1984:

Tensions run high in the West End with the appearance of “Shame the Johns”, a group dedicated to embarrassing those who buy sex from the area’s prostitutes, by visiting them at their homes.

“I swear to God, if anybody from Shame the Johns shows up at my door, they’re going to get punched out,” says a 22-year-old convenience store manager (and regular john) named Bob, in an interview with The Vancouver Province. “It’s an invasion of the constitutional right of people to go wherever they like and buy whatever they like.”

However, Shame the Johns spokesman Don Odegaard, a 33-year-old high school teacher, has a different view, instead insisting that it’s time for the group to “step up” their campaign.

“The group’s first two targets,” the paper notes, “are a married man from a ‘fairly prestigious’ North Vancouver neighbourhood and another from an upper-middle class area in south Vancouver [...] If, after he is contacted, the john does not stop buying sex from young teenagers and take his business to a non-residential part of town, Odegaard said Shame the Johns will swoop down on his home and ask the media to come along for the action.”

“We’re not weirdos and moralists out to ruin families,” Odegaard insists. “We just want to stop these guys from coming down to the West End and upsetting our lifestyle.”

Sex-trade workers interviewed for the story laugh at the group’s tactics, noting that they have yet to scare away any potential customers.

 

IMAGE: The West End in the 1980s. Image courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.