Green Light Red Light Districts?
Pickton trial, British murders reignite debate over prostitution laws.
The often fatal dangers of the sex trade packed papers on both sides of the Atlantic last week as court officials parsed potential jurors for the Robert Pickton trial in New Westminster and the strangled bodies of five prostitutes were discovered in an English suburb.
Pickton is accused of murdering 26 women, many of whom sold sex to feed crack and heroin addictions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. On Friday, Pickton’s defense team announced they would not seek a publication ban for their client’s first trial.
The decision foreshadows a year of gory headlines that will force the issue into Canadian kitchens and may re-ignite debate over Canada’s antiquated prostitution laws.
The Globe and Mail fired the first volley today in an editorial attacking Conservative MPs on the federal justice subcommittee.
“Opposition members… have it right,” they argued. “The full force of the law should descend upon those guilty of acts of exploitation, violence or trafficking involving prostitutes, instead of ‘criminalizing consenting adults who engage in sexual activities for money.’ It is a shame that Conservative MP’s on the subcommittee resisted reforms to prostitution laws that might have resulted from such lucid analysis.”
But even among those who agree the laws should change, there is no consensus.
Writing earlier this month in The Tyee, Catharine Rolfson described a “deep fissure” between those who believe that “because sex work will always exist, we should decriminalize or even legalize it to make it safer,” and those who say that doing so “will only entrench the violence and legitimize the abuse.”
What’s more, off the street, in massage parlours and escort services, prostitution is already a de-facto legal occupation. Any remedy that ignores that is bound to fail, according to one woman who has worked in the industry for most of the last decade.
“Changes definitely need to take place to redirect, change, and save the eastside girls,” she argued in an anonymous piece last year. “They need compulsory rehabilitation and counseling centres in the outlying areas; where if they're caught working without treatment, the only other alternative is jail … repeatedly, until they get ‘the message.’”
Meanwhile, in England, the serial murder of five sex-trade workers in Suffolk has touched off a national debate over these same issues. A suspect in the slayings is now in custody. But the dispute over how to stop them from recurring is far from done.
Ministers in Tony Blair’s Labour government have mused openly about targeting users and legalizing small brothels to crack down on violence in the trade. But that’s not good enough, according to one former insider.
Katharine Raymond lashed out at the Blair administration in an article for Sunday’s Observer. Raymond, a former advisor to the home secretary, said Blair had scrapped plans for continental style red light districts over fears that bad headlines would derail any attempts at liberalization.
“The uncomfortable reality is that, while these pitiful girls and women cater to an eternal consumer demand, their lives are being put at greater risk by the lamentable failings of both government and law enforcement.”
But liberal laws alone won’t stop exploitation. At least not according to the New York Times Nicholas Kristof. In a Sunday column, Kristof offered a grim reminder of a world where widespread sexual slavery operates with near impunity. (Behind the firewall)
Reporting from Cambodia, Kristof tells the story of Yan Kosal, a woman tricked into and trapped in a Thai brothel while in her teens. After more than a decade of abuse, the woman escaped back over the border to Cambodia, where Kristof found her lying and dying in her family home.
"Kosal had begun suffering from abdominal pains while at the brothel," Kristol wrote, "and by the time she returned to Cambodia she was severely ill. Kosal was too mortified to tell me the ailment, but her cousin said that it was a gynecological problem arising from sexual abuse."
"With Kosal hovering near death, an aunt mortgaged her house for $250 to
pay for medical treatment. That bought medicine that has kept her alive
so far, but doctors advised that she needed surgery — which she can’t
afford. The aunt, Khlat Dam, says: 'There just isn’t any more money to
pay for an operation.'" ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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ShortSummer
5 years ago
Comments on "Green Light Red Light Districts?"
And on CBC Radio this morning we heard about white women going to the Carrribean to enjoy guilt free sex with the local males.... and its ok. but for a man to do the same ...yes I know there are some "differences" but still the rich (relative term between the buyer and the seller) are taking advantage - and paying for it. And Mr. Picton gets 365 days of media attention, but his victoms go mostly unnoticed. And millions spent even before the trial.
And that pig of a predetor ex-teacher / adventure guide gets huge media. He knew what he was doing was wrong, as did the principal of the school, as did his colleagues, as did parents,...
Something just isn't right. RESPECT is missing here - we are all people, and we all share the same planet.
Alcibiades
5 years ago
ShortSummer
I heard that too. Moreover, I've been trying ever since to find a way to integrate a comment about the neo-colonial attitude behind that kind of amoral and selfishly hedonistic behavior into one of the threads around here. On the one hand men are excoriated for such activities in the East and women, doing exactly the same thing with under-aged boys in Brazil and the Caribbean are just girls who wanna have fun.
It seems to me that the ideas discussed by the 'travel writer' who represented those 'adventures' as nothing more than 'a good time was had by all' needed some more comprehensive response than she got on air.
It's time we started treating all human beings as members of the same human family and not objects for individual selfish passions.
Thanks for giving me the chance to make that point.
snert
5 years ago
Alcibiades
That encompasses way more than you want it to in this context. Just by their very nature all passions are selfish.
Alcibiades
5 years ago
snert
NO. You clearly don't understand language very well. Haul out your dictionary and put on your thinking cap.
snert
5 years ago
Alcibiades
No need to check the dictionary but you may wish to think outside the box you're in. Prostitution can not be written off simply as pandering to "individual selfish passions". We are dealing with one of the strongest needs, wants or desires that anyone has to cope with. Some do it better than others.
The dichotomy is that prostitution can be both, a crime and a victimless crime.
Remove the word crime and you may be able to elevate the status of all involved so that those that are trapped in it can get out of the abusive arrangement that currently exists.
You certainly aren't going to eliminate prostitution by trying to get it to go away. That has been proven to fail time and time again.
Alcibiades
5 years ago
snert.
Read the posts.
Shortsummer and I were not talking about prostitution per se We were talking about a completely different phenomenon - sex tourism: Where people from a First world country exercise their capitalistic hegemony over citizens of a different culture entirely in sexually exploitative terms and in ways which cater to their selfish passions. That's where the colonial reference came from. I don't see the idea of prostitution in that dichotomy at all. Shortsummer was also pointing out the disconnect between women who go to the Caribbean for a fling with a cabana boy being seen as something quite different from the 'men' who go to Thailand for a similar purpose and who end up criminalized into the bargain if caught.
One activity is written up as a viable travel 'option' for a certain kind of woman while the other is decried to the high heavens when the parties involved are men looking for young girls.
Both practices are exploitative and immoral in my opinion. It's hardly wrong to point out the obvious incongruities between the attitudes of commentators and the law, in my opinion.
You have to pay attention.
snert
5 years ago
Alcibiades
I understand what you and Shortsummer were talking about but you did make a pretty broad generalization which opened the door to the whole issue.
Alcibiades
5 years ago
Nope. You're the one who assumed I had. You were wrong.
snert
5 years ago
The word all fooled me.
Chris H
5 years ago
They have to do something about it. It is a shame that our inaction on this has caused the most vulnerable women to be prone to being beaten, raped, or even killed. If prostitution isn't going to be a crime in Canada then we should certainly make sure it happens in the most safe way possible.
Why not ask working prostitutes how we can make it safer for them? What could we do to help women that want to leave prostitution? We need to put more resources into this then we currently are - that is for sure.
Unfortunately, politically, it is better to ignore the problem altogether. Bah, it makes one think how broken our political system is if we can't even come up with a way to deal with prostitution that isn't so ambigious. Shame on all of us.
G West
5 years ago
Chris H
It's a dilemma all right. And one I don't think pee wee is very likely going to deal with at all sympathetically.
What are all those escort services in the yellow pages about anyway? Ambiguous is right. Perhaps someone at the Fraser Institute could come up with a better marketing program for street hookers - they certainly get all the bad press - and the bad treatment.
I read the Kristof article in the Times and it was a very sad story - but not all that different from the way one section of our culture deals with (and ignores) the poor and the hopeless here in Canada.
We're much more concerned here about high taxes.