BC Coalition of Experiential Communities

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.

The criminal code prohibits communicating for the purposes of prostitution or the keeping of a common bawdy house. But three Ontario awomen say they are professionals and are urging the courts to strike down those laws, which force them to work on the streets and not in their homes.Photograph by: Global News, Global WinnipegCanada’s prostitution laws will be put to the test by a trio of sex-trade workers in a court challenge that begins Tuesday in Toronto. Terri-Jean Bedford, 49, a dominatrix, along with two other prostitutes, Valerie Scott and Amy Lebovitch, have filed papers in Ontario Superior Court arguing that the criminal code violates their constitutional rights and threatens their physical safety. The criminal code prohibits communicating for the purposes of prostitution or the keeping of a common bawdy house. But the women say they are professionals and are urging the courts to strike down those laws, which force them to work on the streets and not in their homes. The women have compiled a wide range of documents as part of their case, including parliamentary and government reports, as well as various affidavits from academics, experts and NDP MP Libby Davies.

<http://www.newuniversity.org/2008/11/opinion/selling_to_the_wrong168/>  

By Editorial Board <http://www.newuniversity.org/author/eboard/>  on Nov <http://www.newuniversity.org/2008/11/> . 3 <http://www.newuniversity.org/2008/11/03/> , 2008 <http://www.newuniversity.org/2008/>  

Amidst the financial crisis, an imminent election and a dozen important state propositions, a proposition decriminalizing (but not legalizing) prostitution in the city of San Francisco is a rather small and contained issue. Essentially, the proposition would prevent local law enforcement authorities from investigating, arresting or prosecuting anyone for selling sex.

While proponents have touted the proposition as a step toward protecting sex workers, it merely allows the city to wash its hands of responsibility. Current laws cite prostitution as a misdemeanor punishable by fines or up to six months in prison, but these sentences are enacted to protect sex workers from a prostitute’s vicious lifestyle. Prostitution is never the rose-tinted equal exchange of money for a service by two consenting adults, but a cruel system of extortion by pimps and prostitutes’ dependency, often through drugs, on the very pimps that take their earnings and force them to work under harsh and abusive conditions.

Proposition statistics on the ballot state that decriminalizing prostitution will save the city’s police department an alleged $11 million in funds used to investigate and prosecute prostitutes. Police methods range from planned “stings,” where undercover police pose as prostitutes and lure unwitting “Johns” into paying for prostitution, to infiltrating a prostitution ring as customers. Saving $11 million in city funds is a paltry sum to prove the worth of decriminalizing prostitution, especially since it neglects to take into account possible increases in crime that will result from decriminalizing prostitution. This could be the drug market that accompanies the pimp’s business territory or the magnetic attraction of sex workers and pimps to a city that makes prostitution easier while impeding police efforts to prosecute worse aspects of prostitution, such as sex trafficking.

The proposition would also hinder rehabilitation projects like San Francisco’s First Offender Prostitution Program (FOPP). The program was introduced in 1995 in order to radically change the city’s approach to prostitution, from its previous revolving-door recidivism to a four-part approach: prevention tactics for young women, intervention for older women, arrest and education services for “Johns” and counseling and support for sex workers wishing to change their occupation. Passing Proposition K would prevent local police from pressuring sex workers to leave their field for beneficial workshops.

San Francisco is not the first big city in California to try to pass a proposition like Proposition K; Berkeley rejected a 2004 attempt to decriminalize prostitution. Only two states allow prostitution in a severely limited form: Nevada allows brothels in strictly rural counties and Rhode Island allows prostitution behind closed doors between consenting adults, but forbids brothels. This extremely limited form of prostitution allows communities some form of control and confines prostitution to private residences and establishments.

The measure is an interesting but terribly drafted piece of legislation that refuses to go the distance by demanding government regulation alongside full legalization. In 2003, New Zealand narrowly passed a law legalizing prostitution, but has several requirements for sex transactions. Prostitutes can refuse to have sex with clients for any reason, even after payment, and cannot be coerced into doing the act; prostitutes must use “prophylactic sheaths” (condoms) or some other form of sexual barrier to prevent sexually transmitted diseases or be fined; sex workers “at work” must comply with Occupational Safety and Health guidelines; brothels can be relocated to specific zones indicated by local Councils but cannot be banned outright; and most importantly, operators (managers) can be heavily fined or imprisoned if they have hired a sex worker under the age of 18.

Clearly, New Zealand has taken steps to regulate the sex industry in a mature fashion to prevent health risks and to protect workers. Without government regulation, San Francisco cannot ensure the health and safety of its workers, nor could it adequately prevent underage sex workers from entering the field or combat sex trafficking. Prostitution in Amsterdam was legalized in 1988, and since then the sex worker population has unionized to receive better representation and fight for legal rights.

California and federal law would still outlaw prostitution if Proposition K was passed, but decriminalizing prostitution without regulating the health and safety of sex workers – in a nutshell, legally endorsing prostitution – can only lead to unclear jurisdiction between city, state and federal prosecution and will impede police from protecting sex workers from pimps, trafficking and drugs. Were the proposition to take a clear stance by advocating the legalization of prostitution (and giving responsibility to the government for its regulation), the proposition would become less of a legal issue and more of a matter subject to debates of morality.

Send your comments to newuopinion@gmail.com. Include your name, year and major.

Petition: City of Vancouver trying to cancel March for Murdered and Missing Women for Olympics

City of Vancouver trying to change the March for Murdered and Missing Women
to make way for Olympics 

http://www.petitiononline.com/feb14/petition.html 

It has been brought to our attention that the City of Vancouver, Olympic
officials, and the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit are trying to
change the historic Feb 14, 2010, March for Murdered and Missing Women in
order to ensure 'flow of Olympic traffic' down Hastings Street. 

As residents of the DTES and supporters of the Memorial March, we completely
oppose any change in date, time, or route of the Memorial March. This March
has been happening for 18 years to honour our sisters who die each year due
to the violence of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual abuse. It is
something far more significant and sacred than the Olympic Games, which has
already increased poverty, homelessness, and policing in our neighbourhood.
The government is spending billions on a circus, while putting people aside.

We, the women in the Downtown Eastside and our supporters, demand that:
. There be no attempts to change or control our Feb 14th Memorial March .
Not a single person be forcibly removed, evicted, or displaced from their
homes in the Downtown Eastside and any other community due to the Olympics.