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?