opinion

‘It lights up the brain like crack’: Why men buy sex

IndyStar columnist Tim Swarens spent a year investigating the commercial sex trade of children, a lucrative business where more than 1 million kids a year are abused. This is the fifth of 10 columns in the EXPLOITED series.

SEATTLE — The man in the red shirt is angry.

My question, which has triggered his anger, was about whether he and other men in a court-ordered program for sex buyers had considered whether at least some of the girls and women they purchased were victims of human trafficking.

“I’ve never had sex with anyone who didn’t want to be there,” Red Shirt says, his voice rising. “They’re whores. They wanted the money.”

Denial is a high wall to climb. One of the lies men who buy sex tell themselves is that the people they purchase are always willing participants. Most admit that trafficking does exist, but they also insist they’ve never been involved with it.

I move to the next question. Why do many online ads promote 19-year-old women for sale? (In the sex trade, the supposed 19-year-old who is supposedly working her way through college has become a cliche).

A professional in the tech sector speaks up. “Nineteen is the sweet spot,” he says. “If she’s advertised as 18, then there’s a risk that she might be underage. But 19 is still a teenager.”

The man who says this is in his late 40s. Later, I learn that he had been arrested for arranging to buy sex from an undercover officer posing as a 15-year-old girl.

Of course, pimps can’t openly advertise the real age of the 14-year-olds they groom, manipulate and coerce. They know police and prosecutors are watching. Instead, young victims often are marketed online on websites like Backpage with code words: Fresh, new, sweet.

Or as 19-year-olds who need help with tuition.

For most men who pay for what they tell themselves is barely legal sex, it’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell affair. She may be 19 as advertised. Or 25. Or 15. Just don’t shatter the fantasy with the truth.

“The whole business is built on lies,” the tech guy says.

How likely is that when a man in the United States purchases sex he is exploiting a victim of human trafficking? There’s no definitive answer. But a 2016 study of the sex trade in San Diego, Calif., found that slightly more than 50 percent of adults arrested for the first time for prostitution had at some point met the federal legal standard as trafficking victims. (Under federal law, anyone younger than 18 who is purchased for sex is considered a victim of human trafficking). And a 2016 national study of youth in the trade (ages 13 to 24) determined that 80 percent were currently or had been victims of sex trafficking.

Red Shirt has had time to take a breath. His insistence that he’d never purchased a trafficking victim has begun to waver. “You just don’t know,” he says. “You don’t know.”

Another brick in the wall of denial begins to fall.

“For a lot of the men it’s the chase. It’s the seduction. They’re dependent on the novelty of the next new thing. It lights up the brain like crack, meth or heroin.”

Carol Juergensen Sheets, certified sexual addictions therapist, Indianapolis

Two hours earlier, the men in Seattle had filed into the room one by one, most avoiding eye contact as they claimed a plastic chair. They’re here to sit for another night in a drab room, with beige walls and a concrete floor, because a court said they must.

The participants agreed to let me observe the class and to ask them questions if their names were not published.

► Am I a sex addict? These are the signs

Red Shirt, on the post side of 60, was the only man who approached me to introduce himself. Like his plaid shirt, he’s loud and rustic — the kind of man who makes his presence and his opinions known in bars and barbershops.

That night marked the sixth of an eight-session course, long past the ice-breaker stage, but for the first hour the men avoided going deep on the evening’s topic — shame and guilt.

Then it was Red Shirt’s turn to cite a time when he’d recently felt shame. “It was when I had to call my wife to tell her to come get me from jail,” he says. “The ride home was rough.”

The surface now breached, two other men recall the disgrace of telling their wives they’d been arrested for trying to buy sex. A fourth man, divorced and with a child, says he felt ashamed and afraid when he had to call his father from jail.

Minutes later, a young man fights back tears as he tells the group that he’d received a text from his girlfriend. She had dumped him.

► Exploited Part 1: Who buys sex with a child?

The course is the creation of Peter Qualliotine, co-founder and director of men’s accountability at the Organization for Prostitution Survivors. The first class met in 2015 after authorities in King County decided to fight sex trafficking by going after the buyers, rather than continuing to arrest people they rightly see as victims.

Most participants pay $900 to attend the course because of a court order. A few men sign up on the recommendation of a therapist or the insistence of a spouse.

Qualliotine’s message isn’t about shame. The point rather is to help the men think about the destructive attitudes they hold, to learn to express an emotion other than anger, and to understand that their unhealthy quest for sex has come at a devastating price. For themselves, yes. But also for the women and children they’ve exploited.

As much as men think about, and sometimes obsess over, the topic, most of us don’t talk about sex all that much, at least not in a group setting. Often the pathways to develop and maintain a healthy male sexuality are unspoken and assumed.

“I’m not anti-sex,” Qualliotine tells me with a smile. He’s heard that charge against himself before. But he’s seen the deep wounds that an unhealthy male sexuality inflicts on others. And he’s heard the lies men tell themselves to justify their behavior.

The most common excuse men give for buying sex is that they’re lonely. Even some trafficking survivors agree. “I feel like most of the men were lonely, and if they’re not lonely, they’re just evil,” a survivor, exploited when she was 15, told me.

Yet most of the men in the class are married, and numerous studies of sex buyers have found the same thing. The men may not be satisfied with a long-term relationship, but many of them are in one.

I asked the men in Seattle why, instead of risking arrest by buying sex, they didn’t have an affair. It might not be right, but it is legal. The first response floored me. “I didn’t want to hurt my marriage,” said a businessman, who first had commercial sex while on a business trip to Asia (“It was a gift. It was expected.”).

Red Shirt chimed in: “I love my wife.”

Yet, when I asked the men what they’d told their wives about their reasons for purchasing sex, it was Red Shirt who said: “I told her she stopped putting out eight years ago. I’m 60. I’m not ready to stop having sex.”

In other words, blame the wife.

Qualliotine began his career in Portland counseling victims of domestic violence. The work was his profession and passion because of personal experience — he’s a childhood survivor of domestic violence.

Early on, however, Qualliotine says he noticed a trend — several of his domestic violence clients were actually victims of sex trafficking. (A 2016 study in California reached a similar conclusion; researchers found that in San Diego County about 120 cases a year classified as domestic violence may actually involve sex trafficking).

So the focus of Qualliotine’s efforts shifted. More than 20 years ago, he launched his first “john school” to challenge men to take responsibility for their sexual behavior. At 24 hours of class time, and two one-on-one sessions with each man, his current course is a master’s level john school.

► Exploited Part 2: Shattering the Lolita fantasy

Most research indicates that such programs are effective in reducing demand; re-arrest rates for men who’ve completed john schools are low. But that can be misleading. Just as most drivers who go over the speed limit aren’t ticketed, most men who buy sex are never arrested. Those who do get caught may not pursue commercial sex again, or they simply may be more cautious about how and where they purchase it in the future.

“We have one shot with these men,” Qualliotine said.

“She said she was legal. But I doubt it. And I think that she wasn’t a willing participant. And I told her, you don’t have to do this. You can give my money back and I’ll leave. ‘Oh, I can’t do that. I have to do this.’ And so we had sex. I felt like crap. But then I just forgot about it. It was much easier to forget about it and not have to deal with it than to think that I just exploited this young Asian girl who was forced to do this.”

Study participant, “Former Buyers: Why and How They Stop,” by Dr. Joel Ziff, 2013.

More than 3,000 miles away from Qualliotine’s Seattle classroom, Dr. Joel Ziff, a psychologist and certified sexual addiction therapist supervisor, works with men who are running out of shots at redemption.

Many of the patients who visit Ziff’s Newton, Mass., practice have been successful in their careers and leaders in their communities. But their compulsion — to buying sex, pornography, voyeurism and other destructive sexual behaviors — has wrecked relationships, destroyed jobs, damaged their health and often left them wracked with guilt.

► Exploited Part 3: The sex trafficking victim who needs training wheels

Prostitution and pornography aren’t new, of course. But many of the therapists and law enforcement personnel I interviewed for this project say the digital world has intensified sexual problems. “We call the internet the crack cocaine of sex addiction,” Ziff said. “You can find absolutely anything online.”

That anything includes images of teens engaged in almost every form of sex imaginable. Search the phrase “teen sex” and the first web pages that show up promise “casual teen sex,” “hot sex with young girls,” “young girls xxx videos for free” and “impossibly beautiful teen girls with tight bodies.” It all appears to be legal; the pornographers insist the actors are 18 or older. (We’ll explore the horrific business of cyber-trafficking of children later in this series).

But easy access to such videos and photos reinforces the arousal that some much older men feel around teenagers. For such men, even mainstream advertising and entertainment, with young models and actors in sexually charged roles, can stir strong attraction.

Ziff said a person’s arousal template shapes who we are attracted to sexually. For some, the template is fixed on an early sexual experience, locking in a model of beauty and attraction that hasn’t progressed past the high school or even middle-school years.

So when a teen-fixated man finds an escort ad for that elusive 19-year-old who needs help to pay for school, the temptation can be overwhelming. For other men, it’s the false promise of better sex — the marketing hype of “beautiful teen girls with tight bodies” — that pushes them to buy young.

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Each year in the United States, about 10,000 kids trapped inside the sex trade (ages 13 to 17) pay a devastating price to feed those fantasies.

Yet there is hope. Men can and do change their behavior.

In 2013, Ziff published a study of a small group of former high-frequency buyers who had stopped paying for sex, most after an arrest or other crisis had exposed their secrets.

“This addiction more than others is isolating,” Ziff says. But the men in the study, most of whom had purchased sex more than 200 times in their lives, were able to change their behavior by breaking through that isolation. They’ve built a long-term relationship with a therapist or regularly attend 12 Step meetings for sex addicts. They no longer settle for the pain and shame that haunted them in the past.

Most of all, they stopped believing the lies. The lies the sex trade sold them. The lies they told themselves.

“We live our whole lives thinking that we’re right,” a man in Peter Qualliotine’s class said. “And then you realize, you might be wrong.”

Next: These are the ‘choices’ that lead girls into sex work

The EXPLOITED project was made possible by a grant from the Society of Professional Journalists. Google, Eli Lilly and Co., and Indiana Wesleyan University provided additional support for public awareness efforts related to this project.

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @tswarens. Friend him on Facebook at Tim Swarens.