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.

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 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.

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.

Folks in Montreal mobilize to fight the street scene.   Read more at The CBC…

Montreal residents fight prostitution online

Residents in Montreal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district have launched an online group to fight street prostitution.

As of Tuesday, some 377 people, mostly residents in the southeast borough, had joined a group on the social networking site Facebook, where people discuss drug use and public sex they’ve witnessed in the area.

The Facebook group, called “Prostitution en plein jour” also features photos of prostitutes who work in the neighbourhood south of the Olympic Stadium.

Sex-trade workers have walked the streets in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve for years, says resident Frédéric Leroux, but the situation has worsened in recent months. “On the same corner, I saw a kid, waiting for a school bus, and I saw a prostitute, waiting for a client,” said Leroux, who has three children.

Police are doing little to solve the problem, and that’s why fed-up residents turned to the internet to take action, Leroux contends.

He said he doesn’t blame the prostitutes, but rather clients, or johns, who drive the demand.

Take a little off the top. Read more at CBC News…

Prostitutes allegedly offered at Calgary hair salon

A Calgary woman who police allege posed as a hair stylist to run a bawdy house faces several charges in one of two unrelated human trafficking cases in the city.

In September, vice-squad officers began watching a woman they say was advertising the erotic services of young Asian women on a free online classified ad service.

The probe led police to the Alternative Hair Design salon and to homes in Calgary, where prostitution and human trafficking were allegedly taking place.

A woman posing as a hair stylist at the salon allegedly made appointments for clients to meet prostitutes.

Police said undercover officers were offered services, including the chance to purchase two teenage Asian women for $5,000 each. Eventually, the two women, both originally from China, were sold to officers for $4,000 each, police said. The women were later found to be 25 and 41 years old.

“Human trafficking is a hugely profitable industry in the world,” said Supt. Roger Chaffin of the Calgary police. “In terms of the price for these particular girls — again it is a fairly rare investigation so I don’t know that this price, how common that price was — but it’s a shocking thing to see humans traded for money and for a relatively low amount of money.”

Read more at CBC News…

Escort sting brings $134,000 in fines

A two-day sting operation aimed at unlicensed escorts and escort agencies in Edmonton has resulted in $134,000 in fines levied against 20 escorts and 15 agencies, police said Thursday.

“We set up in a local hotel and we call off craigslist a number of the women who advertise themselves there,” said Det. Chuck Prince of the Edmonton Police Service’s vice unit.

“We’re looking for the women who are unlicensed, and ask them to respond to provide a sexual service for the occupant of the hotel suite.”

If the escort wasn’t licensed, or if the agency she represents wasn’t licensed, fines of $2,500 and more were levied, Prince said.

The goal is not to cut down on prostitution — which is legal so long as it’s not arranged in a public place — it’s to ensure that those who provide the service are licensed.

Read more at The Barrie Examiner…

Sex sweep nets 15 ‘johns’ in downtown Barrie

City police say a man was Christmas shopping when he decided instead to get his jollies: sexual services from a downtown hooker.

He was among the 15 males — one was just 16 years old — who have been arrested and charged with communication for the purpose of prostitution.

Twenty-three people have been arrested and charged after the Barrie police street crime unit used undercover officers during a four-day period to target suspected johns and prostitutes, as well as associated criminal activity.

Police said the suspected johns approached the prostitutes on bicycles, on foot and in vehicles.

The sting operation — which led to police laying 27 criminal charges and five drug charges — was conducted in the area of Toronto and Mulcaster streets.

Eight suspected hookers were arrested for communication for the purpose of prostitution. One of the women was found to be violating her parole and was sent back to jail.