[Photo © Paige Parsons]

By Paige Parsons

With the new federal prostitution laws now in effect, Canadian sex worker advocacy groups are ramping up efforts to support people involved in prostitution.

Jennifer Bigelow was involved in street-level sex work in Ottawa for almost 20 years. During much of that time she was in an abusive relationship and struggled with drugs. But she says she was still making a choice: for her, sex work was work.

“Going out like that every day, often it was for the drugs, but I would still get up, get dressed in the evening, go out, know what I’m doing, doing my job and come home with my pay. It’s no different than any other job, except there are certain dangers,” she says.

The danger came to a head for Bigelow on Sept. 13, 2013 when she was brutally attacked and raped.

Surviving the assault and her desire to escape her abusive boyfriend led her to Brigid’s Place – a transition home where she was able to spend a year getting off drugs and making a new life.

Though Bigelow moved on from sex work herself, she’s committed to making it a safer job for people still engaged in street-level prostitution. Bigelow is collaborating with local agencies to open an overnight drop-in centre in Vanier for sex workers to go to when they need a safe space.

“There’s nothing out there for the sex-trade worker during their hours or even specifically for them. Nobody is able to understand or meet their needs or understand their fears other than peer-driven sex-trade workers, like myself, that want to make it safer for the other people out there,” she says.

The laws

Prostitution is not illegal in Canada, but the new laws regulating it criminalize various aspects of the sale or purchase of sex. According to Bigelow and many other sex-work advocates, these laws cause harm.

In the December 2013 Bedford decision, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the old federal prostitution laws, declaring them to be a violation of the guarantee to life, liberty and security of person.

The previous rules made street soliciting, keeping a brothel and living off the avails of prostitution illegal.

The courts ordered the government to come up with new legislation within a year. In 2014, Minister of Justice Peter McKay brought forward a bill emphasizing criminalization of purchasers of sexual services. The new laws officially came into effect in December.

“We fought all the way to ensure that sex workers would be consulted about it and voiced dissent but [the laws] were basically sped through the whole process and adopted in December,” – Frédérique Chabot, POWER member.

However, critics were quick to point out that the bill reinstated some aspects of the laws that the Supreme Court ruling had declared problematic, plus included new restrictions.

It is now legal to communicate with the intention of selling sex in some instances, but sex workers can be criminally charged for doing so within the vicinity of anywhere a person under 18 could reasonably be expected to be present. And even if the sale of sex isn’t always illegal, purchasing it is. Similarly, though it’s legal for a sex worker to advertise their own services, any publisher or website that runs such ads could be charged.

Opponents

The new laws were opposed at every step of the legislative process by POWER – an Ottawa/Gatineau-based non-profit advocacy group that favours decriminalization of sex work.

“We fought all the way to ensure that sex workers would be consulted about it and voiced dissent but [the laws] were basically sped through the whole process and adopted in December,” says POWER member Frédérique Chabot.

Chabot says that in an effort to avoid detection under the new laws, street-level sex workers are not spending adequate time screening clients before getting into vehicles and are operating in secluded areas.

“Because people have to wait longer because clients are nervous and they’re moving indoors, it means people accept clients they would have never accepted before — people who are drunk, people who are being aggressive, people who are refusing to abide by what has been negotiated.”

Chabot says the new laws have also been an issue for sex workers operating indoors. The ban on advertising sexual services means many sex workers have resorted to using code that can lead to misunderstandings and confrontations with clients about what was and wasn’t consented too. She adds the new laws have also made clients less willing to share personal information that sex workers previously used in screening.

Proponents…sort of

Unlike POWER, Vancouver-based prostitution abolition advocate Trisha Baptie supported the bill’s broader intent to criminalize purchasers of sex.

Baptie was involved in prostitution from the ages of 15 to 28. When she exited the sex industry she became an advocate for abolishing prostitution and she founded EVE, an organization of “formerly prostituted persons.”

“We’re abolitionists because we don’t see how women can be full and equal human beings as long as we are being bought and sold and have our very sexuality and our very personhood commodified,” she says.

Though Baptie supports the “spirit” of the new laws, she lobbied throughout the legislative process to have the sections that criminalize sex workers taken out. She wasn’t successful, but EVE plans to continue efforts to have those aspects of the law struck down. Baptie hopes greater public education will encourage Canadians to condemn prostitution, but not prostituted persons.

“People will realize that there is a societal cost to having prostitution around and that we shouldn’t be legitimating it nor should we be saying that this is the best we can do for our women,” Baptie says.

However, the changes EVE and POWER seek won’t come easily.

University of Ottawa professor Christine Bruckert researches sex work and has been involved with POWER since its inception. She explains that mounting a legal challenge against brand new laws isn’t a straightforward process.

“Bedford was successful because there’s 20 years of social science evidence demonstrating the harms of the law. The problem is we don’t have that evidence and we can’t have that evidence for many years. So it’s actually quite hard to launch a Charter challenge,” Bruckert says.

The fallout

So far, in Ottawa at least, the evidence isn’t forthcoming.

Sgt. Jeff LeBlanc works with the Ottawa Police Service’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit. He says his is the only Ottawa unit that has laid charges using the new law and that in those instances the prostitution charges were laid on a third party for exploitation of a woman, along with other trafficking charges.

Though LeBlanc says police strategy is generally unchanged by the new laws, when it comes time for police to enforce the newer and untested elements of the laws, it will be a bit of an experiment.

“It’ll be up to us to articulate in court why we lay the charge and all the details and I guess we’ll see at that point whether our procedure or our reasoning was in line with the legislation because really nobody can answer that question until it becomes an issue in open court,” LeBlanc says.

Read more about how Canadian police are implementating the new law here.