For Immediate Release

December 14, 2009

Vancouver. BC

RE: The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

Thursday December 17, 2009

Vancouver Art Gallery, Robson Street Entrance

Start Time- 6:30pm

The BC Coalition of Experiential Communities (BCCEC) would like to invite everyone to join us as we march with red umbrellas, adopted in 2002 by Venetian sex workers for an anti-violence march, symbolizing resistance against discrimination for sex workers worldwide.

We will be raising awareness about violence against sex workers by distributing materials amongst holiday shoppers on Robson Street. Fancy dress is definitely encouraged and festively decorated red umbrellas too! This year we will be asking people to think about hate crimes against sex workers. We will be holding a vigil at the Art Gallery on Robson before marching along the street greeting holiday shoppers. After the march, we will be meeting at the Lennox Pub at Granville and Robson for hot chocolate and refreshments.

In the BCCEC report, “From the Curb,” sex workers who participated listed the following acts as violence;

• Physically being beaten, raped or assaulted by dates, pimps and drugs dealers
• Being ignored, belittled, humiliated, sworn at, shunned by police and public for being a “dirty ho, crack whore, or slut”
• Having items thrown at them from vehicles (very common)

Sex workers commented that even children throw garbage at them. People in cars throw beer bottles, pennies, pop and hot coffee. One respondent lost part of her ear due to an assault by a non sex working woman who threw a beer bottle at her while she was working on the street. Sex workers in our consultation described the pain of being “beaten down by words.”

Their words:

• “Any type of mistreatment is violence because people don’t care what happens to our kind.”
• “Being looked at like you’re less.”
• “Saying no to allowing us use of their phone or washroom- it leaves us depending on dates and other people who like to harm us.”
• “Being mistreated by the public.”
• “People laugh at me.”
• It’s like they take this beautiful thing we have… the ability to give love, and they destroy it.”

Sex workers described violence as activities ranging from public humiliation and social exclusion to more extreme incidents of beatings, sodomy, rape, extreme violence and the abduction and murder of their friends.

Overwhelmingly, sex workers agreed that violence against our community should be considered a hate crime. They also noted that doing so puts their violent experiences into a deeper context. They expressed that violence against our population is done with “specific intent to cause harm” due to our social identity and compounded by their sheer vulnerability under Canada’s outdated and harmful prostitution laws.

The BCCEC are also calling for people to contact the Attorney General by phone or by mail (mike.dejong.mla@leg.bc.ca; 250 387-1866) in support of the call for a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Canada’s missing women’s cases. Only if we can identify where systems are failing to protect vulnerable people in our society will we ever see any increase in safety for Canada’s sex workers.

Thursday December 17^th, 2009, 6:30pm

Vancouver Art Gallery, Robson Street Side!

Join us as we march with red umbrellas, adopted in 2002 by Venetian sex workers for an anti-violence march, symbolizing resistance against discrimination for sex workers worldwide.

We will be raising awareness about violence against sex workers and the organizations that support us by distributing materials amongst holiday shoppers on Robson Street. Fancy dress and festively decorated red umbrellas are definitely encouraged!

The march will be followed by a gathering at the
Lennox Pub/Restaurant (corner of Robson & Granville).

WE HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!!

By Lewis
Page •

Posted in Bootnotes, 4th December
2009 11:09 GMT

COPENHAGEN (AFP) – Prostitutes of a Danish sex workers association will offer their services for free to delegates of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen , an association official told AFP Saturday.

Susanne Moeller said the move was meant to protest an anti-prostitution initiative undertaken by Copenhagen city hall. The city, host of the December 7-18 UN climate summit, distributed postcards in Copenhagen’s hotels that said “Be sustainable: Don’t buy sex.” It also sent letters to hotel managers inviting them to take measures to avoid prostitutes meeting clients in their establishments. The prostitutes, whose work is not illegal in Denmark, promptly reacted to the move. “All delegates who come to Copenhagen for the world climate summit will be able to use the postcards for payment after making a request on our website,” Moeller, of the Danish association for the defense of sex workers, said. “We do not expect many delegates (to make use of the offer), but we want to protest what we consider discrimination,” Moeller said, adding the offer was good for the duration of the climate talks. The Copenhagen summit aims to craft an international climate accord to replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.

www.rememberoursisterseverywhere.com

ROSE (REMEMBER OUR SISTERS EVERYWHERE)
FREE COMMUNITY EVENT
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Gather at 10:30am,
Ceremony commences at 11:00am
Main St and Terminal Ave
Thornton Park, Vancouver, BC

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the massacre of fourteen
women at L*Ecole Polytechnique, University of Montreal, Remember Our
Sisters Everywhere (ROSE) invites the public to a community event to
remember women and girls who have been murdered in Vancouver and around
the world.

Below is a link to the Canadian Labour Congress’ website. They are asking Canadians to send 20 postcards in 20 days to the Prime Minister telling him to take action now to end violence against women. The CLC and its affiliate unions have distributed thousands of postcards and have asked people to return them to Prime Minister Stephen Harper between November 16th and December 6th. The cards urge him to keep the gun registry, and also contain messages asking that Canada improve the lives of women by: improving the funding of shelters for women and children; investing in new social housing; setting a national standard for welfare rates; providing equal pay for work of equal value; and improving services, including a nationally-funded child care program, better public pensions and access to Employment Insurance.

Each day a new card is posted and sending them to the Prime Minister can be done on the site. I am also trying to get some cards into the office to distribute among our clients who do not have internet access.  

http://www.canadianlabour.ca/home

Peace,

Angela

Angela Marie MacDougall

Battered Women’s Support Services

Executive Director

P.O. Box 21503 – 1424 Commercial Drive

Vancouver, BC, V5L 4G2

Direct Line:  604-687-1613

www.bwss.org

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44136976430&ref=mf#/group.php?gid=44136976430

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEKrYBMCQu4

“We are the answer to our ancestors prayers, an opportunity to be the instrument for their journey and breath…”  Ahu Turahe, Quese Imc

AND WHAT?

 Downtown Eastside Girls Speak [spoken word, stories, monologues]

Rhizome Café, 317 East Broadway (corner Kingsway) Vancouver,

 Coast Salish Territories All welcome.

 By donation $00.50-$500.00

 Prostitutes Empowerment Education Resource Society (PEERS) is an organization of sex trade workers for sex trade workers. We provide support, resources, and programs in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Since January, we’ve been working to build solidarity and seek empowerment through a creative writing and storytelling workshop series. We now want to share our stories of struggle and resistance with the greater community.

http://www.straight.com/article-272070/vancouver/sex-workers-defend-buyers

Veteran sex worker Susan Davis wants people to know that her “clients aren’t
the bogeymen they are made out to be”.

“I love what I do,” Davis told the Georgia Straight in an interview at the
Vancouver Public Library’s central branch. “I think the guys are the best; a
lot of them are my friends. Some I’ve known for 18 years. How do you not
become emotionally attached?”

Davis, who has been in the business for 23 years, insisted that stability
and security for sex workers can only come with decriminalization of
prostitution.

FIRST, a national coalition of feminists who support sex workers’ rights,
hosted a lively forum on the subject at the library on November 23. Davis,
who was on the panel, suggested that men who buy sex can actually help
enhance the safety of those in the trade.

“I think that clients are our biggest resource in trying to combat
exploitation, trafficking, and exploitation of youth within the sex
industry,” declared Davis, a member of the West Coast Cooperative of Sex
Industry Professionals, in the interview.

Another panellist, SFU sociology instructor and researcher Chris Atchison,
echoed Davis’s sentiments. He revealed the results of an extensive
three-year study-called “Johns’ Voice”-that documents the relationship
between buyers and sellers of sex in Canada.

“I wanted to understand how these men engage in purchasing behaviour and
what their relationships with sex-trade workers are about,” Atchison told
the audience. “I wanted to know whether social and legal intervention such
as the Swedish model is warranted by any empirical evidence.”

Atchison was referring to a Swedish law introduced in 1999 that criminalized
johns’ purchasing of sexual services, but not the sale of those services by
prostitutes. At the forum, organizers screened a 10-minute video that showed
many Swedish sex workers are unhappy with the law. One sex worker featured
in the video claimed that things have become much more dangerous for street
workers, since they no longer have as much time to negotiate with their
customers.

Atchison was critical of the Swedish law. The men he spoke to were seeking
companionship and a connection with the sex workers they patronized, he
said, adding that they wanted to engage in a safe and respectful
relationship. He also reported that many customers saw the same sex worker
for months or years, and that 79 percent said they wished to see
prostitution decriminalized and regulated.

“I’m not here to present a picture of the sex buyer as some wonderful guy or
say that they are all great, salt-of-the-earth people,” he said.

The “Johns’ Voice” project showed that between one and two percent of
clients have been brutally violent toward a sex worker. Those are the people
the law must address, according to Atchison.

Jody Salerno, a former sex worker and the director of women’s services for
the B.C./Yukon Society of Transition Houses, told the audience that the men
who paid her for sex were not criminals or violent. “They wanted to share my
time and have consensual sex,” she said. “If men who pay for sex are
criminalized, sex workers are unsafe.”

She emphasized that anyone-including sex workers-who commits acts of
violence against women, children, youth, or men should be arrested and
prosecuted. “When sex workers are victims of criminal acts, treat them with
dignity and respect,” Salerno said.

Toronto author and investigative journalist Victor Malarek, a staunch critic
of legalizing the sex trade, told the Straight in an interview earlier this
year that about 90 percent of prostitutes worldwide are not doing this work
by choice. “Rather than deal with the drugs, the mental-health issues, the
physical-health issues, what led these women away from their reserves and
put them on the streets, the only thing these bozos [proponents of
legalization] can come up with is to keep them in something they never
wanted in their lives in the first place,” Malarek said.