Risky Business

[Guest N***he**Ont**y]

Risky business

 

By Sebastien Perth

Thursday, April 25, 2013 6:07:58 EDT AM

 

 

 

Sex trade workers shared their stories at the conference, Building Inclusive Communities with Sex Workers. (Supplied photo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jayelle was 15 when she first started working in the sex trade. She started out while skipping school, but has kept working ever since.

Now 33, Jayelle has worked all over the country, except for the Maritimes and Vancouver.

She says for the most part, the work has gone all right, except for the one time someone pulled a gun on her and she had to jump through a window to escape.

"We (sex-trade workers) talk to each other about who to watch out for," says Jayelle, who shared her experiences at a Sudbury conference earlier this month. "If I'm working on the street and I encounter someone who is doing something a little creepy or inappropriate or violent, I'll call the police or report it.

"If I can get their licence plate number and I'm nervous, I'll text that plate number to a friend, just in case."

Jayelle says she now warns some of the young girls working the street. "I try to keep people safe, especially when I see young girls on the street. I see these young girls and they ask me questions, if I'm working.

"I tell them it might look like fun now, but 20 years down the road it'll look a lot different."

Jayelle was one of several sex-trade workers who shared their stories at the conference, Building Inclusive Communities with Sex Workers.

The event was organized by Tracy Gregory, sex trade peer development co-ordinator at Access AIDS Network. It was intended to be a learning experience for ever yone attending, but also a chance for those involved in the sex trade to share their stories with people who may not otherwise hear them.

Greater Sudbury Police officers, health-care workers, nursing students and more attended the conference, seeking input on the best ways to communicate with, and provide services to, people in the sex trade.

In hearing stories like Jayelle's, Gregory says she hoped conference-goers would shed some of the stigmas associated with the industry.

Jayelle admits that she does work in prostitution to support a drug habit, but that's also one misconception of people in her line of work.

"I'm an avid drug user and avid sex trade worker," Jayelle says. "A lot of people think that most prostitutes are on drugs, but that's not the reality. A lot of them are working to support their family, their children. Not everybody is on drugs."

Both Gregory and Jayelle say Canada's prostitution laws are putting lives at risk and stigmatizing people.

With a decision by the Supreme Court of Ontario to strike down two prostitutionrelated laws, Gergory says there is potential to address some of those issues.

"With the laws being the way they are now, women and men working are at risk of losing their homes or housing because landlords are evicting them if they are found to be charged with any prostitutionrelated charges," Gregory says. "Landlords don't want it coming back on them as living off the avails of prostitution or (as a) bawdy house.

"For example, nine women were arrested in the summer of 2012 in Sault Ste. Marie. Their names, addresses and charges were listed in the paper and online. So now those women are automatically more at risk of a number of things -- like losing their housing because landlords now know they have been charged with these crimes.

"So now they potentially lose their housing based on these alleged crimes. But they are now also branded and stigmatized for the rest of their lives. They are at risk of having people show up at their doors. So there's a number of problems with that."

In the end, she says the conference was a great success, bringing different groups together to learn.

"It was really awesome to see our community come together. We had people from our police force, from Laurentian University, people from Toronto, Timmins and the Sault that came to hear the conference.

" There was a really good showing of people that came to listen to the talk and really recognized this was a gift that sex-trade workers were coming in and sharing their experience, lived and educational. All to better understand how to work with sex-trade workers. It was a fantastic experience."