Bid to bar sex workers

If there’s no curbing kerb crawling, locals say they’ll have to move from suburb

Matt Bonis thought his family had escaped the worst when the earthquakes hit. Their inner-city Christchurch home stood up well in the violent shaking that wiped out large swathes of the eastern suburbs and felled much of the nearby central business district.

But as the aftershocks rumbled on, New Zealand’s greatest modern natural disaster brought with it an unexpected consequence for fatherof-two Bonis and his St Albans neighbours. They suddenly found their normal, quiet suburban street turned into the city’s street-sex trade epicentre.

Prostitutes and their pimps had for years plied their trade, often called the world’s oldest profession, on a seedy red-light stretch of Manchester St, south of Bealey Ave inside the city’s old Four Avenues boundary.

The area was largely industrial and had become synonymous with sex workers. Every night after dusk, they could be seen, in all weather, tottering in high heels and short skirts, enticing passing motorists.

But when the quakes flattened the CBD, and an army-patrolled cordon kept the public away from potentially dangerous buildings and falling masonry, the sex workers migrated north of Bealey Ave.

And for the last six years, they haven’t really moved. For Bonis and many residents of that Manchester St area around the corner of Purchas St, life has proved a living hell.

In their gardens and around their properties, residents have found needles and syringes, human faeces, used condoms, and litter. Vandalism to houses and cars has been reported, as well as thefts. One elderly couple found a prostitute “servicing a client” on their lawn at 3am and when they asked them to leave, had their car vandalised.

Attempts to ask the prostitutes to move on are often met with threats and intimidation, locals say.

Bonis made a police complaint last year after three prostitutes allegedly threatened to burn his house down at 3am with his family inside.

The trade starts about 10pm and often goes through to 6am or 7am.

“They yell price lists to their clients, they yell all sorts to each other. My son, who is now 11, knows the price lists, he knows what a transvestite is. It’s everything you try and protect your children from,” Bonis says.

Since 2011, Bonis and fellow residents have tried to get help from police, local and central government,

HFor video go to nzherald.co.nz and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective to have the sex workers moved from the residential zone. Bonis says he’s made more than 300 calls in the last six years to police over noise and other complaints.

“It’s got to point where they don’t respond at all now,” he says.

The residents have been campaigning for a bylaw to ban the sex workers from the area. Some have given up, sold up, and moved on.

A camera was installed last year on the corner of Manchester and Purchas streets in an initiative by then Christchurch City councillor Ali Jones, security-camera firm ATF Vision and police to deter sex workers’ clients and document anti- social behaviour. But residents say it’s failed to curb the kerb crawlers, and more often than not, there are sex workers on all four corners.

Former city councillor Aaron Keown erected “No street workers at all times” signs in the area in 2013, but council staff took them down because they were deemed illegal.

Central Christchurch resident Andrew Huntley started a petition this year to get the council to ban prostitutes soliciting in residential areas through the introduction of a bylaw.

Huntley said he was sick of being offered oral sex for $20 when walking his dog at 6am.

“I’m fed up having to watch where my dog walks in case of needles. I’m fed up having prostitutes leering at me in my car to see if I’m a potential punter just when I drive to and from my home address, and I am right over them exposing their breasts, backsides and genitalia in broad daylight on some occasions when I have driven by.

“I’m fed up having condoms dropped on the verge outside where I live, and am struggling to get the image out of my mind of the prostitute defecating in full view one morning when I left for work.”

The residents were buoyed this year when police indicated they would back Christchurch City Council in enforcing a bylaw to regulate the street-based sex work, especially in residential areas.

However, a letter to residents last week from council chief executive Karleen Edwards and Canterbury Metro Commander Superintendent Lane Todd said a bylaw was no longer supported by police.

Under the Local Government Act as it now stands, a bylaw would be