Find a new approach to sex work

We used to call it “Hooker Alley.” I started my career at The Standard as a crime reporter and back then the Queenston Street area was prostitution central.

Anti-prostitution police operations were common. Sometimes the Niagara Regional Police targeted the women selling sex. Sometimes the men buying it.

The crackdowns suppressed the sex trade in the area, but never stamped it out. The women who walked Queenston Street would turn up in Niagara Falls. The police would target the Falls, and the women would return to St. Catharines.

The sex trade was an appendage of the drug trade. As often as not, the women were addicts. Crack cocaine was their drug of choice. A house on Division Street, just off Queenston, was the area’s hub of criminal activity. Part prostitution den, part drug flophouse, the building was a pitiless limbo from which few women escaped.

Those who cover crime often adopt gallows humour. And so the Queenston Street area was labelled “Hooker Alley” in the news room.

I don’t know anyone, myself included, who would use the term today. More than a decade ago, sex trade workers were not often reported on as people in the full sense of the word. In those stories, prostitution was treated solely as a law enforcement issue. Underlying factors of poverty, drug addiction and abuse that often push women into sex work only received tangential attention.

All this came to mind following last week’s recent NRP crack down on prostitution in the Queenston Street area.

Police arrested seven women. Although the Supreme Court of Canada struck down anti-prostitution laws in 2013, amended legislation makes it illegal to offer sexual services in a public place or impede the flow of pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

The women were released from custody on the condition they don’t return to Queenston Street.

While that might provide some temporary relief to business and residents in the area, it doesn’t solve the problem.

“It’s happening already. Some of the gals who were arrested have already started working in other areas,” said Krystal Snider, the skills development manager at YWCA Niagara who works closely with sex trade workers.

Aside from pushing the sex trade into other neighbourhoods, the conditions of release have other unintended consequences, she said.

The women who work the Queenston Street area are doing what Snider calls “survival sex work,” meaning they are on the street because of past trauma, including abuse or addiction issues. Desperation fueled by the city’s economic malaise is also

in the mix.

“This is also a city where it’s hard to find jobs and rent is very high,” she said. “If these gals cannot afford a place to live, they may turn to sex work.”

Many of them would choose other work if they could find it, she said.

They know the Queenston Street neighbourhoods in ways other residents don’t, including where to escape to if they are in danger.

St. Catharines Mayor Walter Sendzik said that after speaking with sex trade workers months ago as part of his compassionate city project, the city improved lighting and landscaping in the Queenston Street area specifically to improve safety.

Snider said the women who are working in other areas they aren’t familiar with are now at greater risk.

“From our point of view, this is tremendously unfair because when Supreme Court struck down the prostitution laws, it was because those laws further put these gals at risk,” Snider said.

The police say the women are directed to diversion programs designed to help them get out of the sex trade. At the same time, however, the release conditions have cut the women off from critical social services that can help them, including those that can assist them in getting out of sex work entirely. The YWCA, Start Me Up Niagara, Positive Living (Formerly AIDS Niagara), Quest Community Health Centre and others are in the immediate Queenston Street area.

“What these women need is what is called a variance in their conditions so they can still access these services,” Snider said. “It also means these women could have criminal records, which will make it more difficult for them to find other work if they decide to get out of the sex trade.”

There was a further unintended wrinkle. Local business owners, upset with the presence of prostitution, were set to meet with some of the sex-trade workers in a bid to find some common ground.

The day before the meeting, the police, responding to community complaints, launched their operation on Queenston Street.

Sendzik said business owners are still willing to meet, but Snider said the women “are not in a place where they feel they can do that.”

The mayor said he has since met with the NRP Chief Jeff McGuire to discuss the issue and how better to handle the situation going forward.

So what do we take away from all of this?

Many object to the sex trade in the strongest of terms for justifiable reasons. However, sex workers are still members of this community.

They are at risk. If a community is measured by the compassion it shows its most vulnerable citizens, how we choose to treat these women says a great deal about who we are.

The police, city hall, social agencies and businesses need some manner of summit to construct a more practical framework that will improve our community as a whole.

To do otherwise will be to simply push the issue from place to place. That didn’t work in the past, and it doesn’t work now.