Examining Sex Work from the Client's Perspective: Assessing Johns Using on-line Data

Abstract

Academic research on prostitution focuses on the prostitute, rather than the clients, who are called johns. This limits our understanding of the methods and reasons individuals solicit sex. However, johns increasingly use computer mediated communications to discuss sex work. Their comments provide insight into the attitudes and methods of johns. This qualitative study utilizes a sample of posts from active Web forums for johns in 10 U.S. cities. The findings indicate the importance of on-line discussions for johns to identify and solicit sex workers, as well as manage external risks. Implications for law enforcement and deviance research are also discussed.

The authors thank Joe Kuhns and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and assistance on previous drafts. This research was initially presented on September 21 at the 2006 Southern Criminal Justice Association in Charleston, South Carolina.

Notes

¹The Web addresses and names of the groups and users of all sites and forums used are not provided in this analysis in an effort to maintain some confidentiality for the johns' groups and forum users.

²The website selected for this research maintained an archive of posts for each city, although each forum had been operating for a different length of time. This made it impossible to use data from 2002, as some of the cities had no posts until 2004. Thus, posts from 2005 were used to ensure a consistent data point across all cities.