There's something strangely fascinating about the Falun Gong stories coming out of Vancouver these days. I'm sure it's damn annoying for everyone coming to the Chinese consulate to have to deal with Falun Gong protesters every day, but it's unsettling to think that the City of Vancouver is prepared to side with China on this long-standing human-rights issue and ban the protesters. Here's what the Vancouver Sun's Pete McMartin has to say.
The issue has many similarities to the abortion debate: two polarized groups, both very certain that they are in the right, fighting for control over the piece of sidewalk out in front of some building that represents the issue (abortion clinics in one case, the Chinese consulate in another).
But B.C. manoeuvered very carefully on that issue. The "bubble zone" law prevents protesters from setting up within 50 metres of the entry of an abortion clinic.  The reason the law was able to sustain a free-speech challenge was because the courts ruled that a woman's right to medical treatment trumps freedom of speech.
How do you make that defence in the Falun Gong case? As irritating as it must be for the Chinese consulate to have to deal with protesters outside every day, I have to think it pales beside the right of the peace-loving followers of a religion to protest the killings, assaults and harassment that plague their peers in China.

Update on HIV/sex worker issue


I noted a couple weeks ago a report on HIV/AIDS that had wrongly been presented in the media as being about all Vancouver sex workers, even though the study had actually involved only street-entrenched and addicted outdoor sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Here's a March 14 letter from the authors of the study that sets things straight on that subject:


RE: Unintended results of research (14 March 2009)
by Druyts, Hogg, Montaner
British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

We thank Dr. Goodyear for his response to our article. We fully agree with
his concerns surrounding the recent coverage of our work on HIV prevalence
in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Goodyear has expressed difficulty in
seeing how this study will benefit the individuals who participated in the
research. Of note, estimates of HIV prevalence among at-risk groups are
vital in planning for the development and provision of appropriate policy
and programmatic responses. We wish to affirm that it is our overarching
goal to ensure that there are adequate services for all individuals living
with HIV infection in Vancouver. The WHO has consistently shown that less
than 10% of sex workers have adequate access to HIV prevention and care
resources.

Our paper did not aim to highlight HIV infection among sex workers in
particular. Instead, we sought to model the estimate of HIV prevalence at
the city level and related gaps in services in Vancouver. Also of note,
all the studies considered in our paper received institutional ethical
approval.

We acknowledge that prevalence estimates are rarely perfect and are
limited by uncertainty surrounding population size and potential biases
inherent in source data. We would like to clarify that the estimate of HIV
prevalence among female sex workers in 2006 is based on data collected
among survival sex workers predominantly located in Vancouver’s Downtown
Eastside, who live in poverty and all who inject and/or smoke illicit
drugs. This estimate therefore does not reflect indoor sex workers, such
as sex workers in establishment-based venues, bars, or escort services. We
are fully aware that female sex workers in Vancouver do not constitute a
homogeneous group. This could have been further stressed in the published
paper.

Perhaps most importantly, we recognize that sex workers have been unfairly
stigmatized in the past by medical research as vectors of disease, and it
was not our intention to perpetuate this in any way. We have acknowledged
in our article that detailed data on sex work clients were not available.
As a global assessment of HIV prevention needs, our article did not seek
to review the factors that enhance vulnerability to HIV infection among
marginalized populations, such as survival sex workers. However, as
mentioned by Dr. Goodyear, we feel it is important to acknowledge that
many pivotal studies both in Canada, including some of our own, and
globally have demonstrated that criminalized sex work legislation,
enforcement-based strategies and violence greatly reduces sex workers’
ability to safely negotiate condom use with clients as well as other HIV
risk reduction strategies.

Finally, we concur with UNAIDS and WHO that structural approaches to HIV
prevention are crucial both for the health of sex workers and clients.
This includes policy changes such as the removal of criminal sanctions
targeting sex workers.

Eric Druyts, Robert Hogg and Julio Montaner

http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/6/1/5/comments

Best bet for ending gang violence is to remove the profit

A UVic student I met last fall when I was teaching a journalism course let me read an interview he’d done with a Vancouver gang member - a childhood friend of his.
It was an extraordinary read. Everybody’s got an opinion on why gangs have become such a deadly problem in B.C. and how we’ll get a handle on things, but it was fascinating to get a take on the issue from the point of view of a former gang member.
Like a lot of the young people caught up in Vancouver’s gang scene right now, this kid had grown up as a generally happy and well-cared-for child in a financially comfortable family. Boys emerging from impoverished, troubled childhoods are still the primary recruits for a lot of Canadian gangs, but the rise of a new kind of gang culture in Vancouver points to more complicated risk factors that we’ve barely begun to understand.
This particular young man was drawn into gang life after meeting another teen a couple years older than him who had it all going on: Money; cars; girls; drugs; stature among his peers. The older teen asked the boy if he wanted to earn a little money selling marijuana to his secondary-school classmates.
Within months, he was making more money than he’d ever imagined. He’d also undergone a transformation among his peers: From the quiet kid at school who nobody noticed, to the one whom everybody wanted to hang out with.
He had a cool car, lots of girls interested in him, and access to the best drugs. Heady stuff when you’re an invincible 16-year-old.
Neither this boy nor anyone he worked with in the gang seemed to worry too much about running afoul of the law. So I’d counsel that we think twice before assuming that more policing and tougher jail sentences will solve Vancouver’s escalating problems. Things are always much more complex than that.
The boy was eventually invited to be a truck driver for the gang, moving drugs back and forth over the Canada-U.S. border. The older teen he’d first met continued to be a mentor of sorts, even inviting the boy to room with him for a while after he fought with his parents over the source of his lavish new lifestyle. The parties at the new place were non-stop.
In his eight years in the business, he never got caught. He made a ton of money. The only reason he even left gang life was because guys above him in the hierarchy started getting killed by rival gangs, and he knew his time would be coming soon if he didn’t get out. He’s back at university now, studying to be a pharmacist.
A word like “gang” has a great deal of emotional charge, but at its essence a gang is an organization that’s in the business of buying, selling or producing something that’s illegal.
The product can be just about anything; I remember reading a few years ago about U.S. gangs who specialized in hazardous waste, because there was a lucrative business at that time in illegal dumping. Here in B.C., it’s mostly drugs, the trade of which we are superbly placed to handle due to our long coastline, proximity to the U.S., and sophisticated network of marijuana operations.
Were the product anything but illegal drugs, the B.C. government would be bragging about the runaway success of a local industry. Like it or not, it’s an immensely successful industry, albeit one in which murder is an acceptable corporate strategy for resolving rivalries and personal slights.
Gangs exist because many, many people in the mainstream community want to do illegal things, and go looking for someone to provide it. So either we’re going to have to stop buying anything illegal, or we’re going have to make more things legal in hopes of cutting into gang profits.
We obviously don’t want to be legalizing every criminal activity. But it seems to me we could make significant progress by starting with drugs and sex. Decades of bad law haven’t done a thing to curb demand or supply of either of those products, so it’s not like we’d be abandoning a winning strategy.
It’s the buying habits of the mainstream community that fuels gang activity. Any real solution has to involve making gang life less profitable.
Yes, we also need enforcement, and meaningful tools for understanding the small segment of privileged, middle-class boys who end up attracted to the egocentric and anti-social world of gangs. But we’ll get to the root of the problem only by taking the money out of it.