I
Last July, Austria Andrews walked through the lobby of an Indianapolis hotel, holding a vanilla-frosted cupcake. Her braided hair was neatly twisted up, and she was dressed in a geometric-print wrap dress with some silver jewelry. Andrews looked like any other woman in the hotel that day: an unremarkable extra. If you saw her and thought anything at all, you would guess she was paying a birthday visit to a friend.
Up in a hotel room minutes later, Andrews was arrested on both criminal and civil charges for prostitution and fined up to $7,500, according to reports in the Indianapolis Star. The cupcake, her calling card, sat untouched on a nearby shelf. Andrews — fully clothed, arms crossed — watched on in muted outrage as patrolman Jeff Goodin — naked from the waist up — rifled through her purse.
Unfortunately for Austria Andrews, a transsexual escort in Indianapolis, Super Bowl XLVI is coming to the city’s Lucas Oil Stadium: that means open season has started on local prostitutes. On Super Bowl weekend, “there will be more prostitutes here than this city can handle,” the commander of the Indianapolis Municipal Police Department’s vice unit predicted. The sting that netted Andrews and four others that night was the IMPD’s “practice swing at escorts,” six months in advance of the game to prepare for the “flood of prostitutes” the city is expecting.
Indianapolis is cycling through a familiar pattern. Every year, in the months leading up to the Super Bowl, high-ranking officers in the host city issue ominous predictions of a massive surge in the numbers of the city’s prostitutes, and local police arrest, at most, a couple dozen women.
In 2011, Dallas Police Sgt. Louis Felini warned that between 50,000 to 100,000 prostitutes would descend on Cowboys Stadium during Super Bowl week. Apparently Felini assumed that every Super Bowl ticketholder would want to solicit a prostitute — and that prostitutes throughout North America would stream into the city to meet this presumed demand. Felini’s outrageous estimate was perfectly credible to the public that he had whipped into a frenzy: prostitution bans were proposed and rejected and billboards to deter solicitation were raised. “Dear John,” one sign read across the mug shots of arrested johns, “You never know. This could be you.” But on the weekend of the big game, police picked up about sixty adults on charges of prostitution; only a handful of these were from out of town.
Right on schedule this year, the Indianapolis police, governor, state attorney general, and even state legislators, have begun to instigate the annual Hooker Scare. Why is it necessary to put a city on high alert for prostitutes before a championship game? Where did law enforcement officials and politicians get this Super Bowl chestnut, proven only by its repetition, and why was it so easy — desirable even — for the public to buy? And who really benefits from the Hooker Scare that reliably surrounds major American sporting events?
II
It’s no surprise that we immediately go along with the city’s fevered speculations. Prostitution at big games represents the collision of our dearest, most enduring gender stereotypes: dudes in jerseys and sirens in miniskirts. We don’t expect much out of the men; we do expect the women to generate a lot of cash.
Julie Shematz, the founder and CEO of Beauty From Ashes Ministries, an anti-sex trafficking organization, confirmed our suspicions when she explained that “male-dominated sporting events are a lucrative market for the sex-for-sale industry,” adding later that most johns at games “are seeking out women or girls that will let them go as far as they can, and their buddies seem to have this attitude of ‘what happens here, stays here.’”
In a stadium full of mostly affluent, mostly white men, it is, of course, highly probable that there will be some johns, but can it truly be the “concentrated populace of men” that makes citizens so nervous about the impending prostitute invasion? If we really suspected that sports fans were nothing but trouble, luring prostitutes with promises of fast money, then wouldn’t local officials make bold pronouncements — this time backed up with verifiable facts — that 50,000 to 100,000 men are coming to the city, looking for action?
But as the mythos of the Hooker Scare has it, the sports fans have no agency in this situation; they are simply a collective matchstick, waiting to be lit up by beer, fan mania, and easy sex. Johns are assigned an uncomplicated role in our gender play, as louts helplessly ensnared in a prostitute’s trap. (You never know. This could be you.) The women, then, are the active (and guilty) parties, reducing defenseless, clean-living sports fans to horny brutes.
It seems an especially absurd injustice that women should incite civic panic among the same audiences that cheer on Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, twice accused of sexual assault.
And last year, the chairman of the Hospitality & Lodging Practice Group issued an alert to “beware of sporting women,” offering industry tips on how to avoid the bad press associated with prostitutes; but rather than illustrate the dangers of these sporting women, the hotelier inexplicably cited a 2010 scandal when Pro Football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor was charged with raping a sixteen-year-old runaway in a Holiday Inn. The connection between athletes and sexual violence was made abundantly clear, but the connection between prostitutes and football fans is still shaky.
III
With greater frequency every passing year, elected leaders in the Super Bowl host city issue a dual-pronged notice to residents: along with the hooker advisories, we are told that instances of child sex trafficking will soar.
In 2011, USA Today reported that “child sex rings spike during Super Bowl week,” and the Dallas Women’s Foundation launched an advocacy campaign to raise awareness for underage sex trafficking, timed to coincide with the Super Bowl. But when Dallas-area police officers conducted their pre-Super Bowl crackdown, they made steady arrests of women until they picked up a fifteen-year-old girl; police turned the girl over to juvenile authorities and shut down the sting operation for the night. “Three out of three phone calls [for sexual services], we made arrests on them,” said police spokesman Lt. Todd Dearing. “We would have made more if the last one who showed up was not a juvenile.” Oddly, the discovery of the teenager in Arlington halted, rather than spurred, a continued search for trafficked girls — the lieutenant had explained that the sting was an exploratory operation, to see “what type of crime we could get,” and apparently, underage trafficking was not one of them.
In a characteristic feature of the Hooker Scare, the means and the message for responding to the putative crisis often appear to be at cross purposes. Indianapolis police have been exclusively targeting and arresting independent adult escorts like Austria Andrews; but state politicians, taking a cue from Dallas, have unwaveringly focused on trafficked children.
“I admit, I just didn’t know much about [underage trafficking] until about six or eight months ago,” Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said recently in an interview. “And then I learned how it has special relevance to an event like the Super Bowl.” Daniels vowed to fast-track beefier child trafficking legislation that will make it easier to prosecute, and toughens the punishment for, the felony currently on the books.
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, who initially proposed the underage trafficking bill, said of the legislation: “Our goal is to increase awareness that prostitution isn’t a victimless crime. Many of these young women who enter the sex trade are often physically forced, coerced, raped or imprisoned by traffickers.”
The attorney general deployed a classic rhetorical move of the Hooker Scare, and his seemingly innocuous statement obscures a dangerous political tendency: the bill in question deals with minors, and yet, in one breath, he invoked prostitution and human trafficking — two separate crimes in the Indiana criminal code — interchangeably. The trafficking of children and women, a felony, is rightly considered a “crime against the person,” akin to kidnapping and homicide; meanwhile, prostitution, a misdemeanor, is filed under “crimes against public health and decency” along with panhandling and littering. Regardless of whether we personally believe that prostitution and human trafficking are synonymous, we must question why the chief prosecutor in the state muddles the laws he is bound to enforce: because despite the publicity frenzy surrounding Indiana’s child trafficking bill, it is Andrews’s prostitution charge that has been — and likely will be — most used against women in the city.
IV
In the hands of our state leaders, the Hooker Scare appears to be a massive bait-and-switch tactic, one that yields moderate political profits at zero political risk: politicians incite a moral panic about the pink menace slithering toward a town near us, then they swivel our attention around to enslaved women and children. Protecting trafficked victims is an essential goal, but when it comes from elected officials in the guise of the Hooker Scare, whom does it really affect at street level?
“We want the message to be, ‘Don’t come to Indianapolis, because you are going to be arrested,’” Indianapolis city prosecutor Helen Marchal said to reporters in the run-up to the Super Bowl, decidedly not reaching out a sympathetic hand to trafficked women and girls. (And the sergeant of the IMPD has been unavailable for comment on the Super Bowl Hooker Scare because he’s been suspended since November, when he was found soliciting a hand job from a dancer during an on-duty visit to a strip club.)
In the warped morality of American law enforcement, prostitutes are both the predators and the prey, a Victorian binary that obscures the routine arrests and abuses of women, and makes the public conveniently malleable for enterprising politicians looking to score a few points of their own on Super Bowl weekend. And that is the point of the Hooker Scare: citizens aren’t meant to meaningfully debate policy decisions; rather, we are simply fed rhetorical ploys to keep us in a perpetual state of disgust (at prostitutes) and horror (at the evil of human trafficking) to blot out our capacity to reason, to engage, and to challenge.
The child-trafficking bill, which has passed in the Senate and will likely be signed into law, is a political maneuver that helps Indiana senators look at once tough on crime and nobly devoted to protecting children; in matters of policy, they are free to continue classifying prostitutes as arrestable, criminalized victims — but despite peppering their rhetoric with the word “victim,” elected officials and prosecutors across the country still operate within a prostitution paradox, where prostitutes are treated as criminals until proven trafficked.
So who benefits from the Hooker Scare? The prostitution panic surely benefits someone — but not the women and girls trapped behind the political posturing. And it surely doesn’t remedy the grossly inequitable economic system in which prostitution and enslavement flourish. It is, however, a remarkably convenient way for politicians to appear take-charge while doing nothing but allowing (or perhaps, ordering) the police units to continue to expend tremendous resources on stings that net a smattering of prostitution arrests. When women and girls are lodged beneath these indifferent spheres of power, how will compassionate, sane policy ever make its way to them?
