Fighting Canada's Laws on Sex Work

Second post on sex work in a row, but this one is far from my new place of residence in Seattle -- all the way back to Toronto, Ontario, where Terri-Jean Bedford, Valerie Scott, and Amy Lebovitch are challenging Canada's laws against sex work. Now, we run into a bit of difficulty here because Canada doesn't have a law specifically prohibiting the actual exchange of sex for money. However, it does have legal restrictions surrounding the transaction, where workers are allowed to do business, and so forth.

I heard Valerie Scott speak on this issue at a conference on sex work at the University of Toronto back in the Spring. She made a pretty compelling case that having specific laws against "pimping" was ridiculous. As she explained it, we have forcible confinement laws, we have kidnapping and coercion laws -- so if that is what is happening in a particular situation, then apply those laws. Laws against "living off the proceeds of prostitution" are too specific and restrictive to be of much use. Scott used two semi-serious examples to explain. First, she cited an occasion on which she fed a reporter banana bread that she had baked with ingredients bought with the proceeds of her own work, and then told him that he was "profiting from the avails of prostitution". Next, she handed out small folded papers to the audience, each containing a single nickel. Before she had even told us the point of the exercise, some people had realized what her message was -- by Canada's laws, she jokingly remarked, we were now all pimps.

These examples, of course, are not serious and aren't intended to gloss over the very real cases of abuse and terror that sex workers sometimes experience on the job. The point is, we have laws that apply to these cases -- the problem is in the policing. Laws that apply specifically to sex work in this way don't improve workers' safety, and instead make their work more difficult and dangerous. As well --and I forget who said it -- laws of the type that exist in Canada make sex work totally different from any other occupation. In what other line of work are you forbidden to have a boss or co-workers, or to communicate with your clients?

I will be very interested to see where this case goes, because it has the potential to dramatically change the landscape of the sex industry in Canada. Here's hoping that Bedford, Scott, and Lebovitch's arguments are taken seriously by the Crown.