A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

    This is an amazing day for the sex workers' rights movement with the news that Amnesty International has approved its draft policy supporting decriminalization of adult sex work .      "What will it all mean?" asked one of my friends. I admit to not being sure what it will change in the immediate future. But as a symbol, it's significant when the world's most recognized human rights organization acknowledges that criminalizing sex work violates the rights (and threatens the lives) of sex workers.     I've had the good fortune of getting to know a lot of sex workers over the last two decades, so for me it hasn't been a stretch to understand that criminalizing sex work increases the dangers, the sense of isolation and the stigma for those who work in the industry. It sorts sex workers into a different category of human - one who lives and works alongside the rest of us every day, providing us with services that we want, yet is denied the most ...

    One summer day when I was a young reporter in Kamloops, my bosses at the newspaper sent me off to pretend I wanted to get hired as a lingerie model.     The advertising department at the paper had been running classified ads seeking young women interested in working as lingerie models. The paper wanted the advertising revenue, but was worried the real nature of the business was prostitution. So they sent me off to pretend to be a job applicant so I could report back to them, a task that I accepted without hesitation.      The interview was in a hotel room at The Dome, a fairly popular place in mid-1980s Kamloops. I can’t remember what I wore. An average man of average age – 35, maybe, with the everyman feel of someone who, like myself, had known life in a B.C. resource town – invited me to sit down. A few minutes later, a woman of about the same age joined us.     My managers back at the paper had sent me to the job interview i...

The Washington Post is doing some great work these days with their Fact Checker feature , which is digging into all kinds of "statistics" being thrown around out there to see where the figures come from and whether there's any truth to them. Think of it as the rhetoric version of that TV show Mythbusters. Today's myth-busting was around the "fact" that 300,000 U.S. children are at risk of sexual exploitation. Take a look at how they tested those figures and what they found out - fascinating stuff, and all of it underlining that we need to be very, very careful in deciding what to believe when topics are highly emotional and potentially divisive. That old adage about believing half of what you see and none of what you hear has never been truer.

     Found myself making a long, ranty comment on a Facebook thread this morning and realized, hey, that could be a blog post. Those of us who write for food appreciate writing that lends itself to more than one application.       So here's the article that started everything, a Washington Post piece on the vast and profoundly misleading inflation of human-trafficking figures around the world, and why that has happened.       Posting it on Facebook brought out some interesting comments from people I don't usually interact with, but in the end I feel like we had the chance for a good conversation, each of us writing in our little boxes one after the other. Here's the thread if you want to take a look at how it went.       Talk of human trafficking has become something of a flash point for me in the last couple of years, as it was wrongly used and amply abused to justify the terrible injustice enacted...

          I crossed back into Nicaragua from Honduras yesterday at dusty, dry Guasaule, on my way back home to Leon after a work trip.       Crossing a Central American border by bus is often a mysterious, confusing process that involves everyone getting out of the bus in a big herd and wandering to and from various unmarked buildings. So it was kind of nice to see the familiar face of Carmen the Cashew Girl as I descended the Tica Bus stairs yesterday.      She was wearing the brilliantly coloured eye shadow and matching shirt that the Cashew Girls clearly favour as a strategy for getting groggy, overheated bus travellers to remember them. There is something of the sex worker in the visage of the brightly painted and sexily dressed Cashew Girl, who like a worker on stroll has only minutes to get you to take note of her and decide to buy her wares rather than those of her (friendly) rivals.      Ca...