Craigslist controversy

Interesting viewpoint from the Globe and Mail opinion pages on all this fuss about Craigslist.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas one and all during one of the busiest seasons for sex workers. Here's a jolly Christmas read out of London, where the BBC set out to get a straight-up story from the city's sex workers about what kind of a Christmas season they're expecting. Nice to see adult sex work starting to get normal media coverage - not so long ago, that would have been unimaginable, as media would have been falling all over themselves to find a vulnerable victim to profile instead.

And of course, there are still vulnerable victims forced into sex work, and we wish them all the support they need to get into a new life. But there are also a whole lot of adult sex workers who are just fine with working in the business. Nice to see their perspective gaining at least a little credence in the press.

Happy holidays, everyone! Hope your season's nice, and just a little naughty.

Hard to know who the good guys are when you're a sex worker, as this story about police abuse of Ottawa sex workers makes clear.

Setback on the legal front

So we have to wait a little longer for decriminalization of the sex industry - the Ontario Court of Appeal has ordered that sex work remain illegal in Ontario until the appeal of three recently overturned laws is heard.

No one said it was going to be easy. But it's pretty obvious that there's no contest when you weigh the harm of the current laws against the good. It'll take a few years, but the landmark ruling from the Ontario Superior Court earlier this fall will eventually stand.

Are we legal yet?

The plot thickens as Canada (well, at least the federal government lawyers) ties itself in knots over the fate of laws around prostitution. This just in.

Oh, they always know how to have fun...

Only Sweet VIP girls could turn a night of blood and urine testing into a good time. But the place definitely had the feel of a party Thursday night when Cool Aid health nurses and two University of Victoria researchers showed up for "rapid HIV testing" on a dozen or so VIP workers.

The new kind of HIV test shows accurate results in seconds, just like a pregnancy test. That makes the medical community very happy, seeing as studies have shown that more than half of people who got the older style HIV tests never came back for the results.

The UVic researchers are looking into sex workers' responses to the rapid tests, and surveyed the VIP workers on their feelings about the test. Pretty good deal for the staff - everyone who did a survey got a $100 spa certificate!

For better or worse, find us on Google Maps

Hey, here's an interesting thing: Type "escort agencies Victoria" into Google Maps and up comes those familiar little balloons showing where a bunch of them are (including VIP, of course). Hmmm - is this a good thing for agencies, given that little business of the Criminal Code that still hangs over the industry? Hard to say, but it's handy for finding the places, even though the search pulled up a few wild cards.

Some good work is coming out of a few big Canadian papers around sex work - notably the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen. Here's a recent example from the Gazette, which gets beyond the usual knee-jerk stuff and tries to move the debate forward.

Two very different things

As this story out of Cambodia points out, presuming that sex work and human trafficking are the same things create dire consequences for people in the industry.

Sue Davis speaks out

Check out this interview with Sue Davis, a Vancouver sex worker who is tireless in her work to decriminalize the adult industry and create better working conditions for outdoor sex workers. You go, Sue!

Outreach on stroll a big help

Programs like this one in Vancouver and the PEERS outreach service on stroll here in Victoria can make all the difference for marginalized survival sex workers. Sweet VIP helps raise money for PEERS outreach services through some of its events.

B.C. sex-work court challenge inches forward

More good news of successful court challenges of Canada's pointless and dangerous laws around adult sex work, this one made in B.C. The B.C. courts have been reluctant to hear the case up until now because the woman leading the fight is a former sex worker, not a current one, but the Court of Appeal has now given the go-ahead.

And here's a good screed from Simon Fraser University professor John Lowman, taking Sun columnist Daphne Bramham to task for a recent piece in which she appears to have closed her eyes to any evidence that didn't suit her argument against decriminalization.

That's one of the big problems with this issue - it's got way too much ideology and personal belief wrapped up in it and not nearly enough straight-up facts. If we just considered the facts of the law and its impact on the lives of Canadian sex workers (and its complete lack of impact on preventing prostitution or stopping child exploitation), any thinking person would have to conclude that decriminalization of the adult industry is the right and smart thing to do.

Thoughtful writing on sex-trade court decision

There's been some terrific (and terrible) commentary and writing about Canada's prostitution laws since the Ontario Superior Court struck down three key laws around the sex trade last week. Here are a couple pieces from the former category, one from SFU professor John Lowman in the Vancouver Sun, and the other from the Ottawa Citizen by Steve Sullivan, Canada's federal ombudsman for victims of crime. Nice to see some smart, thoughtful writing on this subject.

The good guys won!!

Yay, triple yay, wild screams for the legal team that may have changed everything about Canada's prostitution laws. The ruling came down today from the Ontario Superior Court scrapping that province's laws against bawdyhouses, living off the avails and communicating for the purposes.

Hypocrisy 'round the world

A thoughtful essay on legalizing sex work, from a blogger in India.

Poll shows 50 per cent Canadians favour decrim

Somehow missed this story until now, but here's the results from an Angus Reid poll a year ago asking Canadians whether they support decriminalization. OK, 50 per cent support isn't overwhelming, but it's a pretty good start! And at least a solid majority of Canadians recognize that the status quo needs to change.

Prague gets with the program

While Canada takes a big step backward by toughening up sentences for anyone convicted of keeping a bawdyhouse, other places in the world recognize what most of us can clearly see: The sex industry is here to stay, and trying to deny that just makes the whole business way more risky and stigmatized than it needs to be. Here's what Prague is up to around decriminalization.

Sex and Money

Check out this interesting sex blog put together by an economics professor at Dalhousie. Here's a little squib from the Dalhousie newsletter about who the prof is and who she's starting to influence now that her blog has been picked up by Big Think, one of those sites that does the work for you and just goes out and finds interesting writers.

Medical journal sounds off against criminalization

An excellent piece from UBC researcher Kate Shannon, written for the Canadian Medical Association Journal this month. Some great (but disspiriting) facts in here about the tremendous surge in arrests for outdoor sex workers in Canada due to short-sighted changes in the communications law in the 1980s. We're still living with the fallout - let's not add another bad, poorly considered law to the mix by toughening up sentences for keeping a common bawdyhouse.

From the September edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal:

(All editorial matter in CMAJ represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the Can adian Medical Association.)

The hypocrisy of Canada’s prostitution legislation

Often described as the world’s oldest profession, the exchange of sex for money has always

existed and will continue to exist worldwide.

For many, the sex industry evokes a sense of moral unease, and divides feminists and society alike on whether it is an oppression and commodification of women, or a woman’s right and choice to sell her body. Canada’s federal legislation reflects this divide: The buying and selling of sex among consensual adults has always been legal, yet criminal code provisions on communicating, procuring, bawdy houses and living off the avails of prostitution make it virtually impossible to work legally in safer indoor settings.

Against this backdrop, the numbers of missing and murdered women continue to swell in Canadian cities and street-involved women engaged in sex work experience some of the worst health outcomes in our society, including drug-related harms, trauma, and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

Standardized mortality rates among female street-based sex workers are higher than any other population of women in North America, with homicide being the most common cause of death.

Sadly, there are multiple examples of convictions of serial murderers of sex workers over the last decade in North America and the United Kingdom, and ongoing concerns remain of potential

serial murderers in Edmonton, Winnipeg and along the “Highway of Tears” in Northern British Columbia. The recent convictions for the gruesome homicides of women on the streets of Vancouver and Seattle — the largest serial murders in Canadian and American history — should be a vivid and chilling reminder.

Importantly, growing peer-reviewed research published in some of the top medical journals now suggest that enforcement of criminal sanctions targeting sex work, including communicating

in public spaces, displaces sex workers to isolated alleys and industrial settings away from health and support services.

Enforced displacement and lack of access to safer indoor work environments independently increase sex workers’ risk of physical violence and rape, and reduces their ability to safely negotiate condom use with clients, thereby protecting themselves from sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies. Qualitative evidence further describes how criminal sanctions limiting sex workers’ ability to regulate safer industry practices (e.g., create unions,

safer indoor work spaces. etc.) compound health-related risks.

Globally, evidence-based public health research is being used in calls to remove criminal sanctions targeting sex work; one such call even came from the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Yet in Canada this public health policy gap has been met with

scaled up enforcement-based efforts targeting sex workers and their clients.

According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, following the enactment of the 1985 ‘communicating code’legislation designed to remove the visible presence of sex work, annual prostitution arrests increased nearly 10-fold,

from 1, 255 arrests in 1985 to 10, 457 arrests in 1987. These rates have remained constant at about 10, 000 arrests per year, with 97 per cent occurring in Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal.

Despite three separate parliamentary sub-committees on prostitution since the

mid-1980s, sex workers and human rights experts are now being forced to

challenge the criminal sanctions through the courts, as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Now, as we wait for the Ontario Supreme Court decision on one challenge, the federal government has taken another backward step, this time by reclassifying the Criminal Code on

“keeping a bawdy house” (a place kept for the purpose prostitution) making it a

serious crime with a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment.6 This new

Criminal Code regulation, introduced without Parliamentary debate, is in blatant

disregard of the evidence and has the concerning risk of pushing sex workers

further underground and outside the public health umbrella.

In perhaps the saddest reflection of this public health policy gap, in 2008 sex workers in Edmonton began giving samples of their DNA to a community agency and RCMP network to ensure their bodies would be identified in case of future harm.

While rigorous evaluation of legal policy approaches to sex work remains critical, it is also time for government and policy makers to take into account the evidence of the failures of the criminalized approach to sex work on health and human rights in Canadian society.

Kate Shannon PhD

Assistant professor

Department of Medicine

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, BC

REFERENCES

1. Shannon K, Strathdee SA, Shoveller J, et al. Structural and environmental barriers to condom use negotiation with clients among female sex workers: Implications for HIV prevention strategies and policy. Am J Public Health 2009;99:659-65.

2. Shannon K, Kerr T, Strathdee SA, et al. Prevalence and structural correlates of gender-based violence in a prospective cohort of female sex workers. BMJ 2009;339: b2939.

3. Rekart ML. Sex-work harm reduction. Lancet 2005;366: 2123-34.

4. Goodyear M, Cusick L. Protection of sex workers. BMJ 2007;334:52-3.

5. Duchesne D. Street prostitution in Canada. Ottawa (ON): Statistics Canada; 2002. Cat. no. 85-002-XPE

6. Perreaux L. Tory legislation takes aim at brothels and bookies. The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 2010 Aug. 5. Sect A:6 DOI:10.1503/cmaj.100410

© 2010 Jupiterimages Corp.

Previously published at www.cmaj.ca

CMAJ • SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 • 182(12)

© 2010 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors

Another ally speaks up

Sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh challenges the misconceptions around sex work in this article from the Washington Post, one of your blog mistress's favourite newspapers. Venkatesh makes the point that a lot of SPs make all the time - that the work isn't all about sex by a long shot. And how nice to see the piece addressing that tired old myth about SPs all being drug-addicted, desperate and exploited.

Like fine wine...

Nice to know the old girls have still got it, at least according to this news story out of Chennai, India.

Hey, it's got us talking

If nothing else, Ottawa's efforts to get tough with Canada's bawdyhouse laws is getting us talking about the sex industry. A recent article from the Vancouver Sun, and another from the Toronto Star.

Salon article on Canada's shame

Salon Magazine jumps into the debate over Canada's ridiculous plan to toughen up bawdyhouse laws while at the same time we're preparing for a big inquiry into how we could have avoided the Pickton tragedy. Come on, people! What can they possibly be thinking?

They're not just sexy, they're smart

A study out of the UK verifying what we already know: Sex workers aren't stupid, coerced victims.

More on bawdyhouse changes

Today's column by Times Colonist writer Jody Paterson, on the hypocrisy of lamenting the Pickton murders while at the same time the federal government is making Criminal Code changes that put even more women at risk.

Troubling changes in federal bawdy-house laws

A closer look at the federal government's new regulations on "bawdy houses" reveals some pretty alarming changes. In case you missed it, here's the press release and the backgrounder that the Department of Justice issued in early August. Very scary for anyone working in the indoor sex industry in Canada - now that they've redefined keeping a common bawdy house as a "serious offence" under the Criminal Code, police have the right to run wiretaps, and the minimum prison sentence for someone convicted of this will now be five years (compared to a maximum of two years right now).

What does it all mean? Depends on how police choose to use the changed laws, but it certainly increases the risks for sex workers and others in the business. Pay attention, folks - this is a very worrying development.

Beware: The feds want to ramp up enforcement of the bawdy house laws

Here's a Vancouver Sun editorial from last week and an excellent column from Sun writer Peter McKnight, sounding the alarm about a potential crackdown on "common bawdy houses" - otherwise known as brothels, escort agencies and massage parlours. The federal government has just designated certain crimes as deserving of more police attention, and one of them is the rarely used bawdy-house law.

The last time there was a government-ordered crackdown, in the 1970s, the result was a dramatic increase in street prostitution and an even more dramatic rise in assaults and murders among sex workers, who now no longer had a safe indoor place to work. We can't let this happen again!

Disposable women

How would things have turned out if Willie Pickton had been murdering, say, bank tellers instead of street-entrenched sex workers? Guess we'll never know, but here's the Vancouver Police Department report on the many things that stopped the VPD and the RCMP from taking their investigators more seriously during the period when Pickton was murdering women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Blog gap

Blogmistress Jody is on the road for the next while, so blog-posting will be on hold until later in August. See you back here then!

He's b-a-a-a-c-k!

Looks like Robert Pickton's back in the news, at least for a media moment or two.

Rights groups support Cambodian sex workers

Fighting back in Cambodia.

Fashionably racy

Oh, for the day when we can be this open about sex work in Canada.

Yay, us!

Thanks to our wonderful Sweet VIP customers and staff, we raised $500 for PEERS outreach at the recent party at VIP.

Know about PEERS? It's a non-profit here in Victoria that helps past and current sex workers who need a little support to get things straightened out in their lives. We're picking them as our spotlight charity and will be raising money at our parties and at other events for the PEERS late-night outreach program on the stroll.

We're putting a donation box up at the office soon - hope you'll contribute to it!

The Brothel Project

A few links to The Brothel Project, a documentary that aired on Global in June and stars VIP's very own Harvi Wallbanger, plus assorted other VIP characters and enthusiasts.

Here's a blog post from one of the subjects in the documentary, Jody Paterson.

And here's a link to a review of the film, which has a link to the actual doc at the bottom of the article, in case you'd like to see The Brothel Project for yourself. (P.S. Jody HATES the photo they used of her in this article, but what can you do?)

World Cup Woes

The World Cup falls flat for sex workers.

Oops!

Sorry, folks - the Sweet VIP blog was tragically and inadvertently deleted (long story). We'll be rebuilding it over the next couple of weeks. Please stay tuned.