Re-Thinking Prostitution in Bryan

*Warning: Responsible, constructive discussion of mature content to follow*

Problems are bigger, more complicated, and more intractable than they seem. That seems to be a lesson that I am continually learning. Even in comfortable College Station, huge societal ills are right in among us.

This past summer, I did an internship that helped to launch an anti-sex trafficking initiative, and I did weeks of research on the connections between sex trafficking, prostitution, and pornography. It’s not a pretty picture.

One of the main lessons I took away was the knowledge that commercial sexual exploitation happens everywhere, in every major town, whenever a supply of desperate people meets a demand for commercial sex. So when I got back to Texas A&M, I wanted to find out what’s going on here in Bryan/College Station, in terms of prostitution and sex trafficking. For some reason, I somehow assumed that my summer’s experience would give me some knowledge that I could use to solve some gaping hole in current policy. The reality was far from being that clear-cut.

A quick search for “prostitution” and trafficking in local news outlets yielded multiple stories of police busts for prostitution, and a few for human trafficking. Just like everywhere else, it turns out that College Station has a craigslist section entitled “adult services”, a weak pseudonym for prostitution. I emailed several police officers from the Bryan and College Station Police Departments, asking for interviews and information, and got several quick responses. One officer on the Neighborhood Enforcement Team in the Bryan PD was particularly helpful. We arranged for a meeting.

As it turns out, prostitution in Bryan is a complex story of drugs, immigration, poverty, and a thousand other societal factors. Most prostituted women are impoverished, middle-aged souls addicted to crack cocaine, desperate for that next rock. As the Bryan police officers pointed out: “this is not Vegas”, and the prostitutes are not a pretty picture. Most of the “johns” (sex buyers) are Hispanic men, who are first or second generation immigrants. They may be far from wives and families, and prostitution in Mexico doesn’t carry the same cultural stigma that it does in the United States. The police do conduct occasional busts, but the women involved are already caught in the nasty cycle of poverty and addiction, and the simple instrument of law enforcement cannot bring transformation, restoration or healing.

Poverty and drugs are just the most salient features of a deeper, swirling web of issues. Prostitution is closely related to the break-down of the family, sexual stereotypes, police paradigms and methods, the history of drugs in the United States, immigration patterns, human trafficking, racial issues, cultural norms, and the huge demand for pornography in the United States and the world over.

Right now, I’m still digesting the huge amount of information that I just received about my own town. Eventually, I need to come to grips with the reality of what’s happening, formulate a transformative perspective, and think through some next steps.

For right now, I am just re-learning this valuable lesson: issues are always deeper than they seem.