But most prostituted women will pay the price

Op-Ed by Suzanne Baustad

Vancouver |   The most conservative Supreme Court we’ve seen in decades has decided to decriminalize prostitution, striking down all laws against keeping a brothel, living on the avails of prostitution (pimping), and street soliciting. The most reactionary government we’ve had in decades has been given a year to rewrite the law that will have huge implications for all working class women in Canada, whether or not we’ve ever turned a trick.  It is a clear victory to finally have prostituted women decriminalized, but the Court has opened the door to framing prostitution as ‘entrepreneurship’, the new social safety net for working class and poor women.   I suspect Kim Pate, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies may be right when she said of today’s decision “Our daughters and granddaughters will look back and say ‘What were they thinking?’”

All the commentators I heard speak to the decision this past Friday morning celebrated the fact that ‘prostitutes’ have been decriminalized.  Too true: they should never have been criminalized to begin with! But few highlight the fact that the Supreme Court just decriminalized johns and pimps and deregulated this capitalist and colonialist industry which functions most basically in the interests of pimps and johns. The safety of prostituted women has been used (disingenuously) over and over to mask the fact that what is really happening here is the unleashing of an industry no longer fettered by sanctions on those who buy and profit from the selling of women’s bodies.  It’s a weird analogy but I can’t help but think of the asbestos industry – another industry known to be harmful to its ‘workers’.  We didn’t argue to support that industry in order to ‘protect’ the workers.  We shut it down and provided support to the workers to transition to another way of making a living.

Why the opposite approach when it is the most marginalized women facing harm?  Why is the legal infrastructure for a Canadian sex industry emerging now at a time when working class, migrant and Indigenous women are increasingly displaced by Canadian colonialism and imperialism, and hit on all sides by neoliberalism?  Outside of abolitionist circles – see for example, Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry – the silence around what the sex industry stands to gain from the Supreme Court decision is deafening, even among those who should know better and among those who should have been told what was being argued in that courtroom in their name.  I live and work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.  A prostituted woman I know who works doing orientations for Sex Workers United Against Violence – one of the key appellants to the Supreme Court case – and she was shocked and appalled when I told her that SWUAV was fighting to have johns and pimps decriminalized.  So much for ‘nothing about us, without us’.

As with any capitalist industry there will be regulation, deregulation (and lack of enforcement), a flurry of competition, followed by the inevitable monopolization.  As we’ve seen in Germany, New Zealand, Netherlands and other countries where decriminalization has occurred, this process will not be pretty, the industry will expand and become even more entrenched, and women will not be safer.  Just check out what’s happening in New Zealand: mega brothels integrated into the entertainment industry including a 15-storey super-brothel, across the street from the country’s largest casino and conference centre development in Auckland. By 2017 it will also house a convention centre catering for up to 3500 guests and will employ 400 prostitutes. Think: a Walmart for johns.

The decriminalized sex industry is being presented as yet another neoliberal solution to the problems created by structural inequalities under patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism.

As demand increases, so does the need for a greater supply of women’s bodies, but with no ‘worker protection’ for the workers in this industry – wishful thinking under neoliberalism. The most recent review of New Zealand’s prostitution laws (read beyond the boosterish executive summary) shows no effective regulation of brothels – no enforceable employment standards, no enforcement of occupational safety regulations, no union formation, while women are not any more likely to report the still ongoing violence to the police.

This report is noteworthy as it excludes non-English speaking sex workers.  Yet Asian and Maori/ Pasifika women make up a very significant part of the trade, and are concentrated in the street trade and the most exploitative brothels. By factoring out the experience of some of the most marginalized in the trade, the report creates a rosier picture of the trade than is warranted – and underestimates the size of the illegal sector given that non-New Zealander sex trade workers remain criminalized.

Canada’s Supreme Court decision will decriminalize all johns and pimps but not even all ‘sex workers’ will be decriminalized. We know that there will be a distinction made between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prostitutes with the ‘good’ ones hidden away in brothels out of sight of property owners.  The ‘bad’ prostitutes will be those at the bottom of the prostitution hierarchy who remain on the streets.  In New Zealand, street-based workers have not moved indoors, for the same reasons they did not work in massage parlours and escort agencies prior to decriminalization, and continue to face high levels of violence – including the murder of two street workers by their johns after decriminalization.

In fact, the Prostitution Review report mentioned above concludes the situation is so dismal for street-based workers that they should simply get off the street.  In New Zealand this amounts to a bit of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ as there is not one dedicated exit program for street workers and, as in Canada, almost three decades of neoliberal fundamentalism has stripped social programs to the bone for all working class women living in poverty.  But for those who ‘choose’ to remain on the street, the report holds out the promise of a bit of street lighting and maybe a bit more cordial relations with the cops – who continue to harass street workers, not under criminal law sanctions but through municipal bylaws which are already happening here, as do resident groups and brothel owners fearing ‘unfair competition’.

The other ‘bad prostitutes’ who will likely continue to face sanctions in Canada’s post-Bedford sex industry will be migrant women. We know that the vast majority of women in decriminalized prostitution regimes are not ‘locals’ but women from those areas of the world ravaged by colonialism and imperialism. In New Zealand, the Prostitution Reform Act made it illegal for non-citizens or non-permanent residents to sell sex.  In fact, in all decriminalized regimes, these women are still criminalized, still in the illegal markets, which flourish alongside legalized prostitution.

Decriminalization will mean some, certainly not all, prostituted women will escape the carceral state; but many more women will be left to fend for themselves in a violent and intensely exploitative sex industry where johns will become “clients”, and pimps “entrepreneurs in the adult entertainment industry”.  Supplying this market are women’s bodies, objectified and made into a commodity.  Commodification under capitalism is not a feeling and women do not escape the process of commodification by claiming to ‘choose’ to sell sex or simply provide a service, a claim made by a tiny vocal minority at the top of the class and race hierarchy of prostitution. As one prostitution survivor aptly responded to the claim that prostitution is no better or worse than flipping burgers at McDonalds: “In McDonalds, you’re not the meat.  In prostitution you are the meat.”

So exactly whose daughters, sisters, mothers, and aunts will supply the Canadian sex industry demand in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, in Vancouver’s entertainment zones, or along BC’s pipeline construction routes? Just look at the racist and colonialist back pages of the Georgia Straight or Toronto’s NOW magazine. All working class women and especially non-citizen women and Indigenous women will be the ones who bear the costs of this Supreme Court decision.

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