Who are the 264 men arrested in the Florida day spa prostitution crackdown?
Demand Abolition’s report on “Who Buys Sex?” and Founder and Chair Swanee Hunt are featured in a new article in USA Today:
Swanee Hunt, a former U. S. ambassador to Austria and founder of Demand Abolition, a Washington, D.C. group that works with survivors of prostitution, said while it’s true most men don’t buy sex, “one out of five men you know do.”
“The demographics basically match the demographics of a community that they come from,” Hunt said. “With one exception and it’s … men who are the highest frequency buyers; they call themselves ‘hobbyists,’ which is telling, and it’s a sliver.”
A survey study, “Who Buys Sex?” released in November by Demand Abolition found that “most men have never paid for sex.”
The group partnered with the University of Portland to survey 8,201 adult men nationwide over two months beginning in December 2017 to learn more about sex buying habits.
Results show 6.2 percent of the men surveyed reported buying sex in the past year and 20.6 percent had done so at least once in their lifetime.
Other findings include:
- Demographic traits are poor predictors of sex buying: Race and sexual orientation have almost no profiling power.
- “High-frequency” buyers account for a disproportionately large share of the illegal sex trade, estimated at $5.7 billion in the United States
- “High-frequency” buyers are much more likely than other men to make $100,000 or more annually.”
- U.S. sex buyers spend more than $100 per transaction.
- Only about 6 percent of men who purchase sex illegally report ever having been arrested for it.
