The Olympics was great for business in Vancouver. Read more at The New York Daily News…

Winter Olympics’ boost for Vancouver sex trade as business triples at brothel
By Megan Taylor

Vancouver’s estimated 1,000 sex workers agree: The Olympic Games are good for business.

Business at a brothel near downtown Vancouver tripled during the Winter Olympics, AOL News reports. But instead of the expected foreign visitors, Sexy Nina, who owns the house of ill repute, found local clients excited by the competitive spirit.

“The Games gave us the desire and willingness to connect, the energy to move,” she told AOL News. “What an amazing two weeks!”

Despite fears that out-of-town sex workers could make work riskier, some street workers reported that business was slow, said Kerry Porth, the executive director of Prostitution Alternatives Counseling & Education Society (PACE), which offered nightly outreach sessions during the Games.

Porth said the increased police presence may be to blame for some of the slowdown in street business.

“There were police on foot and in cars, all over the usual sex worker neighborhoods,” she said.

Although sex work is legal in Vancouver, some associated activities are not, such as running a brothel. But the Vancouver Police Department usually leaves sex workers alone.

Burbank Cops getting tough!  Read more at NBC Los Angeles…

Burbank Hookers, Beware
“The Burbank Police Department will not allow prostitutes and their customers to believe that they can use Burbank as their meeting place.”
By OLSEN EBRIGHT

Police in Burbank have issued a warning to pimps, prostitutes and anyone else benefiting from prostitution-related crimes.

“The Burbank Police Department will not allow prostitutes and their customers to believe that they can use Burbank as their meeting place,” Lt. Armen Dermenjian told the Burbank Leader.

The warning coincides with a beefed-up effort from cops to curb sex trade.

On Feb 23, police arrested three women at the Ramada Burbank Airport Hotel, said Burbank Police Sgt. Robert Quesada. On Feb. 16, a 19-year-old Poway woman and 26-year-old San Diego man were arrested on prostitution-related charges, according to police records.

Other recent incidents include the arrest of two Oakland men at the Extended StayAmerica Los Angeles-Burbank Airport on suspicion of pimping a minor under the age of 16, Quesada told the newspaper.

“We want these people to know that if they’re going to engage in this kind of conduct that the police and citizens won’t put up with it, and we’ll be out there targeting it,” Quesada said. “We don’t want to let them get comfortable.”

Read more at The Province…

64 charges against prostitutes, johns in Calgary sting
By Sherri Zickefoose

A city-wide prostitution sting has seen 64 charges laid against johns and sex trade workers.

Police also have seized 25 cars from johns caught soliciting prostitutes, a penalty provided for in Alberta law.

Police made arrests on nine outstanding warrants as they operated the two-week undercover sting.

First-time johns can get their cars back after performing community service, but those who get caught more than once could see their vehicles seized by the Alberta government and auctioned off.

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.

Though this study doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, it’s welcomed nonetheless. Read more at The Times-Colonist…

Good news: Johns are just normal guys
By Jody Paterson

A new study out of Simon Fraser University concludes that people who buy sex are no more prone to violence than anyone else.

Fewer than two per cent of the 1,000 respondents who took part in SFU sociologist Chris Atchison’s study reported ever having hit, hurt, raped or robbed the person they bought sex from.

Granted, that’s just them saying so. But Atchison noted in a Vancouver Sun story this week about his research that there was little reason for the respondents to lie, given that the survey was anonymous.

That his findings are provocative is an understatement.

“It’s an outrageous study and it really works towards normalizing sexual assault,” said Aurea Flynn of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, which is the go-to organization in B.C. when media are looking for a quote from someone vehemently opposed to prostitution.

“I’m really angry about the emphasis on the compassion for johns that the study provides,” added Flynn, “and I’m very concerned about its impact on the continued normalization of prostitution in Canada because I believe prostitution is violence against women.”

Read more at The San Francisco Chronicle…

San Francisco prostitution crackdown leads to 51 arrests
by Jaxon Van Derbeken

In response to neighborhood complaints about a rise in prostitution and accompanying street crime, San Francisco police said Tuesday that stepped-up enforcement in the downtown area has led to 51 arrests since Jan. 1.

Police arrested three dozen suspected prostitutes and 15 would-be johns in the first two weeks of 2010, authorities said.

Those arrested for prostitution all came from out of town, some from as far away as San Diego, police said.

Police targeted Polk Street from Sutter to Washington streets, as well as portions of Van Ness Avenue and Leavenworth Street.

Read more at KCBA.com…

6 held for alleged SoCal prostitution ring

Police have arrested six people they claim ran a multimillion-dollar prostitution ring out of luxury apartments in Pasadena and Irvine.

A Pasadena police statement Wednesday says officers acting on an anonymous tip worked with federal immigration agents to make the arrests last month following a 2-year investigation.

Read more at Yahoo News Canada…

Anti-prostitution Facebook group dismantled

A Montreal-based Facebook group created to fight street prostitution in the city’s east end has been shut down for security reasons.

The group, called Prostitution en plein jour, was an online forum for Hochelaga-Maisonneuve residents concerned about the problems of public sex, drug use and drug dealing in the modest working-class neighbourhood.

Hundreds of people joined the group on the social networking site, where residents would post pictures of sex workers or drug dealers spotted on the street and gripe about police inaction.

But last week, the group’s administrators announced they were dismantling the Facebook page, saying it had become increasingly dangerous to the neighbourhood. Photos posted on the site have been removed.

“Some group members [posted] negative things, and it’s dangerous for members, because drug dealers or pimps could [attack them],” group member Frédéric Leroux, a Hochelaga-Maisonneuve resident, told CBC News.

Guys wandering the highways and byways for some TLC face some bad odds, evidently. Read more at The Californian…

Salinas police arrest 4 women, 4 transvestites in prostitution sting

BY KIMBER SOLANA

The Salinas Police Department arrested one woman and two transvestites, and cited five others, after officers conducted a prostitution sting Friday night.

The five-hour sting by the poilice narcotics unit, the Violence Suppression Unit, and SUBA Unit, were conducted in east Salinas – at Griffin and Rianda streets, and Kings and Roosevelt streets.

Read more at The Record…

Man charged with keeping brothel in Kitchener hotel
By Cherri Greeno

A 25-year-old Toronto man is facing several charges after police discovered a brothel inside a Kitchener hotel this week.

Waterloo Regional Police say they discovered the bawdy house inside a hotel room Tuesday after receiving a tip that a missing Kitchener woman was seen there.

“Information they received when they arrived at the hotel led them to be suspicious that illegal sexual activities were taking place, which prompted further investigation,” said Waterloo Regional Police spokesperson Olaf Heinzel.

“This is very rare. We don’t have too many kinds of these incidents.”

When officers went to the room, they found three women and a man inside. The women — two from Toronto and one from Kitchener — were between the ages of 15 and 20.

Police allege that money was exchanged for sex in the hotel room.