Say you’re standing on the street with some sex for sale. Someone, maybe a scary guy with a personality problem, pulls up beside you and asks, “How much for a blow job?” and you reply, “Twenty bucks.” (You’re not expensive – you’re working on the street.) Bam! That’s a violation of the law.
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But it’s also illegal to retail your services from the safety of your home. And if you want to hire anyone for security reasons, that’s a no-no, too, because then they’d be “living off the avails.”
You can’t work outside. You can’t work inside. You can’t work safely. But other than all that, prostitution’s perfectly legal. Go on, sell all the sex you want.
The only possible beginning of a remedy for this legal mess comes up October 6, when the Superior Court of Ontario hears Osgoode law professor Alan Young’s constitutional challenge of the sex trade laws. “You don’t need to be a constitutional lawyer to know that the law shouldn’t put you in harm’s way,” he tells me.
But will the judges see it this way? It’s certainly been a long haul, this campaign to make the sex trade safer. As recently as 2006, a House of Commons report detailed the dangerous effects of keeping the sale of sex criminalized, and the mass murder of BC prostitutes caused a roar of indignation. Nonetheless, not much has changed and we’re still living, it seems, with the ghosts of 19th-century woman-despising prudery.
“We’ve been served up on a silver platter to sexual predators across Canada by this law,” says Valerie Scott, director of Sex Professionals of Canada. Seems like a harsh statement, but you can see her point.
“The laws are a catch-22,” Young says. “‘Communication’ is basically a screening device, one of the means by which a prostitute determines if she’s getting into a car with a psychopath. The ‘living off the avails’ law is a problem because most in the trade would like to have some degree of security or infrastructure for their business. And if you move indoors into a controlled setting, that becomes an indictable offence called ‘bawdy house.'”
Scott, who’s an appellant in the case, agrees the dilemma is deadly. “If you work on well-lit streets where there are passersby, you’re more likely to be busted, so instead women work on lonely streets or alleyways. Sexual predators know this. It doesn’t take them long to catch on.”
The person who sees the consequences up close is Detective Wendy Leaver of the Toronto Police Force’s special victims section of the sex crimes unit. She investigates violent crimes perpetrated against sex workers. “Women working in-calls or for escort services are really hesitant about calling us, because they feel that if they do we’re going to charge them with bawdy house,” she says.
Last year, 133 Canadians were charged under the bawdy house law, 2,976 under the communication law and 145 for living off the avails.
A meaningless use of the courts, it seems. So why do these laws endure? “Most of the opposition comes from people who say you can’t make it any safer because prostitution is inherently degrading and violent,” says Young.
It’s certainly the view I get from Alice Lee at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. “I agree,” she says, with “not criminalizing women in prostitution,” but that’s pretty much where our agreement ends. “We’re arguing to abolish prostitution. We know many women are in it because of poverty. Legalizing prostitution legitimizes men’s right to buy and sell women and children.”
Hmm. As soon as someone brings “children” into the argument, my alarm bells go off. Isn’t this sort of like the argument that all pornography featuring consenting adults should be illegal because some people are making kiddie porn?
Not that underage prostitution isn’t a major problem. “It has to be tackled,” says Young. “But we’re representing the interest of self-actualized women above the age of 18.”
Then there’s the trafficking issue, but repressive laws sure don’t make those women any safer.
Activists like Lee believe wholeheartedly that prostitution is simply wrong. She even lumps johns into the same category as traffickers and pimps. “Johns exploit women, because they’re accepting the man’s right to buy and sell women.”
“But,” I interject, “they’re not buying a woman – they’re buying a service that she is selling.”
“They are buying her,” insists Lee. “They are buying the degradation of her body.”
Doesn’t this line of thinking just stigmatize whores and turn all johns into losers or predators? I’ll let my friend Robbie, who has purchased his fair share of hooker services, have a say: “What prostitutes offer is sex without emotional attachment, and while that might seem odious to some, it’s something a lot of men require. We would be much better off if we could start to understand this.”
Where do we go from here? Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Holland have moved toward legalization/decriminalization, but here we’re still waiting for the courts to do what politicians don’t dare.
Anastasia Kuzyk of the Sex Workers Alliance of Toronto has worries about a possible legal win. “With a Conservative government, we could have other legislation that might be even more draconian,” she warns.
Leaver is equally unsure of the merits of decriminalization. “There are so many levels of sex work, from the street person to the high-priced escort. I’m not sure how we would apply decriminalization to all the different levels.”
It’s clear that we are nowhere near a comfortable place on this issue. But I’d like to think that even those on the other side of the debate can grasp what Kuzyk is saying: “If we had the same access to health and safety resources on the job as other Canadians, there wouldn’t be so many of us getting murdered.”
ROUGH TRADE
The laws that keep sex workers in the occupational danger zone:
NOT SAFE AT HOME
Everyone who keeps a common bawdy house is guilty of an indictable offence. (Criminal Code: sect 210)
NO NEGOTIATIONS, PLEASE
Every person who in a public place attempts to communicate for the purpose of engaging in prostitution is guilty of an offence. (Criminal Code: sect 213)
PRIVATE SECURITY FORBIDDEN
Procuring or soliciting a person to have sex with another person and living on the avails of prostitution is prohibited. (Criminal Code: sect 212)
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