BC Coalition of Experiential Communities

Robyn Doolittle Crime Reporter Published On Sat Oct 24 2009

A woman works Gerrard and Jarvis Sts. Oct. 21, 2009. Roadwork in the area sent most women elsewhere. TONY BOCK/TORONTO STAR Crusading clergyman. Moralizing political regimes. Undercover police stings. Each has failed to drive prostitutes out of Toronto’s unofficial red-light district. Yet on a recent Wednesday night, only two women are working the Jarvis St. corridor. The reason is surprisingly practical – roadwork. “You aren’t going to get any customers if the sidewalk is blocked,” says Ebony, a curvy 23-year-old brunette who stands alone outside the Harvey’s – “Hooker Harvey’s” – at Gerrard and Jarvis Sts. This is a pivotal time for the country’s sex industry. In the past fours years, the dozens of women in knee-high boots and thick faux-fur coats shuffling in six-inch stilettos around these downtown streets have moved elsewhere. Some have relocated to the suburbs. Others have taken mainstream jobs. And many have moved inside, soliciting clients through the Internet and classified sections of free weekly newspapers. In July, most of the remaining women left the Gerrard-Church-Carlton-Jarvis block. Hard hats replaced miniskirts and fishnets as city crews began ripping up the sidewalks. By August, construction was tearing apart Church St. Ebony prefers working outdoors. She works alone and gets to keep all the cash she earns. “A lot of them have moved to strip clubs or their homes … they find it safer,” she says of the other women. The construction should be finished by next spring. Coincidentally, it’s also around that time that a ruling is expected in a landmark constitutional challenge, being argued in Superior Court this month. Law professor Alan Young, with three former and current prostitutes, has asked a judge to strike down three provisions in the Criminal Code. The act of selling sex for money is legal, but everything surrounding that business transaction isn’t. The three provisions Young wants dissolved are soliciting in a public place, working out of a brothel (which could be a sex worker’s own bedroom) and living off the avails of prostitution. If the judge agrees, prostitution would essentially be decriminalized. Most high-end workers are expected to then move their business inside, which may mean the end of Toronto’s red-light district. Currently, penalties associated with street-level prostitution are significantly lighter than those for indoor sex work. If successful, says Young, the Crown will almost certainly appeal. If they win again, it will be up to politicians to decide how to rewrite the laws – whether to regulate the industry or ban prostitution outright. Valerie Scott, an applicant in the case, said the current laws put the workers on Jarvis in danger. “Legally, it’s safer for us to work on the street, even though physically, it’s far more dangerous. And I have to laugh at people who say, `If they decriminalize prostitution, there’ll be a brothel on my street.’ Every block in Toronto already has a brothel on it. People just don’t know it.” Street prostitution in Toronto has generally been concentrated in the east downtown core. The “High Track,” where workers earn as much as $300 a trick, is in the Jarvis and Church area. Transgendered prostitutes work in “Trannytown,” southeast of Jarvis and Wellesley Sts. Crack-addicted sex workers can be found along River, Shuter and Sherbourne Sts., and earn as little as $20 for sex acts, said a police affidavit submitted in the constitutional challenge. Det. Christopher Higgins recently led a John sweep on the Danforth that left 70 men facing charges. Most of the women who work the streets there are addicts, he said. Jarvis is one of the few areas in the city where higher-end prostitutes work outdoors. “The others work out of condo buildings all over the city. … They put an ad in classified sections or on Craigslist.” In an affidavit submitted to the Superior Court, Insp. Howie Page warned changing the laws would increase the number of brothels, he says. “It will be a free-for-all, bawdy houses will proliferate and society will be the victim,” said Page. Julia Vanderheul, who does sex worker outreach with the Bad Date Coalition, thinks it might end the Jarvis strip. “You won’t see the girls on Jarvis any more. They do think it’s safer inside.” Even though this might be the case, Ebony has no plans to leave. Tonight, without any competition she will earn as much as $1,000. Johns will pay a few hundred for an hour with her in a local hotel room. Even Ebony doesn’t plan to work the Jarvis strip much longer. She’s saving to go to school and has plans to open her own spa.

 The story of a prisoner’s death in Arizona over the summer popped up in the national media for a single news cycle and disappeared without provoking much outrage. Marcia Powell died after being left in an outdoor holding cell in triple-digit heat for more than four hours. She had a history of mental problems and was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution—a crime for which we can assume none of her clients were prosecuted. Women are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, and sexual violence is often at the root of the events that put them behind bars. Women and girls are victimized at all income levels—one in three experiences some form of abuse by age 18—but for those who enjoy economic stability, the protective layers of good schools, safe neighborhoods, and access to mental health services tend to be a buffer from further exploitation. For women and girls at the margins, sexual violence too often starts a cycle of drug use, delinquency, and despair that eventually lands them in the criminal justice system. And along the way, many become mothers. I first encountered these most vulnerable women and children as a law student trying to think about how to bring the issue of women’s rights as human rights home to the U.S. During those years, I met young women in Washington, D.C., Ohio, and California who had been brutally trafficked, abused, molested, and raped, just like women and girls in developing nations. Yet they were not usually perceived as victims. Instead they were cast as “hos,” prostitutes, or “cracked out” mothers, and dispatched to youth detention centers and prisons. Nobody was talking about educational initiatives, micro-loans, psychiatric services, or human rights for them. I also discovered that few people were aware of the barbaric conditions the U.S. justice system inflicted on pregnant women, forcing them to be shackled during labor and delivery (even for a C-section birth) and whisking away the newborn child a few minutes after delivery, with only single Polaroid for the mother to keep. That’s why in 2003 I founded the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a national advocacy organization working to reform the criminal and juvenile justice systems and improve the child welfare and public health services available to these fragile families. The Rebecca Project started with two full-time staff sharing one desk and a $25,000 fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Today we have a staff of seven and 11 state chapters around the country, and hundreds of low-income women and girls are part of our advocacy efforts According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), as many as 88 percent of female inmates have experienced sexual or physical abuse before coming to prison. And by and large the mothers behind bars are not gang-bangers, murderers, or drug kingpins. They are first-time, nonviolent offenders, arrested for untreated addiction. With the drug wars and the passage of mandatory minimum sentences, the incarceration of mothers has skyrocketed. Similarly, in the juvenile justice system, 73 percent of girls have been subject to sexual abuse prior to incarceration. A recent Oregon Social Learning Center study of chronically delinquent girls found that the average age of first sexual encounter among detained girls was 6. And most of these girls are behind bars for offenses related to sexual violence. They are detained for prostitution or running away from abusive homes or foster care placements—not for being violent or joining gangs. What a senseless, and inhumane, approach to vulnerable women and girls’ lives. Mothers with a history of sexual violence and substance abuse do not belong in the criminal justice system. They need a chance to heal, and they need addiction programs they can attend with their family. It costs about $14,000 a year to put a mother and her children into a family-based treatment program, compared to $30,000 to put her behind bars—plus another $35,000 to place her child in foster care. These family programs have significantly better outcomes for family stability and child well-being than the criminal justice system, yet very few of them exist. Placing sexually victimized girls behind bars is also wrongheaded and cruel. Like girls in India, Costa Rica, and the Congo, they are victims—gang-raped, cut down by incest, physically beaten, and sex-trafficked. Underage prostitutes in this country deserve the same interventions and safe space to heal that young victims of sex trafficking abroad are deemed entitled to. Nor do very young girls belong in the juvenile justice system because they ran away from abusive homes. We advise victims of domestic violence to flee from their batterers, and that’s exactly what these girls have done. They deserve safe havens and trauma-responsive programs, not punishment, for their courage to leave. Since 2003 the Rebecca Project has worked to shine a light on women and girls at America’s margins. We have single-handedly increased federal funding for family-based substance abuse treatment 16-fold. We have helped pass major legislation in Congress on prison re-entry programs and child welfare reform. We ended the draconian practice of shackling mothers during childbirth in all federal correctional facilities. How did a small, young, and underbudgeted organization achieve so much? By training hundreds of low-income women and girls to be civic leaders and use the truth of their own experience to inform public policy. They cross the gaping divide between the privileged and the disenfranchised to tell lawmakers what it means to be sexually abused, poor, drug-addicted, in prison, and torn away from your family. On Tuesday, Oct. 20, two girls active in the Rebecca Project will testify before a House subcommittee about their experience in the juvenile justice system, just as our network of women and girls has done in state legislatures around the country. But there is still so much to be done. The pipeline that channels vulnerable young girls from cradle to sexual abuse to prison must be completely dismantled. The mass incarceration of mothers for nonviolent, drug-related offenses must be stopped—and replaced with access to family treatment programs. And we must all agree that even the most marginalized women and girls are too sacred to be left to die under a hot Arizona sun. Malika Saada Saar is the founder and executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a national legal and policy organization that advocates for justice, dignity, and reform for vulnerable families. For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/crime/article/706582–prostitutes-suffer-with-sinister-law By Rosie DiManno Columnist Published

 When the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, was sentenced for murdering 48 women, his written confession was read aloud in court: “I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. … I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.” Marcello Palma shot three Toronto sex trade workers during a manic, two-hour killing spree in 1996. Married, with a young child, Palma later claimed he was “getting rid of street scum.” Pig farmer Robert Pickton, charged with murdering 26 prostitutes – and convicted on six counts at his first trial in 2007 – preyed on the most vulnerable of drug-addled and transient hookers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, though years had passed before police aggressively tackled the phenomenon of so many women disappearing off the face of the Earth. The streets are not safe for prostitutes. Yet the streets are where Canada’s laws force them to work. While prostitution is legal in this country, nearly everything surrounding the activity is criminalized, particularly where the service can be provided: Not indoors, not in one’s home, and not under a roof shared with a spouse, partner or bodyguard, any of whom can be charged with living off the avails. That Catch-22 is at the heart of a constitutional challenge which finally opened Tuesday before Ontario Superior Court Justice Susan Himel, and largely on the efforts of students from York University and Osgoode Hall Law School. Few others, it would appear, care much about the lives – too often, deaths – of sex trade workers. As rewritten in the mid-’80s, Canada’s legislation is far more preoccupied with marginalizing prostitution, keeping the nuisance of solicitation off the streets, yet simultaneously denying its practitioners a secure environment that would discourage both predatory assaults and the visible street presence that many citizens find objectionable. “The law is contributing to lack of safety and the harm women face,” said Alan Young. “The laws today operate as a sinister contradiction.” An Osgoode law professor, Young is arguing the motion on behalf of his client, notorious – and endlessly waggish – Toronto dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford. As befits an S&M specialist, Bedford showed up for court Tuesday in full-leather (but stylish) ensemble, riding crop tucked inside her coat. “It’s to keep reporters in line and whip some shape into the law,” the 49-year-old grandmother teased. More seriously: “Just because I have a crop doesn’t mean I don’t mean business. This is my business.” Bedford’s “Bondage Bungalow” in Thornhill was raided by cops in 1994 and she was convicted of keeping a common bawdy house four years later. Police, she reminds, still have her professional toys. “They never even returned my panties.” She and two other prostitutes, including long-time activist Valerie Scott – whose Bad Date register provides crucial information on clients to avoid – are the catalysts for the landmark legal challenge as a violation of their rights to security and freedom of expression under the Charter of Rights. Aligned against the challengers are lawyers for the attorneys general of Ontario and Canada, with intervention status granted to religious and conservative groups, a misguided privilege in itself. At issue are sections dealing with keeping a bawdy house, living off the avails and communicating for the purpose of prostitution, all of which is forbidden. “Is it a vice? Is it a virtue?” Young mused, as he launched into oratory that, in this venue, often sounds like a filibuster. “The applicants don’t even call into question Parliament’s right to criminalize prostitution. We’re questioning how they’ve done it. “This is not a challenge about morality. That’s not relevant for the purposes of this hearing. Our challenge relates to the means chosen to achieve an objective.” Prostitution legislation is intended to curb public nuisance while protecting against exploitation – the latter an issue that will be heavily emphasized by the respondents later this week, the spectre of women forced on their backs by pimps and human traffickers a predictable, if limited in reality, counter-argument. Nobody among the plaintiffs is denying that “survival-sex” exists or is promoting a prostitution free-for-all. “I’m here representing the intelligent, independent and well-informed sex worker,” said Young. There are some. There are plenty. It’s a legitimate profession and it’s not going away, even in countries such as Sweden that have recently passed dogmatic and draconian legislation that pre-emptively assumes coercion, with sex-as-commerce an inherent violation of human rights. Such legislation is staggeringly patronizing. As the legislation stands, prostitutes must choose between compliance and safety, Young argued. “The law should never put anyone on the horns of that dilemma.” This is no minor consideration. Soliciting in public is a summary offence that carries a monetary fine. Keeping a bawdy house – arcane language for working out of one’s home – is an indictable offence that triggers forfeiture of assets and allows police to obtain wiretaps. Conviction on living off the avails – be that a driver, spouse, security employee or receptionist – means landing on the sex offenders’ register. “You will get the mark of Cain for life for assisting a sex worker and protecting them.” The law is self-defeating, Young continued, because, in application, it runs counter to intent, while tacitly promoting the stereotypical and ideological arguments it doesn’t have the guts to make overtly. There’s no practical option offered for women (or men) who choose to be prostitutes. “It’s all bad, period. The Constitution tells you there is only one safe option – exit the sex trade.”

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/10/05/bc-abolition-coalition.html

| 8:19 PM PT CBC News

 A new women’s group in Vancouver vows to fight against the trend to try to have prostitution legalized. (CBC) A new coalition of women’s groups in B.C. is hoping to head off what they see as an emerging trend to try to legalize prostitution. The group, called the Abolition Coalition, cites two upcoming court cases that the group says will use the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to argue that prostitutes and their customers should be allowed to sell or buy sex for money. One of those cases gets underway Tuesday in Ontario Superior Court in Toronto. The three women who launched the case are arguing the Criminal Code forces them to work in the streets and not in the safety of their homes. “The parties involved in those court cases would have you believe, when it comes to the law, our choices are all or nothing: either we criminalize both women and johns and continue to enforce the law inconsistently, as now, or we decriminalize it entirely, and this is untrue,” University of British Columbia law professor Janine Benedet told a Vancouver news conference Monday. The Abolition Coalition’s position is that prostitutes should never be criminally charged for selling sex, but the men who buy it should face harsh legal punishment. The coalition referred to Vancouver prostitute Nicole Parisien, who was killed by a client in a Kitsilano apartment building in August 2007. Andrew Evans, 27, was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week for Parisien’s murder. “That case alone should cause all of us to think seriously about the foolishness of arguing the safety of the indoor trade,” said Lee Lakeman of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres. Vancouver’s Pivot Legal Society has a different view. It’s involved in one of the court cases challenging prostitution laws and argues that all adults should have the legal right to engage in consensual prostitution. Dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford is one of three women fighting in court for the rights of prostitutes. (CBC) “Decriminalization is ultimately about creating safe working conditions, so that those who choose to do sex work can do so safely, and those who choose to exit it are in a better position to do so,” Pivot lawyer Katrina Pacy told CBC News in an interview. The Abolition Coalition said Pivot’s argument only protects the men who buy the services of prostitutes and so-called pimps, the individuals who supervise and live off their work. “You can’t take the violence out of prostitution because it’s the very act of prostitution that is the violence,” former sex-trade worker Trish Baptie said at the coalition’s news conference Monday.