Time To Reduce The Risks of The Sex Trade In British Columbia
Read the whole article in The Times-Colonist…
Editorial: Time to reduce sex-trade risks
How long do we have to follow a failed and destructive policy before we smarten up? The Brothel Project, a well-crafted debut documentary by Victoria director April Butler-Parry and producer/writer Gillian Hrankowski, premiered at the Victoria Film Festival this week.
It raises — once again — our peculiar attitudes and laws about prostitution and their damaging effects as it follows the efforts of Jody Paterson, a Times Colonist contributor, and Lauren Casey, a researcher and outreach worker, to open a legal brothel here.
Prostitution is legal in Canada. One person can pay another for sex.
But virtually every activity associated with the transaction is not. Public communication to arrange the exchange is illegal. Owning or running or having anything to do with a brothel is illegal. “Living off the avails” is illegal.
Remarkably, the situation was much the same 130 years ago in Victoria.
The fascinating website victoriasvictoria.ca, a project of the University of Victoria history department, looks at all aspects of our history, including the thriving sex trade.
It notes that in 1881, “legally, prostitution itself was not regarded as an offence, instead it was dealt with by means of a charge for street solicitation or the operation of a ‘bawdy house.’ In effect, the test of it as an offence was the extent to which it became a ‘fact of public annoyance.’ “
The effect today, as it was then, is that the work is more dangerous than it needs to be and the participants — mostly women — are excluded from the basic rights and protections enjoyed by everyone else in society.
The risk of arrest for soliciting forces sex workers and their clients into dark and dangerous neighbourhoods at night. Instead of discussing the transaction with a client, like any other business exchange, hurried judgments must be made before climbing into a stranger’s car.
The bawdy house laws make it legally impossible for sex workers to operate a brothel like any other business. They exist, of course, surreptitiously or as massage parlours or escort agencies. They pay taxes and licence fees and advertise. But they operate in a legal shadow that penalizes workers. The laws serve mainly to make the sex trade dangerous.
And they perpetuate a view of those in the trade that makes them less than human — even disposable.
The slow and ineffectual investigation of missing women in Vancouver and the Pickton murders showed the results.
Society’s concerns about the sex trade are understandable. Human trafficking and forced prostitution do exist, with the biggest coercive factors being poverty and addiction. Those concerns must be addressed.
That would be simpler if the trade was regulated and conducted like other businesses, with access to the same workplace and legal protections.
Many people object to the trade based on personal views on the role of sex in life and relationships.
While those views should be respected, so should the right of adults to make their own choices and to be either customers or suppliers in the trade.
We have pretended to support that principle by making prostitution legal.
But we have left in place laws that serve mainly to make it dangerous and difficult and turn participants into second-class citizens.
