Thank you.
Hello. My name is Chris Bruckert. I hold a doctorate in sociology from Carleton University and I'm a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa. I have spent the last 20 years examining various aspects of the sex industry, including conducting research on street-based sex work, the in-call and out-call sex industry, male sex workers, and management.
I am pleased to be here and thank you for the opportunity to address the justice committee about an issue to which I have devoted much of the last two decades of my life.
As a researcher, I believe policy and law should consider the research evidence. However, given how in these committee hearings research on one population is being generalized to another, and given the number of questionable assertions being attributed to research, I thought it was important to start with a few comments on the need to be discerning consumers of research. This means examining the research methodology employed. Where does the sample come from? Who is included? Who is excluded? Was it rigorous and ethical? And who funded the research?
It also, rather obviously, is imperative that the research be applicable. For example, the situation in Germany and the Netherlands, where they have legalized some aspects of the sex industry, are irrelevant in evaluating decriminalization. Legalization and decriminalization, such as we see in New Zealand, are simply not the same thing; therefore, any conclusions drawn from one model about the other are simply spurious.
Today I would be delighted to discuss the large body of solid and relevant social science evidence demonstrating that criminalization increases sex workers' vulnerability to violence; however, time is short, so I will simply refer you to Justice Himel's helpful analysis of the research in this area and, in some cases, its lack of rigour.
I'm going to focus most of my remarks on the material or financial benefiting from sexual service provision that reintroduces the “living on the avails” provision struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. I will be restricting my comments to the issue of adult sex workers.
Yesterday and today, we heard youth prostitution, trafficking, and adult sex work being casually conflated. This is frankly surprising if not disingenuous, given that the law criminalizing the procuring, living on the avails of youth, and human trafficking was neither challenged nor struck down. It means that laws around adult prostitution are being framed in relation to very distinct and separate issues, those of youth and trafficking.
Much of what I'm saying is coming from large, multi-site research on third parties in the sex industry. I have deposited my written submission and a copy of a report in which some of these points are more fully developed.
All too often, in the absence of solid empirical evidence, stereotypes based on stigmatic assumptions and fueled by ideology persist, and third parties are cavalierly denounced as pimps, exploiters, and profiteers. The evidence tells us it is much more complicated.
Research tells us that third parties are men, women, and people who are trans, and that they fulfill a range of roles. They are, for example, receptionists, brothel owners, worksite providers, drivers, security persons, and mentors. All of these persons, if they were providing services within the context of commercial enterprise, would be criminalized under Bill C-36. Of course, anyone providing advertising services to a sex worker would be criminalized under the provision prohibiting the advertising of sexual services.
Why would someone work with or for a third party? This is a particularly salient question in the face of the prevailing narrative of sex workers as exploited victims in need of state intervention or rescue. Sex workers told us that working as an independent—essentially running their own small business—was neither viable nor desirable for everyone. It necessitates skills, assets, knowledge, and labour.
Now, I'm not suggesting that third parties are not sometimes exploitative, abusive, and violent: this too is a reality. There are, of course, laws of general application that address the egregious behaviour generally associated with pimping: assault, forcible confinement, sexual assault, to name a few. There are also, of course, as previously mentioned, laws against procuring and living on the avails of a youth for underage prostitution and human trafficking.
What I am suggesting is that we need to move towards a reasoned and respectful approach that is not detrimental to sex workers, and the broad brush strokes of this law criminalizing virtually all third parties will have a very significant harmful impact on sex workers. I want to highlight just a few.
It will decrease the ability of sex workers to access those services of third parties that improve their safety and security, such things as screening, maintaining bad date lists, collecting and verifying personal information, providing a deterrent presence, and hiring on-site or on-call security persons.
It is truly perverse to suggest that sex workers would be safer and more secure if working in isolation. It will also decrease sex workers' access to in-call venues, which empirical evidence has shown to be safer environments in which to provide sexual services.
Although prostitution has been removed from the definition of bawdy house, as per the Supreme Court decision, individuals previously defined as keepers--owners, managers and staff--are recriminalized through the receiving financial and material benefit provision. This also has implications for street-based workers. Research has shown that the provision of indoor spaces for sex workers who solicit on the street reduces violence. As the Supreme Court justices noted, “for some prostitutes, particularly those who are destitute, safe houses such as Grandma's House may be critical“.
The broad criminalization of third parties proposed in Bill C-36 will push the sex industry further into the shadows where unfair labour practices have the potential to flourish. At the same time, labour site abuse is enabled when criminalization excludes sex workers from human and labour protection. This exclusion contrasts sharply with the safeguards and avenue of redress available to sex workers in New Zealand, where prostitution was decriminalized in 2003.
It will also diminish sex workers' access to the justice system and criminal justice redress. Quite simply, in a criminalized context sex workers are hesitant to turn to law enforcement for fear that they or their employer will be charged with prostitution-related offences. It will also criminalize sex workers as third parties.
The proposed receiving financial and material benefit provision is so broad that it will, like the living on the avails provision it replaces, certainly capture any sex workers who provide assistance to a third party. Any sex worker who answers the phone, books calls for an escort agency, locks up the massage parlour at the end of the night, or helps out another sex worker by renting her in-call location, would potentially be criminalized under Bill C-36.
Finally, the law endeavours to protect individuals, presumed to be women, from becoming or remaining sex workers. This legal paternalism hinges on the assumption that no reasonable person would wish to engage in sex work. As such, it reifies a profoundly judgmental image of sex workers working with or for third parties as deluded, incompetent social actors and bestows upon them a disempowering identity of hyper-vulnerable victims.
This is, of course, part of a larger discourse that draws on stigmatic assumptions to discredit and delegitimate sex workers as youth, as mentally ill, as drug addicted, or as simply unable to make the right choices. Then, paternalistically if somewhat illogically, frames criminal justice intervention as a reasonable pathway to salvation.
I started by speaking of the importance of evidence-based policy and have presented research findings on third parties. I want to take a few minutes to address some of the frictions I have seen in these committee hearings by speaking about logic and ethics.
We all agree that sex workers experience unacceptable levels of violence. Indeed, this is precisely the reason why Terri-Jean Bedford, Valerie Scott and Amy Libovitch challenged the prostitution laws in the first place. It does not, however, necessarily follow that violence is inherent to the sex industry and that risk cannot be mitigated. We need only compare the rates of violence, including the rates of fatal violence, between the street level that accounts for between 5% and 25% of the sex industry, and indoor work, where most sex work happens, to realize that context matters. Moreover, the fact that there is a risk of violence in any line of work does not mean we prohibit it completely. We ensure that workers have access to the laws, regulations and other protections that safeguard them from specific harms.
Yesterday the issue of choice emerged in a number of the panels. Of course, what constitutes choice is profoundly complex and subjective. It is disconcerting, however, when choice is reduced to a simple binary. Among other things, this erases the agency of social actors and negates the resilience of marginalized individuals operating in extremely challenging circumstances.
That said, it is certainly true that some sex workers would rather be working in other sectors of the economy and find themselves with severely restricted options. We would all agree that this is an unacceptable situation. It seems wholly illogical, however, to suggest that the solution is to remove the income-generating activity these women and men do have access to. One does not create options by taking them away. You most certainly do not create options by implementing a legal regime that puts people in harm's way.
I put forth that the solution is not found in criminal law at all but rather in anti-poverty initiatives and the provision of social, economic, and housing supports that deal with the underlying conditions that constrain personal and professional choices.
I'm almost finished.
Now on to morality, I implore you to listen to the organizations representing current sex workers who, in their submissions and presentations before this committee, are calling on you to abandon Bill C-36. Emily Symons told you this morning that sex workers have a voice. Please listen to them. Do not discredit, speak over, or endeavour to speak for them, but engage in a meaningful dialogue. Frankly, this is too important an issue and the implications too horrific to sacrifice the lives of sex workers on the altar of ideology.
I'm going to conclude—and I'm going to conclude quickly—by quoting an open letter released on June 27 by religious leaders in British Columbia. Most of the 34 signatories are ministers of the Anglican Church. They write:This is a moral issue. While we can debate the pros and cons of sex work in our Canadian society, and bring our religious beliefs to bear upon both sides of this question, we are all agreed that this proposed legislation does nothing to advance the welfare of sex workers and in fact, it increases the potential for dangerous situations. This is immoral.