ESSEX JUNCTION, Vt. (AP) – The head of a women’s advocacy group is questioning why police have named the women in recent prostitution arrests, but not their male customers.

“The fact that all the victims’ names and histories are revealed, while the perpetrators are protected, is troubling to us,” said Sarah Kenney of the Vermont Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

A naked man found during a raid on the Tokyo Spa July 1 was identified only as G.F., while the woman with him had her name spelled out in court papers.

G.F. and other customers nabbed in the raid deserve to be named and charged, Kenney argued. Paying for a sexual service is a crime in Vermont, as is providing the service for a fee.

The men are unidentified because they might prove useful in charging the people behind the spas, prosecutors say in reply.

“I’m hoping that G.F. is going to be one of the people who can help us link the manager with the sex,” Chittenden County State’s Attorney Robert Simpson said. “We want the people who were making all the money.”

Authorities say recent raids on three spas in Chittenden County uncovered tentacles of an international ring that forces Asian immigrant women to work as prostitutes to pay off debts owed to the people who smuggled them into the United States.

Police normally can release adult males’ identities; Kenney said they should.

“These men, they were the ones committing a criminal act,” Kenney said. “We see it as the women who were being forced.

“Hopefully the full force of the law will be applied to the people frequenting these establishments, and contributing to the women’s enslavement.”

A first-offense prostitution conviction, by state law, brings a fine of no more than $100 and a jail term of no more than one year. The same penalty applies to men who purchase sexual services.

By contrast, a person convicted of bringing a woman into the state to work as a prostitute faces a $2,000 fine and up to 10 years in jail.

“If we want to prosecute the managers, we hope to use the cooperation of these men who were found there,” Simpson said. “The idea would be that if they cooperated we could forego the prosecution.”

AP-ES-07-26-04 0606EDT