Jana G. Pruden, Leader-Post
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Part 6:
SELLING SEX ON THE STREET
For more than a decade, William Davison has led efforts to help those involved in all sides of the sex trade– devoting himself to helping johns, street workers and their families deal with the impact of prostitution. Today, we look at the personal motivations behind Davison’s important work, and look at what, if anything, can be done.
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William Davison has lived in two worlds.
A treaty Indian, Davison spent his childhood bouncing between residential schools and foster homes, surrounded by the harsh realities of drugs, poverty, violence and prostitution. Unlike many, he somehow escaped the cycle, living comfortably in mainstream society for years before being drawn back to the street.
This time, it was to help.
As the child of a prostitute and a john, the story of Davison’s work is also the story of his life.
“I do this because I’m a trick baby and I wanted to know who my father was and what he was like,” he says, with his usual candor. “And now I know.”
Backed and funded by the Indian Metis Christian Fellowship, Davison helped pioneer the city’s john school when there were only a handful of similar programs in North America, and spearheaded Hope School, which provides educational and healing opportunities for street workers.
He’s currently involved in the creation of a new program for women facing first-time soliciting charges, and spends his days talking to prostitutes and johns about how they got into the sex trade and, hopefully, how they can get out of it.
“The sex trade is a symptom of underlying causes, root causes, and from a counselling perspective, we try and address those,” Davison says.
B.C. criminology professor John Lowman agrees, saying it’s time to address the social conditions that breed “survival sex” — where women engage in prostitution because they have no other choice — while re-evaluating how the sex trade fits into broader Canadian society.
“Everyone agrees what has to change is prostitution law,” says Lowman, who has been studying the issue for three decades.
Selling sex is only illegal in Canada if negotiations are done in public, violating soliciting laws. It’s also illegal to persuade someone else to work as a prostitute (pimping) or to live off the proceeds of prostitution. Bawdy house laws can be used to clamp down on places where sex is sold regularly.
Valerie Scott, executive director Sex Professionals of Canada, a Toronto-based advocacy group, says current laws are dangerous because they marginalize sex workers, treating them as second-class citizens.
“The law tells your average Canadian that we’re criminals, that we’re disposable women and you can do what you want,” says Scott, who has been a sex worker for more than 20 years. “That’s the message that law sends, so when you get some unstable guy, that’s a pretty powerful message in his head.”
Lowman says there are a few options available, including prohibition, where prostitution is outlawed completely; decriminalization, where it’s treated like any other business; or legalization, where “you turn the state into a pimp.”
“And quite frankly, the state is a much, much meaner pimp in a lot of ways because it’s got police forces with guns and laws and legislation,” he adds.
Legalizing may seem like a liberal solution, but Scott warns it would actually be far worse than the current system. She says legalized prostitution– in which sex workers are licensed and regulated like in Amsterdam– breeds bribery and corruption, takes away a worker’s right to refuse a sexual encounter, and, ironically, can endanger sex workers’ lives through mandatory testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
“The clients come in and see your little Grade A disease-free meat card on the wall, where you must post it, and they say, ‘Great, I’m not using a condom’,” Scott says. “And when you come up with some kind of (sexually transmitted disease) your licence is revoked and they just bring in a fresh girl … It’s great for the men, but it hasn’t worked out very well for the women at all.”
Instead, Scott’s organization is pushing for decriminalization, like in parts of Australia and New Zealand, which removes prostitution-related offences from the law and treats the sex industry like any other business.
She says a decriminalized system makes sex workers safer because they can work together, and argues it doesn’t promote or increase prostitution as some believe.
“Everyone thinks there’s going to be a brothel next door with hundreds of naked women hanging out the windows,” she says. “That’s not the case.”
Others disagree, of course, arguing legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution promotes the sex trade and leads to increases in organized crime, sexually transmitted diseases and human trafficking.
But while the answers certainly aren’t easy, it’s clear something needs to be done.
Currently, it’s common for street workers to be robbed, raped or assaulted, and more than 300 prostitutes have been murdered in Canada in the past 25 years. Their attackers and killers are rarely brought to justice.
Lowman calls it a social tragedy.
“We need to do something to stop them from getting killed,” Lowman says. “I think the murder of 300 women is an issue that every single Canadian citizen should be alarmed about and want to do something about. Plain and simple.”
Scott agrees.
“Prostitutes don’t come from Mars on a shuttle every night and leave at sunrise,” she says. “We’re part of the community. We’re people too.”
The federal government is currently looking at the issues around prostitution law, and the province of Alberta is lobbying for the creation of a national DNA databank for johns, which could help police catch prostitute killers.
For now, Davison says it’s important to minimize the damage of the sex trade, to help break dangerous cycles and offer the possibility of a better life to those trapped on the streets.
“The work we do brings hope that there will be change, that it can be different,” he says. “Hope is out there and you just look, it grows. It’s exponential.”