Portal:Prostitution in Canada
Portal maintenance status: (October 2018)
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Introduction
Current laws on sex work, introduced by the Conservative government in 2014, make it illegal to purchase sexual services, illegal to advertise, illegal to live on the material benefits from sex work, and in some cases illegal to sell sex in public areas. It is the first time in Canadian history that the exchange of sexual services for money is made illegal. The Canadian Department of Justice, claims that the new legal framework "reflects a significant paradigm shift away from the treatment of prostitution as 'nuisance', as found by the Supreme Court of Canada in Bedford, toward treatment of prostitution as a form of sexual exploitation that disproportionately and negatively impacts on women and girls". Many sex workers' rights organizations, however, argue that the new law entrenches and maintains harm against sex workers since sex workers are still committing a crime, albeit there is an immunity from arrest for material benefits and advertising.
The new laws came in response to the Canada (AG) v Bedford ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, which found to be unconstitutional the laws prohibiting brothels, public communication for the purpose of prostitution and living on the profits of prostitution. The ruling gave the Canadian parliament 12 months to rewrite the prostitution laws with a stay of effect so that the current laws remain in force. Amending legislation came into effect on December 6th 2014, which made the purchase of sexual services illegal.
Selected general articles
- Timea Nagy (born 1977) is a Canadian activist who has spoken on behalf of victims of human trafficking. She founded Walk With Me, a Toronto-based organization that aids survivors of trafficking. Nagy was featured in an anti-trafficking campaign by the Salvation Army in 2009. Her activism has drawn upon her own experience of forced prostitution in Canada. Read more...
- Bridget Perrier (born 1977) is an activist and former prostituted woman who cofounded Sex Trade 101 with Natasha Falle. She became a child prostitute at the age of 12 while she was staying at a group home and an older girl there persuaded her to become a runaway in order to sell sex to a pedophile named Charlie. She had a son, Tanner, who developed cancer as an infant and died at the age of five with the dying wish that his mother get out of the sex industry. In 2000, she moved to Toronto from Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. She is the stepmother of Angel, whose biological mother was Brenda Wolfe, one of Robert Pickton's murder victims. In 2009, Perrier accompanied Angel at Toronto's Native Women's Resource Centre for the Sisters in Spirit vigil in remembrance of Wolfe and the other more than 500 Canadian Aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing over the past 30 years. In 2010, Perrier picketed a courthouse in downtown Toronto in recognition of International Day of No Prostitution. She was joined by Trisha Baptie, Natasha Falle, Katarina MacLeod, and Christine Barkhouse, all former human trafficking victims. In 2012, after being removed from a news conference relating to Bedford v. Canada, Perrier demonstrated a pimp stick to the media, saying that she had been battered with a pimp stick by her pimp every day that he prostituted her. Perrier opposed the legalization of brothels as proposed in Bedford v. Canada, saying, "Having a legal bawdy house is not going to make it any safer. You are still going to attract serial killers, rapists, perverts." Bridget shared her story in the ground breaking article by Dr. Vincent J. Felitti in Cancer InCytes magazine (Volume 2, Issue 1) about how childhood trauma is associated with chronic diseases during adulthood, and how child trafficking will eventually worsen the economic burden on civil governance. Read more...
- The history of prostitution in Canada is based on the fact that Canada inherited its criminal laws from England. The first recorded laws dealing with prostitution were in Nova Scotia in 1759, although as early as 19 Aug 1675 the Sovereign Council of New France convicted Catherine Guichelin, one of the King's Daughters, with leading a "life scandalous and dishonest to the public", declared her a prostitute and banished her from the walls of Quebec City under threat of the whip. Following Canadian Confederation, the laws were consolidated in the Criminal Code. These dealt principally with pimping, procuring, operating brothels and soliciting. Most amendments to date have dealt with the latter, originally classified as a vagrancy offence, this was amended to soliciting in 1972, and communicating in 1985. Since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms became law, the constitutionality of Canada's prostitution laws have been challenged on a number of occasions. Read more...
Nina Arsenault (born January 20, 1974) is a Canadian performance artist, freelance writer, and former sex trade worker who works in theatre, dance, video, photography and visual art. Read more...- Wendy Babcock (May 29, 1979 – August 9, 2011) was a Canadian activist for the rights of sex workers. Born in the city of Toronto, Babcock became a sex worker at the age of 15. From 2004 to 2007 she was a key member of Sex Professionals of Canada, an advocacy group whose main objective is to promote the rights of sex workers and the decriminalization of sex work in Canada.
Babcock was found dead at her home on August 9, 2011; foul play was not suspected. At the time of her death, she was at work on a memoir, to be released in 2013 to coincide with her graduation from law school. Read more...
Raymond Gravel (November 4, 1952 – August 11, 2014) was a Catholic priest from the Canadian province of Quebec, who was formerly the Member of Parliament for the riding of Repentigny, as a member of the Bloc Québécois. He was elected to the House of Commons in a November 27, 2006 by-election following the death of Benoît Sauvageau.
As a young man Gravel worked in bars in Montreal's Gay Village; he has been open about the fact that he was a sex-trade worker during that time. He entered the seminary in 1982 and became a priest. Gravel is controversial among the Catholic clergy and laity for his support of abortion rights, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, three issues officially opposed by the Church. He was most recently a priest at St-Joachim de la Plaine Church in La Plaine, Quebec. Read more...- Ratanak International (previously The Ratanak Foundation) is a Christian charity founded by Brian McConaghy in 1989 that works exclusively in Cambodia helping the country rebuild after decades of revolution, civil war and genocide. Ratanak, which means 'precious gem' in Khmer, was an 11-month-old Cambodian baby that Brian McConaghy watched die as a result of a basic lack of medicine in a documentary he was shown in 1989. Since 1990 Ratanak has been working in Cambodia to help prevent such needless deaths. To help rebuild Cambodian society which the Khmer Rouge effectively dismantled in the 1970s, Ratanak has partnered on projects that have built schools, clinics and hospitals, opened orphanages, provided shelters for the elderly and AIDS victims, and initiated emergency programs in response to natural and man made disasters. In 2004, these projects plus many more continued, but the work of Ratanak also took on a whole new dimension as it begin partnering on projects that rescue, rehabilitate and reintegrate children sold into sexual slavery.
Based on the forensic and investigational experience of its founder, Brian McConaghy, Ratanak has become involved in assisting Canadian Law Enforcement in the investigation of Canadian pedophiles within Cambodia and providing rehabilitation services to their victims. Read more... - Paying for It, "a comic strip memoir about being a john", is a 2011 graphic novel by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. A combination of memoir and polemic, the book explores Brown's decision to give up on romantic love and to take up the life of a "john" by frequenting prostitutes. The book, published by Drawn and Quarterly, was controversial, and a bestseller.
The book is concerned with Brown's conflicting desire to have sex, but not wanting to have another girlfriend after his partner Sook-Yin Lee breaks up with him. His solution is to forgo traditional boyfriend/girlfriend relationships and marriage. He takes up frequenting prostitutes, and comes to advocate prostitution as superior and to "possessive monogamy" of traditional male–female relations, which he debates with his friends throughout the book. Read more...
Natasha Falle (born 1973) is a Canadian professor at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada who was forcibly prostituted from the ages of 15 to 27 and now opposes prostitution in Canada. Falle grew up in a middle-class home and, when her parents divorced, her new single-parent home became unsafe, and Falle ran away from home. At the age of 15, Falle became involved in the sex industry in Calgary, Alberta.
Falle's pimp kept her falsely imprisoned and trafficked her across the country. He married her and tortured her, breaking several of her bones and burning her body. In order to cope with the trauma of prostitution and violence, Falle became dependent on cocaine and almost died. Eventually, she got out of prostitution and, with her mother's support, went through drug rehabilitation, finished high school, and eventually received a diploma in Wife Assault and Child Advocacy from George Brown College. Read more...- Pivot Legal Society is a legal advocacy organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia's Downtown Eastside. Founded in 2000, Pivot's stated aim is to represent and defend the marginalized and disenfranchised. Read more...
- The Café Cléopâtre on Saint-Laurent Boulevard.
The Red-Light District (French: Quartier du Red Light) of Montreal, Quebec, Canada was formerly centred on the intersection of Saint Laurent Boulevard and Saint Catherine Street in the borough of Ville-Marie.
The neighbourhood has historically been home to cabarets and illegal businesses as early as the mid-nineteenth century, but especially between 1925 and early 1960s. The term Red Light recalls the old lantern on the doors of brothels. Gambling, illicit taverns and prostitution have marked the history of this area, also related to Prohibition in the United States and Montreal's status as a port-city. Today, there are still traces of this type of activity, but it is much more discreet. Read more... - is a ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada relating to Canada's laws relating to sex work. The applicants, Terri-Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott, argued that Canada's prostitution laws were unconstitutional. The Criminal Code includes a number of provisions, such as outlawing public communication for the purposes of prostitution, operating a bawdy house or living off of the avails of prostitution, even though prostitution itself is legal.
The applicants argued that the laws deprive sex workers of their right to security by forcing them to work secretly. In 2012, the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled that some, but not all, of these prohibitions violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a 9-0 decision on December 20, 2013 that all of these laws are unconstitutional; although, it delayed the striking down of the laws by one year to allow Parliament to update the laws in accordance with the ruling. Read more... - Trisha Baptie (born 1973) is a Vancouver-based citizen journalist and activist for the abolition of prostitution. Read more...
- Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC) is a Canadian activism group. SPOC was formed in 1983 and campaigns through public education and legal challenges to decriminalize Canadian prostitution laws. Read more...
- Jessica Edith Louise (Jessie) Foster (born May 27, 1984), is a Canadian woman who disappeared in the Las Vegas Valley in Nevada, United States, in 2006. Her parents are Glendene Grant and Dwight Foster. Jessie had spent some time living in Calgary, Alberta. In 2005, Jessie and a friend of hers visited Florida together, and then stopped by Las Vegas on the way back in May where Jessie decided to stay. Before disappearing the following year, Jessie became involved in prostitution, was arrested once for solicitation, and was the victim of battery on several occasions. Read more...
- Cheryl Perera is a Canadian children's rights activist. As a teenager, she founded OneChild, a non-governmental organization which seeks to eliminate the commercial sexual exploitation of children abroad. For her work, and in particular her achievements at a young age, Perera has received several accolades. Read more...
- The Servants Anonymous Society (SAS) is a nonprofit women's organization that provides aid to young women in exiting the sex industry, achieving sobriety, and avoiding sexual slavery. SAS offers life skills-based education to these women and safe houses for them to live in. One of the skills taught by SAS is how to prepare a budget. SAS partners with Sex Trade 101. In 2008 and 2009, there were book sales in Calgary, Alberta in support of SAS and Canwest Raise-a-Reader. In July 2011, paramedic Will Rogers performed a 1,000 km long-distance run to raise funds for the Surrey, British Columbia chapter of SAS. That December, the Surrey chapter received a $20,000 award at the Awards for Excellence ceremony hosted by the William H. Donner Foundation. In 2013, there was a fundraiser called "Cry of the Streets: An Evening for Freedom" that raised money for Servants Anonymous Facilitates Exit, a SAS women's shelter for those seeking to leave the sex industry. Read more...
- She Has a Name is a play about human trafficking written by Andrew Kooman in 2009 as a single act and expanded to full length in 2010. It is about the trafficking of children into sexual slavery and was inspired by the deaths of 54 people in the Ranong human-trafficking incident. Kooman had previously published literature, but this was his first full-length play. The stage premiere of She Has a Name was directed by Stephen Waldschmidt in Calgary, Alberta in February 2011. From May to October 2012, She Has a Name toured across Canada. In conjunction with the tour, A Better World raised money to help women and children who had been trafficked in Thailand as part of the country's prostitution industry. The first performances of She Has a Name in the United States took place in Folsom, California in 2014 under the direction of Emma Eldridge, who was a 23-year-old college student at the time.
The script calls for five actors to portray ten characters. The two main characters are Jason, a young Canadian lawyer; and Number 18, a young female prostitute who claims to be fifteen years old and has been a prostitute for six years. The drama centers on Jason's infiltration of a brothel ring that is trafficking girls into Bangkok. Jason comes to believe that Number 18 could be a key witness to a human trafficking incident and tries to gain her trust and persuade her to testify against the ring. The victimized child in the play is known only by the number 18 to reflect how traffickers often dehumanize their victims by giving them a new name or simply a number, which in some cases is branded onto the victim's body. Waldschmidt said he hoped that She Has a Name will educate Canadians about human trafficking and motivate them to act on what they learn, thereby turning them into anti-sexual slavery activists. Read more... - Nashi (Ukrainian: Наші; Nashi; "Ours") is a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada-based organisation that opposes human trafficking by raising awareness through education. Savelia Curniski is the president of NASHI. The organisation has established a vocational school in Lviv, Ukraine to teach girls and women carpentry, sewing, information processing, and cooking so they won't become trapped in Ukraine's human trafficking network. NASHI also founded the Maple Leaf Centre, a resource centre and shelter in Ukraine for young people who are at risk of being trafficked. In 2011, NASHI hosted the Saskatoon portion of the Canada Freedom Relay to raise awareness about human trafficking. The event lasted 45 minutes and raised funds for various programs that aid human trafficking victims. In 2012, NASHI organised the Youth Unchained conference in Saskatoon that presented approximately 900 youth with information about human trafficking. Betty Lawrence is one of the co-founders of NASHI. The organisation's activities are facilitated by volunteers. Read more...
- Sex Traffic is a two-part British-Canadian television thriller, written by Abi Morgan and directed by David Yates, that first broadcast on Channel 4 on October 14, 2004. The series, produced by Veronica Castillo and Derek Wax, stars John Simm as Daniel Appleton, a journalist who uncovers a trafficking ring involving Anti-Trafficking officers employed by a private security company in the United States. As Daniel vows help to help Elena (Anamaria Marinca), one of the trafficked girls, he attempts to expose the business which forces young women from Eastern Europe into a life of sexual slavery.
The series was filmed between London, Bucharest and Nova Scotia. The series was also broadcast on CBC in Canada during October 2004. Notably, despite winning the BAFTA award for Best Actress, Sex Traffic was actress Anamaria Marinca's first credited television role. Overall, the series won a total of eight BAFTAs, including Best Drama Serial, and four Gemini Awards. The series was released on DVD on September 4, 2006. Read more...
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