Sex workers given voice in new book

Authors in Halifax to tell people about prostitutes’ hardships
By PAUL EVEREST | 6:02 AM
The Halifax Herald.

They are mothers, daughters, former university students and stay-at-home moms. They have concerns about working conditions, the economy and family life.

But because they’re sex workers, they’re often demonized and not given a voice.

So authors Leslie Jeffrey and Gayle MacDonald decided to speak with sex workers in the Maritimes and write a book about the conversations to give the workers a chance to tell their own story in their own words.

That book, Sex Workers in the Maritimes Talk Back, was launched Thursday night at Fred, a Halifax café and salon.

"We thought it was time that we talk to sex workers in the Maritimes and we could hear their own stories about their lives and their work and what they had to say to people around them," Ms. Jeffrey, a professor at the University of New Bruns-wick, said before she and Ms. MacDonald addressed a crowd of about 70 people who came out for the book’s Halifax debut.

The launch was sponsored by the Atlantic Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health and by Stepping Stone, a support organization for local sex workers.

Ms. MacDonald, a sociology professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, said part of the reason she and Ms. Jeffrey decided to write the book was because the lives of sex workers are often overlooked in the Maritimes more so than in other areas such as Toronto or Vancouver.

"This book, particularly, gives a voice to the sex workers," she said. "It gives them agency. A lot of studies have been done in Canada but there’s very few in which sex workers actually talk."

The authors said they spoke to about 60 sex workers, both women and men, over two years. What they found was that many of the issues the workers faced were no different from the ones that people working in "normal" jobs deal with.

Ms. Jeffrey said many talked about how they worked hard to create a workspace they were comfortable in.

"At least they didn’t have a boss breathing down their necks, they said," Ms. Jeffrey said.

Both authors found that the largest problem the workers deal with is violence, which they said is growing within the industry.

To drive the point home to the crowd, which included some sex workers, Ms. MacDonald read an excerpt from the book in which a woman named Alice from Halifax described some of the violence she’s encountered. She told the authors about being gang-raped by three men, getting beaten up and drugged by clients and being filmed for the Internet against her will.

Ms. Jeffrey said this kind of violence is being bred by a "stigmatization" of sex workers in our culture. Negative portrayals of sex workers, she added, are a constant in the media.

"(The workers) pointed out that violence is a product of precisely the kinds of stereotypes that we hold about sex workers, how we talk about them as hookers and high-risk kind of people," Ms. Jeffrey said. "Sex workers are talked about (in the media) as ‘Hooker killed in Halifax’ rather than saying ‘Woman, mother of two, who just happens to work in the sex trade, killed in Halifax.’

"That kind of language, that kind of stereotype, tells clients in particular that it’s OK to beat up a sex worker, it’s OK to kill a sex worker."

( peverest@herald.ca)