On June 29, 2023, during a sting operation designed to target sex buyers conducted by the Pennsylvania State Police Carlisle Criminal Investigation Unit, the Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office Criminal Investigation Division, the Hampden Township Police Department, and the Shippensburg Police Department. Undercover police officers posed as people in prostitution and placed ads on websites where they offered to exchange sex acts in exchange for money. All nine men allegedly agreed to pay the officers for sex acts. The men have been charged with one count of patronizing prostitutes.
Police arrested Jared Dennis Stoner, 23, of Chambersburg; Kenneth Eugene Yoder, 67, of Carlisle; Robert Danrell Lewis, 56, of Carlisle; Thomas Michael Colantuono, 65, of Carlisle; Admir Emkicv, 36, of Mechanicsburg; Edward Allen White, 57, of Waynesboro; Doychin Dimhrov Manchorov, 44, of Dauphin; Edwin Quinones, 68, of Myerstown; and Chad Michael Smith, 42, of Shippensburg.
The CSE Institute commends the Pennsylvania State Police and Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office for their work targeting sex buyers. This is the fifth operation to target sex buyers the Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office has conducted over the past year. The plans to continue prosecuting sex buyers to reduce the demand for commercial sex. As Cumberland County District Attorney Seán M. McCormack noted, sex buyers “are the ones driving sex trafficking by putting money into the hands of the sex traffickers who exploit the women and men trapped in this existence.”
The CSE Institute advocates for the Equality Model, a policy that seeks to reduce the demand for commercial sex by criminalizing those who buy sex rather than those who are bought and sold. The Equality Model consists of four elements: (1) decriminalization of the person in prostitution, (2) criminalization of sex buyers and a commitment to treat buying sex as a serious crime, (3) a public education campaign about the inherent harms of prostitution, and (4) robust, funded exit services for people in prostitution. Criminalizing persons in prostitution does nothing to target sex buyers or traffickers nor does it extinguish the demand for commercial sex.
To further the goal of reducing the demand for commercial sex, it is important that media outlets utilize accurate language to refer to the sex trade. The CSE Institute is disappointed that Fox43 refers to people in prostitution as “sex workers” in their report on the sting. The terms “sex work” and “sex workers” are often used to conflate commercial sexual exploitation and a legitimate form of work. Equating exploitation with labor distracts from systematic causes of human trafficking and legitimizes an industry that relies on gender-based violence. Sex buyers, who are predominantly male, commodify other human beings, predominantly women of color, effectively treating people like goods.
Further, “sex work” and “sex workers” are not terms used in the crimes code. The Pennsylvania crimes code uses the term prostitution. For this reason, journalists should use the legal term “prostitution” to refer to criminal investigations involving sex trade and “person in prostitution” to refer to those in the sex trade. Media outlets must ensure that the language used to report commercial sexual exploitation accurately reflects legal terminology or, at least, does not minimize the lived experiences of survivors.
The CSE Institute will continue to provide updates on this matter.
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.