By Sean Condon
Considered the world’s oldest profession, prostitution continues to be a problem for inner cities to this day. It hurts the women and men who are the prostitutes as well as the communities and businesses in which they procure.
Section 212 of the Canadian Criminal Code makes the communication for the purpose of prostitution illegal, but legal forces have done little to actually get prostitutes off the street. It is time to look at an alternative way to elevate all of those affected by prostitution from this social stress.
Legalizing prostitution and establishing government-regulated brothels would be a step in the right direction. Prostitutes scare off businesses’ potential customers and lower the area’s property value. It also deters other businesses from moving into the area.
The police perform prostitution sweeps, but this just results in the prostitutes moving to another area, only to return a few weeks later.
Setting up brothels away from the residential centres, into an industrial area, would create a safe and clean environment for prostitutes. It would also help eliminate the most violent part of prostitution, the pimps.
Prostitutes would be kept under careful watch to make sure they receive proper medical checkups and are safe from harm. They would also become tax-paying citizens.
The government could set up education programs so that prostitutes could eventually leave the trade if they chose to do so. It would be cheaper and more effective than putting them into jails.
However, brothels would not eliminate prostitution. Centretown has prostitution problems west of Bronson Avenue on Somerset Street and Gladstone Avenue. These areas face other forms of crime, which further deteriorate its economic prospects. Many prostitutes have serious drug problems and are already infected with HIV. This is a problem that would keep them out of the brothels and back on the street.
But brothels would help concentrate the problem. It would free the police and social services to spend more time and resources on the prostitutes that will still be on the street.
So long as large portions of communities exist with poverty, poor education, drugs and crime, women and men will continue to look towards prostitution as a means of survival. While brothels will not eradicate street prostitution, they will act as a step to helping the prostitutes and the businesses that look out their window and face it.