| It’s Friday night near the Town and Country Hotel in Forest Lawn – one of Calgary’s lower-end prostitution strolls. A woman with long, dark hair, heavy eyeliner, tight black jeans and legs so thin it’s amazing she can even walk weaves her way over to the Exit Community Outreach van to grab some condoms and a granola bar. She’s agitated and jittery, obviously in need of her next crack fix. After she leaves the Exit van she immediately hides in a dark parking lot to avoid the cop car that’s driving past.
Later that evening in the Beltline, a prostitute in her 30s flags over the van and hurriedly changes into another outfit. She’s missing one shoe and asks for some clean socks.
At one a.m., the van slowly drives along 3rd Avenue South, Calgary’s high-end stroll. A group of young women who look barely 18, and who wouldn’t appear out of place hanging out with their middle-class suburban peers at Chinook mall, are working the strip. A couple of them – attractive enough to compete on America’s Next Top Model – enter the van to stock up on lube and condoms. One asks the outreach worker in a chirpy voice if she can make her hot chocolate "super chocolatey."
Prostitution is a booming business in Calgary and across the country. It is also one of the most dangerous. In Calgary, seven prostitutes have been killed since 1991. Alleged serial killer Robert Pickton has been charged with murdering 26 prostitutes in Vancouver and dozens of other murders remain unsolved. In Edmonton 11 women who worked in the sex trade have been murdered and two have gone missing since 2001. A special police task force has been set up in Edmonton to investigate the cases of 25 murdered and missing people who led high-risk lifestyles. The cases date from 1978 to the present. The RCMP will not comment on how many of these involve sex workers.
Many experts say our prostitution laws are largely to blame for making life more dangerous on the streets. Meanwhile, there’s no indication that those laws have in any way reduced prostitution in the country.
Carol-Lynn Strachan, a sex worker in Edmonton, has a chilling personal story that illustrates the kind of danger women face.
"I was picked up one time and brought out into a field outside of Edmonton and sexually assaulted with a beer bottle and beaten up and basically left out there. It’s a pretty dark place to be," she says, adding she’s also had a gun held to her head and been gagged by violent johns.
Strachan has worked as an exotic dancer, escort and street prostitute over nearly three decades in the sex trade. She recently founded a national organization for prostitutes called the Sex Trade Workers of Canada, which has between 300 and 400 members. One of the aims of the organization is to keep sex workers safe from sexual predators. She is in favour of decriminalization, not legalization.
"That way the government doesn’t have complete control over our bodies," she says.
She fears that if prostitution were legalized women would have to get tested for sexually transmitted viruses (STVs) before being allowed to work in brothels and those who had STVs would still end up working on the streets. She also doesn’t like the idea of brothel owners legally profiting from prostitution or the possibility that women would be kicked off welfare and told to work as prostitutes because it was considered a legitimate profession.
She says the solution is a "zone of tolerance" where women would be allowed by the municipality to work as prostitutes. She does not like the idea of a red light district where women sit in windows or legalized brothels because prostitutes would be under the control of pimps and brothel owners. If all prostitutes worked in one area they’d be able to "use the buddy system" and look out for each other.
"The way it is right now girls won’t go to the cops… they don’t because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. They don’t want the harassment. They have to pay their rent. They’ve got to eat," says Strachan.
She says police attitudes can sometimes be very offensive and she’s been told, ‘Well honey you’re in a high-risk lifestyle. You have to expect these things."
Kyla, a member of the Canadian National Coalition of Experiential Women (CNCEW), another organization that represents current and former sex workers, agrees that major change is needed to keep sex workers safe.
Kyla, who asked that her last name not be used, says the violence sex workers face is "horrendous."
"As long as society sees sex workers as a lower form of humans, which they do unfortunately, they will always be preyed upon. As a society we just don’t care."
The CNCEW recently interviewed 183 street prostitutes in Vancouver and found 33 per cent had been victims of attempted murder, 40 per cent had been raped with a weapon, 41.9 per cent had been kidnapped or confined, 51.9 per cent had been robbed and 82.9 per cent reported johns who refused to wear a condom.
Kyla says every human being has the right to "decency, safety and security" regardless of their profession.
"The refusal to acknowledge their suffering is heartbreaking. It’s suffering that most people can’t even imagine."
Kyla says she believes only a small percentage of people who work in the sex trade want to be there and adds it’s crucial to address the root problems that cause them to end up on the street such as poverty or drug addiction. She says it’s not uncommon for sex workers to be out on the street in order to feed their kids for example.
The CNCEW, like the Sex Workers of Canada, is pushing for decriminalization of prostitution.
John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University who is a longstanding expert on prostitution, says Canada’s current laws around prostitution are "hypocritical" and ineffective.
He points out that many municipalities, including the City of Calgary, currently licence escort agencies where sex is sold for money. Earlier this year in a court case involving the owner of an escort agency who was charged with living off the avails of prostitution and operating a common bawdy house, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Patrick Sullivan ruled that Calgary’s escort bylaw led the owner to believe that there was nothing illegal about selling sex for money.
"The City of Calgary erroneously induced the accused to reasonably believe that deriving an income from an escort agency, where escorts are engaged in sex for money, was not contrary to the criminal law," wrote Sullivan in his decision.
City of Calgary administration has created a new draft escort bylaw, but city council hasn’t voted on it yet and until council sees the bylaw it won’t be released to the media.
Meanwhile, in the Criminal Code of Canada, it’s illegal to communicate for the purposes of trafficking, making it difficult for street prostitutes to work without getting arrested, essentially creating two tiers of prostitution, says Lowman.
"If they wanted to get rid of prostitution why wouldn’t they just criminalize it? The fact that it hasn’t been cannot be disregarded," says Lowman. "You’ve got a situation where nobody knows what the law is trying to achieve. If the purpose of the law is regulation then it’s doing a damn lousy job of it, isn’t it?"
Lowman believes current Canadian laws around prostitution are "indirectly killing people."
"By treating street prostitution as a sin… we put a target on those women for predatory, misogynistic men to go and kill them," he says, explaining that often street sex workers don’t go to the police for help because they’re afraid of being arrested.
Lowman has been doing media interviews on prostitution for years and he’s starting to lose his temper on the subject because nothing has changed.
"I just get pissed off when I see a bunch of women killed and nobody’s doing anything about it," he says. "We’re a society that is so deeply split about the issue of prostitution that we’re immobilized. We’re like a deer stuck in the headlights of a car when it comes to the social attitudes."
Lowman is a strong proponent of decriminalization of prostitution, but he says it’s not the only necessary step.
"Most of those women should not be involved in prostitution. It’s not really prostitution. It’s survival sex. They’re doing it because they’re desperate," he says. "We have to deal with issues like feminization of poverty and the effects of three generations of residential schools on aboriginal people. We need to do something about substance abuse and addiction. We need more treatment facilities. We need options for people. Our social and economic policies should be geared towards creating situations where if somebody prostitutes it really is a choice."
He adds that society needs to recognize that the sex trade is much bigger than just street prostitution and some people at the middle and high-end choose to work in the industry.
The previous Liberal government created a parliamentary committee to investigate Canada’s laws around prostitution and to study whether the existing laws have made the streets more dangerous for sex workers. The committee didn’t finish its final report before the Liberal government was overthrown. The Conservative government has promised to re-form the committee, but as yet, has not.
The committee heard from experts, including sex workers, in cities across the country. Libby Davies, a Vancouver MP who was on the committee and whose constituency includes the Downtown Eastside where dozens of women have gone missing or been murdered, says it become readily apparent to her that prostitution can’t be narrowly categorized.
"We did talk to women who said, ‘Look, I’m involved in sex work. I do it to make a living. This is my decision. I’m not being exploited,’" she says.
The testimony she heard also convinced her that the laws governing prostitution aren’t working. Women who testified in front of the committee told MPs that they don’t go to police if they’ve been sexually assaulted or physically attacked because they don’t want to get arrested.
"Somehow we’ve got to change the environment here and… acknowledge that there is violence taking place and actually be honest about how we’re going to deal with that instead of having this idea that somehow these laws are actually protecting women. (The laws) are creating a more dangerous situation and, where there is violence taking place, women aren’t reporting it," she says.
Davies says she supports a harm-reduction approach that also includes help for women wanting to leave the trade.
"I’m not in favor of criminalizing sex workers and criminalizing people for adult sexual activities. What we need to focus on is violence and exploitation and… focus on supporting and helping women exit the sex trade where they want to do so," she says.
She’d like to see more safe, affordable housing available for people exiting the sex trade and 24-hour support services available when they’re ready to leave the trade.
She agrees with Lowman that current laws are hypocritical and points out that most of the sex trade is off the street. All of society’s focus, however, is on street prostitution, including police enforcement.
Calgary alderman Joe Ceci made a presentation in front of the parliamentary committee studying the issue. He also favours focusing on making streets safer for sex workers and helping them exit the trade.
He’d also like to see Canada start targeting johns and the demand side more rigorously.
"There’s just too many people," he says, "who have the idea that it’s OK to exploit others for their own purposes and until we get society turned around… we’re still going to have johns picked up who say, ‘Well, I paid her money. What’s wrong? It’s an economic transaction.’ It’s not an economic transaction."
Ceci says he’d like to see programs established in schools that teach students that prostitution is wrong. He says he doesn’t believe working in the sex trade is a choice and therefore he’s not in favour of legalization.
Ceci also wants the province to speed up implementation of legislation that will allow police to seize johns’ cars. He’s hopeful johns will be deterred from cruising for prostitutes out of fear they’ll lose their vehicle.
Scharie Tavcer, an instructor in the Justice Studies department at Mount Royal College, says the fact that sex workers are currently criminalized for street prostitution makes it extremely tough for them to ever leave the life.
Tavcer was one of the authors of a recent report called Breaking Down Barriers, that looked at the impediments that sex workers in Edmonton face in leaving the profession. The report was conducted for Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton, a social agency that helps prostitutes.
In the report, 40 per cent of the sex workers surveyed said they had gotten into the profession because they needed money, and 25 per cent were addicted to drugs. They had tried to leave the sex trade an average of 7.9 times. More than half of the women said they had been refused employment, education or housing because of their criminal record. Almost all of the sex workers had children and the average age they’d left home was 13.
"If we criminalize them, charge them, convict them, you’re feeding them back into the system and it is even more difficult for them to get out of the industry. You’ve got a criminal record. Where are you going to get a job?"
She says some post-secondary education programs also won’t take students who have criminal records because they need to be able to send them to do field work or job placements.
"The barriers are immense," she says, explaining that sex workers often lose their kids to social services if they get arrested.
Like Ceci, Tavcer advocates more emphasis on the johns and the demand side.
"Target the johns because they are the exploiters of the industry," she says, adding that education is required to try and change johns’ behavior.
"Right now we’re thinking it’s OK to buy and sell another human being. Once upon a time people thought that way about slavery," she says.
Tavcer’s not in favour of legalization because she says it means society is conceding that prostitution will always exist and therefore it should become legal and regulated.
"None of these women when they were children dreamed of being a hooker – to use a derogatory term… They do not want to do this. This is not glamorous work. It’s violence. It’s degradation."
Tavcer says there needs to be more help available for adult sex workers in Calgary who want to leave the industry. She’d also like to see more of a co-ordinated response to prostitution involving police, the court system and social service agencies to help people exit the trade.
"First of all there has to be an acknowledgement and a shift in ideology and then there has to be a long-term, sustainable commitment and I’m talking dollars," she says. "This population continues to be neglected."
Strachan, the Edmonton sex worker, says until societal attitudes change as well, sex workers won’t be safe.
"The general public sees us as society’s castaways, non-persons, and that’s the way they can distance themselves from the deaths and the feelings. That’s been going on for too many years," she says. "The girls that are out there are somebody’s kid." |
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