Getting Screwed (27 page)

Much of the existing stigma against sex workers comes from entrenched views of marriage and female sexuality, as discussed in
Chapter 4
. In a 2010 book about the New Zealand prostitution reforms, Gillian Abel, a public health researcher at the University of Otago at Christchurch, and Lisa Fitzgerald, a public health sociologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, cite the same problem: “Sex workers and most especially female sex workers do not conform to ideals of ‘normal' sexuality with its accompanying presumptions of female passivity in the sexual domain. They are, therefore, as Sibley has termed ‘othered' — different from ‘normal' decent citizens, framed as ‘deviant' and generally stereotyped as involved in drug use, gang activity, crime, spread of sexually transmitted infections and with threatening the moral fabric of society.”
⁶⁰

In a Skype interview months after we met by the pool in Las Vegas, Ida Kock also connected the stigma surrounding sex work to “ideas about female sexuality and female chastity” and warned that such entrenched stereotypes will not change quickly. “I think we all overestimate the value of changing the law,” the Swedish ethnographer says. “We can have better legislation that protects sex workers' rights, but the stigma won't go away overnight.”

In the meantime, Eva-Marree Kullander Smith's young children are in the care of Swedish Social Services, the same agency that refused to let her raise them. They will never know their mother or how hard she fought for them.

Canada's Public Health Experiment

W
hen Valerie Scott was a child growing up in New Brunswick, the northeastern province of Canada just over the border from Maine, she would watch old westerns on rainy afternoons. And that's when she fell in love with saloon girls. “The cowboys running around killing each other bored me, but I lived for the moment when the saloon girls came on,” Scott recalls. “The cowboys couldn't pull the wool over their eyes, and sometimes they'd get their own saloon. I knew that's what I wanted to be: a saloon girl.”

This was, of course, years before Valerie understood exactly what saloon girls did, but even when she gleaned the truth (from a friend at the age of eleven), she wasn't deterred. After graduating from high school, she majored in science at the University of Guelph in Ontario (near Toronto) and began working as an exotic dancer to pay her way through school.

“One of my first costumes was a nineteenth century saloon girl,” Scott says. “I danced for seven years and worked up to feature status.” By the early 1980s, she had dropped out of school and was performing burlesque in a different city every night, from Philadelphia, Miami, and New York to Toronto, Vancouver, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She eventually tired of the constant traveling and, at the age of twenty-four, discovered a new way of working in the sex industry.

“I put a companion ad in the
Globe and Mail
[a major Toronto newspaper] and ran it for one week,” Scott says. “I received ninety-three replies, and I threw out the ones with poor grammar, reasoning [that] they probably wouldn't have a very good job. And then I began to work.” She
would meet clients in a public place, and if they passed her screening test, she would take them to her apartment or a hotel. Most of her clients were men from Toronto, many of them married. “I remember standing in the hallway of my apartment after the third or fourth client I'd seen and thinking, ‘I could kick myself for not getting into the business sooner,' ” she says. “This is a good job. I don't care what everyone says.”

By the mid '80s, however, Scott was disgusted, not by the sex work, but by the stigma surrounding it from every facet of society. “I couldn't handle being treated like I was a disposable person,” she says. “I couldn't handle my colleagues being treated like that. And I hated lying to my parents and friends about what I was doing.”

In 1985, the conservative government then in power in Canada passed a law that prohibited communicating in a public place for the purpose of engaging in prostitution. Known as the communicating offense, it made life on the streets much more dangerous for streetwalkers, who, because of the fear of being arrested, could no longer take the time they needed to assess clients before they climbed into their cars. What Scott saw politicized her.

“I didn't work on the street, but too many of my colleagues who did were getting hurt,” Scott says. “I would take women to the police station to have them report the violence, and the police would say to my face, ‘It's part of their job.' ”

One day, Scott was listening to the
CBC
(Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), and she heard John Crosby, then Canada's justice minister, talking. “He was carrying on about sex workers like we were vermin,” Scott says. “That was it. That was the moment.”

Scott joined the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes (
CORP
) and became active in the sex workers' rights movement. The first lawsuit she and
CORP
filed challenged, on constitutional grounds, the new law making communication for the purpose of prostitution a criminal offense. But in 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the law. Scott wanted to carry on the fight, but her group didn't have the money. “Challenging all the [prostitution] laws was a $200,000 case,” she says. “We had $40 in our legal fund.”

In Canada, unlike the United States, selling or buying sex itself was not a crime. Instead, Canadian authorities relied on three laws to curb prostitution: a law prohibiting the operation of a bawdy house or brothel; a law against living on the avails of prostitution, which was aimed at pimps but also was used to arrest sex workers' domestic partners, security guards, and business agents; and the law against communicating for the purpose of prostitution.

In the years after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld that last mandate, Canadian researchers amassed a body of research showing that all three criminal codes increased the risk of violence to sex workers and made it more difficult for them to practice safe sex and access health care. Several studies showed that violence against sex workers increased dramatically in the 1990s after the passage of the communicating law, according to a 2006 report by the Canadian House of Commons.
¹
Sex worker advocates say the 1985 law against communicating made life particularly dangerous for streetwalkers.

One study, for instance, showed that up to 98 percent of women who worked the streets of Vancouver's poorest area, the Downtown Eastside, experienced violence from clients, pimps, and others.
²
Another, more recent study, published in the
British Medical Journal
in 2009, found that of 237 streetwalkers throughout Vancouver, more than half (57 percent) had experienced physical or sexual violence at least once in an eighteen-month period.
³
As lead researcher Kate Shannon said, “These women continue to be pushed to work in isolated spaces, with limited access to housing and drug treatment, which further compounds their risk of being physically assaulted or raped.”
⁴

What this research revealed was that violence was not intrinsic to sex work — women working indoors were much less likely than street workers to be assaulted. Rather, it showed that the laws prohibiting women from working in brothels, communicating with clients, and living on the avails of prostitution were largely responsible for the violence against sex workers. For example, a 2011 study of Vancouver sex workers found that Canada's prostitution laws made it more difficult for them to secure housing and practice safe sex.
⁵
Published in
Social Science & Medicine,
this study found that criminalization made it difficult for sex workers to live and work together in indoor spaces and thus forced them out on the streets, where it was harder for them to negotiate safe sex. In addition, restrictive curfews and guest polices at many rooming houses in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside forced low-income women out onto the street, where they were at greater risk of being subject to physical violence and contracting sexually transmitted diseases, the study found.
⁶

“Normalized violence in street-based cultures often leads women into relationships with older men for protection . . . and these relationships can be physically abusive and economically exploitative,” the researchers noted. They concluded that Canada's prostitution laws led to discriminatory and exploitative housing practices that target the most marginalized populations (poor minority women.) The researchers called for the development of women-only housing, which would “promote women's agency and ability to negotiate health, safety and risks of
HIV
infection.”
⁷

The Canadian findings echo earlier research in Miami, which found that homelessness and marginal housing increase the risk that sex workers will have unprotected sex. Women who are either homeless or sleeping on a friend's couch are more likely to be desperate for money and have sex with clients who refuse to wear condoms, the Miami studies found.
⁸
In yet another study of street-based workers, by the Urban Justice Center of New York, sex workers themselves said that the single most important public health intervention would be stable and affordable housing. As the researchers noted, “Homelessness creates a cycle of deepening impoverishment that may be almost impossible to escape. The lack of a fixed address or a telephone number hinders attempts to find other employment. The high cost of even substandard short-stay accommodation imposes a financial burden that may be hard to meet without resorting to the ‘fast money' offered by illegal activities such as prostitution. Temporary accommodation creates an environment that is often not conductive to resolving other contributory problems such as substance dependency.”
⁹

Since other research shows that drug addiction increases the risk of
HIV
infection, decriminalizing prostitution and providing more stable
housing for sex workers would reduce the spread of
HIV
infection and other diseases. (Perhaps this is a good place to point out that the Netherlands, where prostitution has been decriminalized since the 1970s and legalized since 2000, has the lowest rate of
HIV
infection in the world.
¹⁰
) The intrinsic link between eliminating laws against prostitution and improving public health is one of the primary reasons why groups as far-flung as the World Health Organization, the United Nations
AIDS
Advisory Group, Human Rights Watch, and the National Association of Social Workers support the decriminalization of consensual adult prostitution.

While such emerging evidence helped bolster the policy argument against Canada's prostitution laws, what really turned the tide of public (and judicial) sentiment was the discovery that a serial killer had been systematically butchering Aboriginal streetwalkers in Vancouver. Many of these women were part of the generation of Aboriginal Canadians (native Indian, Inuit, and Métis) who had been molested as children after they were taken away from their parents and put in residential schools. According to a recent class action suit against the Canadian government, thousands of Aboriginal children in British Columbia were removed from their own homes and put in non-Aboriginal homes across North America between 1962 and 1996.
¹¹

“It was during a period when we wanted to destroy their culture,” explains John Lowman, a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “And some of these children were preyed on by pedophiles over and over again. And that's part of the generation that was involved in survival sex. They are the most victimized women in our society.”

By the late '90s, dozens of these streetwalkers had gone missing, and everyone on the street knew that a serial killer was on the loose. But police ignored the mounting concerns, Lowman says. In 1997, Robert William (Willy) Pickton, a wealthy pig farmer, was charged with the attempted murder of a sex worker whom he had stabbed on his farm after having sex with her. The woman survived, but because prosecutors believed she would not be a believable witness (she had drug problems),
they stayed the charge. (A stayed charge can be dismissed after one year.) Furthermore, crucial evidence against Pickton was left unexamined in a police storage locker for seven years.
¹²
In 1999, Canadian police were tipped off that Pickton had a freezer filled with human flesh on his farm. Although police interviewed Pickton and obtained his consent to search his farm, they never did a search.
¹³
Not until 2004 did lab testing show that
DNA
from two missing women were on the clothing and rubber boots seized from Pickton in 1997.

Pickton was finally arrested and brought to trial in 2006. He was convicted of killing six women; another twenty murder charges against him were stayed, although police believe the sixty-four-year-old farmer may have murdered as many as forty-nine women, mostly street-based prostitutes.
¹⁴
He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years. “It was a national disgrace,” Lowman says. “But it created a sea change in attitudes — a woman doesn't deserve to die because she's involved in sex work.”

Lowman, who wears his long white hair in a ponytail and has a mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes, began studying sex workers even before he obtained his Ph.D. His dissertation focused on the effects of law enforcement on crime patterns, including the displacement of sex workers from indoor locations onto the street. That research developed into a career-long interest in sex work and the law, and starting in the early 1980s, Lowman received federal funding to do a series of studies on how Canada's laws were affecting sex workers. Between 1984 and 2002, Canada's Department of Justice provided funding for Lowman to conduct eight studies of prostitution law enforcement.

In 2002, Lowman was introduced to Alan Young, a law professor at Toronto's York University, who was thinking of mounting a constitutional challenge to Canada's prostitution laws. In the late 1990s, Young had represented a dominatrix by the name of Terri-Jean Bedford, who had been arrested for running a bawdy house in Toronto. Bedford, who went by the name of Madame de Sade, dressed in black leather, and often brought her whip to court, was ultimately convicted of the charge after a long legal battle. But Young realized there just might be a case for
challenging the laws themselves on the grounds that they violated sex workers' rights to liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted as part of Canada's constitution in 1982.