The Re-Rise of John School: Why this type of “Demand Reduction” Is Not the Same as Anti-Trafficking
John School is back in the conversation as though it is a fresh anti-trafficking strategy.
It isn’t.
John School is an old carceral intervention being repackaged in the language of modern anti-trafficking.
At its core, John School is a diversion or education program for people charged with purchasing sexual services. Supporters often frame it as a form of “demand reduction,” arguing that if fewer people purchase sex, exploitation and trafficking will decrease.
It’s an appealing theory.
The problem is that the evidence has never convincingly demonstrated that it works.
Research evaluating John School programs has found, at best, mixed outcomes. While some participants report increased awareness or changes in attitude, those changes have not consistently translated into meaningful behaviour change or reduced reoffending. A review of the Toronto John School concluded that the program was “not overwhelmingly successful” at reducing future purchasing arrests.¹
Even the most rigorous evaluation of John School, San Francisco’s First Offender Prostitution Program, which is frequently cited by supporters of demand-reduction approaches—reported lower rates of re-arrest for solicitation among participants.²
Let’s assume those findings are accurate.
They still do not answer the question this article is asking.
A reduction in solicitation arrests is not evidence that trafficking decreased.
It does not tell us whether fewer people were trafficked.
It does not tell us whether more victims were identified.
It does not tell us whether trafficking networks were disrupted.
It does not tell us whether fewer children were sexually exploited.
It does not tell us whether fewer people were being coerced into the commercial sex trade.
Those are anti-trafficking outcomes.
A reduction in solicitation re-arrests is an enforcement outcome.
The two are repeatedly treated as though they are interchangeable.
They are not.
If we are going to call John School an anti-trafficking intervention, we need evidence that it reduces trafficking—not simply evidence that fewer people are re-arrested for purchasing sexual services.
This matters because anti-trafficking interventions should be judged by one simple question:
Do they reduce trafficking?
Not whether they make us feel like we’re doing something.
Not whether they generate arrests.
Not whether they satisfy political pressure.
Do they identify victims, reduce coercion, disrupt trafficking networks, and improve safety?
John School has not demonstrated those outcomes.
Instead, it focuses on people who purchase sexual services rather than the conditions that create and sustain trafficking: poverty, housing instability, migration precarity, racism, gender-based violence, child welfare involvement, labour exploitation, migration precarity, and a lack of meaningful economic opportunities.
The problem is not simply that John School has limited evidence of effectiveness.
The deeper problem is that it continues to collapse sex work and trafficking into the same conversation.
That collapse is dangerous.
What About Children?
Before going any further, let’s be absolutely clear.
Nothing in this article suggests that people who sexually exploit children should not be aggressively investigated and prosecuted.
Quite the opposite.
Children cannot consent to commercial sexual exploitation. Purchasing sexual services from a child is a serious criminal offence, and individuals who sexually exploit children should face robust criminal accountability.³ ⁴
But protecting children requires interventions that are specifically designed to identify and disrupt child sexual exploitation.
Research and practice point toward specialized Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) units, intelligence-led investigations, online child exploitation investigations, financial investigations that dismantle trafficking networks, Child and Youth Advocacy Centres, and coordinated multidisciplinary responses that identify victims early and support them through recovery.⁵ ⁶ ⁷
Those are anti-trafficking interventions.
John School is not.
When we blur the lines between child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and consensual adult sex work, we risk investing in interventions that have not been shown to reduce trafficking while underinvesting in strategies designed to identify exploited children, support survivors, reduce harms to sex workers, and dismantle organized exploitation.
Protecting children requires precision.
It requires us to target child sexual exploitation as the distinct crime that it is—not assume that broad demand-reduction programs aimed at purchasers of adult sexual services will accomplish that work for us.
The goal of anti-trafficking work should not be to reduce sex work. It should be to reduce trafficking. Those are not synonymous, and our policies shouldn’t pretend they are.
Human Trafficking and Sex Work Are Not the Same Thing
Human trafficking involves coercion, control, exploitation, and the loss of meaningful autonomy.
Sex work, while sometimes shaped by poverty, discrimination, and structural inequality—as many forms of labour are, is not automatically trafficking.
When policy treats all sex work as trafficking, we lose the ability to distinguish between consensual adult work and criminal exploitation.
That has consequences.
People experiencing trafficking become harder to identify because the definition of trafficking expands to include every commercial sexual transaction. Resources become concentrated on policing consensual adult sex work rather than locating victims, investigating traffickers, or addressing coercion.
Canada has already been warned about this.
In Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, the Supreme Court of Canada found that laws restricting sex workers’ ability to communicate and screen clients increased risk by preventing them from taking steps to protect their own safety.⁸
Human rights organizations, public health experts, and sex worker-led organizations have reached similar conclusions.
The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform argues that criminalization undermines safety, access to justice, and labour rights.⁹ Human Rights Watch has concluded that decriminalization improves access to legal protection, health care, dignity, and equality.¹⁰
The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women has also cautioned that criminalizing clients has not been shown to reduce trafficking and may instead undermine anti-trafficking efforts by pushing the industry further underground, limiting outreach, and making exploitation more difficult to detect.¹¹
That brings us back to the central question.
If an intervention is going to be promoted as anti-trafficking, it should be able to demonstrate that it reduces trafficking.
After decades of John School programs, we still cannot point to evidence showing they identify more victims, dismantle trafficking networks, reduce coercion, or improve long-term safety for people experiencing exploitation.
Those are the outcomes that matter.
Beyond Symbolic Responses
John School may create the appearance that something is being done.
It may satisfy political pressure.
It may generate headlines.
But appearance is not impact.
Visibility reduction is not safety.
Arrest diversion is not prevention.
Shame-based education is not systemic change.
If we are serious about ending trafficking, our investments should reflect what the evidence tells us.
That means investing in safe housing.
Income security.
Trauma-informed, survivor-led supports.
Culturally responsive services.
Specialized child sexual exploitation investigations.
Long-term case management.
Prevention that addresses vulnerability before exploitation occurs.
Those are anti-trafficking interventions.
John School has not been shown to be one of them.
Anti-trafficking work should always be measured by the safety and self-determination of the people most affected.
That means listening to survivors of trafficking, sex workers, migrant workers, Indigenous women, Black women, queer and trans communities, and young people with lived experience of exploitation and systems involvement.
Anti-trafficking work cannot be built on policies that make people harder to find, harder to support, and more afraid to ask for help.
John School belongs to a long history of attempting to control sex work under the language of protection.
We do not need to repackage it.
We need to move beyond it.
If we are going to call something an anti-trafficking strategy, we should expect it to do one thing above all else:
Reduce trafficking.
After decades of John School, that evidence still isn’t there. John School isn’t anti-trafficking it’s anti-sex work.
Notes
- Benedikt Fischer, Scot Wortley, Cheryl Webster, and Patricia Erickson, Vice Lessons: A Survey of Prostitution Offenders Enrolled in the Toronto John School Diversion Program (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 2002).
- Michael A. Monto and Steve Garcia, research evaluating San Francisco’s First Offender Prostitution Program (FOPP), which reported lower solicitation recidivism but did not measure impacts on trafficking, victim identification, or exploitation.
- Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, including offences relating to obtaining sexual services from a person under the age of 18.
- United Nations, Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography (2000).
- Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Resources on child sexual exploitation prevention and investigations.
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Guidance on child sexual exploitation investigations and offender identification.
- Child and Youth Advocacy Centre Network of Canada. Best practices for multidisciplinary responses to child abuse and exploitation.
- Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72.
- Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform. Policy and legal reform publications.
- Human Rights Watch. Why Sex Work Should Be Decriminalized (2019).
- Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). Publications on client criminalization and anti-trafficking policy.