The Commoner, October 25, 2008
Sex Trade Decriminalization Sought

Sylvia Cole
sylviacole@dal.ca

Decriminalizing prostitution in Canada would protect the safety and well being of sex workers, say members of a centre in Halifax that offers services to sex workers.

“The police resources of the city would be more focused towards violent crime as opposed to quote-on-quote crimes of morality,” says Rene Ross, the executive director of Stepping Stone.

Others agree with Ross, such as John Ince, leader of the Sex Party, a political party in British Columbia that says prostitution should not be considered a criminal activity. He says Canadian laws reflect a social attitude that looks down on prostitution.

“You can’t legally work out of your home and do sex work … the law is very, very unhealthy in stigmatizing all sex work, even sex work that is not socially harmful.”

Ince is referring to a section of the Criminal Code that talks about bawdy houses. Anybody that owns, lives in or visits a house for the purpose of prostitution can face charges.

Ross says if women were allowed to work indoors they would feel safer in calling the police if a client abused them.

The North End of Halifax and the North End of Dartmouth are areas where a high level of prostitution takes place, says Const. Jeff Carr, media relations spokesperson at Halifax Regional Police.

Last year, 46 people in Halifax were arrested on a charge of communicating for the purpose of prostitution. This year, 53 people had been arrested as of Oct. 1. This number includes both sex workers and clients, but Carr says the majority of those arrested are sex workers.

Carr agrees that a lot of sex workers are reluctant to call the police when they have been assaulted, even though he says they would not be treated differently than others because of their profession.

Dr. Michael Goodyear, a professor at Dalhousie University and a board member at Stepping Stone, says that sex workers will not receive better treatment until society’s views change.

He says the typical, and inaccurate, image people have is of a street sex worker at “midnight … leaning against a lamppost with their legs crossed and a cigarette dangling from their fingers.”

Goodyear explains that most sex workers work indoors. Ince says the reason sex workers are associated with those who work on the street is because those are the only sex workers who are visible.

Valerie Scott is a former sex worker and the director of Sex Professionals of Canada, a group challenging the Ontario Supreme Court to change laws that target prostitution. Scott was in Halifax last week to deliver a speech on sex work and clarified the distinction between legalizing and decriminalizing prostitution.

In places where prostitution was legalized, such as Nevada and Amsterdam, Scott says it resulted in too many regulations. She says this keeps prostitution stigmatized. Sex workers have to display a certificate to show they are free of sexually transmitted diseases.  This can cause problems because it may entice clients to refuse to wear condoms.

Goodyear says that laws and cultural attitudes have a reciprocal relationship. By decriminalizing prostitution, people’s attitudes will begin to change.

Carr doesn’t think decriminalizing prostitution will help the situation in Halifax.

“Most of the people who are in the sex industry in our region, in particular street-level prostitution, they’re there because a lot of them have had a hard go in life.” Carr doesn’t think this would change with the decriminalization of sex work.

Ince says it would be hard to solve the problem of street workers with decriminalization because a lot of them are addicted to drugs and may have other serious problems that need to be addressed.

But he believes that decriminalization will help, because it will allow women to band together and live in a house where they would be safer than if they stayed on the street.

Goodyear says about six per cent of college students are involved in prostitution and suggests that number might be increasing with the rising cost of tuition.

The reasons why women go into to prostitution vary. Some are there, like Carr says, because they’ve had a rough go in life.
Scott, though, says she became a sex worker because she always liked the saloon girls she saw on cowboy shows on television.