JON TATTRIE, METRO NEWS HALIFAX October 17, 2008
{Rene Ross, the executive director of Stepping Stone, a non-profit organization that supports individuals involved in the sex trade, hosted An Evening with Valerie Scott last night. Scott is the head of the Sex Professionals of Canada, a group seeking to challenge Canada’s laws related to the sex trade.}
The head of the Sex Professionals of Canada called for the decriminalization of sex work last night, arguing the current system exposes sex workers to violence.
Valerie Scott, speaking at a packed Stepping Stone meeting at the Italian Cultural Centre in Halifax, said SPOC is launching a constitutional challenge to remove the laws used to prosecute sex workers.
“It is the laws that make prostitution a violent occupation,” Scott said. “I’ve been in sex work for many a year and it can be a very good job. It need not be in the gutter, it need not be violent.”
Selling sex is a federal matter in Canada and it is legal, but it’s illegal to live off the avails of such work, to solicit for sex work, or to run a “common bawdy house.”
Scott looked to New Zealand and parts of Australia, where sex work has been decriminalized.
“It’s a different world over there,” she said. Sex workers are protected by the police and courts, not prosecuted. She did not advocate legalization, which could lead to a costly licensing system and forced health checks. Decriminalized sex workers would operate like any other small business, including paying taxes.
“(Sex work) has been here for eons, and it’s staying,” Scott said. “People are afraid if it’s decriminalized, there will be a brothel next door and naked women on the lawn. It’s not like that.”
She said many women quietly sell sex out of their apartments and nobody has a clue.
“There is already a brothel on your block; you just don’t know about it,” Scott said. “We are your family — your daughters, your sisters, your mothers. Just because someone may have a moral problem with the commercialization of sex is not reason enough to make us a social punching bag.”