The Ottawa Police Service appears to have added officers to a unit that plans to trawl the Internet looking for victims of human trafficking, particularly among those engaged in sex work.
It would be silly to dismiss the premise trafficking is a very serious – if overstated – scourge, and needs to be policed appropriately.
The problem is that police services often have an inability to distinguish between trafficking and consensual sex work. This leads to a philosophy among police that sex workers are victims in need of help.
That isn’t the case and care needs to be taken to distinguish between the two as a matter of operational philosophy.
It is patently clear that policing sex workers makes their lives more difficult and more dangerous, especially to street-based workers.
The concern is that this becomes a hidden world, a haven for pimping and trafficking that’s tougher to police than street-based sex work.
It is worth remembering that a small percentage – less than a fifth – of all sex workers are working on the streets in the first place. Not only that, but, pimping is far less common than often assumed.
However, what police don’t realize is that soliciting on the Internet is a far simpler process, not least because sex workers don’t constantly need to be wary of police who can arrest them and lay charges.
Sure, police have switched tactics in this city, going after clients in “john sweeps” and sending them to “john school” for re-education.
These tactics drive sex workers out of well-lit, well-populated areas, and out into parts of the city where they can be preyed upon. After all, arresting johns doesn’t change the fact that sex workers need to make money from those people.
With more clients under arrest, the market pressures become more intense: more favours for less money, pressure increases for unprotected sex, and negotiations are conducted further from help, should something go wrong.
On the Internet, though, there is the opportunity to screen clients. You can get a phone number, get a sense for what they’re like, and arrange on a meeting place. If you leave that information with a friend, the entire process is substantially safer than hopping in a john’s car.
What the police in this city need to realize is that, on the whole, they’re major contributors to the endangerment of sex workers. Complaining about the very practice that would make sex work safer is hardly a logical approach.
Policing of sex work is haunted by the twin spectres of human trafficking and underage prostitution. Both are legitimate concerns; however, police need to be able to distinguish between the two over the course of their operations.
A sting on an underage prostitution ring?
That’s hard to object to, although its worth remembering that not all youth are exploited either. However, policing that catches women and men who are simply working for a living?
That’s objectionable, and though police triumphantly claim to have “rescued” sex workers and victims of trafficking, what they often really mean is “arrest.”