By February, 1969, the operation had apparently become so scandalous or could the media merely have discovered something they considered spectacular? that a six part TV report was broadcast. The TV report, according to Jack Gould in the New York Times of February 26, 1969 said, “There were 25,000 prostitutes in New York and that the lenient 15 day sentence for conviction had led to an invasion of the city by girls from as far away as Alaska and Hawaii.”

So, at the end of March, 1969, Governor Rockefeller of New York State signed a bill increasing the penalty to ninety days and the maximum fine to $500. The law went into effect September 1; and a Criminal Court judge was quoted on August 31 in the New York Times as saying that the new law "may end this business. It may cut street crime." A year later in the same newspaper (September 10, 1970) a small news item mentioned that there had been a decrease of 18.2 per cent in arrests for prostitution in New York during the first seven months of 1970 as compared with the same period of 1969: 4092 as compared with 4838 arrests. Increased penalties are likely to evoke sharpened means of evasion; it does not follow that a decrease in arrests means a decrease in prostitution. During the same interval, we know, the VD rate was rising.

Here are a few scattered items on prostitution in other countries in recent years. A Reuters dispatch from Bonn, Germany, datelined December 1, 1968, reported that the city had legalized prostitution "in the hope it would help to bring street prostitution under control." About fifty prostitutes moved into a new "Eros Center," where each woman was to pay rent for her one room apartment. It is mentioned that a similar brothel, one of the largest in Europe, had existed in Hamburg for years; and a later dispatch by the same news agency (March 23, 1969) gave some details of the clubs along the neon lighted Reeperbahn of West Germany's biggest port city. It appears that sailors are no longer the main customers, who have now come to include businessmen, tourists, mainly American and Scandinavian, and troops, both American and British. The troops are said to be the biggest spenders, but some of the establishments have achieved such world wide renown that South African and Australian businessmen have sought them out by name. The Hamburg city fathers have plans to clean up the city eventually, but "are not rushing ahead because of the tremendous tourist profits based on Hamburg's 'wicked' reputation."

In Japan, the traditional brothel system in effect for centuries was officially dissolved by law in 1958 at the urging of women who had gained the suffrage in 1946. Prostitution had been active there for the "benefit" of United States troops, and has evidently not disappeared. An AP dispatch in the New York Times on March 12, 1969, reported that brothel operators in Amagasaki, a suburb of the industrial city of Osaka, site of "Expo 70," had been discouraged by police raids which embarrassed the customers so much that many never returned. The police estimated that 800 prostitutes worked in Amagasaki, and one raid netted 280 arrests.

According to another newspaper story, some 1400 legally registered prostitutes ply their trade in the red light district of Juarez, Mexico, where the girls are supposed to have daily inspections and one dollar penicillin shots before going to work. This operation evidently depends largely for customers on American troops stationed just over the border. Juarez "businessmen" are worried because the United States has barred servicemen from similar facilities in Tijuana; but the Pentagon seemed to be more concerned about the exposure of troops to marijuana than about VD. A more recent note (AP, January 4, 1970) mentioned that perhaps as many as 300,000 South Vietnamese women are living as prostitutes, bar girls, and "temporary wives" of American troops there. The details are similar to those reported from Japan. The girls earn much more by this means than they could by any other. In Vietnam, the New York Times reported on September 7, 1969, “where the average farmer's annual income is about $240 "it will be difficult for the girls to return to farm life after living on $400 or $500 a month."

In Vienna, a new cleanup drive forced prostitutes off the main thoroughfares but did not attempt to stop their practice. The new regulations were said to be a compromise between the harsher measures asked for by legislators and police, and “business interests that argued that some prostitution there was desirable for tourism." Vienna's leading newspaper, Die Presse, scornfully termed this "a typically Austrian solution"; but on reading further one finds that the newspaper meant to advocate licensing brothels which, although prohibited in Vienna, are tolerated in some of the provincial Austrian cities. It cited a recent opinion poll which found that among Viennese who were asked, 75 per cent favored such licensing.