OPP Make Additions To "Serious Crimes" List

[Lou 9208]

Oui WrinkledinTime, I agree and expressed what your are saying in less eloquant words in my earlier post. Once the Court struck down the actual laws, it will be the legislative turn -but they wont be able to go against the Constitution and they can't neither leave this whole industry in a "juridique void" for ever. Plus, prostitution is not illegal.

 

The recent surveys I heard of also show that the population is in (weak but still) majority in favor of "legalisation" but not necessarily for the street girls. This is one more reason why the sex workers advocates and public health people should be consulted.

 

Do you believe sex work will be decriminalize before "assisted suicide - euthanasia" ?

 

Which one will be the last political taboo?

 

:)

[masterowls 249]

Lindsay,

Actually being a prostitute is not, and has as far as I know never been a crime in Canada. What is illegal are any of the activities associated with prostitution. Keeping a common bawdy house, solicitation, etc. etc. etc. believe it or not it's even illegal to call a woman and discuss paying for sex. Some obscure law involving using public communications to further a criminal enterprise. I studied it in my high school law class. What the criminal code does, is effectively make it impossible for a prostitute/sex worker to function within the law, without actually making prostitution itself a crime. The law was set up to make it as difficult as possible for men to legally legitimately hire a woman for sexual purposes. A state which I find absolutely ridiculous. Particularly since it is not cost effective to employ police manpower, Crown resources, and take up prison cells, to prosecute a crime that has been around likely since men walked on two legs.

Well the Ontario Provincial Police, and their municipal counterparts have added some new crimes to the umbrella of "serious crimes". Guess what is now considered as a "serious crime"? Yep, prostitution.

 

What does this mean for most of us? Nothing at all, really. Law enforcement are solely concerned with street girls, pimps, bawdy houses/brothels, and other indiscreet forms of an otherwise respectable vocation.

 

No need to get spooked by this, but there is an increasing need to make sure the lady/ladies you see are of good repute, and conduct their business with discretion.

 

Law enforcement seem to have a good understanding of the difference between an escort and a prostitute - the differences namely being class and discretion.

Posted via Mobile Device

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

... believe it or not it's even illegal to call a woman and discuss paying for sex. Some obscure law involving using public communications to further a criminal enterprise. I studied it in my high school law class...

 

Communicating for the purposes of prostitution is only illegal if it is done in public. Communicating in private is legal.

 

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a land based telephone is a private communication.

 

Part VI of the Criminal Code ("Invasion of Privacy") expressly states that its privacy provisions also apply to "radio-based telephone communications" (i.e. cell phones). Section 183 defines "private communication" for the purposes of Part VI:

"private communication" means any oral communication, or any telecommunication...

that is made under circumstances in which it is reasonable for the originator to expect that it will not be intercepted by any person other than the person intended by the originator to receive it

...

When one places a phone call from a private place, one has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Therefore, the communication is private, and legal.

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Peter McKnight for The Vancouver Sun, 14 Aug 2010:

 

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/places+prostitutes+danger/3398769/story.html

 

How our law places prostitutes in danger

 

A decades-old act that forced sex workers onto the mean streets has been exacerbated by a failure of political leadership

 

Calls for a Pickton inquiry are typically predicated on the notion that we lack knowledge -specifically, knowledge about the conditions that allowed a man to prey on vulnerable women with impunity. But what if we knew about those conditions for years and, in fact, created them? And what if it was a lack of will, rather than a lack of knowledge, that prevented us from changing those conditions?

 

There's good reason to believe this is the case, since Canada's prostitution laws have been placing street prostitutes in grave danger for a quarter of a century, and we have been well aware of that for many years. But as a brief review of prostitution laws demonstrates, successive governments have failed utterly to do anything to improve the situation.

 

Prostitution has never been illegal in Canada. From the Prohibition era until the 1970s, prostitution was attacked through vagrancy laws, which allowed police to arrest and charge women who were unable to account for their presence on the street.

 

Women's groups bridled at such laws, so in 1972 Parliament replaced the vagrancy law with one prohibiting soliciting for the purposes of prostitution in a public place. That soliciting was only prohibited if it occurred in a public place reveals the purpose of the law: It was not intended to protect prostitutes, but to protect the community from having to witness prostitution-related activity.

 

Nevertheless, Parliament also had enacted bawdy house laws that made it illegal to run or be found in a place used for prostitution. So the prostitution law was at war with itself: While prostitution remained legal, it was illegal to solicit in public, and illegal to occupy a private place used for prostitution.

 

After two high-profile murders in massage parlours in Vancouver and Toronto in the 1970s, police began enforcing the bawdy house laws in earnest. Consequently, many prostitutes were forced from the relatively safe employ of massage parlours and escort agencies into the streets, which raised the ire of many residents and business owners.

 

Yet police then found themselves unable to do anything about street prostitution. Courts had defined "soliciting" as being "pressing and persistent," which meant prostitutes couldn't be convicted for simply offering their services. The law therefore fell into disuse, and led to demands from the public that Parliament get tough on prostitution.

 

In December 1985, Parliament responded by enacting the communicating law. While prostitution remained legal, the law prohibited communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution. Like the soliciting law, it's clear that the law was designed, not to protect prostitutes, but to protect the community from the nuisance of prostitution.

 

Unlike its predecessor, though, the communicating law had teeth. Gone was the requirement that the communication be pressing and persistent, and the police responded enthusiastically by laying up to 10,000 charges a year across the country.

 

Despite this, studies commissioned by the Department of Justice revealed that the communicating law did little to curtail street prostitution, particularly in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto. But other studies found it did have an effect -a deadly one.

 

In 1996, Simon Fraser University criminologist John Lowman analyzed police statistics and reports from The Vancouver Sun and the Province to determine how many prostitutes had been murdered in B.C. in the previous half century.

 

He found that there were no prostitutes murdered between 1940 and 1972, almost the entire time the vagrancy law was in place. After the law prohibiting soliciting was enacted in 1972, a few murders occurred: One in 1975 and 12 between 1978 and 1984, for an average of about one a year.

 

The increase in the number of murders in the 1970s could have been a consequence of an increase in the number of street prostitutes as a result of the bawdy house raids.

 

It's well known that street prostitutes are in much greater danger than those who work in massage parlours or escort agencies, which means that by forcing prostitutes into the streets, the enforcement of the bawdy house laws might have directly contributed to their deaths.

 

In any case, when the communicating law was promulgated in 1985, things ran out of control. Four B.C. prostitutes were murdered in 1985, followed by 49 more between 1986 and 1995, which means prostitute murders rose to five a year from one. Nor do these numbers include all of the Downtown Eastside's missing women.

 

There have now been more than 100 prostitute murders, almost all of them street workers. And while this isn't proof that the communicating law is to blame, there is reason to believe that it created an environment that made the murders possible.

 

Since the law made it easier for police to arrest both prostitutes and their customers, prostitution was effectively displaced from residential or commercial neighbourhoods to barren, industrial areas where sex workers could not seek help if they were assaulted.

 

Furthermore, prostitutes had to divest themselves of the minimal self-protections they previously enjoyed. Street workers could no longer look out for each other, since by working in groups they could draw the attention of police and the public. They typically had little time to assess whether a new client was trustworthy before getting into his car.

 

The law also created an adversarial relationship with the police and other institutions that might have been able to help sex workers. Prostitutes ceased reporting bad dates -street slang for being assaulted on the job -- to police, for fear that they might be arrested. If a prostitute did file a report, she was often seen as untrustworthy -- recall the Crown's decision not to proceed with a 1997 case against Robert "Willie" Pickton because they feared the complainant would not make a credible witness. All of this meant, of course, that men who preyed on prostitutes could do so with impunity.

 

We have known all of these facts for more than a decade. Yet the former Liberal government did nothing to rectify the situation, other than strike a committee to investigate that issue. The committee produced its report in December 2006, and while it clearly recognized the problems with the law, it made no recommendations for law reform.

 

The Conservative record on the matter is even worse. Attorney-General Rob Nicholson originally stated that the government had no plans to change the prostitution laws, which is bad enough. But last week, the Conservatives changed regulations that will make it easier for police to crack down on bawdy houses. As in the 1970s, this will result in more prostitutes on the street, and in danger. Clearly, we don't learn from history.

 

Given this failure of leadership, prostitutes have taken to protecting themselves, and not just on the street. Two groups -one in Vancouver and one in Toronto -have challenged the constitutionality of the laws. The Vancouver case was dismissed for lack of standing, but a decision is expected in the Ontario case on Sept. 30.

 

Whatever happens, the matter will likely end up before the Supreme Court of Canada, which will be hard-pressed to uphold the law. Although the court did uphold the communicating law in 1990, it was not presented with the evidence of the damage it causes.

 

Despite this, the two female members of the court in 1990 -Bertha Wilson and Claire L'Heureux Dube -would have declared the law unconstitutional. And now, there is all the more reason to do so.

 

In any case, it is a sad thing when prostitutes must do the job of government in ensuring that the criminal law helps, rather than harms, our most vulnerable citizens. It also reveals that it is not our lack of knowledge of conditions, but our lack of willingness to make decisions, that has condemned so many prostitutes to death.

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Opinion by Jody Paterson in the Victoria Times Colonist, 27 Aug 2010:

 

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Jody+Paterson+Creating+prey+next+Pickton/3449559/story.html

Our sex-work laws kill people. We had a reminder of that last week, when Willie Pickton's murderous ways were news again. Only the streets can provide so many potential victims to a predator like him. Our ineffective and dangerous laws around sex work create those streets.

Last Friday, the Vancouver Police Department released the report that we all knew had to come, detailing the tragic inability of B.C.'s police forces to act on years of tips that women were being killed at Pickton's farm. I've watched our conflicted attitude around the sex industry for too long to be surprised by the public's muted response to that damning report.

 

We talk a good game about how much concern we have for the women Pickton and his ilk prey on. But our actions tell a different story every time. It's beyond ironic that even as the shameful story of B.C.'s missing women returns to the headlines, the federal government is introducing much tougher penalties that can only increase risks for sex workers.

 

We light candles for dead women without a moment's thought about the appalling working conditions that set them up as targets for murder. We lament the Pickton legacy without giving one hoot for the people we continue to banish to the fringes. The hypocrisy is unbearable sometimes.

 

I was working with sex workers at PEERS Victoria when Pickton was on trial. Media outlets from across Canada called me frequently to ask what I thought and whether anything was changing now that there had been so much publicity about the hard life of a street-entrenched sex worker.

 

How can anything change when our laws remain resolutely the same? Working alone outdoors in the middle of the night would be dangerous no matter what product is being sold. As long as we continue to deny adult sex workers a safer workplace and a place in our communities, nothing changes.

 

The federal government's recent decision to increase penalties for people convicted of keeping a common bawdy house will add significantly to the risks.

People convicted of operating a brothel will face a mandatory jail sentence of at least five years (compared to a maximum of two years under the previous law).

 

The Justice Department says the change is needed to fight organized crime. Unfortunately, the tougher penalties will also ensnare many independent sex workers and small business people operating thousands of escort agencies, massage parlours and bathhouses across Canada.

 

Perhaps there are still some people who believe that closing down brothels will eliminate the sex trade. I'm not one of them.

 

The commercial sex industry thrives in every country in the world, courtesy of a solid customer base and a strong profit motive. A crackdown on indoor venues won't stop prostitution, it will merely push sex workers deeper into the shadows and closer to the streets.

 

How is it that we can mourn the Pickton murders so eloquently, yet do nothing to address the real issues for sex workers?

 

We have erected monuments to murdered women. Lit a few thousand candles in their memory. Spent a small fortune on bringing Pickton to justice. But we haven't done a thing to reduce the risks for Canada's sex workers, who apparently hold our interest only when they're dead.

 

Our laws are as conflicted as we are. The sale of sex is legal in Canada but anywhere that it happens is by definition illegal, because a bawdy house is wherever a sex worker regularly conducts business. You can sell sex through a newspaper ad, but risk arrest if caught soliciting customers in a public place.

 

The last time our country's police forces cracked down hard on indoor sex venues was in the 1970s. The result was a notable rise in street prostitution and an even more notable increase in assaults and murders involving sex workers.

 

Can we possibly be here again? That would be the biggest tragedy of all -- to have learned nothing from the deaths and suffering of so many women and their families.

 

Not everybody shares my opinion on the sex trade, of course. But I think even the naysayers want laws that work. Our laws are useless in preventing the sale of sex, but frighteningly effective at increasing the misery and danger for those in the industry.

 

Canada has poorly considered laws, random enforcement and a strong undercurrent of moral judgment when it comes to sex work. It's a lethal combination.

 

More jail time for people with the audacity to want to work indoors certainly won't change that. Neither will tears and candlelight vigils.

 

Additional Comments:

Opinion by Antonia Zerbisias for The Star, 27 Aug 2010:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/853114--bawdy-politics-critics-say-new-regulation-endangers-sex-workers-lives

Bawdy Politics: Critics say new regulation endangers sex workers' lives

It's hard to picture Claire Jones in bed with organized crime.

The curvy sex worker, who has been plying her prodigious assets for seven years now, could one day face five years in jail if she works with other "girls'' at her luxury downtown condo.

And she does, at least sometimes.

New regulations announced earlier this month by Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, regulations aimed at strengthening "the ability of law enforcement to fight organized crime,'' put her at risk.

Enacted in the dead of summer without Parliamentary debate, the regulations give government the powers to wiretap, deny bail, and move in on people without the usual safeguards such as warrants.

They affect everything from illegal gaming operations to auto theft rings.

But what Jones worries about is that they also include "the keeping of a common bawdy house.''

That's defined in the Criminal Code of Canada as "a place that is kept or occupied, or resorted to by one or more persons, for the purpose of prostitution or the practice of acts of indecency."

As for what constitutes "organized crime,'' the law says all it takes is three or more people committing serious offences for financial benefit.

So, in the eyes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, a trio of prostitutes partying together with their "dates'' are tantamount to The Sopranos, and deserve the same treatment as gun runners or drug gangs. Instead of a maximum two-year term, sex workers could now face "at least five years'' in prison, have all their assets seized and their children taken away.

That despite how prostitution is not illegal in Canada.

What is illegal is keeping that common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living off the avails of the trade, which means that, for example, a sex worker putting her adult child through university is against the law, and would designate that child as a "pimp.''

What independent sex workers who do "in-calls'' are worried about is that the new regulations could push them into the streets, where it's both unclean and unsafe.

And anyway, do you want them on your corner?

Make no mistake. There are so-called bawdy houses all over Toronto.

Says Valerie Scott of Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC), "I laugh when people say they've never met a sex worker. Yes you have. You just don't know it. And if you live in a condominium building, there are one or two sex workers in there. You just don't know it."

All of which makes this new regulation absurd, says Scott, especially since there are many tough laws dealing with the very real problems of human trafficking, child exploitation plus other crimes associated with organized crime.

The new regulations should leave the consenting adult sex workers ? small business operators, in essence?alone.

"Lumping us under organized crime and giving us a five-year prison sentence for working indoors, in safe clean environments, is ridiculous,'' says Jones, which, of course, is not her real name. "We're not trafficking in drugs, we're not trafficking in people, we're providing a service.''

But, to the minority Conservative government, it's all part of law-and-order agenda which includes a $9 billion investment in new prisons.

0"This government engages a lot in symbolic politics,'' says lawyer Alan Young, who has been fighting a constitutional challenge on behalf of Ontario members of SPOC, arguing that the current laws put prostitutes at risk. "There are some things the Conservatives do that actually have a dramatic impact on the criminal justice system ? and they may be negative ? but there are a lot of things they do that have very little impact. They simply are being done to send messages that we are the tough old boys from a different moral era.''

Still, the government pushes on with its crusading, crime-fighting image.

[northerntantra 4671]

The ridiculous part of the concern over organized crime is that its law enforcement that creates organized crime. If an activity is illegal then the value of that activity goes up, and it becomes lucrative to run those business creating organized crime. Tough regulations force those engaged in that activity to organize. Prohibition of drugs and alcohol for example created the mafia in the form we know today. For gambling, governments have realized that the best way to combat the involvement of organized crime is to legalize it and regulate it.

This is like concluding that because cities that have the most fires also have the most firefighters, then firefighters must cause fires. Correlation doesn't always imply causation.

 

In this case, I would agree that there may be some indirect causation between policing and organized crime, but the root cause of organized crime is the desire for criminals to get richer while remaining safe from external threats, including police but also including rival criminals. To lay the blame for organized crime entirely at the feet of law enforcement is to suggest that in the absence of law enforcement there would be no organized crime. That, I think, can be proven untrue.

 

I think the justification for having special laws that specifically target organized crime is related to the fact that sometimes organized crime is a response to law enforcement's measures to curtail crime. It is a type of escalation, by the criminals, and as such needs to be treated more harshly than the crime itself. The reasoning is similar to that used to justify banning radar detectors or making resisting arrest or assaulting a police officer serious offenses.

 

Eliminating the laws against organized crime might reduce it, but wouldn't likely eliminate it. It might even flourish once law enforcement (and the courts) have fewer tools to combat it.

[nntsci 11076]

I didn't suggest eliminating laws against organized crime, I said legalizing and regulating the activity that organize crime uses to make money such as gambling, prostitution, alcohol distribution and drug distribution, takes that market away from them. They no longer make money from alcohol and have been pushed out of most forms of gambling.

 

There is a literature on this topic in economics (forensic economics). I'll see if I can paste a few references for you when I get a chance.

[northerntantra 4671]

Nntsci, I do get your point. And I agree that laws against gambling, prostitution, etc. tend to encourage criminals to organize in order to subvert those laws. I just don't agree that these laws cause organized crime.

 

Note also that we're actually talking about two different sets of laws here. There's the set of laws prohibiting certain activities (like gambling), and then there's the set of laws targeting criminal organization. I agree that substituting regulation for prohibitive laws can lead to a reduction in organized crime. It doesn't necessarily lead to a reduction in the behaviors being prohibited -- just shifts the profits from criminals to licensed purveyors (often government). Whether one considers that an improvement or not may depend on your moral stance on the activity being regulated.

 

Personally, I think government's job is to protect it's citizens from each other, but not from themselves. Unfortunately, excessive drinking, gambling or whatever often leads to dangerous consequences to others. So as a society we feel compelled to either prohibit or regulate the activity. It just vexes me to see government profit from their regulation of an activity at the expense of private enterprise. Alcohol sales in Ontario being the classic example. If alcohol consumption is considered morally reprehensible, as it was in the US during Prohibition, then government has no business being a purveyor, let alone the sole purveyor. If it's not morally reprehensible, then why can't private enterprise engage in a legal activity?

 

In other words, prohibition and regulation are both imperfect solutions to the problem of crime associated with high risk activities that are easily manipulated for criminal profit.

[Bick 120]

I'm sure someone has mentioned this before "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation".

Pierre Trudeau

He was not too popular here in Alberta for other reasons, but I'll agree with him on this one!

[Cyndall_Kent 6880]

Thanks for making this post. Reading through the threads and comments I've found a lot of information that is new to me, and I do love to learn new things.

[Junkmail 110]

I have always advocated for legal status of prostitution and throwing out the bawdy house laws. A significant number on here disagreed and said that things are fine the way they are. The trouble of not having a recognized legal status is that when the winds of politics change, sex workers become collateral damage. Here is a perfect example of that. In some more tolerant jurisdictions, life will carry on as normal, but I expect that some of the more conservative provicial and municipal governments will use this opportunity to crack down on the more visible sex workers in order to garner suport among the more conservative factions of society, seeing as this is the way the wind of change is currently blowing.

It's about Harper legislating his morality.