HUNTSVILLE FORESTER BY KATY PEPLINSKIE
Wednesday, January 4, 2004
Swingers’ clubs — bastions for orgies, voyeurism and partner-swapping — are now legal in Canada. The Supreme Court sanctioned them after resolving that harm, rather than community standards, should be the criterion used to determine the point at which constitutional freedoms may be limited.
Of course, no change is immune to the butterfly effect. The court’s decision has prompted the question of whether the decriminalization of prostitution should be next. After all, why should it be legal to have sex in a swingers’ club, but not in a brothel, some ask
“People just don’t want it in their backyard and they don’t want to see it and
they don’t want to know about it.”
— Amy Lebovitch, sex trade worker
Valerie Scott, a veteran sex worker and the executive director of Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC), says the Supreme Court has created a “jump-off point” for sex workers. As long as those in the sex industry can prove to the Supreme Court that their work doesn’t cause Canadians harm, prostitutes may be able to practice their profession with no holds barred, she explains. “And make no mistake,” Scott adds. “Taking this before the Supreme Court is something we fully intend to do.” Twenty-seven-year-old Amy Lebovitch who has been a sex worker for 11 years, agrees with Scott. She insists that Canada’s prohibition of prostitution has everything to do with ‘community standards’ and nothing to do with ‘harm.’
“People just don’t want it in their backyard and they don’t want to see it and they don’t want to know about it,” she says. Lebovitch argues that the harm inflicted on thousands of sex workers would decline substantially if the legal system were on their side. “The illegal nature of the sex trade has a dramatic impact on the safety and rights of those working in the industry. Street level prostitutes are criminalized by Canada’s laws against solicitation and are less likely to ask for police protection when at risk,” agrees New Democrat Libby Davies, who spearheaded the standing committee on Justice and Human Rights, which is reviewing Canada’s solicitation laws. “It is time we stop treating these women like disposable garbage, ignoring the risks posed to communities by the contradictory legal framework that surrounds the sex trade.”
Numerous studies have shown that the majority of sex workers have received medical treatment for physical injuries they received on the job. And in the ‘90s, murders of prostitutes made up five per cent of the overall homicide rate of women in Canada.
The mistreatment of prostitutes needs to be thought of as a hazard to the trade, and an abuse to human rights and labour standards — not as a condition that sex workers bring upon themselves, says JoBindman of Anti-Slavery International. Ann Jordan of the International Human Rights Law Group presents the following analogy: “We don’t support a woman’s right to choose [whether to have a baby or not] because we think abortion is a great thing, but because we believe fundamentally that women should have control over their own reproductive capacity. The same argument can be made for prostitution. Womenwho decide… to sell sex should have the right to control their own body.”
Of course, many people are also fighting against decriminalization. Melissa Farley, an activist-feminist who spoke before Davies’ subcommittee last March, argues that decriminalization would do little to help sex workers. What prostitutes truly need is drug and alcohol addiction treatment, job training and counselling, she stresses. In essence, they need help escaping the streets, not staying on them.
However, those arguing for decriminalization say they also want to give prostitutes these supports. But since the world’s oldest profession isn’t going anywhere, sex workers also need a way to ply their profession more safely — something which has proven difficult under Canada’s current legal system. Various groups, including SPOC and the HIV/AIDS Legal Network, are pushing to have politicians address the conflicting rules surrounding the sex industry. “People have a lot of questions because they have a lot of misinformation… It is way overdue for a national debate on this to happen,” adds Scott.
The opinions of three Parry-Sound-Muskoka candidates on swingers’clubs and prostitution are printed below.
The Green Party’s Glen Hodgson says that while he typically encourages other activities that are “more wholesome and healthy” than swinging, he’s not opposed to the Supreme Court’s decision. He says that “society is changing and the laws need to reflect this.” He adds that the decriminalization of prostitution might be a logical next step, since it might improve sex workers’ safety. “We want to ensure that the people in these trades are protected and supported. By driving something underground, you leave the women involved without support and no way of protection,” he says. “We can’t just pretend [prostitution] doesn’t exist and that the related problems don’t exist,” Hodgson adds.
Conservative candidate Tony Clement says he is disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize swingers’ clubs. “I find myself shaking my head and thinking that this is an example of how our values are being degraded by an unelected body,” he says. “The public good is not advanced when decisions are made in a vacuum.” Clement is particularly bothered by the court’s decision that harm, rather than community standards, has become the yardstick by which to measure which activities are acceptable. “There are lots of things that may not be harmful but which we decide as a society to be unacceptable,” he says. Clement reasons that the Supreme Court’s ruling may open the door to the decriminalization of prostitution, explaining that it’s “hard to separate these two.” When asked if he would support the decriminalization of prostitution he says he is uncertain. “We’d have to have a very big public debate if that were to become the law of the land.” “I doubt if Canadians would be open to that right now,” he adds.
Liberal incumbent Andy Mitchell says that swinging “is not the kind of behaviour [he] would find appropriate.” He also says that the new legislation will need to be applied in a way that ensures that those people not taking part in swinging “wouldn’t be subject to that kind of behaviour. “It would have to take place in private and would have to be consensual… and the activity could not be causing harm to society at large,” he stresses. When asked if he thinks the decriminalization of prostitution might follow if advocates proved to the Supreme Court that it causes no harm, Mitchell replies that “the court, in offering its judgement, did not appear to speak to that. “I think there would have to be some broad-based studies done to fully examine [the idea,]” he adds. “We would need input from a wide range of society.” When it was pointed out to him that Libby Davies is currently heading a standing committee on prostitution and has already spoken with international experts who support the idea, he adds that “the government has no intention of putting forward legislation at this time.”
NDP candidate Jo-Anne Boulding says she is unable to comment on the issue as she doesn’t know the details surrounding the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision. She explains that since she is currently traveling in Ireland, she does not have access to Canadian media sources.