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210 | Where Are the Bodies? Christian Right Claims Club Crime 8 “No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles.” sir arthur conan doyle, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” Humankind cannot bear very much reality. t. s. eliot, The Four Quartets Within a segment of the politically active Christian Right nationwide, Phil Burress, leader of Citizens for Community Values (CCV) in Ohio, declaims exotic dance as a “blight plaguing the community with increased crime.” He pushed through the state’s Draconian exotic dance regulations. Clubs are an incitement to sexual assault, murder, other violence, prostitution, bribery, drugs, and property damage. True? If so, the main point is, are these problems disproportionately represented in exotic dance establishments compared to other businesses or institutions? Who is doing what to whom? CCV worries about the sinful clubs causing men to brutalize women. But perhaps they should be more concerned about a place like their state university. In 2006, Ohio State, with an enrollment of nearly fifty-two thousand students had fifty-three incidents of forcible sex, the highest number among universities in the United States.1 As a volunteer for the Victim Assistance Sexual Assault program of Montgomery County, Maryland , for a decade, I can attest to university males creating havoc. A phone call from a stranger at about 5 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 2002, certainly moved me to continue to dig into the downside of exotic dance. Joe said he was in Philadelphia and had read my article “If This Is Stripping, What Is Adult Entertainment?” in Exotic Dancer Bulletin. Saying he was an unemployed editor in his late forties, Joe told me he had been to clubs over the years, and he accused me of doing a whitewash on exotic dance clubs, that the clubs exploit and degrade women who permit men to touch them and give blow jobs in back rooms for money and drugs. Joe Christian Right Claims Club Crime| 211 was surprised I had not heard about the stripper who went to a motel with a man who threw her out the window and then over a bridge. He read about it in the National Enquirer and heard about it on TV. The cabarets I visited had few, if any, convictions for crime. When I travel to a place to testify, club owners driving me through the area might point out a club that “gives us a bad rap.” But criminology studies show that, overall, exotic dance businesses have no more, or often fewer, problems than other places of public assembly. I read news and National Criminal Justice reports to broaden my knowledge, and I have found far more reports—and convictions—of clergy sexually abusing children and adults than of exotic dance clubs causing the harm alleged by church people and misinformed others. Exotic dance is not more dangerous than other forms of dancing, and dancing is usually a safe profession or recreation. Here are illustrative incidents from my research into the downside of the exotic dance industry. The incidents of murder, other violence, prostitution , drugs, and bribery are the exception, not the rule. Murder: Boyfriends, Husbands, Police, Mafia, and Others A different kind of case for me as an expert court witness occurred after a quadruple shooting took place near the Déjà Vu SeaTac club in Seattle. An exotic dancer had dumped an alcohol- and drug-addicted boyfriend. He had done construction work at Déjà Vu but lost his job and she had been financially supporting him. The dancer moved into a duplex behind the club with her new boyfriend, the club manager who had just been fired because of drugs. Dejected, the ex was hanging out in a parking lot shared by the club and duplex. One evening the dancer left work at 9 p.m. and returned to her apartment. Her ex went there about 2 a.m. and shot her and her current boyfriend, killed an innocent bystander, and then committed suicide. The dancer lost an eye; her boyfriend got palsy. The bystander’s estate and the living victims sued Déjà Vu SeaTac. The legal theory behind the suit: the shooting was foreseeable because women who work as nude dancers have a higher expectation of violence against them. Here’s where I came in. I was asked to...

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