Betina Alonso
November 10, 2009
Canada’s anti-prostitution laws are under fire, as two sex workers and a dominatrix claim that the current laws deny sex professionals their Charter rights under the Canadian Constitution.
The applicants are Toronto-based workers Terri-Jean Bedford, a dominatrix, Valerie Scott, a former sex trade professional who now advocates for sex workers’ rights, and Amy Lebovitch, who has been a prostitute for the last twelve years.
Essentially, current laws do not criminalize prostitution, but everything related to it: sex workers are not allowed to run brothels, communicate for sex trade or live off the avails of prostitution.
The main issue with these laws, the applicants claim, is that they expose sex professionals to greater risk than necessary, as they have to resort to finding customers on the streets or the internet, without any ability to screen them.
Valerie Scott, one of the applicants and the executive director of Sex Professionals of Canada, claims that these laws have been upheld for so long because “Parliament does not have the backbone to bring the death penalty upon [sex workers] or decriminalize prostitution entirely”, and maintains that when it comes to the sex trade, the unofficial policy is for the police to look the other way.
She argues that the criminalization of sex work also places significant burdens on tax-payers, who bear the costs for “imprisonment of sex professionals, the one court-room that stays open every day for prostitutes, the health care money that goes into hospitals when we’re beaten up”.
Professor Mariana Valverde, director of the Centre of Criminology at UofT, asserts that these laws result from “no intention, no general plan,” and adds that “the vast majority of the laws [on sex work] are Victorian, literally, and they were put in individually at different times, without a plan.”
When it comes to charter rights, she adds that “of course all forms of business regulation will interfere with freedom of speech and other charter rights, but the crucial question is whether the current [prostitution] laws curtail rights more than it is necessary and rational. And the answer is ‘yes’.”
Mr. Michael Morris, counsel for the attorney general of Canada, says that the government “believes prostitution carries dangers and harms to the community at large”, and the laws now in place intend to protect society.
Jason Qu, Executive Director at the Sexual Education Centre at the University of Toronto, responds to these claims saying that “the claim that sex work is dangerous regardless of setting, even if it were valid, cannot be used as grounds to deny the security and rights of sex workers; there are many legal activities which are dangerous and which routinely inflict harm upon society, activities which we nonetheless engage in and regulate as a society” and, by taking account the claims of sex workers themselves, and also contends that “the laws which criminalize and stigmatize sex work are often themselves obstacles to addressing and ameliorating these safety concerns.”
Christian groups argue that current laws serve the purpose of protecting public morals.
Lawyer Derek Bell, representing the Christian Legal Fellowship, REAL Women of Canada and the Catholic Civil Rights League argues that “morality is all over the Criminal Code”, citing laws forbidding voyeurism, bestiality, loitering and nudity.
SEC’s Jason Qu comments that “many [sex professionals] affirm that sex work can be safe, economically beneficial, even empowering work.”