A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

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...

     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’m still shaking my head after two and a half enlightening hours yesterday talking with the local sex workers’ organization here in Managua, RedTraSex (Red de Trabajadores Sexuales). I’m not sure whether to be delighted or shattered by how completely identical the issues are for sex workers in Nicaragua as they are back home in Canada.      Had it not been for us talking in Spanish, I could have easily been back in Victoria talking to my pals at Peers Victoria . I fear my new friends at RedTraSex were a little discouraged to hear that everything they identified as problems were also problems for sex workers in Canada – stigma, judgment and misunderstanding at the top of that list. The swag from my RedTraSex visit, including a key chain  designed to fit a condom.  Can't wait to  wear my  "I always use a condom" t-shirt.      Up until we met, the group believed that a country as developed as Canada w...

I am remarkably excited that the long-talked-about podcast with sex workers that I've been wanting to do for more than a year now has finally come together. Here's our first episode . With any luck, we'll be doing a new episode at least once a month. All episodes will be looking at sex work as a small business, as there is so much the work has in common with any other small business. Yet that aspect is never touched on in the public discourse about sex work, where it's drowned out by shouting about victimization, exploitation, trafficking and abuse of women - the standard themes when talk turns to sex work out there in the world. Our first episode features three of my favourite people, all sex workers from Greater Victoria. We wanted to kick off the podcast on June 2 to mark International Day of Action for Sex Workers' Rights . (It's got another name, as you'll see if you click the link, but I'll leave controversial labelling to be used by those...

No disrespect intended to Times Colonist reporter Katie DeRosa, but what exactly has B.C.'s human-trafficking office been doing with its $500,000 annual budget, anyway? What got me the most about this agency back in the days when I was at PEERS (and am again, so maybe that's why I'm so het up) was that it was ostensibly fighting the great scourge of human trafficking in B.C. even while the far greater risk was to the garden-variety outdoor sex workers on B.C.'s strolls and working invisibly in a thousand different venues around the province. We spent $2.25 million on this office in the last four years, apparently to help 100 people. It kills me to think how that money could have been used for real needs rather than for chasing ghosts. You'd think that with all the sex workers I'd met over the years in B.C., I might have met one who'd been trafficked at some point in her life. Nope. Hey, maybe it's just coincidence. Or maybe it just seemed easier to f...

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...

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...

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...

A different take on the issue of human trafficking - which, as this professor points out, is a phrase that tends to bring out emotional prose, gigantic numbers and no real evidence that it really is the major problem everyone says it is. I'd hate to be considered pro-trafficking, because that would be just plain weird, but I do think it's one of those issues we use to justify throwing money into initiatives that sound good until you realize they're not actually helping anyone other than the people paid to do them. Yes, there are vulnerable people out there trapped in horrible situations. But maybe we should be figuring out how to help them instead of chasing ghosts. 

Here we go, introducing get-tough-on-crime legislation in a period when we really ought to be celebrating how effective we've been at lowering crime rates these past 20 years. But enough of the public seem to want to believe otherwise that the Conservatives see a political edge in doing this. Time will tell how these laws will translate on the ground, but you do have to wonder about what will happen to people's rights. Case in point: The  Preventing the Trafficking, Abuse and Exploitation of Vulnerable Immigrants Act .  The act sounds good on paper.   It gives power to immigration officials to refuse work permits to people if they suspect the person is vulnerable and being brought to Canada to do "humiliating or degrading" work (the nickname for the act is the "anti-stripper law," reports the Globe). Hey, nobody likes human trafficking and exploitation. But how exactly will an immigration officer decide who's "vulnerable"? What criteria wi...

  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 consid...

Local police officer takes a stand against drug prohibition David Bratzer and I share at least one opinion in common: That it costs us a pointless fortune to maintain the charade of having effective drug laws in Canada. Me holding that opinion: No big deal. Anyone who knows the kind of things I write about wouldn’t be too surprised to discover I’m of the belief that Canada and the U.S. have made a complete hash of things by treating a health and social issue like a criminal matter. But Bratzer holding that opinion: That’s just a little different. He’s a Victoria police officer - the one tasked with enforcing those laws. I suspect there are many more who think like Const. Bratzer inside the department, as you’d expect would happen to anyone tasked with patrolling Victoria’s ridiculous streets for any length of time. But it’s still not a view that’s expressed publicly by police very often. In fact, Bratzer is one of only two active police officers in Canada who does public speaking on b...

Google decision snuffs out human-rights ad for sex workers Everybody’s got an opinion on the sex industry. But when you’re Google, what you think really matters. So when Google yanks the online ads of a small group of Dublin sex workers trying to talk about human rights for people in the industry, it’s a big statement. I’m going to have to rethink everything I thought I knew about Google. Ten escorts launched “Turn Off the Blue Light” earlier this year, responding to a major campaign in Ireland right now to outlaw the last legal vestiges of prostitution. The anti-prostitution campaign is called “Turn off the Red Light.” The escorts picked their name as an allusion to the blue lights on Ireland’s police cars, and the impact of criminalization. Ireland’s prostitution laws are essentially the same as Canada’s. The sale of sex is legal, but everything else to do with the industry is a crime. As in Canada, that has led to a thriving industry that operates almost completely in the shadow...

    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 ...