Andy Nichols

Canada's prostitution laws have made the trade far more dangerous for street-level workers, says criminologist

At 42, Susan Davis has worked in the sex trade for more than half of her life. She’s been raped more than 15 times since she began selling her body 24 years ago — once allegedly at knifepoint by convicted serial killer Robert Pickton. As well, a fellow prostitute she knew was mutilated and murdered by a john.

Despite the violent encounters, Davis doesn’t intend to abandon the trade. “It’s a great job,” says the Vancouver-based prostitute. “There’s lots of freedom and it affords me the time to do the political work that I like to do.”

Since establishing the West Coast Co-operative of Sex Industry Professionals in 2007, Davis has been pushing for wide-sweeping reform of Canada’s prostitution laws. She also plans to open a member-owned-and-operated brothel, offering prostitutes a safer place to work and access to exit programs and job training. “This is not a sole-proprietor business where only one person is profiting. It’s owned by the community of sex workers,” she says.

This week, Davis will be peddling her vision at a day-long Calgary event hosted by the Calgary Network on Prostitution (CNOP) — a group of social agencies and community groups working on prevention, harm reduction and exit programs for prostitutes.

“The issues around prostitution are so diverse,” says Louise Crane, CNOP’s co-ordinator. Prostitution typically isn’t about sexual exploitation, says Crane. “It can be economic exploitation, such as paying the grocery bill — single moms raising kids,” she says. “I’ve known single dads in the trade.”

Abolishing the trade isn’t realistic, Crane says. “It’s been around for a long time and I don’t see things changing.”

Prostitution is not illegal in Canada — one can exchange money, goods or services for sex. However, the Criminal Code bans several activities linked to the trade: profiting from prostitution; operating, working or directing a person to a bawdy house; and communicating in any public place for the purpose of prostitution.

According to Calgary Police Services, 90 per cent of prostitution in the city takes place through escort agencies and massage parlours as well as over the Internet and the phone. However, the number of sex-trade venues makes it difficult to calculate how many workers are in Calgary, says Capri Rasmussen, interim executive director for AIDS Calgary. “It’s not like people are necessarily going to advertise that they are a sex worker either.”

Collecting accurate statistics on crimes committed against prostitutes is difficult, says Staff Sgt. Colin Adair of the Calgary Police Service’s vice-unit. “We have stats on assaults, rapes and murders, but we don’t say that this was a prostitute who was assaulted or raped,” says Adair. “We don’t make that differentiation unless it was in the report that she was working as a prostitute at the time she was assaulted or raped.”

Prostitution is a grey area that most people choose to ignore, says Susan McIntyre, who has conducted several studies on prostitution over the past 20 years. She found that up to 82 per cent of prostitutes were sexually abused as children prior to working on the streets. “If someone is over the age of 18 and they have no background of abuse, it’s none of my business,” she says.

McIntyre also discovered that male prostitutes start selling themselves at an earlier age than women and they stay in the profession twice as long. Several factors contribute to this, including homophobia, lack of support services and less incentive to start a family, says McIntyre. “The topic of sexual exploitation makes people uncomfortable in the best of times,” she says. “Add the male to it and it makes people even more uncomfortable.”

In Calgary there are few services to help male prostitutes, says Crane. “If they want to exit they’ve got nobody to champion for them.”

Canada’s prostitution laws prevent workers from properly screening customers and working in the safety of their homes and brothels, Davis says.

In 1991, Davis was the victim of serial killer Pickton. She was raped and robbed at knifepoint on the street. “I tried to report it,” she says. “I had his licence plate number. Unfortunately they didn’t take it seriously, and when he was arrested later for killing a number of missing women, I felt extremely angry.”

Pickton, a B.C. pig farmer, was later charged with killing 26 women. He was convicted of second-degree murder of six of the women and was sentenced to life in prison. “I live with survivor guilt and I’m haunted by the idea that if they would have listened to me those women would be alive,” says Davis.

Canada’s prostitution laws are merely “symbolic,” which in essence has resulted in the murder of hundreds of street prostitutes across the country, says Simon Fraser University criminologist John Lowman, who has studied prostitution for almost four decades. In the mid-1980s, he predicted violence against prostitutes would increase because of Canada’s laws. Using police records and newspaper stories, he found 11 prostitutes were murdered in Vancouver from 1940 to 1984 — a number that skyrocketed to 46 in 1985 to 1994 (that doesn’t include Pickton’s victims).

“If off-street prostitution was as violent as on-street prostitution, we should be reading about hundreds of murders of escort and massage parlour workers, but we’re not,” he says. “I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but the prohibitionists say ‘As long as there’s a single murder of an off-street prostitute, it shows that prostitution is inherently violent.’ It does nothing of the sort.”

Davis wants to establish a national industry association to protect workers. “We have the right to form a trade association,” she says. “We have the right to choose employment over poverty and work at jobs that we choose. We have the right to be given tools to make safe decisions in that job.”

Co-operative brothels would support localized groups of sex workers and prioritize their needs, says Davis. “I appreciate that no one should be forced to do sex work because of poverty, but people do choose it so we have to ensure they are safe while they are working.”