Very worrying stuff going on around the changes to Canada's bawdyhouse laws. By lumping bawdyhouses in with other "signature activities" of organized crime, the federal government will dramatically increase jail term for people convicted of operating a bawdyhouse - from a maximum two years to a mandatory minimum sentence of at least five years.
Seeing as the law has already defined a bawdyhouse as anywhere that a sex worker routinely does business with her clients, that sets the stage for a crackdown on indoor sex work. And as we learned in the last crackdown in the 1970s, that in turn sets the stage for an increase in street prostitution and a rise in violent crimes against sex workers.
Here's the press release and the backgrounder on the issue released by the Department of Justice in early August. I'll be writing about this in my Friday column.
1 comment:
I am so mad at our governments that I could blurt out many, many words that a lady should not use in polite company. I guess since it's pretty hard to arrest, convict and sentence perpetrators of unreported crime, they need someone to fill the 9 billion dollars worth of new prisons they are hoping to build.
I have to say, I have never felt so helpless and hopeless in my entire life.
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