Enforcing sex laws could have saved Marylène Lévesque
Marylène Lévesque was killed by a man in Quebec City last month, not by a law, as some sex industry supporters claim. The idea that her killer would have been less of a danger if he was legally entitled to buy sex is wrong.
To the contrary, the failure of police to enforce the law against pimps, brothels and sex buyers and the complicity of the parole officials, who allowed this man to commit a crime while on day parole, together ensure that women like Lévesque will remain acutely vulnerable to men’s violence.
In 2014, Parliament amended the Criminal Code to make it an offence to buy or attempt to buy sexual services, in any location, from a person of any age. This act was classified as an “offence against the person,” which means that it is an act of violence.
At the same time, the law made clear that people who sell sexual services, who are mostly women, would not be subject to prosecution in almost all locations. This law also criminalized the acts of those who profit from other people’s prostitution — pimps and brothel owners, for example.
These laws were drafted in a way that mirrors an emerging international trend — Sweden, Norway, Iceland, France, Northern Ireland have all passed such laws. Laws alone will not end the male demand for women in prostitution any more than laws against murder will end homicide or laws against theft will end stealing. But they are a necessary cornerstone for any society that wants to resist entrenching men’s sexual entitlement to women’s bodies — the same sexual entitlement that underlies sexual harassment, sexual assault and femicide, as the killing of Lévesque shows.
These criminal laws need to be accompanied by robust enforcement, generous social supports for vulnerable women, and public education that makes clear that buying sex is a crime.
Unfortunately, the recent killing of Lévesque is being used by supporters of the prostitution industry to demand that the government amend the law to permit men to buy women in prostitution and to provide impunity for those who profit from the sale of women’s bodies.
In making that demand, these advocates obfuscate — calling for the “decriminalization of sex work” — without acknowledging that the people they would actually be decriminalizing are the johns and pimps, not the women selling sex, who have already been immunized from prosecution.
Cases like Lévesque’s show us exactly what happens when laws against sex buyers are not enforced.
The parole officials in this case behaved as if purchasing sexual services was already legal. Decriminalization of her male buyers would not have saved Lévesque and it would instead have normalized what the parole officials did in this case.
Decriminalizing her profiteers would not have changed the economic incentives that encouraged them to keep her stuck in prostitution and pushed her into that hotel room. Enforcing the law could have kept this man away from her.
Women are recruited into prostitution by commercial massage parlours and pimps, who operate with impunity because police decline to enforce the laws against obtaining a material benefit from someone else’s prostitution. Men are given the green light to do what they want to the women that they buy, because police decline to enforce the law against buyers.
When buying sex is legal, it becomes normalized and more of it will happen. When laws against buying sex are not enforced, the same result follows. When buyers know they risk actual arrest, they are more likely to stop buying. The kind of asymmetrical laws we have in Canada put power in the hands of women, who can report buyers to police without risking arrest themselves.
Media coverage of this issue is remarkably one-sided — almost none of the recent coverage of Lévesque’s killing has even mentioned that a wide cross-section of groups and individuals support the current laws, and agree that their non-enforcement is the problem.
MPs who support the current laws are derided for daring to ask the obvious question — why is it mostly poor, racialized and Indigenous women who are consigned to do this “job” and why are so many women of privilege content to outsource to those vulnerable women the task of doing what men demand sexually, when and where they demand it?
Janine Benedet and Isabel Grant are professors of law at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. Elizabeth Sheehy is a professor emerita in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa.