New ads fighting sex worker exploitation during Grand Prix harmful: advocate
Posted June 12, 2022 7:00 am.
Last Updated June 12, 2022 6:33 pm.
After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Canadian Grand Prix returns June 19 in Montreal, with festivities beginning Thursday.
La Concertation des luttes contre l’exploitation sexuelle (CLES) is releasing advertisements said to raise awareness against sexual exploitation. One says, “Paying for sex is illegal in Canada.”
(CREDIT: CLES)
Sex workers and those who represent them say it’s not the right messaging.
Sandra Wesley, director of a Montreal advocacy group for sex workers, Chez Stella, explains why.
What was your initial reaction when you saw the ads? What message are these ads sending out?
These ads are sending actually a very violent message. What what they’re saying is that they want all of our clients to be arrested. And what they want is more police in our lives. They want to send the police to arrest our clients. And obviously, sex workers become responsible for this. When our clients are targeted by ads, by police, it becomes our responsibility as sex workers to make it safe for them. So this means that they will not comply with any screening procedure. Clients will not be giving us their legal name or even sometimes their phone number if they know that we might be a cop, we might, they might get arrested, they might be under surveillance. They won’t agree to negotiate fully about what services we offer, what protection we’re using, what price we’re charging before actually meeting up with us. So all of that creates a climate of violence and danger for sex workers.
What would you have preferred to see or think should be done?
So for us, obviously, we need decriminalization of sex work. The fact that – the ad is true, it is illegal to buy sex in Canada – it’s actually illegal to communicate in any way with a sex worker for the purpose of buying sex. So that is the state of the law in Canada. And I think the public doesn’t necessarily know this. People think that sex workers are somehow decriminalized. They think that something has been done to protect us. But it’s the opposite.
The government has no business telling people, especially women, what we can do with our bodies, and they have no business preventing us from accepting money in exchange for sexual services.
What more needs to be done to protect sex workers when it comes to international events like the Grand Prix, where the city is filled with tourists?
Tourists are not usually necessarily problematic clients and there is no actual increase in sex work during the Grand Prix or any other event. So we need to acknowledge that fact and that reality, that sex work happens all the time throughout the year.
Sex workers have bills to pay 12 months out of the year. So there’s nothing special about summer as some sex workers will make more money, some will make less money. But the common factor that is harming all sex workers during the Grand Prix is the police repression. We need to end this. There is no increased safety from police in our lives. There’s only decreased safety. So we need to give sex workers rights. We need to have access to employment standards, to occupational health and safety, to all of the other rights that other workers have in our society. And in order to do that, we need to remove sex work from the Criminal Code and view it as labor and have laws that reflect that.
