Council drops plan to force body rub clients to show ID
Workers told city officials proposal would push more of the business underground
City hall will not force clients of Edmonton’s body rub centres to show identification before going into a room with a woman.
The measure was proposed to protect female workers, who advocates said are being choked, bitten and slapped during their time with male clients.
But when city officials surveyed women working in the centres, 92 per cent said that would make their lives more dangerous. It would drive men from the centres to informal settings with unlicensed women and sex-trafficking victims.
Women working in the licensed body rub centres would likely follow, working independently by advertising services online.
City officials recommended against mandatory identification and, on Monday, council’s community services committee agreed. They voted instead to endorse a series of fee changes for the licences.
It will be free for individual women to get licensed, whether they work as a registered escort or in a body rub parlour, if council also endorses the change.
Jonathan Kuyt, who owns Jailey’s Health Studio, told the committee the real issue is a lack of enforcement against those operating outside city rules.
“The majority of the adult business is already underground,” said Kuyt, who criticized council for constantly changing the rules and failing to crack down on the thousands of women and men often moving in and out of the city.
“Body rub centres are the safest alternative for working in this business, period,” he said.
Kuyt advocated for higher fines and listed cities where being caught working without a licence will cost $5,000 or even 50 days worth of wages on a sliding scale.
“The city, through its inaction, has directly contributed to the rise of illegal activity,” he said.
Body rub parlours are required to have security cameras and panic alarms, to always have a second person on location who is not with a client, to operate out of a fixed workplace, and to have regular visits from nurses and health enforcement staff.
City officials said they would look at increasing the safety measures, including more effective placement of video cameras, better education for women on how to access help or report a crime, and more stringent enforcement of all applicable legislation. They’ll report back on that work in March 2018.
On fines, Ryan Pleckaitis, the city’s director of complaints and investigations, said the city’s first step is to ensure the fines for not being licensed are all higher than the fees for getting licensed.
That will happen after next Tuesday, if council drops the cost of getting an independent escort licence from $1,083 to zero. The cost for a body rub practitioner would drop from $230 to zero. The body rub centre owner pays $607. The fine for operating without a licence remains at $1,000.
Only 23 of the thousands of women working as escorts in the city today are licensed, Pleckaitis said. “Any movement on that would be considered a success.”
Officials will then evaluate whether that fine needs to increase, he said. When women get their licence, they also get training on health and safety and access to support for leaving that line of work.
It is illegal to buy sex in Canada, but Edmonton has chosen to license body rub centres as a harmreduction measure.