OMAR EL AKKAD, Globe and Mail
March 22nd 2007
A group of current and former prostitutes and an Osgoode Hall law professor joined forces yesterday to launch a constitutional challenge aimed at striking down three provisions of the Criminal Code dealing with the sex trade.
The challenge effectively amounts to a call for decriminalization.
“Some people may find this controversial,” law professor Alan Young said at a news conference in Toronto yesterday, “I don’t.”
In the past, Prof. Young, well known in the Canadian legal community, has launched similar challenges to Canada’s marijuana laws.
Although the challenge, filed on Tuesday with the Ontario Superior Court, is in the name of three current or former prostitutes, it is being fought by about half a dozen lawyers and some of Prof. Young’s students, all of whom are working free.
“There’s a vast amount of goodwill in this case that you don’t see in other litigation,” Prof. Young said, adding that in terms of legal issues, this is one of the simplest cases he’s ever undertaken.
While the challenge was triggered by the continuing trial of B.C. farmer Robert Pickton, charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of prostitutes, Prof. Young said the issues of his challenge were around long before the Pickton case came to light.
Currently, prostitution is not illegal. However, communicating for the purposes of prostitution is against the law. That’s one of the three sections being challenged by Prof. Young and his supporters, who say the law keeps women from ensuring their clients aren’t likely to harm them.
The team is also challenging the provisions on “bawdy houses” and living off the avails of prostitution, saying the two laws force prostitutes onto the street and keep them from hiring security and support staff in the same way other businesses do.
Detective Sergeant Mike Hamel of Toronto police’s sex-crimes unit said much of the enforcement of prostitution laws is done as undercover work. But police officers working the beat also maintain almost daily contact with the women on the street, Det. Sgt. Hamel added. “They check up on them,” he said. “They know the girls are vulnerable to violence. That’s no secret.”
That violence is most often seen in “bad dates,” when clients become aggressive and sometimes viciously assault the women they pick up. Sex Professionals of Canada, a support group, keeps an online list of such incidents — documented cases range from men refusing to wear condoms to assault and rape.
“Some of these people who abuse prostitutes believe prostitutes will not tell the police,” Det. Sgt. Hamel said. “They feel that gives them the right to be violent, which is absolutely not true.”
The constitutional challenge was announced just a day before Toronto police unveil the results of a nine-month pilot program called Deter and Identify Sex Trade Consumers. DISC, a database of prostitutes, clients and others involved in the sex trade, was developed by members of the Vancouver Police Department in 1998, and later implemented by forces across North America.
The three applicants launching the challenge are Valerie Scott, a member of the Sex Professionals of Canada, Amy Lebovitch, who works in the sex trade from her home, and Terri Jean Bedford, a dominatrix whose S&M business, later dubbed the “Bondage Bungalow,” was raided by police in the mid-1990s.
Ms. Lebovitch said she moved off the streets and began operating out of her home because she feared for her safety. However, she says her partner who lives with her also faces the threat of arrest because of the criminal provisions dealing with living off the avails of prostitution.
Ms. Scott said hundreds of women either have been killed or have gone missing since the communication provision was introduced in 1985. She added that the government should admit it has a “death penalty” against prostitutes, or change the law. Women who make a living off sex, she said, deserve to be treated as human beings and Canadians first.
“We don’t come in on a shuttle from Mars every night and leave before sunrise,” she said.