My name is Rachel Phillips. I'm the Director of Programs at Peers Victoria. I want to tell you a bit about Peers and then more specifically address the issue of sexualized violence.
Peers Victoria opened in 1995. We're located on Songhees and Esquimalt territory. About 80% of those we serve identify as women, 15% as men, and 3% as transgender, queer, or two spirit. The average age of people at Peers is the late thirties. Just over a third identify as indigenous.
We provide services to 500 to 600 individuals a year. We have a wide variety of programs, from housing, to health care, to night outreach, as well as programs specifically for agency and independent escorts, men, and indigenous people. We require a wide variety of programs because those who access our services are diverse and have differing support preferences.
Our values prioritize meeting people where they are and harm reduction. Also, throughout our organization, we have people who represent various sectors of the sex industry—that's in terms of our staff and volunteers.
My point in drawing attention to this diversity is to set the context for why it is fundamentally problematic to think that Criminal Code provisions regarding trafficking can or should be applied in a broad way to sex work or trade. I'd like to detail a few key issues.
People in the sex industry do not uniformly agree that they are exploited, and they infrequently identify as trafficked. Therefore, it is not conceptually or definitionally valid to treat these concepts as the same.
The misapplication of concepts of trafficking and exploitation to the sex industry results in the inability to properly measure the prevalence of trafficking, and this leads to problems in effective allocation of public resources.
The supposition—this is my third point—that all sex industry involvement is exploitative or potentially trafficking supports the deployment of police and other authorities into areas of sex work/trade where little or no coercion or exploitation has taken place. Invasive enforcement against an already marginalized population, low conviction rates, increased fear of police, and under-reporting of crimes are just a few of the negative effects.
I want to turn my attention to the specific context in Victoria, where we have been working with community partners to address sexualized violence. It is widely known that the best practice for addressing intimate partner, gender, and sexualized violence is to respect the perspectives of the person who has been harmed. People are aware when their consent has been violated, and they require autonomy over what supports they wish to access. This principle must be applied to violence experienced in the sex industry as well.
At Peers we take reports from people who have experienced crimes, and we compile and circulate a bad date and aggressor sheet. This work is done in multiple cities across Canada. We work specifically with two Victoria police liaison officers who have experience in working with people in the sex trade. If a sex trade worker is willing to talk to the liaison officer about a crime or other concern, it is very rare that they are willing to proceed beyond that. It is well known that those who have experienced sexualized violence face further harms in the justice process. This is no different for people in the sex industry, and in fact it is most often worse, because sex workers face the additional insult of not having their perspective validated, or having information exposed publicly that they wish to keep private.
We are able to do this violence prevention and response work in partnership with police because the police locally have not widely applied Criminal Code provisions related to prostitution since the late 1990s. In the absence of Criminal Code enforcement, combined with respecting the perspective of the person reporting a crime, we have opened up opportunities for us to address violence in a more targeted and safer way.
In sharing this, I don't wish to suggest that addressing sexualized violence is the bulk of our work at Peers or that this work is unique to the sex industry; rather, violence prevention is one aspect of our continuum of supports, and that continuum very importantly includes services related to poverty reduction and housing security, access to health care, and access to non-stigmatizing support settings.
Thank you.