Laws should protect people, not endanger them

A few years back, when the horrific crimes of Robert Pickton were still top of mind, I was on my way downtown for a meeting at a city non-profit. I chanced to arrive just as one of the agency outreach workers was “calming down” after a verbal altercation with a known user of prostitutes.

If you can call it that. The engagement was pretty one-sided.

I was told this particular purchaser of sex liked his girls young, below the legal age of consent. He had the additional poor judgement to park his pickup right in front of the outreach worker's offices.

He was more or less forced to sit there stone-faced in his truck, staring straight ahead, while the worker gave him a loud, public and prolonged cussing-out.

As far as I have ever seen, that's about the extent of enforcement of Canada's laws governing prostitution, and the protection of the vulnerable women who work the sex trade.

I realize both police and helping agencies do much better than that, but just as the sex trade operates well out of public view, so do the forces that seek to regulate it, and mitigate its harm. And for all most of us know, a public cussing-out is about as effective as any of it.

Justice minister Peter MacKay and heritage minister Shelley Glover have been on the front lines in the past few days, to explain first reactions to the Supreme Court of Canada's striking down of three major planks in federal law meant to control prostitution.

Both were eager to point out their top concern was for the victims of the selling of sex, the prostitutes themselves. They are going to work diligently, etc., etc., to ensure Canada's women are protected from the predators who rule the sex trade, the pimps, the johns and all the parasites who profit from selling women's bodies for sexual pleasure.

The Supreme Court gave the government a year to do exactly that.

Yet the laws struck down were the very ones that make working the streets so exceedingly dangerous.

The ruling, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, specifically mentions that in Vancouver, while Robert Pickton was murdering hookers and feeding their bodies to pigs, it was illegal for the women to seek shelter while plying their trade.

It was illegal to have a driver or bodyguard to help assess the safety of their clients. It was illegal for them to have a safe bedroom to work from, where someone else could screen the men who arrived with their money.

It was illegal even to have a financial adviser to help them build enough security to leave the business. Taken far enough, even their local grocer could be said to be profiting from the avails of prostitution.

The organizations that have the government's ear on this issue want to criminalize the sex trade altogether, thus driving it even deeper underground into darker, more dangerous territory.

Moreover, Parliament's own research finds that the laws themselves are rarely enforced, and when they are, they are enforced badly.

A parliamentary committee reported that 92 per cent of all people charged with communicating for the purposes of prostitution were female. Of the women charged, 68 per cent were convicted.

Of the tiny minority of males charged, 30 per cent were convicted.

And you thought it took two to communicate, right?

The image of the prostitute as a victim has a lot of basis in fact. Studies by both the government and by academics point out that most sex trade workers come into the business very young. Many start out as young as 14 — to the delight of the pervert in the pickup downtown.

They have as much as 40 times higher mortality rate than the national average. A high percentage attempt suicide.

A high proportion of girls who become prostitutes were abused as children. In Canada, aboriginal women are represented far above their proportion of the population.

And the laws dictate they should face a much higher risk of violence.

But the most sordid face of the trade most of us see is only a small part of the business. There are far more sex trade workers in Red Deer than the women who look at us a little too closely downtown.

Most prostitution in Canada's larger cities occurs in hotel rooms, managed by (necessarily) discrete operators who do exactly what the law now prohibits — they protect their workers.

That's better than what the Tory party plans to do. Last month, at their policy convention in Calgary, the party passed a resolution to develop a “Canada-specific” plan on prostitution. They specifically seek to criminalize the purchase of sex as well as criminalizing any third party earning money from the sale of sex.

If MacKay and Glover are as concerned for the women in the sex trade as they say they are, and want to work to protect them, they're starting out at the bottom of a very steep hill.