A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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 ...

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...

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 ser...

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 mu...

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 Vanco...

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 t...

  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 aspect...

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 an...

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 resea...

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 iden...

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 ...

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, therefor...

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...

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...

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...