A-Infos (en) Canada, Anarchist journal Linchpin #11 - The ‘crime’ of sex work By Jeff Shantz

Criminal justice systems in capitalist liberal democracies like Canada have criminalized 
work that is predominantly done by women. Examples of this regulation of women's labour 
range from the witch hunts — the punishment of women largely for medicinal knowledge; the 
criminalization of midwifery and abortion provision; and the criminalization of sex-trade 
workers. Three sex-trade workers challenging Canada's prostitution laws in a court case in 
Toronto show the struggles over the regulation of sex work in Canada. ---- The three sex- 
trade workers involved in the court case, dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford and prostitutes 
Valerie Scott and Amy Lebovitch, argue that the laws against keeping a common bawdy house 
and communicating for the purposes of prostitution perpetuate violence against women by 
forcing them into more dangerous working conditions.

Views, legal and social, on sex work in Canada have varied widely. Often at the centre of 
moral panics, prostitution has been targeted as a threat to public health as well as 
signaling the decline of moral order. For others, particularly business owners, 
prostitution has been viewed as a nuisance activity serving to drive away customers from 
commercial areas. For land developers and owners, it poses a threat to property values and 
rental profits. More recently, as prostitution has become more prevalent in suburban areas 
outside of the city core, residents and homeowners associations have spoken against 
prostitution as a threat to children and property values.

Many people are unaware that selling sex is legal in Canada. Instead laws focus on issues 
related to prostitution, such as publicly communicating with another person to sell, or 
less frequently, to buy sexual services or operating a “bawdy house”. It remains a 
contested issue that has received a great deal of attention by various levels of 
government, police and local business associations. Street prostitution in particular has 
been the target of legislation and policing — a fact that is reflected in laws against 
public communication for purposes of selling sex. Despite sex work being legal, 
legislative responses and popular opinion generally treat sex workers as criminals engaged 
in illegal and immoral behaviour.

Legislation and policing practices that deal with the sex trade are guided by assumptions 
that sex work is deviant and that those who sell sex are morally impaired, whether through 
birth, socialization or socio-economic status. In labeling the women working in the sex 
trade as “criminal,” society sidesteps the obligation to deal with underlying social 
inequalities that impact the work and shape working conditions. Instead of addressing the 
roots of exploitation, the criminal justice system is used to contain or “cleanse” cities 
of the unwanted manifestations of the capitalist market. The consultations that gave rise 
to the communication law were marked by an outward concern, driven by business 
associations and developers, about the economic costs of a visible sex trade presence.

Since the introduction of the communicating law the focus of arrests has been on street 
prostitutes. As sociologist Kari Fedec notes, the various laws in Canadian history have 
been consistent in targeting the sellers of sex for violating moral and social codes of 
conduct. Sexually exploited women and children continue to be indicted as offenders by 
local communities and the law, even where they are victims of abuse by male clients.

Issues of power and control are not only expressed in sex-trade interactions, but in 
police charging practices as well. Sex workers, unlike clients, are perceived to be part 
of a criminal underclass associated with thefts and drugs and treated accordingly. The 
arrests of prostitutes and their removal from areas near commercial venues, such as 
upcoming Olympic sites in Vancouver, is portrayed by police as part of a broader security 
strategy focused on these other offences.

This ongoing practices of what might be called “supply-side policing” is reinforced in 
policing policies and practices that exclusively focus on street sweeps of prostitutes and 
the use of “boundary conditions” that prohibit sex trade workers from being present in 
specific commercial zones, such as the planned Olympic venue sites in Vancouver.

In the face of criminalization a group of women sex workers in Vancouver have proposed a 
cooperatively run brothel where workers would control their working conditions and retain 
their earnings. For the Coalition of Experiential Women, sex work is simply that, work. In 
a capitalist society most people are compelled to sell themselves to someone else and, 
short of ending the wage relation, the real questions are over the conditions in which one 
works and the degrees of autonomy and workplace control one has.

Echoing socialist-feminist analyses of intersections of exploitation and oppression, 
arguments that sex work objectifies women and reduces them to bodily characteristics is 
met with the response that similar reductions are suffered by construction and farm 
workers or anyone involved in manual labour.
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