Bucktown residents reignite battle against prostitution

Bucktown is once again a battlefield in the struggle between gentrification and prostitution. A stylish, family-oriented community by day and deserted, commercial-sex destination by night, its residential streets continue to lead double lives.

Despite an aggressive and controversial initiative against the sex trade in 2002, the prostitutes are back and community frustration is mounting.

“They [the prostitutes] should not be over here making this community their bedroom,” resident Sandy Johnson said.

“I’m not a vigilante,” she said, torn between concern for her community and compassion for the women. “I just want them to have a little respect for this neighborhood. Just leave this neighborhood be.”

In 2002, residents of the Shakespeare District, which includes Bucktown, Wicker Park and Logan Square, launched a campaign against the sex trade. They participated in 4 a.m. marches with police escorts, called “positive loitering,” and called for felony upgrades for arrested prostitutes.

The district had the city’s highest rate of prostitution-related arrests that year. The women accounted for 90 percent of arrests, and customers only 10 percent.

“It was a perfect intersection of everything—of racism, of sexism, of just poor foresight in terms of a citywide strategy to address prostitution,” said Samir Goswami, director of policy and outreach for the Justice Project Against Sexual Harm.

Although prostitution has been a consistent problem in the 23 years Johnson has lived in Bucktown, she said, she has only recently become involved in community activism.

In January, Johnson joined a group of residents volunteering with Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy officers as court advocates. She now attends the court proceedings for prostitution and graffiti in her neighborhood.

“Because no one has been pushing the prostitution issue in this neighborhood for a couple of years, they [the police] have let it go to the back burner,” Johnson said. “If people don’t complain about it, then they move on to something else.”

Every police district has a CAPS Court Advocacy program. In the Shakespeare district, court advocates meet with CAPS officers once a month to go over current cases for prostitution, senior fraud, vandalism and other crimes. Sitting at the front of the courtrooms, they rise as the judge calls the cases that concern them.

“We don’t say anything,” Johnson said. By standing up, she said, the advocates hope to demonstrate to the judge and defendants their concern about the crime and its impact on their community.

A far cry from the furious night marches of 2002, the court advocates’ brand of activism signifies a shift in community thinking about prostitution. 

“They [the prostitutes] get arrested over and over again. Sometimes you’ll see the same name with three or four arrest dates,” said Joe Kopera, who has lived in the neighborhood for 47 years and been a court advocate for two. “Arresting them does not work.”

“They [the customers] are as guilty, if not more guilty,” Johnson said, echoing a rising trend in the strategy to end the sex trade in Chicago. “If there wasn’t a need for it, there wouldn’t be a supply. If there wasn’t the demand, there wouldn’t be a supply.”

Although there has been more attention to arresting customers in the past year, a double standard still exists, Mueller said. “It appears they’re trying to equalize it but the women are still arrested at higher rates,” she said. “There’s an absolute toleration of men’s behavior … They’re not being punished in the same way the women are.”

Policy advocates and service providers working with prostitutes say they understand communities’ frustration with the sex trade and its effects on their neighborhoods: late-night tricks in alleys behind darkened schools, used condoms tossed on manicured front lawns, customers cruising North Avenue for young women.

Yet,  they emphasize the importance of debunking myths about prostitutes and the realities of the sex trade.

A study released Wednesday by the DePaul College of Law and the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority reported that girls enter the sex trade in Chicago at an average age of 16, often already victims of abuse and poverty. The report examined the increasing levels of violence, drug addiction and isolation that trap women in prostitution and likened the situations of prostitutes to those of domestic-violence victims.

“They’re in this because of survival,” Mueller said. “They don’t have the same choices. They’re not on a level playing field.”

In 2006, the Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence analyzed current strategies to deal with prostitution and made recommendations for a more holistic approach to citywide solution to prostitution that includes community education, said Emily Muskovitz-Sweet, program director for the office. The city will be launching a pilot program based on these recommendations in the Chicago Lawn district later this year.

“We’d like to give people tools,” Muskovitz-Sweet said. “It’s easy to go after the women because they’re the most visible.”

“By addressing the demand, that’s really what’s going to impact the sex trade,” she said.

Residents like Sandy Johnson have come to some of the same conclusions, which advocates say they find encouraging.

“Men that feel women are consumables, I’m not sure that I value their other moral or ethical decisions,” Johnson said. “They aren’t the kinds of guys that I want to be hanging around with or that I want driving up and down my street.”

“If they think it’s alright to do that, to involve themselves in that kind of activity,” she said. “I’m not sure what they think is wrong.”