By Jeff Shantz
State Repression columnist

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.