Prostitution is a violent, disruptive business. Which is precisely why it needs to be legalized.

Crackdown

by Sarah McNaught

Some of prostitution's most spirited opponents are people who live where the streetwalkers hawk their wares.

Thirty-seven-year-old Mary Chen has lived in Chinatown, not far from the former Combat Zone, for 19 years. Chen says that she and her daughter encounter at least one prostitute every afternoon as they walk home from her daughter's school.

The impact, she says, is more than fleeting annoyance. One evening while Chen was preparing dinner, she heard a ruckus outside. "I heard my daughter offering her body to the boys in the neighborhood in exchange for candy," Chen recalls. "When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was `playing hooker.' "

Over time, episodes like these reach critical mass, and neighborhood rage mushrooms. At that point, the story becomes a political set piece. When neighborhood residents shout loudly enough and become organized enough, the city responds with a crackdown. A new initiative is announced; the streets are swept; the evening news features shaky women being dragged into a police van. But old hands know the exercise is futile.

"I get a call every night before I go out, telling me what streets to work," says "Cheri," a 26-year-old brunette with ruby-red lips and electric-blue liquid eyeliner. "[My pimp] scouts out certain areas, finds out where the cops are putting the most heat, and sends me somewhere else."

Cheri, whose pimp is a former boyfriend and who treats her quite well -- in comparison to other pimps -- says it's not uncommon for a prostitute to go all the way to Worcester or Brockton if her pimp feels the heat in the Boston is too much.

But even those who do get arrested quickly find their way back to the street.

Jim Borghesani, of DA Ralph Martin's office, says Mondays and Tuesdays are swamped with weekend prostitution cases; the majority of the time, officers issue fines, order drug or alcohol counseling, and then release the women, who return to the streets.

The Boston Police Department is disgruntled at a recidivism rate that persists despite repeated crackdowns.

"There is no question that many of the women who work the streets have arrest records but have served little or no time," says spokesperson Detective Sergeant Margot Hill.

Boston's Combat Zone has been a textbook example in the war on prostitution. In the mid-'70s, when the demand for prostitution increased in Boston and adult entertainment venues were obtaining city licenses, then-mayor Kevin White established Washington Street, in Chinatown, as the city's official red-light district. The district was zoned for peep shows, adult entertainment bars, and adult book and video stores. But prostitutes began to call the strip their home as well.

Toward the end of the decade, as Boston began to experience an economic boom, Asian immigrants tried to open more family stores in the Combat Zone and establish the area as a hub of Asian culture. Community concerns about prostitution escalated. In the early 1980s, with a growing number of residents complaining to city officials and to the police, a crackdown began on all illegal activity in the Combat Zone.

Clearly, fewer prostitutes are visible there now. Hill says that the groups of streetwalkers once seen standing on the corners are gone. But the prostitution problem has not been solved; it has simply relocated.

Prostitutes have set up shop just outside the Boston Herald's front door, on Traveler Street; on the outskirts of the Theater District; at the southernmost corner of the Public Garden, on Arlington Street; and throughout the South End.

"You hear guys screaming out the cars, asking them how much," says one elderly South End tenant who used to enjoy an after-dinner chat with neighbors on her front stoop. "And if these guys say anything to the hookers, you should hear the piles of trash these women shout back at them."

For the prostitutes, it's a matter of making a living. "Cindy," a 32-year-old seasoned pro, has walked the streets of Bay Village for almost a decade. She says she feels a pang of guilt whenever she sees the wide eyes of a neighborhood child staring up at her. But, adds the buxom, brown-haired Italian, she can't give up her earnings. This is where the men, many of them from the suburbs, know to come.

"These people live here," she says with a laugh, "but I work here."

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Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught[a]phx.com.