TORONTO -- Nearly one-third of sex workers who are in danger won’t call 911, out of a fear of interacting with police, according to a new study from the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity. Researchers also found Indigenous sex workers were twice as likely to report not being able to call 911.
“Our research shows that the laws urgently need to be changed,” Anna-Louise Crago, the study’s author and Banting Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Ottawa, said in a press release.
The study, published in the journal Social Sciences, involved researchers from the centre at the University of British Columbia and the University of Ottawa using the survey responses of sex workers in five Canadian cities.
Crago and her colleagues say their data suggests more harm than good has come from Stephen Harper-era’s “end demand” legislation, Bill C-36, enacted in 2014, which makes it a crime to advertise sexual services and pay for sex work, but not to be a sex worker. Advocates have argued in the past that while provisions in the Criminal Code make workers immune from prosecution, they don’t protect them from arrest.
“‘End demand’ legislation forces sex workers to choose between foregoing access to police protection in a safety emergency and putting themselves, their co-workers or their managers in potential legal jeopardy,” Crago, the centre’s project lead, said.
During the 2015 federal election, the Liberals campaigned on broadening what forms of labour were protected by federal law, which would in turn deliver protection for sex workers. In 2018, the Young Liberals of Canada put forth a resolution at the Liberal National Convention calling on the party to repeal the sex work laws but it wasn’t picked up nor mentioned in the Liberals’ 2019 platform.
But beyond that, critics say Trudeau has been mostly silent on the issue since. Even during the pandemic, despite the federal government pointing to Women and Gender Equality Canada receiving up to $40 million to support shelters and sexual assault centres, sex workers argue it’s not enough.
Other advocacy groups such as Global Network of Sex Work Projects and have criticized similar legislation in other countries.
Crago said, in Canada, the justification behind enacting the 2014 law was that it protected the “most marginalized in the sex industry and to assist sex workers in reporting violence against them. But our data demonstrate that the legislation has clearly failed to achieve its stated goals.”
Instead she said the law simply “reproduces many of the same life-threatening harms to sex workers as previous criminal laws. We see this most explicitly with the experiences reported by Indigenous street-based sex workers.”
Senior author Kate Shannon, professor of social medicine and executive director of the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity, said lawmakers need to acknowledge the harm being done by the legislation. She’s similarly calling for “the immediate need for law and police reform.”
The authors suggest the initial 2014 law and the subsequent legal and law enforcement framework puts sex workers at risk.
PAST POLICE HARASSMENT
For example, the study found past harassment from police was directly associated with sex workers being five times less likely to want to call 911, even if they were in danger.
“Police and proponents of end-demand legislation defend tactics, such as following sex workers, carding them, or detaining them without arrest, as necessary or ‘protective.’ But the data show how such police harassment of sex workers threatens access to police protection in a safety emergency,” Crago explained.
“This is a finding with broader implications for the police targeting of Black and Indigenous communities with practices like carding and street stops,” she said, referring to the heavily criticized practice of police stopping, questioning, and documenting people with scant or no evidence of an offence being committed.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has denounced carding as "unlawful and unconstitutional," with Amnesty International, last year, calling on Canadian government and municipalities to end the practice.
The authors said the study offers the “first known-data” as to who’s actually helping sex workers in danger if not the police, who were one of the least reported sources of assistance, at only 5.4 per cent of the time.
“People involved in the sex industry play a major role in helping other sex workers to escape violent or dangerous situations,” said Chris Bruckert, co-author and criminology professor at the University of Ottawa.
When it came to situations of violence and confinement: fellow sex workers were the ones commonly lending a hand in 40 per cent of reported cases; family or partners helped three out of 10 times; and, other clients helped sex workers in 24 per cent of the reported cases.
“The situations where sex workers get the most assistance are the ones that the current system discourages by making them illegal,” Bruckert said.
Shannon said the findings call for the full decriminalization of sex work and an immediate end to the targeting of sex workers by police.
