BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
28 april 2012
Appealing prostitution ruling shows disregard for sex workers' safety
Source: www.torontosun.com. - Toronto Sun - Canada
CANADA - TORONTO - In Vancouver, an inquiry looks into how pig farmer Robert Pickton managed to slay 26 prostitutes with no one bothering to notice. Or care.
While in our nation’s capital, the federal government refuses to allow a safer working environment for those who still ply the sex trade.
Our willful blindness continues - and it’s shameful.
As expected, the Harper government served notice Wednesday that it’s going to the Supreme Court of Canada to fight last month’s landmark Ontario appeal court ruling that struck down a number of anti-prostitution laws because they endangered the safety of street prostitutes. And so the dangerous status quo remains in effect.
On March 27, the Ontario Court of Appeal declared Canada’s bawdy house provisions were unconstitutional and amended the pimping provisions of the Criminal Code so only those exploiting prostitutes will be prosecuted. Their decision cleared the way for brothels and bodyguards but the court imposed stays on both: Legislators were given a year until brothels become legal, allowing Parliament time to redraft the law. But as of midnight, a 30-day stay was set to be lifted on allowing sex workers to hire bodyguards and drivers without their risking a charge of living on the avails of prostitution.
For the first time, sex workers were going to be legally allowed to protect themselves. But at the last moment, that breakthrough has been snatched away.
“Everything is being done at the 11th hour,” complained Osgoode Hall law professor Alan Young, who won the appeal court judgment on behalf of three prostitutes. “They’re asking the Supreme Court to extend the stay on the very day it expires.”
Ottawa has asked the Supreme Court to maintain the current laws while they appeal, insisting “the public interest, communities and neighbourhoods and the proper administration of justice will suffer irreparable harm” if prostitutes can hire staff.
Valerie Scott, legal director of the Sex Professionals of Canada, isn’t surprised they are now heading to the highest court in the land.
“It’s the federal government playing little boy games at the expense of women’s lives,” said Scott, who has spent years pursuing the case with dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford and Amy Lebovitch. “It means we will still be vulnerable; we will still be in danger. We won’t be able to work safely in a legal way.
“We have to choose between our liberty and our safety. In what other legal occupation is a worker not allowed to take any measure to protect themselves?”
Many may consider it morally reprehensible, degrading and dehumanizing, but selling sex for money is technically legal in Canada. Prostitution is not a crime. Yet all the activities to ply the trade run afoul of the law - from working inside to hiring protection - and that’s placed sex workers at risk. “The violence faced by street prostitutes across Canada is, in a word, overwhelming,” noted Justice James MacPherson. “One does not need to conjure up the face of Robert Pickton to know that this is true.”
In the long shadow cast by the serial killer, the Ontario appeal court ruling tried to strike the right balance in addressing prostitute safety while noting community objections. And so they gave the green light to bordellos so prostitutes can legally move inside - pursuant to municipal bylaws, we’d assume - but upheld the ban on soliciting because no neighbourhood wants to be overrun with johns circling the block. For those concerned about exploitation and underage prostitutes, the court pointed to current laws on the books against human trafficking and pimping. It seemed a fair, realistic, dare we say, enlightened compromise.
So, of course, Ottawa appealed.
“They’d prefer we work in a dangerous environment because that makes them feel morally sound,” argued Scott. “They’re okay to have more women mangled in a wood chipper by people like Robert Pickton because they don’t approve of our legal occupation.”
But the moral high ground shouldn’t be allowed to trump a person’s right to be safe from harm.
