Why anti-john laws don’t work
Toronto Star, Wed Oct 19, 2011
"If Canada adopts the Swedish model, we can expect a disproportionately negative impact on street-based sex workers, the most vulnerable workers in the sex industry. Since the mid-1980s, street-based transactions have accounted for the lion’s share of prostitution-related charges in Canada. As many urban areas face the pressures of gentrification, street-based sex workers and their clients, homeless persons, and street-based drug users and sellers become common targets of police sweeps. “Not in my backyard” campaigns result in street-based sex workers and their clients being much more heavily policed than indoor sex workers. Criminalizing purchasers of sexual services would force street-based workers to continue to resort to furtive and isolated transactions with clients who are seeking to avoid arrest.
And herein lies the hypocrisy of the prohibitionist campaign. Advocates of “ending demand” claim the moral high ground by asserting that their efforts to eliminate commercial sex are motivated by a desire to end sexual exploitation and to protect women. But the evidence suggests that the Swedish approach in fact increases dangers for a significant proportion of these women."
Lisa M. Kelly, a Trudeau Scholar, is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and a Fellow in the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.
Katrina Pacey is litigation director at Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver and counsel in the constitutional challenge to prostitution laws currently underway in British Columbia.
