В Портленде запущена программа «Школа для Джонсов»: покупатели секса могут избежать судимости после прохождения курса

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - It’s Saturday morning, and 20 men have filed into a classroom at the Portland Police Bureau’s training facility in Northeast Portland. All of them were arrested earlier this year for trying to buy sex. All of them have a choice in front of them: complete this eight-hour class, or take their chances with a criminal record. “Really, by the end of the day, you guys are going to be experts on this topic,” facilitator Nicholas Maier tells the group. “Unfortunately, we don’t get this education in school.” It’s formally called the Sex Buyers Accountability and Diversion Program. Everyone else just calls it John School. How it works The program functions much like a DUI or traffic diversion course. Participants need permission from the court to enroll, and they pay their own way. If they complete it, the charge against them disappears from their record. “Today is a class to hold men who have been arrested for purchasing sex accountable, while at the same time giving them an opportunity for diversion from their record,” said Justin Euteneier, who works with the EPIK Project, the nonprofit that facilitates the class in partnership with Portland police. “You cannot arrest your way out of the problem” EPIK Project didn’t start out working with police. Euteneier said the organization built its approach after being trained by law enforcement on how trafficking actually operates, and the goal from day one was singular: reduce demand. “We started off getting involved in this work by being trained by law enforcement for how trafficking actually works,” Euteneier said. “Our motivation was always, how can we start to reduce the demand in any way — just in any way, being wide open to reducing demand.” That focus on demand, he said, comes from a hard truth about the commercial sex trade. “At the end of the day, there are real human beings being traumatized multiple times every day through rape and violence, a lack of autonomy,” Euteneier said. “It wouldn’t exist if there was no demand for those people... You cannot arrest your way out of the problem.” He’s direct about who is responsible for creating that demand. “This is a men’s problem,” Euteneier said. “Men are the ones creating the demand for sexually exploitative material. And so why is this for men to solve? Because we’re the ones creating the problem.” He’s careful, though, not to frame that as an indictment of masculinity itself. “I want to be really careful — this is not a ‘men are toxic’ problem,” he said. “Our culture has produced a normalization of sex buying, a normalization of pornographic consumption... So it’s no surprise to me that we have a room full of men who have been arrested for buying sex.” Facing the reality, not the fantasy Ask Euteneier what part of the eight-hour day matters most, and he doesn’t point to a single lesson. He points to balance. “This is going to be a place that is going to balance nonjudgmental with straight talk,” Euteneier said. “We are going to balance hearing the stories of survivors without shame... but really focusing on: why were you buying sex?” That question — why — is the engine of the entire day, more than any statistic about trafficking. “I doubt that any of these guys will stop buying sex because they became aware of how sex trafficking works,” Euteneier said. “I wish that good information was enough, but it rarely is. It’s usually when you connect them to their personal story of why they were buying sex that they’re willing to consider a different pathway.” The most powerful module of the day, is when participants sit across from women who survived the sex trade themselves. Mary McAbe’s story Mary McAbe has told her story to dozens of rooms full of men like this one. She grew up in what she calls familial trafficking. “I tell my story because I come from familial trafficking,” said McAbe who was trafficked. “My parents were bikers and they had a shop on Sandy Avenue, which is the oldest blade around. That’s where the girls walk.” She was trafficked for decades, both in Portland and in states across the western half of the country. It wasn’t until a human trafficker abandoned her when she found out that she was pregnant that she finally got out. She says it wasn’t easy. She worked at a gas station making $12 an hour, trying to build a life that looked nothing like the one she’d known. “It was not fun,” McAbe said who was used to making $200 an hour when she was selling herself for sex. “I was like, how are we ever supposed to get by?” Today, McAbe is the executive director of Brave Souls, a nonprofit she co-founded that works with survivors of human trafficking and with people navigating the court system with schizophrenia — a cause personal to her, since her brother lives with the disorder. Telling her story to rooms full of men who bought sex is, by her own admission, still hard. “I would say it’s taken a lot of grace and a lot of compassion and a lot of therapy,” McAbe said. “I think I did therapy three days a week for about two years straight.” But she keeps doing it, she said, because of what it can plant. “I think that when they learn about purchasing sex, they only hear the exciting part — the release part, the thing that their wife won’t do,” McAbe said. “I think when they hear our side of it, and how we got into it, it’s more impactful, or traumatizing, probably. And it sticks with them, that seed. And maybe when they go out to purchase next time, they’ll remember my story — and maybe not, you know, take off that condom, or not pick up that girl.” The legal reality Participants also hear from police officers in Portland’s Human Trafficking Unit, who explain some of violent realities of what happens when a “date” goes wrong. And a prosecutor lays out, in plain terms, exactly what these men are risking if they’re caught again. “It’s a crime — sexual solicitation,” said Assistant District Attorney Aileen Santoyo. “If a person pays, offers, or agrees to pay a fee to engage in conduct for sexual contact — a date doesn’t actually have to occur. There has to be an agreement to have sex, or sexual contact, of any sort.” Santoyo also walks the room through Oregon’s sentencing structure for repeat offenses and how prior convictions escalate consequences — including the possibility of sex offender classification on a second conviction. “It’s pretty heavy stuff” Later in the day, the men break into small, moderated groups to talk — man to man — about what actually brought them into that classroom. They sit in circles, facing each other, and are prompted to engage, if they don’t the facilitators say they may not get credit for the class at all. FOX 12 spoke with one participant on the condition of anonymity for him to share his story freely. He was arrested earlier in the year on 82nd Avenue, moments after a woman working the street got into his car. “Nothing happened,” he said. “She got in the car and [police] pulled us over right away. In a way, I’m very thankful the cop did pull us that fast, because I could have gone down a very dark road — something that could have been addictive. As I learned in the program today, it could be very addictive. Once you do it once, you tell yourself, ‘I’m never gonna do that again.’ And then it happens again.” He said he struggles with depression and described the moment as a setback, not a pattern — though he acknowledged how easily it could have become one. “It wasn’t because of the sex. It was because of loneliness,” he said. Sitting through the day’s presentations and survivor testimony, he said, hit him harder than he expected. “It’s pretty heavy stuff,” he said. “You walk in here knowing that prostitution is illegal, but you didn’t know how dangerous it really was — all the details about it. When you hear these things, it really strikes a chord in your heart.” Asked directly about the odds he’d ever try to buy sex again, he didn’t hesitate. “Zero percent,” he said. “Not even a thought anymore... All the fines will be paid off eventually. All that stuff — the guilt will probably be with me for decades. And because of that, there’s no way I’d ever do this again. It hurts too much.” He said he sees the diversion program itself as a genuine second chance, not a loophole. “I honestly feel like I’ve been given a new lease on life,” he said. “Not because I avoid jail time, but because of their approach — they really want to help these guys out and prevent this from happening again.” His message for anyone considering doing what he did: “Just stop. It’s not worth it,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re contributing to. It’s a much darker world than you think it is.” A model three decades in the making Portland’s class is part of a national movement that traces back to 1995, when the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and survivor-advocate Norma Hotaling launched the first comprehensive john school in the country: the First Offender Prostitution Program. It was built on a strategic shift in how cities approached prostitution — rather than continuing to focus enforcement on the women being arrested and cycled through the system, officials began targeting the buyers driving the demand. Within its first 12 years, San Francisco’s program reported that recidivism among participants fell from about 8% to under 5%, and by 2012 similar programs — around 58 of them — had spread to cities across the country. Portland, notably, isn’t new to this idea, either. The current iteration of the program began in 2011. But other’s known as SEEP (Sexual Exploitation Education Project) and PPOP (Portland Prostitution Offender Program) date back the 1990s and 2000s respectively. Today’s version, run through the EPIK Project’s partnership with Portland police, reflects a newer generation of these programs — leaning heavily on survivor testimony and one-on-one accountability rather than lecture-style instruction alone. No hard numbers — yet Portland police and prosecutors told FOX 12 they don’t track official success-rate data on the local program. But both say, anecdotally, they’ve seen only a handful of participants re-arrested for the same offense since the class began. It’s not proof. But for the people running it, it’s a start. “Will all 20 men never buy sex or sexually exploit again? I have no way of knowing,” Euteneier said. “But I am not interested in punishing somebody for the sake of feeling good about myself. I am not interested in adding more shame in the world... It’s the best we can do to have them leave here with the best opportunity to decide what matters, who they want to be in the world.”