Catherine Healy
Sex Workers’ Campaigner
Acareer leap from primary school teacher to sex worker was a curious move for Catherine Healy. She didn’t wear lipstick and had never worn heels, let alone owned a pair. But it was a liberating and interesting world for the then 30 yearold who would go on to fight successfully for a change in the law to decriminalise prostitution.
She’d taught at schools around innercity Wellington for nine years before the desire to break out of the institution took hold.
"I wanted to see more, do more, feel more. I wanted to break out."
At the time she was flatting with a woman who she discovered was working as a prostitute. Healy was horrified by the fact and couldn’t comprehend why she had chosen this path.
"I felt I had to rescue her but I’ll never forget her vehemence. She made the point that I had no right to impose that view. She was very compelling."
So compelling that Healy went out with her one night and took home one of her clients.
She experimented but decided at that point sex work wasn’t for her. But in 1986 she answered an ad to be a receptionist in a massage parlour as a way to supplement her teaching wage and solve the problem of a credit card bill racked up by frequent trips abroad ("I was a complete Indiaphile") during the generous school holidays.
Soon after she became a sex worker herself and took a year’s leave of absence from teaching. At the end of that year she knew she didn’t want to go back to her old job.
She worked in a brothel in what is now the General Practitioner bar on Willis St.
"It was full of such interesting women. They were so knowing. I thought I was worldly but they were very clued up, very savvy. I was terrified.
"They were extraordinarily glamorous and wore completely overthe-top dresses and gowns, big shoulder pads. This was the 80s. I’d never worn high heels or lipstick in my life. I was more into tramping."
Many of the women were highly educated. Many had left school at an early age. Just like the clients, they were a diverse group.
It was a deeply social time, she says, with prostitutes and clients crammed into a little illicit bar in the brothel drinking and talking into the wee hours.
It was such a contrast to her morning meetings in demure school staffrooms. The juxtaposition of those two very different lives was stark.
Healy was living with her mother at the time and was open about her career change.
"She was very shocked and upset. It wasn’t an easy thing for her but she was also very strong and she wasn’t ever going to be against me."
Besides, Healy was 30, old enough to make her own choices.
Healy, who had swapped her $400 a week full-time salary for $2000 for parttime sex work, says the profession came with its own set of hurdles. Not so much in the form of dodgy clients, though, she says. More from the law, which stated that it was illegal to solicit but not legal for a client to pay for sex
She was arrested a few times herself in the days before reform. She ended up in court but was acquitted.
People would say that the sex work violates you, she says, but it was the indignity of the law which made her feel truly violated.
Healy, 61, grew up in the bays around Eastbourne with her three siblings and liberal-minded parents. She lives with her partner of 30 years in the same house she was raised in.
As a young woman she was influenced by feminism, she was active in the anti-apartheid, anti-tour movement. She marched for her beliefs.
Her father died when she was 15 and she struggled through her last few years at Hutt Valley High School, where she was a prefect. She got a place at Teacher’s College, wooed by the small income offered to student teachers.
Nine years teaching and seven years as a sex worker prepared her for the 16-year battle she and her colleagues would face to bring equal rights for prostitutes.
Healy is softly spoken but there’s an underlying steely strength, one she harnessed for that Herculean task of bringing about change.
The Prostitutes Collective came about through a meeting of minds, she says from the Wellington branch, which is more like a comfortable living room than a city office.
"The women I worked with were strident and stroppy and sure of themselves and annoyed with the stigma and misconceptions [of prostitution]. I was in awe of them.
"They were talking at the time about needing a union and I was really struck by that. I agreed. We would sit in my flat in Mt Victoria, the house billowing with cigarette smoke, and just talk."
They talked about a community place where sex workers could come to. They talked about their desire to stop the spread of HIV/Aids.
"We just wanted to be treated like normal people. We wanted to change attitudes, we wanted acceptance. Most of all we wanted to change the law.
"We didn’t really know what the law was. There was not a lot of information at the time. Nobody really knew where it sat. But we knew its effect, we knew we could be arrested."
Determined to seek equal rights for sex workers, the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) was established in 1987. Setting up digs in Wellington’s Cuba St they were a somewhat of an underground society at first.
But they ploughed ahead with their work to improve matters for prostitutes and, a year later, NZPC signed a contract with the Minister of Health to provide a range of services to sex workers with a focus on HIV and Aids.
While not specifically a union, the Collective fulfils a lot of the same functions – advocating for sex workers, providing health care and advice.
Reform finally came with the passing of the Prostitution Reform Bill, effectively decriminalising prostitution on June 25, 2003.
The moment the bill passed was "electric", she says.
"It’s so funny because people ask ‘what was your strategy?’, and retrospectively I can say that we had none. How do you get a law changed? None of us thought it would be so difficult but we just thought someone would have to listen to us."
Healy gets calls from all over the world from sex workers’ groups wanting to know about our model. She was invited to the 2010 Oxford Debate arguing for decriminalising prostitution, and won convincingly.
But the work of prostitutes is a long way off from being a career free of stigma, she says. And there are ongoing issues to tackle within the industry – exploitation, underage workers, a migrant population working illegally. There’s room for the legislation Act to evolve.
It’s the Prostitutes Collective which has really evolved over the past 30 years. It operates with 12 fulltime workers and a swag of volunteers in eight branches across the country.
Their mantra is the same as it was when they started out, Healy says. Making sure every sex worker is safe every time, everywhere.