Ronald Weitzer (born 1952)[3] is an American sociologist specializing in criminology and a professor at George Washington University, known for his publications on police-minority relations and on the sex industry.
The book is based on Weitzer's review of studies of legal prostitution in various nations (New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and the US state of Nevada) as well as his own research on Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Most require business owners (of brothels, escort agencies, saunas) to be licensed, and the authorities conduct periodic site visits to ensure that the regulations are being followed.
The first step, he writes, is that "consensual adult prostitution be officially recognized as work and that participants be accorded the rights and protections available to those involved in other occupations".
While positive outcomes are by no means automatic or guaranteed, Weitzer finds that legal, well-regulated prostitution can be superior to blanket criminalization.
Weitzer holds that these kinds of activities typically have little effect on the surrounding community and that enforcing laws against such practices involves time-consuming sting operations that waste police resources.
Weitzer advocates far more local government resources be devoted to helping streetwalkers leave prostitution and to facilitating their reintegration into society—requiring a holistic program of temporary housing, drug treatment, health care, counseling, job training, and other needed services.
He has stated that the exaggeration of the scale of violence and trafficking in the sex industry, the demonization of customers, and the call for a punitive response to such problems by prostitution abolitionists amounts to a moral panic.
[10] Weitzer points out that the Bush administration and its congressional allies strongly embraced prostitution abolitionist views as a justification for a much broader crackdown on the sex industry.
He conducted in-depth interviews and observations of police-citizen interactions in a major study of three neighborhoods in Washington, DC—funded by the National Science Foundation.
Prior to this study, Weitzer conducted major research on police-community relations in Northern Ireland, comparing four types of Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods and the impact of policing on each.
Although satisfaction with the police gradually rebounded years after the incident, this process took longer for African-Americans and Hispanics than for white residents of the two cities.
At that time, he documented the trend toward a de facto one-party state headed by President Robert Mugabe, whose ruling party relied on repressive security measures and institutions to cripple the political opposition.
Weitzer's research was published in a groundbreaking 1984 article titled "In Search of Regime Security: Zimbabwe since Independence" in the Journal of Modern African Studies and in his book, Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (published by University of California Press, 1990).