By: Jim Taylor

Sex trade depends on consumer demand

In an earlier life, I taught at a communications program across the street from St. Peter’s Anglican Church in downtown Toronto.

        I could look out the classroom window and watch the prostitutes plying their trade on the corner across the street. Or sitting on the church steps, when business slowed.

        Their method of advertising was simple. As cars passed by, they flashed their breasts or hoisted their skirts.

        A surprising proportion of cars stopped; a woman slid into the passenger’s seat; the car drove off. A few minutes later, the car was back, having barely had time to drive around the block.

        Slam, bam, thank you ma’am.

        Technically, prostitution is not illegal in Canada. Soliciting is. Those women could not be criminally charged for whatever they did in private. They could be charged for inviting the guy in the car to stop.

        I never understood why no blame attached to the guy in the car.

        Many of those drivers came back repeatedly. These were not innocent passers-by, lured into infidelity by a scheming female.

        They knew what they wanted. They knew where to get it.



Blaming the wrong party

So how come social disapproval gets heaped on the hooker, and not on the john?

        Among its 33 recommendations, a report from the federal House of Commons’ Status of Women committee says Canada should rewrite prostitution laws to crack down on "consumers."

        The report says that sex trade fuels international trafficking of women and children. It estimates that 600 to 800 people are trafficked into Canada each year. "There’s a blurring between prostitution and trafficking," said Liberal MP Anita Neville.

        Irena Soltys, co-chair of Stop the Trafficking Coalition of Canada, told the committee that trafficked women are often viewed as hookers.

        “These women have been enslaved,” Soltys told the committee. “They shouldn’t be confused with criminals."

        Reactions to prostitutes and johns seem to me to reflect an age-old patriarchal tradition that treats women as the source of sin.

        The evidence suggests otherwise.

        A Toronto man was accused of asking a teenager if he could have sex with the children that she babysat. The children could hardly be considered instigators.

        Almost with exception, johns are male. Yes, there are male prostitutes – but they service male customers.



Desperation

 Any demographic study of the women involved in street prostitution comes to the same conclusions. They come from poor families. They are typically under-educated. A high proportion are native.

        The Robert Pickton trial in Vancouver drew attention to the disappearance of 49 women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, most of them involved in the sex trade, many native.

        But the National Women’s Association of Canada estimates that 500 native women have disappeared or died violently during the last 30 years.

        Kelly Morrisseau was one of them. She was found bleeding in a parking lot in Ottawa last December. She had been stabbed more than a dozen times. She died within an hour of being found.

Morrisseau was pregnant with her fourth child.

        Ottawa Citizen writer Kelly Egan asked, “What causes a young woman to…be desperate enough to engage—if indeed it happened—in sex for hire, when seven months pregnant, in the first place?”

        It pays better than a dead-end job at Burger King.

        Admittedly, many prostitutes are addicted to drugs, alcohol, tobacco – or all three. Those are expensive habits.

        But consider—other addicts finance their addiction by theft and violence. They rob convenience stores, smash jewellery store windows, break into homes and cars, beat up elderly pensioners…

 On the whole, selling sex strikes me as a less socially harmful way of funding one’s addiction.



Tacit approval of rape?

I’m not arguing for legalization of prostitution, though such arguments can and have been made. I am arguing for a change in social attitudes.

        A CBC report on prostitution in Winnipeg found that the most popular prostitutes were younger than 14 years old.

        In Canada, the age of consent for sexual relations is 14. To have sex with these children was therefore a criminal act.

        But the law goes further. While it recognizes that hormone-happy teenagers will always experiment with each other, it specifically prohibits sex between younger girls and older men.

        If an older man has sex with a woman under 18, even with her cooperation, it is classed as rape.

        Why then are johns who seek girls as young as eight not charged with rape?

        According to testimony at a provincial inquiry, hundreds of Winnipeg children—some as young as eight years old – have used prostitution to pay for food, shelter and drugs.

        In a Winnipeg trial, Jane Runner of New Directions, a service agency for at-risk youth and adults, testified that as many as 400 city children are sexually exploited each year

More than 70 per cent of these children are aboriginal. Most are runaways or have been shunted from one foster home to another, she said.

        According to Runner’s testimony, the average age these children are pushed into the sex trade is 13. Which means that roughly half are younger.

        “Child prostitution doesn’t necessarily involve pimps,” explained Michael Bear, executive director of Winnipeg’s South-East Child and Family Services. “It can occur when a youth follows a friend or family member onto the streets to get money to pay for basic needs—what many experts call ‘survival sex’.”



Nail the johns

Economics deals with two main forces – supply and demand. The two work together. When there is no demand, supply dries up.

        Canadian law enforcement has typically focused on the supply, and ignored the demand.

        The demand can be changed.

        It is not illegal to grow tobacco, or to make cigarettes. But by altering social attitudes towards smoking, we dramatically reduced the demand.

        In North America, public education made smoking less acceptable. It was no longer smart, or cool, or suave, to develop lung cancer, have nicotine-stained fingers, or stink of stale tobacco smoke.

        It’s time to do the same with johns.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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