.
Now police are more doggedly hunting the johns and encouraging the girls to testify.
Stocker has charged one man with statutory rape, committing lewd and lascivious acts with minors and participating in an act of oral copulation for money.
Police tracked the alleged john, whom Stocker declined to name, during an investigation into alleged pimp Dominic Ruiz.
Stocker claims Ruiz, who is due to go on trial this month, was pimping a 14-year-old schoolgirl to clients in a succession of cheap hotels across The City.
When Ruiz was arrested for pimping and pandering, cops interviewed the young prostitute and was able to identify one of her clients, Stocker said.
The 40-something unmarried defendant was arrested Feb. 10 in the Richmond district and has posted bail until his trial.
Johns caught tangling with children face jail terms of up to eight years, said Marianne Barrett, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case.
"I would like to send a message that sex with minors is illegal and if adults of any sexual background, male or female, continue to have sex with minors and they are caught, our office will take a very serious look at prosecuting them," Barrett said.
Under the law, if a child is 15 or older, and the defendant is found to reasonably and with good faith believe they were the age of consent, a jury can acquit, Barrett said.
But if the child is younger than 15, a john's protestations that he thought the child was older are irrelevant to the court.
With the spotlight on them, johns are starting to feel guilty about taking advantage of pubescent kids, according to Norma Hotaling, director of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation).
Hotaling has been lobbying for police to target johns rather than prostitutes for more than 10 years.
After surveying more than 100 johns, Hotaling says The City's failure in the past to bust men paying for sex with teens was allowing the men to live in denial.
"What does a person tell themselves in order to justify having sex with a child?" she said. "They don't have to justify it. We were arresting the kid so there was no reason for them to even think about it."
In the past, all johns have had to worry about is the misdemeanor charge they may face for soliciting a prostitute, whatever her age.
Hotaling said the new perception of sex clients as predators was also allowing children swept up in a pimp's exploitative employ to see themselves not as criminals, but as victims.
She added that the johns she interviewed even suggested that she instigate a public awareness campaign of the legal dangers and moral wrongs of having sex with children.
The City's Taskforce to End the Exploitation of Women has asked the Board of Supervisors to approve a shelter for former child prostitutes and a 24-hour helpline for kids trying to escape the life.
