Sex workers face more danger with laws: study
OTTAWA — Laws meant to protect sex workers from being exploited often put them in greater danger, a study has found, confirming what sex workers and those in the industry have said for years.
University of Ottawa criminology professor Chris Bruckert’s three-year study involving interviews with more than 100 people who make a living in the sex-work industry in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes found criminalizing the activity of third parties works against the interests of sex workers.
For Bruckert, a third party is anyone in the industry who’s not a sex worker or client. These could include drivers taking sex workers from one location to another, security personnel at shareduse sites, website designers or photographers hired by sex workers, receptionists at body-rub centres, or the more traditional pimps or madams.
“There’s a range of relationships, none of which is reflected in the law, which criminalizes everyone,” she said.
Under current Canadian laws, all of those people, even the ones doing jobs that have mainstream counterparts, could be criminally charged.
All third parties are living on the avails of prostitution and a lot of them, from innocuously advertising jobs or actively coercing sex workers, are guilty of procuring.
In 2010, a group of Ontario sex workers, including TerriJean Bedford, challenged the constitutionality of the law that prohibits living on the avails because of its infringement on their charter rights to security. Last year, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the lower court’s decision to strike down the law. The Supreme Court of Canada is to hear the case on June 12.
“The irony here is that the law’s particularly intended to protect sex workers (from exploitation). Rather than pro- tecting them, they’re actually increasing the harm and increasing the challenges,” Bruckert said.
It’s a feeling shared by Emily Symons, the chair of Prostitutes of Ottawa/Gatineau Work, Educate and Resist.
More than increasing the risks for situational violence, vulnerabilities to predators, sexual assault and the numerous health risks associated with not being able to discuss safer sex practices, the laws prevent safety measures, too.
“If you use a code like, ‘You’ll be satisfied,’ well that’s pretty vague,” Bruckert said. Yet often these codes are used for brevity because the conditions that would allow a proper conversation, like an indoor space with security, are illegal. “Ambiguity is a byproduct, an artifact, of the laws,” she said.
According to Symons, so is the possibility for exploitation. Criminalization of third-party behaviour pushes the work underground.
“A massage parlour might be afraid of getting investigated for operating a common bawdy house and being charged with living on the avails of prostitution, so they might forbid condoms from being on the premises or insist that sex workers be very discreet about carrying them or disposing of them,” Symons said.