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Prostitutes Group Suing Canada’s Federal Government For its Laws Against Prostitution

National Post again calls for legalisation despite poor record of such change

By Hilary White

TORONTO, December 18, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Toronto-based group, Sex Professionals of Canada, (SPOC), is suing the federal government for maintaining laws criminalizing prostitution and thereby, they claim, endangering the lives of “sex trade workers.”

The group's executive director, Valerie Scott, said that communicating and bawdyhouse laws “are arbitrary,” and “do more harm than good.” The group is challenging Canada’s solicitation laws on constitutional grounds.

SPOC calls itself a “grassroots, volunteer organization made up of current sex workers, former sex workers and their allies.” The group claims to promote “workplace safety” by maintaining a list of “undesirable clients,” and by political lobbying for decriminalization.

“We'll be filing in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.” Scott said her group would take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada if necessary.

In 2004, SPOC organized a march to pressure the government to erase the last legal prohibitions to activities related to prostitution. Chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, your sexist laws have got to go,” the march was staged in conjunction with other feminist organizations including the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre (TRCC), and the Multicultural Women Against Rape.

Toronto’s National Post, in its Dec 15 main editorial, continues its ongoing campaign to support legalization of prostitution “to guard the safety of both prostitutes and the public”.  In decrying “moral prudery” in the editorial the Post betrays a strong social liberal bias that may be a larger factor than its argument that current laws leave “prostitutes to ply their trade in the shadows of society where they are victimized by pimps and johns without fear.”

No one disputes the danger of prostitution: Statistics Canada reports show that between 1991 and 2004, 171 female prostitutes were killed. Getting women out of prostitution and into safe and legitimate work, however, is not the goal of the international movement for legalization that is intimately coupled with the feminist movement.

Scott told reporters at the 2004 march that her group’s goal was simple decriminalization that would leave the practice unregulated and unrestricted – supposedly a regular job, like any other. "It's clear, without a doubt, that we're getting assaulted, raped, and robbed because of our profession," she said.

Often called “harm reduction,” the legalization theory is rejected by many women’s groups and anti-trafficking organizations, who say it succeeds only in keeping women in an inherently dangerous lifestyle.

Prostitution Research & Education’s Melissa Farley, Ph.D., wrote in an article in the Journal of Transcultural Psychiatry that women in prostitution, despite its de facto decriminalization in Canada, are overwhelmingly victims of violence.

Farley wrote that her research found “extremely high prevalence of lifetime violence.”

“Eighty two percent reported a history of childhood sexual abuse, by an average of 4 perpetrators. Seventy two percent reported childhood physical abuse, 90 percent had been physically assaulted in prostitution, and 78 percent had been raped in prostitution.”

The Irish Anti-Trafficking Coalition, is among the groups attempting to dispel the harm reduction myth. Gregory Carlin, the Coalition’s director said that Canada in particular is culpable in maintaining lax laws that make it easy to trap women in prostitution.

In March 2005, as the Liberal government considered a private members’ bill to remove the last legal prohibitions surrounding prostitution, Carlin warned that legalization would make Canada a “magnet for human trafficking.”

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
International Group Urges Canada to Raise Age of Consent, Urges Against Legalizing Prostitution
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/mar/05031406.html

See articles on the National Post’s liberal position on this and other moral issues:

Change our Prostitution Laws
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=176ae9...

Lessons from a German Brothel
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=dd7825...

National Post Advocating Legalization of Prostitution Again
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jul/06071308.html

Gay Activists Ask Canada to Lower Age of Consent for Anal Sex, National Post Agrees
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/feb/06021403.html

Victoria Microbiologist Slams National Post Bias Favouring Embryo Cloning
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/apr/06041908.html

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