Elene Lam speaks at a rally against the criminalization of sex work in Toronto, on Oct. 3.
Elene Lam is the executive director of Butterfly, a support network for Asian and migrant sex workers. Kai Cheng Thom is a writer and sex educator in Toronto. Chanelle Gallant is an activist and writer working at the intersections of social justice and sexuality.
Less than 15 years ago, a standard line among many mainstream Canadian women’s organizations was that sex work could not be seen as anything other than exploitation – sex trafficking – which they considered inextricable from consensual participation in the sex industry.
A number of these groups produced major works of advocacy pushing for the expansion of carceral approaches designed to “end sex work” by criminalizing it. We can see this in the widely circulated 2014 Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF) report “No More: Report of the National Task Force on Sex Trafficking of Women and Girls in Canada,” and a 2008 Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies resolution that pressed for the criminalization of those who purchase sexual services.
But many of these organizations have since quietly recanted their positions and made apologetic gestures toward the sex-worker rights movement. The CWF, for example, added a foreword to its report in 2018, stating that the original calls to action around sex trafficking and sex work would “further marginalize and criminalize women from communities we seek to support.”
In October, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies announced that its “past position on sex work – and advocacy that has stemmed from this position – has caused harm to the very communities we seek to be in solidarity with and work alongside.”
As the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform continues its constitutional challenge to the country’s laws on prostitution, which is currently being appealed at Ontario’s Superior Court, national feminist organizations are finally starting to adopt the stance they should have taken all along: that women’s rights include sex workers’ rights, and vulnerable women are best served by the decriminalization of sex work.
And while much remains to be done, the shift marks a welcome sea change for the sex-worker rights movement and its historically rocky relationship with feminism.
These admissions of harm and policy adjustments have enormous implications for the sex-work decriminalization movement. Mainstream women’s organizations are often taken as the authority on women’s rights, and their positions have been used as justification for legislation and policy decisions that have pushed sex work into the shadows and sex workers into precarity.
In 2014, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government adopted the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA). It followed the Nordic model, which criminalized a wide range of activities such as the purchase of sex and the advertising of sexual services.
That model was largely favoured by government-funded women’s organizations at the time based on claims that it ostensibly decriminalized selling one’s own sexual services. But this was misleading. In practice, those who assist or do business with sex workers can still be considered their exploiters – including other sex workers.
Racialized and migrant sex workers in particular continue to be charged for helping other sex workers to communicate with clients, answering phones or arranging their sessions. Criminalizing any area of the sex industry, including clients and managers, means criminalizing access to fair labour practices, safety measures such as screening, and sharing a workspace. And it opens the door to extortion and abuse by law enforcement.
Some women’s organizations that have historically not taken a stance on the regulation of sex work, such as the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), have also started to take up a position of full decriminalization. In April, LEAF put out a statement recognizing “the harms of criminalization that threaten the safety of sex workers, especially for Black, Indigenous, and racialized sex workers” and “respecting sex workers’ rights to autonomy, dignity and equality.” This month, LEAF went to court on the side of sex workers, as intervenors in the constitutional challenge.
Clearly, something is changing in the world of Canadian women’s advocacy: a growing recognition that to truly support the most marginalized women – women of colour, migrant women and impoverished women among them – we must support sex workers and the decriminalization of their work.
Leaders in the women’s sector admit that Canadian feminism still has a long way to go if it is to truly repair the damage it has caused to sex workers. Anuradha Dugal, vice-president of the Canadian Women’s Foundation, says that the CWF’s previous position on sex work was “influenced by a certain kind of white liberal feminism. … It came from a place of privilege.” Emilie Coyle, director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, similarly states that the organization must now “grapple with the harm” its previous stance on sex work has caused.
But a common thread amongst these groups is a growing understanding of intersectionality: an understanding of how race, class and other social experiences affect different women’s lives in different ways. While white, middle-class values have traditionally influenced the mainstream feminist movement’s desire to prohibit sex work, an intersectional perspective acknowledges how criminalization can plunge Black, Indigenous and migrant women living already precarious lives into further uncertainty.
How are women supposed to survive as sex workers when their jobs are criminalized? How does expanding police surveillance and jurisdiction help such women when more than one-third of migrant massage workers in Toronto reported being harassed or abused by police officers in a 2018 survey? As Rosel Kim, a lawyer for LEAF, put it, “If we are not able to develop relationships with sex workers, how can we say we are intersectional?”
Acknowledging and apologizing for past mistakes takes courage; repairing harm takes determination and commitment to action. The Canadian women’s sector has made some fine first steps toward solidarity with sex workers, but so far only one organization – WAVAW, a rape crisis centre in B.C. – has formally apologized to sex workers. Now the sector must follow up by creating real partnerships with sex-worker organizations, devoting resources to decriminalization efforts, and bringing marginalized and migrant sex workers into its advisory committees, leadership teams and boards of directors.
Feminists and sex-worker rights activists have always dreamed of a better world for women. Let us finally build one together.