BEFORE Wally Oppal's botched inquiry into Vancouver's missing women can lurch to its painful conclusion, a real study has concluded with some concrete recommendations about protecting sex workers.
According to researchers from UBC and the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, simply allowing prostitutes to work indoors mitigates public health hazards, reduces the burden on police resources and, most importantly, saves lives.
Exchanging sex for money is not illegal in Canada, but offering to is, doing anything with the money is, and maintaining a "bawdy house" is as well. It's these obsolete laws that lead to the police indifference that allows a predator like Robert Pickton to roam freely for so long.
Two women-only housing societies decided to turn a blind eye to their tenants' commerce, and a decade on, report not a single violent episode. Interviews with the women revealed vastly improved health and safety conditions as well as a far more constructive relationship with law enforcement.
The Supreme Court of Canada will decide if, as an Ontario court held, the prohibition on bawdy houses is unconstitutional. That ruling can't come soon enough for the women who face mortal danger every day to scrape out an existence on our streets.
Our prostitution laws, like our drug laws, are based on a misguided sense of morality and the idiotic belief that banning something makes it go away.
Sex workers are citizens. They are the only lawful workers in Canada to be refused even a shred of legal or physical safeguards. Now that's a moral issue.
