Justin Trudeau's stand on decriminalizing still a work in progress

 

  While I keep my distance from politics, I've somehow ended up on the federal Liberal email list and have been receiving messages urging me to donate to Justin Trudeau and seeking my thoughts. With the heartbreak of Bill C-36 and the further criminalizing of sex work hanging over me, I seized the opportunity to respond to one of the messages to feel out Trudeau's position on decriminalization. Here is our exchange so far.

My response to the Liberals' email asking for my thoughts:

I would like to see Justin Trudeau come out with a clear statement around decriminalizing the work of adult, consensual sex workers. I am a passionate activist on this issue of human and civil rights, and will support the candidate who supports an end to C36 and understands that decriminalization is the best way to reduce risk to sex workers, decrease stigma, and ensure civil equality to a population of workers who are discriminated against and silenced. 

Their response to me a few days later:

Dear Jody,

    Thank you for writing to us about the Conservatives’ recently proposed prostitution legislation, Bill C-36.

    The Liberal Party of Canada opposes this legislation. We have serious concerns that Bill C-36 fails to comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the requirements outlined by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Bedford decision. We are also concerned that this legislation fails to adequately protect the health and safety of vulnerable people, particularly women.

    We have called on the government to produce evidence of the legal opinions it sought in drafting this legislation, however, the Conservatives continue to refuse to release this information. They have also refused to submit this legislation as a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to determine its constitutional validity.

    Given all of these concerns, we remain troubled the legislation will not actually make life safer for sex workers.

    Thank you again for contacting us on this important issue. It is through dialogue with Canadians like you that the Liberal Party of Canada can continue to develop policies that reflect the values of Canadians.

    Kind regards,

    James Cano
    Liberal Party of Canada

And my response back to them, sent today: 

    I really appreciate that someone took the time to respond to my query. However, I urge you to make your platform just a bit more specific around WHAT you will do for sex workers. For instance, I am unclear whether you would support decriminalization of adult, consensual sex work, or if you still like the idea of further criminalization but believe that C-36 isn't a good law for doing that. I feel this is one of the most important civil and human rights issues in our country right now, as tens of thousands of consenting adult sex workers work in the shadows without our support, without the same access to civil and criminal remedies such as police, courts, contract law, employment standards, workers' comp.  

    If the Liberals are looking for more information and research to help them take a firm position on this issue, here are some links that I think have great sources of information. The first is the site of a very large research project going on right now in Canada, which involves subjects who are connected to the sex work industry in a variety of ways. The second is the site of an organization I work with from time to time and am very closely tied to, Peers Victoria. The third is the site of Maggie's, a Toronto sex worker organization that has collected some excellent resources. The fourth is the site of Stella's, a Montreal sex worker organization. 

    There's so much more information I'd be happy to connect you to, from all around the world. This is an emotional issue, but the research around it is very clear. Nothing improves - for sex workers or the communities they live in - through criminalization. Yes, bad things happen to some sex workers, but how does any of that improve by criminalizing the work? The question is not whether we'd want our children to be sex workers (we activists are constantly having that question thrown at us), it's what kind of a work place and safety structure we'd want for them if they were doing this work. 

    Please take a clear stand on this issue as one of human and civil rights. The Liberals stand a very good chance of forming the next government. Be brave, humane and evidence-based, and support a decriminalized workplace for adult, consenting sex workers. 

http://www.understandingsexwork.com/

http://www.safersexwork.ca/sex-work-101/

http://maggiestoronto.ca/resources

http://chezstella.org/stella/en/publications

And what will they say next? Stay tuned. 

So much misinformation in Senate sex-work hearings

     Having a Twitter feed during the Senate's meetings on sex work is both a blessing and a curse. I got so much minute-by-minute info yesterday on the opening day of the meetings that I practically felt I was there, but at the same time I spent the day fuming at all the inane, hurtful and poorly informed comments being made by some of the senators and that infuriating justice minister of ours, Peter MacKay.
     Sex workers and sex-worker organizations that support decriminalization have a huge presence on Twitter. The feed coming out of Ottawa was frenzied from the moment I staggered out of bed yesterday morning, as that three-hour time difference meant that my 7 a.m. rising came a good hour into the meeting. And man, my fellow tweeters were incensed, mostly by MacKay and his continuing assertions that the "vast majority" of sex workers are victims in need of rescue, not workers in need of legal workplaces.
    That statement alone set the tone for the fiction that mostly passes for decrim debate coming out of government these days. In truth, no one knows anything about the "vast majority" of Canadian sex workers, because research has been skimpy and almost exclusively focused on survival sex workers on the street. That group accounts for just 10 per cent of the total sex worker population, and even among that 10 per cent, the diversity of experience is far more varied than research with a few people could ever capture.
     The Tories want to give the impression that they have consulted on this move to criminalize sex work even further. But isn't it strange that Peter MacKay toured Canada in his consultations and never spoke to even one sex worker who is currently working? He didn't stop in at Pivot Legal Society while passing through Vancouver, despite that organization's prominent role in the Supreme Court of Canada ruling last year that threw out three of Canada's main prostitution laws as unconstitutional. He didn't visit sex-worker organizations. Here's how Pivot summed up MacKay's time in Vancouver, in theory consulting with "the people" on C-36.

... Minister MacKay did not spend his time meeting with sex workers. He did not visit where sex workers live or see where they work or listen to their stories. Instead, he hosted private meetings with senior lawyers from major law firms and attended fancy breakfasts at private clubs.

    The Vancouver group Sex Workers United Against Violence sent out invitations to every one of our 412 MPs to come and learn more about the realities of sex work in Canada directly from the people working in it in the Downtown Eastside. Only one MP took them up on it.
    Anyway. We are worlds apart, those of us who feel strongly that decriminalization is the only way to assure more safety, equality and respect for sex workers, and those who think they can abolish the industry by criminalizing more of it. Do your own research into that position and what you'll learn is that there isn't a country in the world that has had success trying to abolish sex work.
    I fear the fix is in, though. The Conservatives have carefully collected feedback that shores up their position, and victims of abuse to tell their admittedly tragic stories to the media as if they were representative of every sex worker experience ever. Never mind that Conservative statements about how further criminalization will protect sex workers fly in the face of the experiences of sex workers and the findings of international research around measures to reduce violence.
     And yes, there will be another court challenge, but years and years will pass before the courts can rule yet again that our laws hurt far more people than they help. Peter MacKay, I hope you realize that the suffering of all the sex workers shut out of Canadian society and forced to work in even more unsafe conditions between now and then is firmly on your shoulders.
     

Revised post: First day of Senate invitation list shuts out sex workers, but things improve on Days 2 and 3

 And yet another revision as of Sept. 10: Yes, the speaker lineup had more balance than I initially thought, but sex-worker organizations note that even so, the ratio was 2:1 in favour of further criminalization of the industry. A wise media scribe also noted that media tend to cover the first day and the last of a meeting, and that it had to be more than coincidence that the first day was almost exclusively anti-decriminalization. 

Mea culpa: Turns out I was looking at only the first day of the Senate meetings when I wrote this, in which the lineup is very much abolitionist. But here's the full list for the 3 days of meetings, and I see many more sex-work groups have been invited to speak. Sorry, Senators! Carry on.

Looks like the Conservative-controlled Canadian Senate is taking extreme measures to avoid hearing anything that might shake up their conviction that all sex workers are exploited victims when the Senate's legal and constitutional affairs committee considers Bill C-36 next week.
     The bill will add even more criminality to sex work if it becomes law, making the purchasing of sex a crime for the first time in Canadian history. It's a controversial bill, coming on the heels of a Supreme Court of Canada decision in December that threw out as unconstitutional three of the country's major laws against sex work.
     A wise government would have taken a step back to really consider the implications of the highest court in the land ruling that Canada's anti-sex-work laws hurt more people than they ever helped. It would have taken a long look at the significant research in Canada and all around the world that has found that the best way to improve the safety, equality and lives of sex workers is to decriminalize the work.
     But the Conservatives had their minds made up long before that Supreme Court decision was handed down. They opted for a different tack, choosing to just shut out the voices of anyone who doesn't think like they do on this issue. The invitation list of those requested to present to the Senate committee on Bill C-36 next Tuesday is blatant confirmation of that.
     Only two of the 11 organizations and individuals invited to present hold a view different than the Conservatives. These two groups will be alone in the crowd in their support of decriminalization, and their view of sex workers as capable people able to make their own choices and deserving of equality, safe workplaces and respect.
     Three presenters are traumatized parents of missing or murdered daughters. I'm sure their tragic and emotional stories will play well on the news that night, even though it's hard to see that C-36 would have changed anything about the circumstances of their children's deaths had it been in force back then. None of the presenters are sex worker organizations, even though Canada has quite an abundance of well-informed groups armed with convincing research in support of decriminalization.
    Instead, the Senate committee will be hearing mostly from groups that support  Bill C-36. They are passionately against prostitution. They're all supporters of the muddled version of the so-called Nordic model that the government is proposing, in which the buyers of sex are especially targeted for criminal charges, but the sellers nonetheless remain at risk for a variety of charges as well (not to mention are forced to retreat even deeper into the shadows to try to protect their customers).
     The Senate presenter list was clearly carefully crafted to ensure that most of the day will be devoted to groups saying exactly what the Conservatives want to hear. You wouldn't want to be the two groups in the room with something different to say facing a lineup like this one:

• Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. Member of the Women's Coalition For The Abolition of Prostitution, which believes no one makes a truly free choice to work as a sex worker.
• Native Women's Association of Canada. Also a member of the Women's Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution. 
• Walk With Me Canada. An anti-trafficking organization that opposes decriminalization and supports C-36.
• Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution. The name of this group pretty much speaks for itself. The group sees all sex work as male violence against women and wants prostitution abolished.  
• K. Brian McConaghy, Director of Ratanak International, which describes itself as "a Christ-centered organization committed to serving the people of Cambodia by being an agent of change in Cambodia’s social, economic, and spiritual landscape." What that's got to do with sex work in Canada, I don't know.
• The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. A coalition of 160-plus church denominations that have strong opinions against gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia and sex work.
• Ed and Linda Smith, a Regina couple whose teenage daughter left home, got into drugs and ended up murdered in 1990 while working the streets in Victoria. Fighting against prostitution has been a cornerstone of the Smiths' lives ever since. 
• Mothers Against Trafficking Humans. Anti-prostitution group founded by the mother of a young woman who went missing in 2006. 

    The two presenters who will speak that day in support of equal rights and equality for adult, consenting sex workers are Pivot Legal Society and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. Both are fine organizations with thoughtful, well-considered positions, but I fear their voices will be lost. I note that both have also been placed in speaking positions that are just before a break, which makes me wonder if they will also end up rushed through their presentations after the more Conservative-friendly groups have had their say. 

    Like all the other Canadian sex-work organizations, PEERS Victoria didn't get an invitation to present. But they sent in a presentation anyway. Read it here if you're still not sure what's so bad about Bill C-36.

     Let's hope at least a few senators will have the decency to seek out the points of view of the other side, that at least some will feel foolish supporting a law opposed by the very people who it aims to "save." You'd think that before you rode off on your white horse  in the certainty that there was a nation of exploited, helpless victims needing rescued from prostitution, you might want to hear from a few of them first. 

Victoria Sexual Assault Centre bravely breaks from the pack to stand in solidarity with sex workers

   

Draw close to the debate about decriminalizing the sex industry in Canada and you will quickly learn that while sex workers' organizations are working hard to move this issue forward, they don't enjoy much support from most women's groups.
    At least on the surface, the problem seems to boil down to a fundamental divide between those who see all sex work as exploitation and victimization, and those who support Canada's adult sex workers in making a free choice to work in the industry and in safe circumstance. Many women's groups have tended to align themselves with the exploitation side of the debate, which has left sex-worker-led organizations largely on their own to fight for safer working conditions, equality and basic human rights.
    Given what a hot-button topic this is among women's groups,  it's a powerful thing that the Victoria Sexual Assault Centre has done in stepping up to the plate this week to announce its solidarity with Canadian sex workers. The organization voted unanimously to support decriminalization and join the fight to stop Bill C36, the proposed law the federal Conservatives want to bring in to criminalize even more of the sex industry.
    With other women's centres such as Vancouver Rape Relief taking the opposite position on C36, it took real bravery for VSAC to stand up against the more popular view of sex work as victimization (a view that rarely includes the opinions of real-life adult sex workers who say they choose to work in the industry). VSAC is even standing in opposition to the position taken by the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres, which is against decriminalization and views all sex work as violence. That takes guts.
    Federal Justice Minister Peter MacKay and the Harper government are so certain they are right on this one - that the answer to problems in the sex industry is to crack down harder on it with more laws. They're wrong. And what's really disturbing is that so many otherwise terrific women's organizations, whose strong feminist roots ought to have taught them all to be mindful of silencing and patronizing other women, are also wrong.
    Yes, some people really are suffering and being victimized in the sex industry, and we need to do a lot more to help them. Human trafficking for any reason must not be tolerated, and children should never be exploited, coerced, abused or forced into any kind of work.
    But that doesn't have to come at a cost to the adults who choose to work in the sex industry, a group that I suspect probably numbers in the tens of thousands in Canada alone. Why are rights-based organizations that do such good work on so many other fronts unable to acknowledge that there is a significant population of sex workers who completely reject being portrayed as helpless victims? Why do sex workers have to suffer just so others can feel safe and smug in their pretension that it's possible to eliminate the sex industry if we just lay enough criminal charges?
     But along comes the Victoria Sexual Assault Centre to remind us that all it takes is one brave soul to break from the pack. Who knows what waves VSAC's decision might set in motion? Those who feel passionately about improving sex workers' rights are already convinced on this issue, but there remains a very large world of unconvinced who might be ready to consider the rights of sex workers if more support started coming from "mainstream" fronts.
     Years ago when I visited some of the legal brothels of New Zealand, I learned that the Federation of Businesswomen of New Zealand was among the organizations that actively supported decriminalization efforts. I felt a flash of pure envy for a country where even the regular folk were ready to stand in solidarity with sex workers. Surely that day will come in Canada? Surely.
     PEERS Victoria has worked hard for many years to explain the realities of the sex industry to a doubting community. I've been connected to PEERS in various ways for 15 years now, and admit that at times I wondered if any of those messages were being heard. VSAC's support is profoundly heartening confirmation that while the pace of change sometimes feels glacial, somebody is listening.
    

Who knew? I'm really into Twitter

    Last week when I commented on Facebook and then reworked the comment into a blog post that I could tweet, I felt like I was one with the social-media universe. I know a lot of people who have mixed feelings about social media and how it's changing the cultural landscape and way we interact. But personally, I love it.
    The big surprise for me has been Twitter, which I avoided for the longest time. The idea of being restricted to 140 measly characters just didn't do it for me, and I really didn't want a whole new "thing" to have to tend on-line.
    But I finally caved a couple of months ago and signed on, only to discover that a well-planned Twitter feed is like having an army of story-hunters around the world connecting me to the most interesting and diverse angles on what's going on out there. I've never had so many interesting news stories put in front of me.
   I like Facebook, too, although it tends to be used more as a gentle and life-affirming medium for my age group, a place where we go to feel good, catch up on the Facebook family goings-on, and share photos of the grandkids or our winter vacations. I also really like it for crowd-sourcing information, like "Who are the best caterers in town?" or "Where's a good venue for a public meeting?" I've spent this past summer in a series of great housesits thanks to connections on Facebook.
    Twitter, on the other hand, is a rougher space where the news is mostly edgy and the clash of opinions much more pronounced. I guess I must have been missing that in my life, because I'm not only loving the stories that my fellow Twitterites are delivering, but also my own hunts to find stories to share with them in return.
    Could a Twitter-like thing be the replacement for newspapers, which appear to be in their death throes? Could be, although the best Twitter stories for my money are still largely generated by paid journalists working in real newsrooms (Globe and Mail, New York Times, CTV, CBC, established on-line news sites). I think we'll always need at least a few good reporters who get paid to do their work, because otherwise a crowd-sourced news site like Twitter risks devolving into a forum for conspiracy theories, unsubstantiated comment, scams and incoherent rants. (Or cute-kitten videos.)
     But something Twitter does much better than traditional media is to act as a kind of clearing house so that stories from all over the world are coming directly to the Twitter subscriber without first having been boiled down or reinterpreted by media in the country where you live. It's like removing the middle man, and it really opens up the global conversation.
    There is much more space on Twitter than there has ever been in traditional media for the voices of activists, protesters, radical thinkers, and those wanting to shake up the status quo. Facebook is where we go to have a hug and share a life anecdote, but Twitter is the place for those wanting to foment a little rebellion. I've been so happy to discover a global community of sex workers on Twitter, where they are shaping a unified political voice through this new connection.
    And you know, I kind of like communicating in 140 characters and hashtags. I like a format that lets me reveal the more intense side of my personality. I admit, I would like more than 89 followers, but hey, it's a start. Come find me and we'll mix things up a little, maybe start a small revolution. I'd like that.
    

I'm just going to keep saying this: Stop Bill C-36

   

 I wrote this response to a couple of my Facebook friends just now on a great comment thread that has developed on my Facebook site. The comments came after I posted a rather pleading message to people to get past the knee-jerk stuff around the Canadian sex industry and get informed before Bill C-36 becomes law. Figured I'd put it out to my blogger audience, too, because damn it, all of us who feel this way need to be shouting from the rooftops right now before this country goes and does something that is shameful, regressive, poorly considered, potentially harmful, discriminatory and mean.

     For Lisa and Darlene, you are both my friends and I have MUCH time for both of you, and I do understand that this is a divisive subject. But this is a time for getting together to understand why each of us feels the way we do. I know that both your viewpoints come from your own life experiences. But we can't just stay here like this, in a standoff where we will be doomed to repeat our many failures on this front. Even if we believe absolutely that the industry must end and people urgently need help to leave it, surely we still want safer work places and human rights for those who are not yet in a position to leave, or in fact are quite happy to stay. 

There is room for all of us in this tent, but this ridiculous pretence that we can "help" people by further criminalizing the work they do is insanity. I don't think this has to be a question about accepting the sex industry, it's about providing the same level of basic rights, respect, access to civil protections (police, contract law, employment standards, etc) and community welcome to people regardless of what job they do. 

    Those who want to debate the right and wrong of a sex industry can continue to do that and see what can be done about it, but the question of decriminalization is, in my mind, not one about why people buy and sell sex but one of rights for a large population of workers who are mostly women, mostly earning at the lower middle income level, and really needing a break from being judged, talked over, silenced, patronized, misunderstood and arrested. I can barely handle that my own country is poised to make life just that much tougher for these workers. People, it is wrong, wrong, wrong. Please don't sit on the fence on this one.

And here's my original post on the subject. 

     How can a country so similar to ours, Australia, be progressively having a public discussion around ensuring employment insurance for sex workers, while Canada is poised to retreat into further criminalization? I know people hate this subject - I know it by the teeny number of "likes" I get when I post anything about it, compared to when I post a photo of an attractive flower or a grandchild. But people's need to not have to think about the existence of sex work does not outweigh Canadian sex workers' need for safer work places and a little dignity and respect. If you've ever thought that you really should learn more about sex work and get out from under the misinformation and myths, now's the time. Start with the Sex Work 101 section on the new PEERS web site. http://www.safersexwork.ca/sex-work-101/. And please, please, join the fight to stop Bill C-36.

Canada looks better from a distance these days

    It appears that I may have developed an idealistic sense of Canada while I was off living in Honduras these last two years. I was thinking of it as a great country with a few problems it needed to pay attention to at the time I left Canada in early 2012, but perhaps the distance - and the contrast with super-troubled Honduras - led me to forget about the "pay attention" part and just remember it as a country that largely had its act together.
    At any rate, coming home and learning about some of the messed-up stuff that's actually going on in my homeland has been pretty discouraging..
     The stuff around sex work has been particularly unsettling, given my affinity for the people who the rest of us leave without rights, dignity or safe workplaces just because we wrinkle our noses at what they do for a living. It is so, so sad that we're preparing to go backwards with a law that will only make things worse for sex workers.
     But the video of the contaminated water pouring out of the huge Mount Polley mine tailings "pond" was another serious wakeup for anyone who thinks Canada's got it all figured out. I could hardly believe what I was seeing, that vast volume of poisoned water just pouring across the landscape. How was it possible, that we would allow a 170-hectare "pond" at a mine to be so poorly maintained that a breach of this size could happen?
    These kinds of things - stupid laws, the ignoring of environmental regulations - happen regularly in Honduras, of course. But while I wouldn't want to make excuses for any country, the truth is that the place is relatively new to democracy, poor as hell, badly educated for the most part and has a government style so hands-off and self-serving that it could have only been created by the most Republican of the U.S. Republicans that have influenced the country so heavily.
    But what's Canada's excuse? We're comparatively rich, our infrastructure is amazing, and our education system is like a golden dream to anyone from a developing country. We have been a democracy ever since we were born as a country, and at least in theory talk a good game about the importance of democratic processes and citizenship. We are very big on equality, and at times have been brilliant leaders on the world stage with our progressive attitudes and drive to be fair.
     Yet here we are, with a chance to do right on behalf of an underclass of sex workers that is largely female and contains the most stigmatized, misunderstood and discriminated-against  people in the country, and we are walking backwards - toward greater discrimination, higher risk of violence, deeper inequality. Is this my Canada?
     As for that haunting spill at the Mount Polley mine, the weird thing is that we've got tens of thousands of regulations in this country, including I don't know how many that would have something to do with not being allowed to leave your tailings pond to get in such disrepair that it might rupture all over the wilderness.  I bet most of us presumed the whole point of having so many laws around things like that was to ensure a day would never come when Canadians would have to see a massive lake of arsenic-contaminated water pouring across our landscape.
    And yet there it was. And yes, we can blame the government, as many people already are. But we citizens have been here the whole time that various federal and provincial governments were taking apart the regulatory bodies and stripping away the funding that used to ensure things like tailings ponds got monitored. We reelected the same kind of governments over and over again. We voted for governments that hated to govern, and it is just a little late to lament their failings now.
    Anyway. I guess it's just a reminder that no country is safe from bad law-making and stupid thinking (like that corporations could ever be left to monitor their own environmental impact, or that you could "help" sex workers by criminalizing their customers).
     I guess I started getting a little dreamy about Canada while I was away. I got thinking that while we admittedly stumble on some fronts, overall we were on the right path. But I'm back in the real world now.
   

Search for the truth on sex work

 

So many untruths are being bandied about as the Tories try to railroad uncertain Canadians into accepting new prostitution laws that will criminalize even more of the industry.
    I know from my own circle of friends - at least the ones who aren't sex workers themselves - that it's almost like people are frightened to rethink what they think they know about the sex industry. Yet there is so much exceptional research out there that challenges this fuzzy belief that to be a sex worker is to be a helpless, trafficked victim dragged into the business by a man who will beat you if you don't comply.
    But surely the public's instinct to want to avoid thinking about an industry they find unpleasant hardly outweighs the rights of tens of thousands of other Canadians to a safer workplace and some respect and dignity. In other words, get informed, people.
    And here are some excellent research papers and relevant info to help get you started:

• London School of Economics study on incidence of violent pimps, or any pimps at all, in the lives of U.S. sex workers
• Multi-project Canadian study into sex work funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
• Straight-up information on "third parties" in the Canadian sex industry put together by the Montreal sex-work group Stella
• Opinion pieces, blog posts and research by Canadian sociology professor Fran Shaver
• Prostitution research from SFU criminology professor John Lowman
• A 2010 study of adult Canadian buyers
• Reality about managers in the industry from the CIHR research project
• Editorial in The Economist
• PEERS Victoria web site with connections to informed, well-researched resources about sex work, management of sex work, clients and more
• Researchers question findings of a Norwegian study of how new and punitive laws are working to control the sex industry

Federal hearings finally put a spotlight on empowered sex workers

 

  While I'm offended as a Canadian that the future of my country is in the hands of people as uninformed, close-minded and unworldly as Justice Minister Peter MacKay, it's a wonderful thing to see Canada's sex workers stepping up to speak their own truths to combat all the lies that are being told about them right now.
     I saw footage from the justice committee meetings in Ottawa this week as the debate around Bill C-36 gets underway. I totally love seeing empowered and passionate sex workers putting it all on the line to challenge the Conservatives' proposed new anti-prostitution law, which would take the ineffective and damaging laws that we've had for the last 147 years and make them considerably worse.
    Based on the untruth that all sex work is violent, coercive and sick and that all sex workers are victims, Bill C-36 is so far from so many sex workers' realities that the generally low-profile community just can't take it anymore. For those of us cheering them on from the sidelines, it's a beautiful thing to see them fighting back with such passion.
     I couldn't have imagined that there would be an upside to Bill C-36, but maybe this is it: That sex workers who have mostly just gritted their teeth and coped with Canada's flawed laws up to this point are now so incensed by MacKay and his team of yes-ministers that they are organizing, speaking up, and refusing to be shut out of other people's discussions about them.
    Two representatives of PEERS Victoria will be presenting to the justice committee on Thursday. They are the kind of people whose knowledge is deep and wise, and I can only hope the committee has its ears on when the PEERS team talks about all the things that are wrong with laws that criminalize everything about sex work.
    This issue is about workers' rights, and in many ways women's rights as well given that the majority of sex workers and brothel managers are women. On that point, MacKay should have been ruled out right off the hop as the man for the job. A man who places all women in the kitchen packing the children's lunches (and all men moulding and shaping the minds of the next generation) simply shouldn't be involved in making life-endangering changes to a woman-dominated industry he knows so little about.
    MacKay was on the news this week saying the goal of the bill is to eradicate sex work. What it will actually do is drive the industry further underground, where the "victims" that MacKay seems so worried about can continue to go unsupported, unseen and vilified in even more potentially dangerous situations.
     More and more, sex workers are speaking out to say, hey, buddy, you don't know anything about our lives. Like all leaders in the early days of a social revolution, they risk so much personally to be "out" as sex workers, which adds even more to the significance of seeing them in the justice committee hearings, bravely and calmly telling it like it is.
      There are always going to be people who don't want to hear anything that challenges their conviction that sex workers are helpless victims and their clients, perverted pigs. But for those who suspect there's more to the story, this week's hearings just might be a powerful public-relations tool for real change and respect for sex workers. 
      Finally, Canadian sex workers have a national platform. So far, they're looking great. Hope you know what you've started, Mr. MacKay.
     

Sex Work Alliance guide to effective consultations with Ottawa

    The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform has just put out an excellent guide for sex workers and allies looking to be more effective in driving legislative change. It's well-written, thorough and well-organized, and while it's focus is decriminalization, the information in the guide would be useful for prompting a change in thinking around any number of issues under federal jurisdiction. It's really a how-to for the engaged citizen.
    This is a big year for sex work law reform in Canada, what with the three key laws around adult, consensual sex work having been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in December. Those of us who support decriminalization as a step toward increasing safety, respect and dignity for adult sex workers will need to be out there pushing on this issue, because it's not a subject that rests easy with any political party.
     Download the guide here and put it to use in all your advocacy work. 

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