A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Red Umbrella March - courtesy of Peers Victoria This piece of mine started as a total rant that I imagined going on my blog or perhaps a BC newspaper. But for various reasons I ended up sending it to the editor of JSource, the website for the Canadian Journalism Project . And here it is , hot off the press today, rewritten into less rant-like style but better because of it. *** The Edmonton Journal ran a  series on sex trafficking  in March. At least, that’s what the headlines said, even though none of the sex workers in the piece were actually being trafficked and nobody was charged with trafficking. Some might say those two details kind of cancel out the premise of the series. But I’ve been taking in news coverage of sex work for a long time, and dressing up a story to look like something that it isn’t is tragically common. It’s as if all the usual journalistic instincts to present a fair story and get the facts go out the window when somebody says “sex traffi...

I'm adding my voice to what I hope will be an ever-larger chorus of British Columbians asking that police departments in BC refuse to participate in the ill-informed Operation Northern Spotlight campaign to "stop sex trafficking," which has been conducted off and on elsewhere in Canada for a number of years and is modelled on a similar U.S. police strategy. As you will see from the letter below from the Supporting Women's Alternatives Network ( SWAN Vancouver Society ), the police campaign most definitely doesn't stop trafficking. But it does do serious harm to adult sex workers just trying to make a living. SWAN bases its letter on solid sources, and I've included all of them here. If you're not already informed on this issue, please read and learn. Uninformed opinion and myth around sex work continue to cause real harm to people, and do nothing to stop the harms of violence, exploitation and genuine trafficking. Around the issue of sex workers...

Delighted to have my writing appearing on other sites every now and then, the most recent examples being in the online B.C. newspaper  The Tyee and as a guest blogger on the web site Naked Truth  run by self-described "anarchist stripper mom" Annie Temple. Hope you'll check them out! The piece I wrote for The Tyee grew out of some conversations I had this week about my own experiences with the people who these days reveal themselves as nasty internet trolls, like the kind who have shouted down actor Leslie Jones with the worst racist, misogynist, super-ugly stuff. And the piece at Naked Truth builds on an earlier blog post I did about the deliberate campaign to silence adult sex workers by building a myth of trafficking and exploitation around them. As you'll see in my piece - and I've included all my sources at the bottom of the piece to encourage readers to see a little more clearly - trafficking is being manipulated into a far bigger issue than it actu...

Were I a cartoon character, I expect I'd have big red flags and maybe some small explosions coming out of my head these days after reading the Ontario government's news release  this week about its big new anti-trafficking initiative. I'm all for ending trafficking, of course. But the issue is increasingly emerging as some kind of stealth instrument for attacking people working in the sex industry, so I've learned to read every announcement of new anti-trafficking measures in a state of acute hyper-vigilance for what's really being said. The Ontario news release offers some worthy examples of what I'm talking about. Scroll down to the "Quick Facts" in the release and you'll see this one: "In many cases of trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, trafficked persons may develop 'trauma bonds' with their traffickers, and may not view themselves as victims. As such, human trafficking is believed to be a vastly underreport...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O4noARYayM     And as the UK legislature moves to reject the criminalizing of sex buyers, Canada steps forward into its regressive law that does the opposite, which the Senate has now passed. For the first time in our history, the customers of adult, consensual sex workers are now going to be criminals.      I guess we all knew how this was ultimately going to go from the minute that Justice Minister Peter MacKay started making noises about further criminalization of the industry earlier this year. But still, the news is so discouraging. Far from abolishing the industry or saving victims, the new law simply pushes sex workers that much deeper into the shadows, where they will now have to take even more care to avoid police and shield their customers from arrest.      As one might have thought from what we learned after the Pickton multiple-murder case, it's in the shadows where bad things happen, which m...