Osgoode Hall and Alan Young's Constitutional Challenge of Canada's Prostitution Laws

"Unsafe" Canada prostitution law to be challenged

2007-07-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Spicer
Reuters

Monday, July 09, 2007

TORONTO (Reuters) - As grisly details emerge in a sensational case involving the serial killing of Canadian prostitutes, a group of lawyers is launching a constitutional challenge of the country's prostitution law, seeking to decriminalize the practice to make it safer.

"We call it the world's oldest profession for a reason. It's time to get out of the world of political denial and take care of these people," said Toronto law professor Alan Young, who leads the challenge.

Under the convoluted Canadian law, buying or selling sex is legal, but it is illegal to communicate about it beforehand, live off its avails, or run a private bawdy house.

The group of lawyers and law students -- representing three current and former prostitutes -- will argue in Ontario Superior Court, likely in August, that these three provisions are unconstitutional in that they endanger the lives of sex trade workers.

If you can't talk with a prospective client before entering the client's vehicle, "how do you expect someone on the street to screen a client to know whether it's Robert Pickton or not?" Young said in an interview.

He is referring to the trial of Robert "Willie" Pickton, who has been charged with killing 26 of more than 60 prostitutes who disappeared from the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia, from the early 1990s until 2001. It is the worst serial killing case in Canadian history and includes allegations that Pickton, a pig farmer, butchered his victims.

Young, who has launched similar challenges to Canada's marijuana laws, said the Pickton trial ensures "maximum political mileage."

A scheduling judge will hear preliminary cases this week in the first step of what Young expects to be a legal process that will eventually end at the Supreme Court of Canada. It is unclear how the government will respond to the challenge.

If the challenge is successful in striking down portions of the law, it would decriminalize the practice until new legislation is introduced.

That could bring Canadian law more in line with countries such as Australia, Germany and the Netherlands, where the business and act of prostitution are legal. The United States has a patchwork of laws dealing with prostitution that differs among states, but the practice is generally illegal.

Between 1991 and 2005, there were 116 work-related killings of prostitutes in Canada. Forty-three occurred in the last four years for which statistics are available.

"We've been seeing an escalating murder rate for a couple decades now..." Young said.

"The bigger problem is everyday violence because people have nonsecure settings and no personnel to work with."
© Reuters 2007

RESPONSE

I feel compelled to respond to your article concerning Alan Young’s constitutional challenge of Canada’s current sex laws. I have a particular concern with Young et al’s goal of decriminalizing Section 210 of the Criminal Code, regarding the bawdy house laws.

There is a serious lack of evidence that decriminalizing indoor sex work creates a safer environment for prostituted women. There IS evidence that the sex industry has flourished in countries where brothels have been decriminalized and that this has lead to an increase of human trafficking and child exploitation in those countries. It has also further victimized vulnerable women working for survival who do not fit the mould of a brothel.

It is reprehensible when the deaths of the missing women in Vancouver and Edmonton are used as leverage to defend the decriminalization of brothels. Brothels would be very unlikely to serve survival prostituted women. As has happened in other countries where brothels have been decriminalized, women such as these have been pushed into the illegal underground, have been further criminalized and/or have found themselves in more dangerous working situations than before.

The decriminalization of brothels stands to benefit those in the upper echelons of prostituted women who work indoors. It does not stand to benefit many of the women who find themselves working the dark alleys and streets of the industrial Downtown Eastside.

I would disagree with Young that an activity is deemed acceptable because it is “the world’s oldest profession.” Certainly enslaving humans is a practice that goes as far back in history as prostituting them does, but I would never dream of decriminalizing slavery because of it’s longevity in human history!

With Young, I agree that it is time to “take care of these people,” take care of them by: supporting and funding education and employment strategies for marginalized women, providing more female-specific de-tox beds, facilitating affordable housing, funding long-term comprehensive exit programs and implementing preventative education campaigns. I would disagree that taking care of prostituted persons entails proliferating the sex industry, in particular by decriminalizing brothels. We can do better than that.

Bawdy house battle

2007-03-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

Paula Todd, host of CTV’s “The Verdict”, interviewed York law student Ehsan Ghebrai (BA ’05) who is part of the legal team mounting the Safe Haven challenge of three provisions in Canada’s criminal law dealing with prostitution. Ghebrai told Todd: "What we're really saying with this challenge is that there is Section 7 violation of the charter, right to life, liberty and security of the person, because you're taking away those things by forcing women out into the streets in vulnerable positions, and taking away their support.

* When governments are too cowardly to repeal bad laws, the courts inevitably step in, wrote columnist Mindelle Jacobs in The Toronto Sun March 23. Just as judges forced change on the medical marijuana issue, they will hopefully repeal our terrible prostitution laws. Still, the government is too lead-footed to act. So, Alan Young, criminal law professor at York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, and three former sex-trade workers have launched a constitutional challenge to quash the laws against bawdy houses, communicating for the purpose of prostitution and living on the avails.

Just to be clear, Young doesn’t want to strike down the pimping provisions that deal with procuring, exploitation and control, wrote Jacobs. He just wants the section that bans living on the avails of prostitution repealed. Young would like to see the current laws overturned so the provinces and municipalities can step in and regulate what will, hopefully, be a legal activity. “You have murder on one side of the ledger and a big question mark on the government side,” he says. “I’m not saying [the Robert Pickton murder case] wouldn’t happen if these provisions were repealed. But you have to give a sex-trade worker on the street who is exposed to violence...legal options. And there are no legal options.”

* The Edmonton Sun also carried a story on the Safe Haven initiative March 22.

Y-File
http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Article=8163

Sex workers challenge Canada's prostitution laws

2007-03-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

Wed. Mar. 21 2007 7:20 PM ET
Canadian Press

TORONTO — Canada's prostitution laws place the lives of thousands of women working in a legal trade in grave danger, amounting to a form of "urban genocide," a group of sex-trade workers and advocates said Wednesday.

The Safe Haven Initiative, led by Osgoode Hall law professor Alan Young and a volunteer group of law students, is launching a constitutional challenge to strike down laws against bawdy houses, communicating for the purpose of prostitution and living on the avails of prostitution.

While there is no wording in the Criminal Code specifically outlawing prostitution, nearly all aspects of a transaction - including hiring a prostitute, scouting potential customers and making money from sex - are made illegal by those three provisions.

Young said because those laws make it illegal for prostitutes to work in their own homes or hire a bodyguard for protection, women are deprived of their right to liberty and security - a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"There is nothing inherently dangerous about prostitution," said former prostitute Valerie Scott, who is executive director of Sex Professionals of Canada, an advocacy group for sex workers.

"What makes it so dangerous is the way it is currently set up in this country. It's the way the laws force us to operate in totally unsafe conditions."

The situation is so dire that the laws amount to an "official death penalty" for prostitutes, Scott said.

Lawmakers and the general public must remember that prostitutes are human beings who should have equal rights under Canadian law, she said.

"So what if most of these women are drug-addicted street girls?" Scott said. "They are A, human, and B, Canadian.

"We are humans. We are part of the community. We don't come in on a shuttle from Mars every night and leave before sunrise."

Young said he felt compelled to launch the challenge and stand up for those women's rights after watching media coverage of the investigation into the disappearances of more than 60 women - mostly sex-trade workers - from Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside.

"As the body count was mounting, I thought, 'Somebody has to do something to stop this urban genocide,"' Young said.

The Vancouver case is an extreme example of the brutal violence often faced by prostitutes, he said, but it highlights a problem that goes much deeper.

"The reality is threats, violence and assault define the daily existence of people who work on the street in the sex trade," Young said.

The Vancouver investigation culminated in the arrest of pig farmer Robert Pickton, who was charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder and is currently on trial for six of those counts.

An Edmonton-area man is also standing trial for the killings of two prostitutes. His charges stem from Project Kare in Alberta, which looked into the disappearances of almost 80 people, many of them women in the sex trade.

Prostitution activist Sue Davis said she believes changes to the laws could have saved the lives of many murdered prostitutes.

"They target the most vulnerable of sex workers, the visible trade," she said.

"It is driving them into more and more isolated areas and making them work in more and more dangerous conditions."

A 2006 Statistics Canada report found that 171 female prostitutes were murdered between 1991 and 2004, and that 45 per cent of those cases went unsolved.

A House of Commons sub-committee concluded in December 2006 that the number of reported homicides among sex workers is "almost certainly lower than the real figures."

But after hearing testimony from more than 300 witnesses, MPs from the various parties on the sub-committee couldn't agree on legislative changes to the prostitution laws.