Creating prey for the next Pickton

Our sex-work laws kill people.

We had a reminder of that just last week, when Willie Pickton’s murderous ways were news again. Only the streets can provide so many potential victims to a predator like him, and it’s our ineffective and dangerous laws around sex work that create those streets.

Then last Friday, the Vancouver Police Department released the report that we all knew had to come - one that detailed the tragic inability of B.C.’s police forces to act on years of tips that women were being killed at Pickton’s farm. I’ve watched our conflicted attitude around the sex industry for too long to be surprised by the public’s muted response to that damning report.

We talk a good game about how much concern we have for the women who Pickton and his ilk prey on. But our actions tell a different story every time. It’s beyond ironic that even as the shameful story of B.C.’s missing women returns to the headlines, the federal government is introducing much tougher penalties that can only increase risks for sex workers.

We light candles for dead women without a moment’s thought for the appalling working conditions that primed them as targets for murder. We lament the Pickton legacy without giving one hoot for the people who we continue to banish to the fringes. The hypocrisy is unbearable sometimes.

I was working with sex workers at PEERS Victoria when Pickton was on trial. Media outlets from across Canada called me frequently to ask what I thought, and whether anything was changing for sex workers now that there had been so much publicity about the hard life of a street-entrenched sex worker.

How can anything change when our laws remain resolutely the same? Working outdoors and alone in the middle of the night would be a dangerous business no matter what product is being sold. As long as we continue to deny adult sex workers a safer workplace and a place in our communities, nothing changes.

The federal government’s recent decision to ramp up penalties for people convicted of keeping a common bawdyhouse will add significantly to the risks. People convicted of operating a brothel will now face a mandatory jail sentence of at least five years (compared to a maximum of two years under the previous law). 

The Department of Justice says the change is needed to fight organized crime. Unfortunately, the tougher penalties will also ensnare many, many independent sex workers and small business people operating thousands of escort agencies, massage parlours and bathhouses across Canada.

Perhaps there are still some people who believe that closing down brothels will eliminate the sex trade. I’m not one of them.

The commercial sex industry thrives in every country of the world, courtesy of a rock-solid customer base and a strong profit motive. A crackdown on indoor venues won’t stop prostitution, it will merely push sex workers deeper into the shadows and closer to the streets.

How is it that we can mourn the Pickton murders so eloquently, yet do nothing to address the real issues for sex workers?

We have erected monuments to murdered women. Lit a few thousand candles in their memory. Spent a small fortune on bringing Pickton to justice.  But we haven’t done a thing to reduce the risks for  Canada’s sex workers, who apparently hold our interest only when they’re dead.

Our laws are as conflicted as we are. The sale of sex is legal in Canada but anywhere that it happens is by definition illegal, because a bawdyhouse is wherever a sex worker regularly conducts business. You can sell sex through a newspaper ad, but risk arrest if caught soliciting customers in a public place.

The last time our country’s police forces cracked down hard on indoor sex venues was in the 1970s. The result was a notable rise in street prostitution and an even more notable increase in assaults and murders involving sex workers.

Can we possibly be here again? That would be the biggest tragedy of all - to have learned nothing from the deaths and suffering of so many women and their families.

Not everybody shares my opinion on the sex industry, of course. But I think even the nay-sayers want laws that work. Our laws are all but useless in preventing the sale of sex, but frighteningly effective at increasing the misery and danger for those in the industry.

Canada has poorly considered law, random enforcement and a strong undercurrent of moral judgment when it comes to sex work. It’s a lethal combination.

More jail time for people with the audacity to want to work indoors certainly won’t change that. Neither will tears and candlelight vigils.

Why do we need to believe the worst about the sex industry?

A new study out of Simon Fraser University concludes that people who buy sex are no more prone to violence than anyone else.
Fewer than two per cent of the 1,000 respondents who took part in SFU sociologist Chris Atchison’s study reported ever having hit, hurt, raped or robbed the person who they’d bought sex from.
Granted, that’s just them saying so. But Atchison noted in a Vancouver Sun story this week about his research that there was little reason for the respondents to lie, given that the survey was anonymous.
That his findings are provocative is an understatement.
"It's an outrageous study and it really works towards normalizing sexual assault," said Aurea Flynn of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, which is the go-to organization in B.C. when media are looking for a quote from someone vehemently opposed to prostitution.
"I'm really angry about the emphasis on the compassion for johns that the study provides,” added Flynn, “and I'm very concerned about its impact on the continued normalization of prostitution in Canada because I believe prostitution is violence against women."
It’s odd, really. Atchison’s findings ought to be considered good news in a society that puts so much emphasis on reducing violence for all British Columbians. Shouldn’t we be happy that most of the thousands of British Columbians who buy sex on a regular basis aren’t violent toward sex workers?
Ah, but this is about the sex industry. We don’t want to hear anything “nice” about it. We don’t want anybody telling us that most of the customers of the sex industry are largely average, non-violent guys - the kind of men we work with, live with and even love. We don’t want to hear that most adult sex workers in Canada might actually be choosing to work in the business.
When it comes to prostitution, we only like it violent, coercive and miserable. I guess we pretty much have to cling to that belief, because otherwise we just might question the ineffective, discriminatory and ultimately harmful laws that govern how the sex industry operates in our country.
We prefer a single story line when it comes to public conversations about the sex trade - one in which all the people who buy sex are exploitive predators, and all the people who sell it are victims needing to be saved (or at the very least prosecuted in the event they refuse “rescue”).
But what if we’ve got that wrong?
Without question, there are some loathsome and horrendous things that go on in the global sex industry. No civil society should tolerate the truly awful parts of the sex industry. We need strong laws - and much more effective enforcement of them - to protect against the exploitation of vulnerable people and prevent child abuse, human trafficking and sex tourism.
We also need plenty of community supports to help people wanting out of the sex trade. It’s not a job that anybody should have to feel they’re doing against their will, including for economic reasons.
But at the same time, it’s profoundly hypocritical for a country with so many eager customers of the sex trade to pretend that the entire industry is monstrous. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that 98 per cent of the people who took part in Atchison’s survey really are just looking for a sexual encounter, not the opportunity to hurt anybody.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a number of adult escorts over the past couple of years, and they’ve given me a whole new perspective on who their customers are. I’ve been stunned to discover just how many customers there are, and their many complex reasons for paying for sex.
So to judge them all as vicious creeps just doesn’t work for me anymore. We may like to tell ourselves that they’re all Robert Pickton types looking for any excuse to make some crushed and exploited woman’s life a little more miserable, but it just isn’t true.
I do think the people who buy sex need to get a spine, however, and start doing more to change the laws to ensure fair, safe workplaces for adult sex workers. The customers of the massive sex industry hold all kinds of authority positions, in our region and around the world. How about they start using some of that influence to create real change for adult workers, starting with decriminalization?
For another view of the industry, come on down to the screening of The Brothel Project Jan. 31 at the Victoria Film Festival. The documentary by April Butler-Parry follows me and UVic researcher and outreach worker Lauren Casey in our 2008 attempt to open a co-op brothel in Victoria.

Pointless prostitution laws help no one but hurt many

Sex work is back in the headlines again, and will be for quite some time with a constitutional challenge to Canada’s prostitution laws finally underway this week.
I wish miracles for the three brave sex workers who launched the challenge. That’s what they’ll need to survive the savaging they’re in for at the hands of those who staunchly oppose anything that might make it easier or safer to be a sex worker.
The case in front of the Ontario Superior Court is challenging three sections of the Criminal Code: the “common bawdyhouse” laws that make anything to do with operating a brothel illegal; procuring or living off the avails of prostitution; and communicating for the purposes of prostitution.
In deciding the case, Justice Susan Himel will be gauging whether our prostitution laws are proportionate to their purpose, or if they have the effect of forcing sex workers into unsafe situations where they can be preyed on by deviants and serial killers.
So let’s ponder those two issues for a moment.
Sex work is legal in Canada, yet everything required for a sale to take place is illegal - location, marketing, even the earnings. That renders the work just legal enough for men to be able to acquire paid sex anytime they like in any city, and just illegal enough to continue the pretence that Canadian society is hard at work trying to eradicate prostitution. What exactly IS the purpose of laws like that?
As for whether the impact of the laws is proportionate to their purpose, I can’t wait to hear the arguments on that point. How many vulnerable women have died across Canada just in the last decade because our laws forced them to work out of sight in the rough parts of town, getting into cars with strangers? How could a gruesome impact like that possibly be proportionate in a civilized society?
What gets me the most about the laws around prostitution is the grand hypocrisy of it all.
We wrung our hands and wept for all the missing women when Robert Pickton’s exploits were the news of the day. We went to their vigils. But we didn’t do one thing that made life safer for the women working our streets.
We tell ourselves that only deviants and weirdos buy sex, and only victimized, desperate people sell it. But Canadians of every stripe are frequenting the places where sex is sold, and leading secret lives as part-time sex workers. Were a scarlet letter ever to appear on all the chests of people who have ever bought and sold sex, I think you’d be amazed to see who was in the club.
The sale of sex is a rip-roaring business in every Canadian community. Every moment spent denying that is another nail in the coffin of women working in isolation and danger on the nation’s outdoor strolls. Outdoor work is the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of the scope of the industry, but it’s certainly the place where the most negative impacts of our poorly considered laws are felt.
I understand the powerful emotions that drive the abolitionist movement. I know that some people have had tragic experiences in the sex trade. It’s definitely a job for adults only, and even then it’s not something that most people are cut out for.
But it’s still a job. Occasional monsters and victims notwithstanding, the buyers are for the most part ordinary people. The sellers are by and large happy for the money. Meanwhile, those who aren’t happy in the work take no solace from the law, because it can only punish them further.
I read an opinion piece the other day from an abolitionist exhorting Canadians to resist anything that might normalize prostitution as a legitimate career choice. That tired old argument is trotted out anytime someone dares to mutter about decriminalizing the industry: “Oh, horrors, your child could end up working as a prostitute!”
Read the research. Prostitution doesn’t increase when it’s decriminalized, because it’s already so well-entrenched in every community that there’s no increase in demand just because it’s now legal. All the men who buy sex are already buying it.
Nor is the growth of sex tourism much of a concern in Canada. Sex workers here are no more likely than any other Canadian to work for the pathetic, exploitive wages that sex workers earn in countries like Thailand.
And even if all that weren’t so, surely we don’t want to support laws that maintain an ugly and dangerous work environment just so our own daughters won’t be tempted into that line of work.
Every woman who works in the industry is somebody’s daughter. We owe it to all of them to fix this mess we’ve made.

Craigslist controversy reveals foolish attitudes toward sex work

My experience is that you can stop any conversation dead by trying to talk about the sex industry. People’s level of discomfort in the subject is near-universal.
So indulge me in trying to steer clear of the squeam-inducing “sex” word for a moment by pretending that this ridiculous Craigslist hullabaloo is in fact about the sale of shoes. Please don’t take it as trivializing last month’s murder of a young Boston woman, as that’s definitely not the intent. I’m just trying for an analogy that might get us past the squirm factor long enough to think straight.
OK then. At issue: The sale of shoes through the on-line listings operated by Craigslist. People have been selling shoes for years on Craigslist and nobody seemed to mind, but something tragic happened in April that has changed that. A shoe seller was killed at a Boston hotel by a shoe buyer, who first contacted her through her ad on Craigslist.
Within hours of the murder, law-and-order types were condemning the practice of selling shoes on Craigslist. Wasn’t that how the Boston murderer was able to find his victim, after all? And given that any shoe buyer is a potential murderer, isn’t it in the interests of shoe sellers everywhere if customers are prevented from finding them?
Various state justice departments soon jumped into the debate. They cranked up the heat on Craigslist, threatening the company with criminal charges for its role in the murder of the shoe seller.
Alarmed shoe sellers tried to wade into the debate, raising concerns about losing an important advertising vehicle. But nobody listened. They’d bought that line about how 98 per cent of shoe sellers only did it because they were forced to, and figured the protests were simply the cries of people too exploited and beaten down to know what they were talking about.
Within a month, a beleaguered Craigslist had agreed to scrap its free shoe-listing service throughout the U.S. It announced it would be relocating shoe sellers to a category renamed “footwear,” and would be much more selective about who advertised there. A victory over evil was declared, followed by calls for Craigslist to do the same in Canada.
Anyway, you get the point. The nuttiness of the Craigslist saga would be pretty clear to all of us if the product was anything other than sex. But it’s like we lose our ability to think rationally when sex is the subject.
Can we ever imagine a time when we would respond to the murder of, say, a real-estate agent by making it harder for real-estate salesmen to advertise? The two things have nothing to do with each other. That there are predators who find all sorts of ways to bring misery to innocent people - well, that’s a given in our world. But you’re not going to fix that by making it harder for the innocent to advertise.
Sex workers already face considerable discrimination in advertising. The sale of sex is legal in Canada, but that’s not to say the ads come cheap. Advertising outlets all take advantage of the highly stigmatized industry by charging many times the going rate if an ad is sex-work related. We can tell ourselves such premiums keep a lid on the industry by driving up costs, but it’s really just an excuse to gouge money out of a sector that can’t afford to complain.
Were we truly interested in preventing the murder of sex workers, we’d provide safer places for people to work. The young Boston woman, Julissa Brisman, wasn’t killed because she advertised in the Craigslist “erotic services” category, but because a killer was able to get her alone in a hotel room. Robert Pickton’s victims didn’t die because they worked in the sex industry, but because a killer knew exactly where to find vulnerable women working alone in the dark.
Recent studies from the United Kingdom and the U.S. estimate that almost 20 per cent of men have used commercial sex services at some point in their lives. The U.S. study found that nearly a third of single men over age 30 were regular buyers of such services. Business is brisk: Nevada’s 25 legal brothels each see an average of 40 customers a day.
Sex sells. North Americans have been despairing about that for as long as Canada and the U.S. have been countries, but it hasn’t changed a thing. That we spend even a moment blaming any of this on Craigslist is sad affirmation of that.

At the request of the Times Colonist, I wrote a
book review of former CBC journalist Victor Malarek's latest, "The Johns." Suffice to say that Mr. Malarek and I have fairly different views when it comes to the subject of prostitution, although I respect his passion.

The piece ran in the Monitor section of the TC on Sunday, and you'll find it at the link above.

If you see this Vancouver Sun article in YOUR local paper, please write a letter to the editor!

I'm an advocate for the rights of sex workers, and one of the biggest problems out there is that all the study, research and reporting is almost exclusively about the experiences of marginalized "survival" sex workers - who make up just 10-20 per cent of all sex workers - yet is presumed to be the experience of all sex workers.

Case in point: an article from the March 4 Vancouver Sun, a shorter version of which ran in the Victoria Times Colonist and Edmonton Journal today (and perhaps other publications - those are just the ones I'm aware of) on HIV/AIDS prevalence among "female sex workers" in Vancouver. I tracked down the original study and the error begins there, as the information they wrote about came from three studies of survival sex workers in the Downtown Eastside, yet the language they use makes it sound as though the findings are representative of Vancouver sex workers overall.

So here's my letter to the editor that I've fired off in various directions this morning, followed by the Sun article. I've got the original study as well if anyone wants me to send them a copy - e-mail me at patersoncommunications@gmail.com. Thanks for caring.

Letter to the editor
Re: “One quarter of female prostitutes HIV-positive,” March 5
I’m writing to correct a blatant error in the reporting of findings from a B.C. Excellence in HIV/AIDS study.
This study was essentially a review of existing literature around HIV/AIDS prevalence among high-risk populations in Vancouver, including survival sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. However, the reporting of it wrongly extrapolated its findings to include all sex workers - the vast majority of whom are indoor workers (escorts, erotic massage, independents) who were never among the groups studied.
One of the primary myths around sex work is that those who do the work are vectors of disease. For those who work in the frequently miserable conditions of outdoor survival sex work, HIV/AIDS is obviously a risk due to high addiction rates and perhaps more unwillingness to turn away customers who refuse to use a condom.
Indoor sex work is a very different industry, however - one that has gone virtually unstudied and unreported on in Canada.
An estimated 80-90 per cent of Canadian sex workers are indoor workers. The limited studies that have been done on the tens of thousands of Canadians who work in the indoor industry have found dramatically lower rates of HIV/AIDS, violence, coercion and misery. Yet this group of workers is routinely lumped in with survival street workers for the purpose of sweeping statements on the fate and health of sex workers overall.
Sex workers are extremely stigmatized as it is, and feel the tremendous impact of that on their lives every single day. Research and reporting that overlooks the numerous differences between indoor and outdoor sex work can only perpetuate that.

Jody Paterson
Victoria, B.C.

Original article from Vancouver Sun, March 4

One-quarter of Vancouver’s female sex trade workers infected with HIV
Pamela Fayerman, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, March 04, 2009
VANCOUVER - Twenty-six per cent of Vancouver's female sex trade workers are infected with HIV, as are 17 per cent of the city's injection-drug users, a new B.C. study shows.
The study, by researchers at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and published in the Harm Reduction Journal, is the first in Canada to estimate the per-capita prevalence ranges for high risk groups, using United Nations/World Health Organization software, 2006 Statistics Canada data and other sources such as population surveys.
Gay men, the local population of which is said to be 20,000, including male sex trade workers, have an estimated HIV prevalence rate of 15 per cent.
The overall prevalence of HIV in Vancouver is about 1.21 per cent, six times higher than the national rate.
"Drugs and sex are the preferred routes for transmission. Female sex trade workers get paid more money for having unprotected sex with johns," explained co-author Dr. Julio Montaner, who is president of the International AIDS Society and head of the division of HIV/AIDS at the University of B.C.
There are up to 520 female sex trade workers in Vancouver. Montaner, asked if the high HIV prevalence among prostitutes should trigger a warning to visitors during the 2010 Olympics, said:
"I don't want to jump on the Olympics bandwagon with this. There should be public advisories everywhere about this, not just because of the Olympics. People who avail themselves to this industry should know you better watch out.
"At home, tourists and transients may behave like star citizens and then, when people go to places like Vancouver, Vegas or Thailand, they party it up," he said.
Dr. Patricia Daly, chief medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, said she had not yet read the report, so she couldn't say whether a targeted public health campaign for those who pay or trade for sex is required.
"Our message has always been that you should assume sex trade workers are HIV positive," Daly said.
"It is a high-risk activity for all kinds of infections and therefore you need to practise safe sex.
"During the Olympics, we are going to be distributing 100,000 condoms to athletes and hotels along with educational information. Whether it will specifically mention the sex trade I cannot say at this point," she said.
The high prevalence of HIV among female sex-trade workers is an emerging trend, given that in the 1980s, most infections were among gay men and in the second wave of the epidemic, injection drug users were hit hard.
"We always knew we had a significant problem, because of factors like our benign climate causing people to drift here, being a port city, and having so much poverty and so many homeless people on the Downtown Eastside," Montaner said, adding that it is difficult to know if men who buy sex from infected prostitutes are also getting infected.
"We don't have any way of accessing the johns to ask them those questions," he said. "And if we see them in our clinics, it's not like they volunteer if they got it that way. They would be more likely to report that they got it through having casual sex, or with multiple partners."
Montaner said HIV experts have made a pitch to the provincial government to "seek out and treat" HIV-infected individuals who are not on medications. It's estimated there are about 13,000 B.C. residents infected with HIV - 11,000 males and 2,000 females - but fewer than a third of them are taking such medications.
Montaner believes the number on medications should be more like 7,500. He said that would reduce the number of new infections each year from 400 to 300.
"The premier, the health minister and other government officials have been very supportive about this kind of progressive approach.
"But now with the economic downturn, we are in a waiting mode. We need an outreach program that brings treatment to the people, to make it more accessible," he said, referring to his vision of clinics in high-risk neighborhoods where such medications would be distributed.
Currently, the drugs are not taken by HIV-infected patients until their immune systems have deteriorated to a certain level. The delay-until-you-can-no-longer-delay approach is intended to save money and stall the potentially unpleasant side effects of medications. But it also means that untreated HIV patients can transmit infections.
Under another proposed strategy by Montaner's group, the "highly active antiretroviral therapy" (HAART) medications would be taken by infected patients far earlier in their disease process, so they wouldn't get the opportunity to transmit the disease.
HAART is said to be nearly 100-per-cent effective at preventing HIV by suppressing viral loads to undetectable levels and preventing people from developing full-blown AIDS by boosting the immune system. A report from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control shows that in 2007, there were only 61 full-blown AIDS cases in B.C, the lowest number since 1994, largely because of the availability of such lifesaving medications.
Sun Health Issues Reporter
pfayerman@vancouversun.com

Oldest profession much like any business
Aug. 8, 2008

The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand.
Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business.
The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country.
Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers.
The naysayers - and there were many of them - predicted the worst in the heated debate preceding legalization: Dramatic expansion of the industry; a flood of new “victims” forced into the work; a rise in trafficking and organized crime.
Fortunately, New Zealand academics had the foresight to launch thorough studies of the industry before and after changes to the laws. That virtually none of the dire predictions have come true five years on has done much to shift attitudes here about the industry. We’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone in our travels who has lingering concerns beyond the usual zoning and location issues.
“For the five-year anniversary, we had a little celebration in parliament and even the prime minister dropped in to congratulate us,” notes Catherine Healey, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective that played a pivotal role in the long battle for legal workplaces.
As you might expect, the most significant change since legalization has been for sex workers.
“Sex workers throughout the world can tell you how it feels to have to talk to the police when the work they’re doing is illegal,” says Healey. “They can tell you about that phone call from the school and the fear of losing their child because someone has found out what they do for a living. They live with the knowledge that they can be picked up by the police at any time.
“Since the changes in New Zealand, all of those feelings have started to dissipate. Sex workers now know they have rights, and that they’re not lawbreakers. They’re finally able to be honest about what they do.”
With everything about the industry now wide open, new regulations requiring “all reasonable effort” be taken to practise safe sex make it easier for workers to convince reluctant clients to use condoms. (One such client has already been prosecuted for refusing to do so.) Brothel managers can talk openly with workers about safe-sex practices rather than in the veiled and coded language previously used to guard against a new hire turning out to be an undercover police officer.
Workers are far more willing to go to police with concerns or with information about violent customers, a change particularly noticeable among those working the streets. One of Healey’s favourite stories of late is of the police officer who inadvertently blocked a street worker’s line of sight to potential customers when he pulled his car up one evening. Suddenly realizing his mistake, the officer apologized and moved the vehicle.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. A simple law change doesn’t eradicate every bad brothel owner or end exploitation.
Immigrant sex work remains illegal, an attempt to prevent cross-border trafficking that has instead trapped some workers in the shadows. Municipalities aren’t uniformally happy about having to govern the adult sex industry by the same rules as any other business, particularly around location. Abuse still occurs, and disadvantaged children remain at risk.
But what was bad about the industry was even worse when it was illegal, note sex workers. They now have the same rights as any other worker, including the ability to take a bad boss to court for sexual harassment or breach of contract. Like any other citizen, they’re finally able to turn to the police for help.
And with workers newly free to talk openly about their profession, they’re comparing notes more often and making different choices about where they work. The single biggest change with the legalization of the adult industry has been a shift away from brothels into small “solo” operations of three or four workers.
“It’s not like we’ve done away with all the problems,” acknowledges Healey. “But when it was illegal, the laws were always there to compound whatever problems a person already had.”

Five years of fair treatment for sex workers in New Zealand

 Aug. 1, 2008
As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself.
New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals.
Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen.
It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspects of consenting adult prostitution are now legal, while the “genuine harms” of prostitution have been separated out to be managed in different ways.
Like Canada, New Zealand’s laws up to that point made it a crime for an adult to solicit sex for money in a public place, keep or manage a brothel, or live on the earnings of sex work. Like us, the country tolerated a bustling sex industry while maintaining pretence of trying to eliminate it, trapping sex workers in a grey zone of quasi-legality. (Also like us, they had laws and policies prohibiting children from working in the industry and preventing exploitation and violence, and those laws have rightfully remained in place.)
If you’ve watched the creeping progress through government of any issue of significance, let alone one as controversial as this, you recognize how amazing it is that in just three years, New Zealand made it all the way to decriminalization. How did that happen?
That’s an important question for people like me, who want to be part of making something happen sooner rather than later on the same front here in Canada. Here’s how it unfolded in New Zealand:
Barnett had been a long-time advocate of sex workers’ rights, and it was his bill that ultimately got the attention of New Zealand’s House of Parliament. But many other organizations had been pressing for reform as well, including the Federation of Business and Professional Women, the National Council of Women, the national YWCA, and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective.
Not all of the groups condoned prostitution. But they came together in recognition that continuing to pretend the industry didn’t exist was simply making things much worse for the people working in it.
Barnett’s bill was sent to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee for a hard look, and the committee drafted a four-stage process for reform.
• First, identify the risks from the activity. Coercion, sexually transmitted infections, and being trapped in the industry were all seen as examples of risk associated with prostitution.
• Next, identify which risks could realistically be dealt with by law, and which required public education, better community services, etc.
• Third, separate the risks that do need a special legal solution from those that could be covered by current law. Thus the issue of sex workers ages 16 to 18 was to be dealt with differently than the regular employment policies that would apply to adult sex workers.
• Lastly, create new prostitution law.

It all came to be, but not without considerable dissent. The law squeaked by in a vote of 60 to 59, ultimately helped along by a passionate speech to parliament from a fellow MP who was a former sex worker. “It is about accepting that which occurs, and it is about accepting the fact that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights,” Georgina Beyer told her peers.
Those opposing the law cited a number of concerns going into the reform: growth of the sex industry; more visibility of street prostitution; an increase in violence against sex workers; the spread of disease and organized crime; the exploitation of children.
Research before and after the new law took effect found that hadn’t happened. Meanwhile, the the newly regulated industry could now be brought to task for the first time around health and safety issues, workers’ rights and contractual obligations.
That’s not to suggest that everything problematic about the sex industry vanishes when you decriminalize. But if the worst didn’t happen when New Zealand sex workers were finally given the right to earn a living, what’s our excuse for continuing to do nothing?

Lessons learned from the brothel project
July 25, 2008

It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life.
Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers.
As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair and friendly place to work.
Next thing you know, things were happening - at warp speed, of course, which I’ve learned is the standard operating speed for those working in the industry.
By June, the two young women had the licensing and business requirements in hand for a Victoria agency. By July, the Web site was up and eight independent workers had signed on give the new model a try. My head’s still spinning at how quickly things came together.
Like any fledgling business, it’s still very much a work in progress. The indoor sex industry has much in common with any industry, but some significant differences as well, including finding investors willing to put their money into an enterprise that at best can be categorized as “kind of legal.”
Developing workplace policy also isn’t as simple as just following standard business practice. As just a small for-instance, consider the delicacies of a workplace drug and alcohol policy when having a drink or two with a customer is often part of the job. Given the nature of the work, it’s a fine line as well that has to be walked to ensure that no worker ever feels exploited or forced to work, yet at the same time can be counted on to show up for her shifts.
Nor is our little business donating any profits yet, or firm on when the point will come when that’s financially possible. We’re not yet a brothel, either, as that really requires either buying a place or having an open-minded landlord in terms of maintaining the discretion required to operate in the land of the quasi-legal. Independent workers generally work out of their homes anyway, and that might work better with the coalition of independents with a centralized administrative core that’s taking shape.
I could fill a book with what I’ve learned about the sex industry in recent years, and in fact think I’ll do that one day soon. Perhaps the most surprising thing has been my own shift in thinking in the past decade - from a decidedly anti-industry position to someone helping to launch a new escort service. Much to my amazement, I’m even starting to understand why men buy sex.
I know I’ve baffled some people with my newfound embrace of the industry, a position that has cost me two friends in the past year alone due to irreconcilable differences in our opinions. I’m uncomfortable and sad to find myself pitted in the media against dedicated, caring feminists for whom I’m now the enemy. Sex work is almost as notable as abortion as a polarizing issue among people who thought they knew each other.
But at the same time, I cherish the memory of a former Catholic nun who took my hand and told me that if I was taking this brothel project on, then she had to presume it was worthy. I’ve been deeply touched by the support of people from all walks of life who, regardless of whether they like that the sex industry exists, share my view that as long as it does, we might as well try to make it as safe and healthy as possible for the tens of thousands of Canadian adults who work in it.
Lauren and I have had a documentary crew following us for a year now as we worked on our project (watch for us on Global TV’s Global Currents show sometime in the spring of 2009). We’re leaving Monday to tour the brothels of New Zealand with documentary director April Parry and the Force Four production crew to see how that country is coping since legalizing brothels five years ago.
Stay tuned for my updates from afar over the next couple Fridays. I’m counting on a very interesting experience.

Response to Janet Bagnall on prostitution

This piece of mine ran Monday, Feb. 4/08 in the Montreal Gazette. I wrote it in response to a piece by Janet Bagnall that had appeared in the Gazette the previous week. I've posted Bagnall's piece here as well, right after mine:

There was a time when I wouldn’t have questioned columnist Janet Bagnall’s recent declaration that 90 per cent of prostitutes have been forced into the work.
That’s more or less what I’d been told over the years by those who considered themselves expert in such matters. I, too, presumed most sex workers were victimized and exploited women manipulated by pimps, bad boyfriends and shady customers. Back then, news of a Vancouver sex worker’s campaign to build brothels for the Olympics likely would have incensed me as much as it did Ms. Bagnall last week.
But then I got out of the newsroom and met a few sex workers - maybe a couple of hundred all told. And I realized I had it all wrong. That 90-per-cent claim is neither true nor supported by any research.
I wrapped up a three-year stint this past summer as executive director of the Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society, a grassroots non-profit in Victoria, B.C. Of the many insights I gained while running PEERS, the most powerful was that sex workers were making their own choices.
Most of the women who come to PEERS are survival sex workers, and work outdoors. Their life stories were often heartbreaking and their ongoing challenges considerable, but none would have categorized themselves as broken victims forced into the trade. Their problems tended to be the problems of any disadvantaged woman; the sex trade was simply how they paid the bills.
Why do women work as prostitutes? For the money. It’s a job, and a legal one in Canada, employing tens of thousands nationwide. But our prudish inability to come to grips with that reality is exactly what has made some aspects of the industry so dangerous.
We like to paint the sex trade as a place of violence and despair. Certainly at the street level, the nightly litany of assaults, rapes, robberies and murders noted on “bad date sheets” shared among outdoor workers in Canada’s urban centres is grim affirmation of the risks under today’s conditions.
But it’s our laws and attitudes that have created those working conditions. Women are dying and suffering out there because we’ve chased them into the shadows with our anti-solicitation laws, criminalized their incomes, and denied them a legal indoor workplace.
We categorize them as victims, but treat them like lepers. Pushed into places where we don’t have to look at them, the shunned women who end up working Canada’s outdoor strolls end up as easy pickings for predators.
Like all free markets, the sex industry exists because of demand. In Canada, our mediocre efforts to stop prostitution have focused on trying to prevent girls from entering the sex trade, but in fact we’d need to channel all our energies toward stopping the buyers if we genuinely hoped to eliminate the industry.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen little evidence of that. A street-level “shame the john” campaign surfaces now and again, but generally serves only to move the trade out of a particular neighbourhood to somewhere even more dangerous for the workers.
Most people don’t buy sex on the outdoor strolls anyway. With 80 per cent or more of prostitution in Canada taking place indoors in brothels, bars, massage parlours and dance clubs, an occasional bust on the street has little effect on anything.
Ms. Bagnall contends that “prostitution is not a job like any other.” Perhaps, but what does that have to do with a sex worker’s right to a safe workplace?
You don’t have to like the industry to see the need to make things better for those who work in it. I wish we didn’t have a weapons industry, but I’d never deny a decent workplace to people working in the munitions factories. Surely we don’t want the provision of safe, regulated workplaces for all Canadians to hinge on our opinion of their line of work.
Parts of the sex industry are truly horrendous, and must be eliminated. Trafficking, pimping, coercion, the sexual exploitation of youth - none have any place in a civil society. Those who want out of the trade should be given whatever support they need to do that.
But for the adults who choose to work in the industry, what could possibly be valid rationale for continuing to deny them a proper workplace? Like it or not, sex sells, and the real crime is that we’d rather leave women to be beaten and murdered on the streets than acknowledge that.

Jody Paterson is a columnist and communications strategist working with Victoria sex workers to develop a brothel that funds social programs for disadvantaged women in the trade.

And here's the piece that sparked my response, written by Janet Bagnall, a regular columnist with The Montreal Gazette
Published: Jan. 30, 2008

Preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics are well in hand: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is getting ready for violence. The province of British Columbia is keeping to its tight construction schedule. And Vancouver's mayor is preparing to meet the sexual needs of tourists attending the Games.
Sam Sullivan, the mayor, has said he is keeping an open mind to a proposal by Vancouver prostitutes who want to set up several co-operative brothels in time for the Olympics. Susan Davis, a prostitute, argued last fall that the city, provincial and federal government should provide a safe working environment for prostitutes in 2010 when, she is quoted as saying, tens of thousands of visitors to the Games will be looking for sex.
This bizarre notion that laws on prostitution should be altered, even temporarily, to accommodate the sexual desires of fans at large sporting events is not unique to British Columbia.
In South Africa, the former national police commissioner proposed liberalizing the country's prostitution laws for the World Cup 2010, soccer's biggest event. The commissioner is reported to have said he wanted to follow Germany's successful -- to his mind, at least -- path.
Germany, host of the 2006 World Cup, campaigned against "forced" prostitution, based on trafficked women and children, and the head of FIFA, soccer's world body, urged soccer fans to use only prostitutes who were "voluntarily" in the business. But voluntary was hardly the order of the day, with reports that as many as 40,000 women and children were trafficked into Germany to service the tens of thousands of fans at the soccer championship.
Already in South Africa, anti-trafficking activists say there are reports of street children being gathered up in readiness for the World Cup.
Sports events like Formula 1 racing, soccer championships or the Olympic Games are a magnet for human traffickers and their customers, writes University of Ottawa sociologist Richard Poulin.
In an essay this year, Poulin criticized proposals to relax prostitution laws for sports events, whether in South Africa or Canada. (In Canada, paying for sex between consenting adults is legal, although other activities such as soliciting in a public place, being in a bawdy house or forcing a person to prostitute herself are not.)
Poulin argued that simply removing prostitution from the streets, as Vancouver's Susan Davis suggests, does not turn prostitution, the business of selling one's body to strangers, into a safe activity. In Quebec, Poulin pointed out in his essay, at least five of 14 prostitutes killed in the past decade were "call girls," working in the presumed safety of a known, private environment.
And if it's true that prostitutes are a target for serial killers, Poulin wrote, it's also true for other marginalized groups such as young gay men. Representatives of one of the most vulnerable of all groups in Vancouver, native women, are adamantly against legalizing prostitution. The Aboriginal Women's Action Network in B.C. has said that legalizing brothels will only increase the number of prostitutes.
With an estimated 90 per cent of prostitutes having been forced into the sex trade, increasing the number of prostitutes is not a good idea. Research shows that the vast majority of prostitutes have been trafficked or been sexually victimized in their homes or suffer from drug addiction.
In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, Daisy Kler, a social worker with Vancouver Rape Relief, said the proposal for a network of legal brothels "entrenches prostitution as legitimate, and therefore legitimatizes pimps and traffickers." Kler added, "I do not believe the public would agree that this is a good idea, to have some disposable women available for the Olympics."
Prostitution is not a job like any other. It can't possibly be: One person pays to use another's body for his own gratification.
Allowing, never mind endorsing, this activity poses, as Poulin writes, "serious ethical questions in a country that pretends to encourage equality between men and women."
That country should be ours.

Janet Bagnall writes for the Montreal Gazette.

Why won't we help sex workers before they're dead?
Jan. 11, 2008

We spent $20 million to gather enough evidence to charge Willy Pickton with murder. We spent another $46 million to convict him.
And I guess we’ll just have to take Attorney General Wally Oppal’s word that we may need to spend many millions more to try Pickton all over again - for zero gain, seeing as the mass murderer has already been handed the maximum sentence for his crimes against B.C. women.
But what a difference the smallest fraction of all that money could have made in changing the lives of the broken women Pickton preyed upon. Why is it we have money for the desperate women working our streets only after they’re dead?
With the prison gates barely closed on Pickton, another serial killer has already emerged in the Lower Mainland. In Edmonton, where 20 survival sex workers have been murdered in the past two decades, police have begun collecting DNA samples from other street workers to make it easier to identify them should they, too, turn up dead.
While Pickton was on trial this summer and media were feasting on the sad stories of his victims, two of the three non-profits that help Vancouver’s survival sex workers nearly went under due to a lack of funding.
During the 10 years it took us to decide whether we should even worry about scores of missing women on our streets, and on through three years of investigations and court proceedings, countless women working B.C.’s rough streets continued to be beaten, raped and killed.
With all due respect to the families of Pickton’s victims, what has been gained? One man is behind bars for the rest of his life, but virtually nothing has changed for hundreds - maybe thousands - of survival sex workers in B.C. And the best our attorney general can come up with is a plan to retry the same guy.
“Will the Pickton case change things for sex workers?” I lost track of the number of times media asked me that last year when the trial was on, and I was executive director of Victoria’s Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society.
A few asked if I thought women would “be more careful” now, perhaps even quit working the streets. That they could even ask that underlined for me how little they understood about why those women were out there.
It should be no mystery by now, not after all these years of talk, talk and more talk about the dangerous lives of street-level sex workers.
The bottom line is that they need money, and it’s available on the streets. In Victoria alone, 300 or so different women and children will work our streets in a typical year; on any given night, as many as 30 women work the strolls along Rock Bay and Government streets. They wouldn’t be out there if no one was buying them.
That was one of the most gut-wrenching realizations I had in my time at PEERS: that there’s so much demand for paid sex that no level of disability, poor health or tragic circumstance is enough to render a woman unfit for the sex trade from the buyer’s point of view.
What might be done to bring about real change? In the grand scheme of things, not much - which is what makes the whole matter that much more tragic.
For the women out there right now: supported housing; addiction treatment; care that meets their needs; a safer place to work. I can’t fathom why we deny them that.
For the women and children still to come: loving, healthy families; help with life’s challenges; educational support. The child at risk of becoming a survival sex worker - or one of the twisted men who prey on them - needs only what anyone needs to grow into a happy, healthy adult.
To stop men from buying sex outdoors on the streets - and it does need to stop - the answer will ultimately be increased police enforcement.
But all the other details must be attended to first. Enforcement alone will never get to the root of the problem, and in fact can make things considerably worse for outdoor sex workers by forcing them into ever-more isolated neighbourhoods.
PEERS Vancouver - the agency that lost eight of its 11 staff members in the summer after Ottawa pulled the plug on two of its key programs - is seeing that scenario play out right now on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. A police crackdown on the street trade is pushing sex workers even deeper into the shadows, where they’re that much more vulnerable to men like Willy Pickton.
Obviously we need to continue to chase down killers, even at great cost. But surely we should first and foremost be trying to help women while they’re still alive. The families of Pickton’s victims would undoubtedly trade retribution in a heartbeat for the services and support that might have saved their loved ones in the first place.
In the grim little news segment this week about the two Abbotsford murders, the news anchor commented that “advocates are hoping their deaths will spur change.” Unfortunately, hope alone just won’t cut it.

Co-op brothel long overdue
Aug. 24 2007

I’ve been trying to pin down the moment when I got so caught up in the issues of the sex trade.
The kick in the butt that got me moving was an interview 10 years ago with former sex worker Cherry Kingsley, when I was working full-time at the Times-Colonist. She blew me away with stories from her tough, sad life.
But even in my fledgling newspaper days I was prowling the streets of Kamloops trying to find sex workers to talk to. So maybe it’s just always been my particular fascination.
In those days, I was adamantly against the sex trade, and for all the reasons you hear in any discussion of it – exploitation, victimization, terrible violence, suffering.
A lifetime of movies, news stories and documentaries about desperate, drugged-out women eking out a mean living on the streets had left their mark on me. I’d heard countless stories from women whose abusive childhoods had primed them to fall into the trade as adolescents, and assumed that all sex workers were victims in need of rescue.
But my views changed over my three years heading up Victoria’s Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society.
Given the rare opportunity to learn about the industry directly from women in the trade – including those who chose to work in it - I came to see that our need to take a moral position against prostitution is in fact a major reason for why aspects of the trade are so dangerous and exploitive.
And now I find myself launching into the planning of a co-op brothel. Who’d have thought?
I’m working on the social enterprise with another former director of PEERS, Lauren Casey. She and I made it relatively unscathed through our intense 15 minutes of fame this week after news broke of our plans.
I think the media were all a little disappointed to discover there’s nothing concrete to talk about yet, other than that the time has come. But planning for any successful business - let alone one centred on the rather incendiary proposition that there are happy, healthy, adult sex workers out there – simply has to proceed at a slow and painstaking pace.
What’s the dream? A terrific work place for sex workers who are in the industry by choice, in which all profits beyond the cost of running the business are mandated to go to social causes.
We want the money to help fund the work PEERS does supporting disadvantaged sex workers wanting to leave the street trade. Street prostitution makes up just 10 to 20 per cent of the total trade, but that group of people are in desperate need of housing, drug detox and treatment, mental-health support, and any number of other services.
What the work place will look like will depend on what we hear from sex workers when we get to that stage of the plan, but we’ve got a few ideas we’d like to test.
Like salaries instead of 100 per cent commission work. Vacation pay. Medical leave. Employment Insurance benefits. Workers’ compensation coverage. Fair shifts, and regular time off.
A letter in the TC this week from a woman I greatly admire condemned our plan as a dangerous “normalization” of prostitution that could attract even more people into the business. I understand that concern.
But sex is a legal commodity in Canada – and like it or not, the industry is thriving. We’ve done nothing to curb the demand that fuels the sex trade, and much to make it even more secretive, stigmatized and dangerous for the tens of thousands of Canadians who work in it. It’s the height of hypocrisy that we buy sex with alacrity but take no responsibility for ensuring workers are fairly paid and well-treated.
Hundreds of functioning brothels are operating discreetly across the country. Some already provide a safe, fair work environment. But it’s far from a given. Our need to deny the existence of the sex trade pushes workers into a twilight zone of wink-wink, nudge-nudge pretence that none of it is happening.
As for the money Lauren and I hope to make from our brothel project, even my younger, more black-and-white self couldn’t have quibbled with the concept of using profits from the customers of the sex trade to fund programs and services for disadvantaged workers wanting to change their lives.
My time at PEERS underlined for me how very difficult it is to find money for that work. A person can only rage for so long at public and government indifference before looking for new ways around the problem. If you knew what I know about the great tragedies unfolding out there, you’d do the same.
I don’t know how we’ll make this brothel happen. But Lauren and I are both of a type to just keep slogging until things work out.
I think we’ll find good people to help us. Work is already underway on similar fronts: planning a co-op brothel in Vancouver; legal challenges going forward both nationally and in B.C. around the lack of safe, legal work places for sex workers.
So we’ll begin, and see what happens. This country’s done nothing for long enough.

Canadian sex workers deserve better
April 20, 2007

It’s no surprise that federal Justice minister Rob Nicholson is against decriminalizing prostitution. A party with Alliance roots just isn’t going to see its way clear to taking action on the issues of the sex trade.
But it’s still pretty galling to have to read Nicholson’s comments on the matter. Decriminalizing prostitution would lead to the exploitation of women, says Nicholson, and therefore can’t be tolerated.
Nice theory. But what he’s actually saying is that he upholds the status quo.
In other words, the tens of thousands of Canadian women and men who work in the sex trade will just have to figure a way out of it, because the government isn’t prepared to do a damn thing about their working conditions. The killings and disappearances of hundreds of sex workers will continue unabated, because nothing is going to change.
I just don’t get it. The sex trade exists because the men of our communities buy sex. There’s a demand, therefore there’s a supply. That’s how a free market works, as Nicholson well knows.
So even if Nicholson’s dream came true to end the steady flow of Canadians of all ages into the sex trade, not even 24 hours would go by before someone had hooked into a new supply of sex workers from some distant land where people needed money. Got to feed that demand.
The sex trade is on our streets, and in our newspapers, phone books and magazines. It’s on our televisions. It’s in our DVD players. Aside from drugs, sex is just about the most readily available service in any city - and on sale around the clock to boot.
Not only that, but it’s the one service that unites the world. Communist-controlled, dictatorship, capitalist, military-led, profoundly religious - whatever the form of government, sex is always for sale somewhere in the country.
Sex is also common tourist fare. I visited Cuba years ago and saw grandpas from Toronto and Montreal buying young girls for as litle as $5 US. More recently, I had the distinct displeasure during a trip to Prague of being seated for a restaurant meal next to three American sex tourists engaged in a loud and loathsome conversation about the night before. Here in Victoria, workers plan for the tourist season.
So what could possibly be our rationale for shutting out the workers?
Why is their workplace unregulated and without oversight? Why do we even have such a thing as outdoor sex workers? Why do the workers live in shame and profound stigma, judged at every juncture of their lives, while their buyers enjoy ease of service and complete anonymity?
And why do we carry on in this foolish charade about how we’re going to address prostitution in Canada by “focusing on reducing its prevalence?” Give me a break, Minister Nicholson. Just say it straight up: You’ve got no intention of doing anything about Canada’s sex trade.
Reducing the prevalence of prostitution is likely an impossible goal even in an ideal world unless all efforts were focused on reducing demand. But that goal is even farther out of reach in a time when governments are also slashing social supports on all fronts.
Children in particular drift into the sex trade because there’s no support system around them - in their home, at their school or in whatever recreational activities they might have been doing had they ever b een connected to them. Outdoor sex work is also primarily an issue of social disadvantage, along with whatever it is that sends men to prowl the streets for sex and violence.
Nicholson’s comments are particularly nervy given that his party has often led the charge around social-spending cuts. I’d sure like to hear his theories on how our country will reduce the prevalence of sex workers while actively priming the pump for more disadvantage.
And what the heck is wrong with the rest of us? There isn’t a single other mainstream service whose workers face the same kind of routine danger - all due to a lack of workplace regulation and oversight. With a workforce that’s at least 90 per cent female, it would be tough to find a more pressing women’s issue.
Yet time and again, the decades-old debate fizzles out with pious musings about the need to prevent exploitation and violence against women. And nothing changes.
We pay a terrible price on a number of fronts. Children continue to suffer in an industry that we completely ignore. Adult Canadians labour in profoundly unsafe conditions. Neighbourhoods break down under the wear and tear of hosting the local prostitution stroll.
I’m still fuming over the Canadian Labour Congress’s dismissal of this issue as one that its members are too “divided” on for the congress to take action. I would have thought workers’ rights trumped moral judgment. Who are we to judge how someone earns a living - especially when our own brothers, sons, friends and lovers are the buyers?
Our paralysis is tragic. Conditions are worsening, and all we do is continue to dither over whose ideology has it right. Unbearable.

Pickton trial no relief for outdoor sex workers
Jan. 26, 2007

Today was going to be the day I didn’t write about social issues. Too much thinking about the frightening mistakes being made these days can really bum me out.
But then Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan came out with his happily-ever-after take this week on how the trial of Robert Pickton will be the thing that changes everything for the troubled women the pig farmer allegedly preyed on.
“There's no doubt that a very big, negative impression is going to be created by this," said Sullivan when asked about the impact of Pickton’s trial on Vancouver’s reputation.
"But hopefully, out of this, we can turn it into a good-news story and find a way to ensure that no women will ever have to put themselves at risk again in this way."
I just couldn’t let that go.
If we actually planned on making a difference in the lives of the women who go missing on our streets, there’d have been some sign of it by now. We’ve known for many years that women are dying out there. It’s not like we can claim surprise.
They’ve been going missing in significant numbers since the 1980s. They’ve gone missing in Vancouver, in Prince George, in Edmonton and Victoria - in every city in Canada, no doubt.
Sure, we’ve wrung our hands about the situation. Our newspaper archives are laden with our outbursts of dismay and horror.
But we haven’t actually done anything. An extremely disadvantaged group of women and youth are still having to work the dark streets on the edges of our towns.
Violence is routine, whether robbery; rape or assault. Addiction is common. So are the many illnesses that result from combining heavy drug use, poor nutrition, and a hard, hard life.
The men who shop for sex among such disadvantaged people run the gamut. Many of them aren’t out to hurt anyone. But given the state of the modern-day Canadian outdoor prostitution stroll, a few killers are bound to find their way there.
The conditions on the stroll are such that murderous types are provided with anonymous access to a population that’s widely shunned by the mainstream.
That population works in the dark, and largely out of sight. The drugs are everywhere, so nobody’s eager to call in the police. The workers are often sick, desperate and out of options, making them easy pickings.
If you were looking for a woman or a kid who nobody was going to make too big a deal about if they went missing, where would you look?
So Sullivan’s bright-new-day comments are just a bit much, given our fairly horrifying lack of action to date.
We can’t just hope to “find a way.” We have to actively seek one out. If we don’t want a subclass of workers vanishing on the edges of our cities, what are we prepared to do about it?
Would we consider trying to house them, for instance? Would we actively help them find another way to make a living? Would we find a safer place for the ones who continue to work, and get them the health care they need to get a handle on their addictions?
I talked to the Canadian Labour Congress the other day about whether the organization would ever consider coming out in defence of a safer sex trade. The members are divided, I was told. No position has been taken.
With all due respect to the members - and to anyone who still thinks we will eliminate prostitution - people are dying out there. They were dying before the Pickton case ever made headlines and they’ll be dying long after if all we’re going to do is more dithering about whether we feel ready to deal with the bigger issues of prostitution.
The first thing to do is strengthen social services, because many of the thousands of women working on B.C.’s outdoor strolls would gladly be doing something else for a living if it was an option. They need a place to clean up and housing they can afford, and maybe three or four years of solid support to get their lives straightened out.
Next comes the workplace.
We wouldn’t tolerate the ridiculous conditions of work that sex workers endure for any other profession. We shouldn’t be tolerating them for the workers of the sex industry either. Whatever our feelings on prostitution, surely we can all agree that adults working in it deserve a safe, healthy and fair workplace.
Improving the situation for women on the outdoor stroll also requires a commitment to cracking down hard on the men who go there to hurt somebody. Nothing about the sale of sex has to involve violence. The killing of a sex worker is not about a “high risk lifestyle,” but about our willingness to apply that term as an excuse for doing nothing.
It doesn’t have to be that way. But if we can’t get beyond the talk, the Pickton trial is nothing more than a pause in the proceedings for B.C.’s most vulnerable workers.

Sex workers owed decent workplaces
Dec. 15, 2006

In its own small way, the police raid on 18 Greater Vancouver massage parlours last week has a bit of the “weapons of mass destruction” scam about it.
Like the invasion of Iraq, the raids were staged under what would turn out to be false pretenses. Raiding a business is, after all, fairly serious stuff in a democratic country. The justification in this case was that the businesses in question were involved in human trafficking, possibly brought into Canada against their will. The raids would in fact be helping people escape a desperate situation.
“Previous experience dealing with human trafficking on a global level has shown the victims of human trafficking are often found working in establishments such as the ones searched last night,” RCMP Supt. Bill Ard said confidently the day after the Dec. 8 raids.
Could be. But not this time. None of the 78 women found at the massage parlours were illegal immigrants. None were younger than 21, nor did any want a transition bed when one was offered to them after the raid.
The raids were pitched as a means of reaching out to enslaved women forced into the sex trade against their will. Instead, those same women ended up accounting for the majority of people arrested in the raids. A week later, charges have yet to be laid against anyone.
What that means in terms of government spending is that some 200 police officers were involved for months in plotting a big raid on 18 B.C. massage parlours, which ultimately turned out to be nothing more than yet more hassle for a group of workers who were theoretically the “victims” when the raids started taking shape.
What that means in terms of adherence to democratic principles is that raids on 18 legitimate businesses were carried out under false pretenses. The raids were sold as rescues, but nobody was looking to be saved.
Solicitor General John Les depicted the raids this week as a “huge shot across the bow” for anyone considering getting into the prostitution business. Oh, please. The sex industry will barely register a blip from the raids. The only ones who will feel the pain are the women who work in the sex trade, who will once again go looking for even darker corners to escape the scrutiny of police.
How can we continue to be surprised at the presence of a sex trade in our cities? As long as there are men who want to buy sex, there will be women and men who will sell it. That’s how it’s been in our community since the first non-aboriginal settlements took root, and in every other community around the world for as long as human history. Surely we can’t still think that this is a matter for the police.
Misguided police raids in Vancouver back in the 1970s were a significant factor in the spike in street prostitution in the years after that. Up until then, B.C.’s sex trade had mostly been an indoor industry, operating in places like Vancouver’s old Penthouse Cabaret. After the busts, sex workers were displaced to the Downtown Eastside. A frightening rise in assaults, rapes and murders involving those workers soon followed.
Three decades later, we’re apparently as baffled as ever about what to do about prostitution beyond more of the same. And no small wonder. We’re clearly stuck if we still believe that complex, costly police raids dressed up like rescues are how we’ll “crack down” on the sex industry.
Not only are such raids a disturbing waste of money, the people who bear the brunt of the impact are typically the very workers identified as needing to be saved through police intervention. All that the latest raids have done for the women rounded up at the 18 massage parlours in Coquitlam, Surrey, Richmond, Burnaby and Vancouver is to push the workers into even more invisible places in the future to avoid hassles with police. Some may even end up working the streets, which are as dangerous as ever to those forced to do their business there.
What’s to be done? It starts with coming to grips with the sex trade, and the fact that it exists no matter how much we wish it didn’t. We’ve all got our views on the morality of the trade, but there comes a point when continuing to do nothing is the most immoral act of all.
The ugly aspects of the sex trade most definitely have to be routed. Exploitation of a child, sexual slavery, coercion -all must be vigorously pursued and punished. But at the same time, we desperately need to address working conditions for the thousands of Canadian adults who continue to work in the sex industry. In an age when even lumber is bought ethically, we at least owe that small courtesy to those who sell sex.
Sex sells, and the buyers are us. All the pointless police raids in the world can’t change that.

Prostitution and violence
Nov. 10, 2006

The media came calling this week, with a short-lived and whirlwind intensity that I have come to recognize as the hallmark of being “in the news.” The subject at hand was a new report that briefly touched on drug-fuelled parties in the Western Communities luring youth into the violence of the sex trade.
It was the briefest of mentions, really: One paragraph in a 78-page report. But for me, it would be the dominant force that would rule my Tuesday.
As someone who works at an agency that helps sex workers, I would be in high demand that day and the night before for my comments about the rumoured party place. I had little to offer, having never heard of the place. But politicians and others waded in with gasps of disbelief, and demands for police to “do something.”
The story blew in and out of the headlines in little more than a day. With no young, partying Western Communities children stepping forward to fuel more coverage with confessions of being lured into the sex trade at parties, interest in the story faded fast. Given how important the report actually is, that’s a shame.
Researchers from the Justice Institute of B.C. spent two years talking to 110 youth and adult sex workers about the province’s sex trade. Victoria and Campbell River were part of the study, as was Kamloops and Prince George. The study’s grim revelations underline that violence is commonplace in the sex trade, but it gets its start at home.
I found that to be the report’s key finding: That the “vast majority” of people interviewed for the study reported that their first experience of violence was as children in their own homes, usually at the hands of somebody who was supposed to be looking after them. Childhood sexual abuse was also a significant factor.
Everyone in the sex trade has a different story to tell, of course, and their stories aren’t all sad, predictable or anticipated. But ask them about their experiences around violence, and some common themes emerge. Kids who are hit, hurt and shamed while growing up are at higher risk of ending up with violence in their lives as adults, too.
The problem with having the media focus almost exclusively on the Western Communities party-place aspect of the report is that the kids and adults who most need the help get bypassed yet again. Everybody gets hysterical about scary bogeymen luring good middle-class kids to a ruinous life through drugs and parties, and nobody does a damn thing for the kids who the report is actually talking about.
Those kids are infinitely fixable, capable of turning their lives around even in the face of astounding life tragedy and disadvantage. They just need the right services at the right time, for as long as they need it. That’s a small price to pay for the chance to see today’s damaged children grow into tomorrow’s healthy parents and grandparents.
But they barely got a mention in all the media hubbub this week. Rather than real support for B.C.’s struggling families - where the participants in the Justice Institute study clearly haled from - I fear the conclusion we’ll draw based on the media coverage is that what’s really needed is yet another awareness program warning teens to stay away from party houses and drugs.
I guess it’s uncomfortable to take a genuine look at the sex trade, because that would require acknowledging that it exists the way it does because of us. We made the laws. Our men are the buyers. The reason the kids in the report virtually all said they wouldn’t dream of going to police with their problems is because we made it so they have a lot to lose by coming forward.
We’ve got to quit pretending that the sex trade happens only at some scary place on the outskirts of town, and that the answer is more enforcement. Police have their role to play, sure, but they’re just one small piece of the puzzle. We can’t continue our wasted efforts to “eliminate” prostitution, a folly that does nothing except to force the issue into ever-darker corners.
People are always asking me how we’ll “solve” the problems of the sex trade. Until we figure out why men buy sex, I don’t think that’s possible. Even if we could prevent every Canadian child from heading into the sex trade from this point on, children from other countries would simply flood in to meet the demand. That’s the unassailable law of the market.
But we can certainly do something to make life less miserable for those in the more unsavoury parts of the industry. We can support families and communities in raising healthy and happy kids in peaceful households, and helping children grow up to be better parents than their own parents knew how to be. The things that people need to step away from despair and hopelessness are within our reach to give.
Or we can let the issue die in a blaze of media coverage that completely misses the point. Surely not.