By Denise Balkissoon
Prostitution is legal, but all the laws surrounding it leave sex workers vulnerable to abuse and violence on the job – a recently launched legal challenge aims to change that.
Valerie Scott is probably Canada’s most famous whore. During her almost three decades in the sex trade, she’s been a tireless campaigner for sex workers’ rights. While it’s not technically illegal to buy or sell sex in Canada, most of the activities surrounding prostitution are considered crimes, and Scott believes these laws do more harm than good.
Like “communicating for the purpose of prostitution,” a statute enacted in 1985. The law may be targeted at johns and pimps and at discouraging sidewalk negotiations, but its wording makes sex workers nervous to discuss their trade among themselves. Before the communicating crime became law, Scott and her friends worked in pairs or trios, keeping an eye out for each other.
“The date knew that he was seen and his car was seen,” says Scott, currently the executive director of Sex Professionals of Canada. “If my girlfriend got worried, she’d call in his licence.” When the law changed, Scott moved indoors. Working at home is safer physically, but carries much greater legal risk: communicating carries a penalty of $2,000 and up to six months in jail; the charge of running a common bawdy house can result in two years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Under enterprise crime law, a prostitute’s bank account can be frozen and her home and possessions confiscated.
Now Scott is working to change those laws. “Just because someone has a moral problem with the commercialization of sex is not a reason to make us live in constant fear of being raped, robbed, beaten and murdered,” says Scott. “People have to understand that we are members of this community.” This past March 21, a group of three current and former sex workers – Scott, Terri Jean Bedford (better known as the Bondage Bungalow dominatrix) and 28-year-old Amy Lebovitch – announced the launch of the Safe Haven Initiative. Represented by pro bono lawyers and law students from York University, the Safe Haven team is heading to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on May 31, aiming to strike out three statutes of the Criminal Code: running a common bawdy house, communicating for the purpose of prostitution and living on the avails of prostitution.
This last charge, which applies to anyone over age 12 and is intended as an anti-pimp provision, prevents sex workers from hiring bodyguards, drivers or other heavies as protection. Safe Haven’s argument is that by subjecting sex workers to danger, these three statutes deprive prostitutes of their right to liberty and security, violating section seven of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“It’s unconstitutional for the government to be complicit in a law that contributes to homicides and assaults,” says Alan Young, the York University professor who is heading up the legal team. Having argued in favour of medical marijuana and against sweeping obscenity laws, Young targets “consensual crimes” – practices in which all parties involved are “happy to participate.” Now he says the timing is right to challenge the Criminal Code statutes on prostitution.
First, there’s the abject failure of a recent federal subcommittee on solicitation laws. After three years of depositions from over 300 sex workers, police officers, academics and community members, the five-member subcommittee unanimously agreed last December that the current legal approach to sex work was “unacceptable.” The Liberal, NDP and Bloc Québécois parties went on to state that prostitution was an issue of health, not crime, and that sexual activities between consenting adults should not be prohibited by the state.
Still, in March 2007, the ruling Conservative government released a statement firmly decrying decriminalization or any type of new initiative, instead focusing on reducing the prevalence of sex work by enforcement of criminal law. (The two Conservative members of the subcommittee did not return calls to be interviewed.)
The second major timing factor is the trial of Robert Pickton. The BC man is now in court for the murder of 26 women, all prostitutes from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Canada’s largest serial killer investigation ever, the case has exposed societal indifference to the vulnerability of street prostitutes. Some of the women found hacked to pieces on Pickton’s Port Coquitlam farm had been missing for decades, and at least 61 sex workers disappeared in Vancouver over the past 20 years. “It’s my constituents who are dying,” says Libby Davies, the MP for the Downtown Eastside who initiated the multi-party subcommittee. Davies is glad to have spurred the most extensive research on the subject in Canadian history but the group’s failure to develop recommendations for the future was disappointing. “If they want to save women, they’ve failed miserably,” says Davies. “The threat of enforcement pushes workers into isolated areas. The violence they face is horrific.”
Those who enforce the law recognize the unique dangers that face prostitutes on the job today. Two years ago, the Toronto Police introduced the Bad Date Line, a dedicated Crime Stoppers phone line for reporting violent johns. Since spring 2006, a new Special Victims Unit tackles assaults on sex workers and the homeless; the unit ignores whatever activity people were engaged in when they became victims of assault. “People say, ‘Look at the business they’re in, what do they expect?’” says the SVU’s Detective Wendy Leaver. “That’s disgusting. There is no reason anyone should be subject to this kind of violence.”
Leaver is now investigating the case of a sex worker who was assaulted in her condo last week. After answering the worker’s newspaper ad, a male suspect raped her before calling in his female partner. The prostitute was robbed and beaten badly. Leaver has photos of the couple from cameras at the condo and a nearby ATM, and believes they have committed similar crimes before.
The freedom to hire burly drivers, work together in central secure locations and discuss decent rates and recent dates would obviously help sex entrepreneurs to run their businesses like businesses (in her day, Scott filed her taxes as a “recreational tour operator”). But some worry that repealing the Criminal Code statutes will put more vulnerable prostitutes at risk – minors, immigrants, drug addicts and those being victimized by pimps. 51 Division Staff Sergeant Howie Page, formerly of the sex crimes unit, is surprised that workers themselves want the “living on the avails” section made void. “Honestly, it puzzles me,” says Page. “How would they turn to the police if there was a pimp involved?” Sex work advocates point out that other laws relating to extortion, coercion, criminal harassment and assault are applicable, but Page feels that the avails law has the most “teeth.”
Then again, “prostitution” is an umbrella term that stretches from sexual slavery to people such as Bedford, a dominatrix who owned her own home in a decidedly middle-class neighbourhood. Many Safe Haven supporters work extensively to help prostitutes at risk (or those who just want a career change) to find education, career counselling, health services and exit strategies. But they say accepting one extreme means allowing for the other – acknowledging that some people are willing participants in the profession.
“I was over 30 when I started, I have a BA, I’ve been married,” says sex worker Cleo Smith, who currently works out of her home. “I wasn’t enticed, and I’m ready to handle what comes.” Smith has fibromyalgia, and was taking extensive sick leave when, hard up for cash, she decided to try sex work. Though she thought it would be “horrible and gross,” she’s found that in servicing the “doctors, lawyers and blue collar workers” that answer her Eye Weekly ad, she’s worked out a lot of her own sexual demons. Smith used Maggie’s, an education group run by sex workers, to learn how to avoid a communicating charge. “I say, ‘You can bring me a present, but anything we do is based on our chemistry,’” she says. “If I don’t want to do something, I’ll say ‘I don’t enjoy Greek.’”
She feels safer working on her turf; doing outcalls, she wouldn’t know where to go if she had suddenly had to leave a violent customer’s home. When she first started, a male friend would wait in another room, and she thinks that the avails law is much too broad. “What the police need to clarify is who hired whom. That’s not hard to clarify in court,” she says. “When people have been aggressive or if I felt they weren’t healthy or clean, I’ve been amazed that if I ask politely and firmly that they leave, it’s all I need.”
The Safe Haven Initiative expects their fight to reach the Supreme Court of Canada within the next two years; lawyer Alan Young acknowledges that one potential outcome is that prostitution will become officially illegal in Canada. At least that would be honest. The law is unlikely to shut down the world’s oldest profession, but it’s unfair to just make it unsafe.