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.