Thank you to the committee for inviting me to participate in these hearings.
As you know, I'm a professor of Law at the University of British Columbia and a member of the British Columbia bar.
Bringing a sex equality analysis to bear, I advocated in favour of the Criminal Code offences against male buyers and pimps that were added to the Criminal Code in 2014, and I believe that they need consistent enforcement along with public education and supports for prostituted people. This asymmetrical equality model has been adopted, as you know, by a number of countries successfully and was pioneered by Nordic countries, which are the most gender-equal countries in the world.
In my brief time for these opening remarks, I will make three simple points. The first is that the prostitution industry is structured as a practice of sex inequality and also of racial and class inequality. This reality is continuously obscured by resort to the gender-neutral clinical language of sex worker and client, manager and third party operator. The reality is that it is men who are buying; they buy women and girls, sometimes boys, other men and transgender people. The women and girls that men buy for sex in this country are disproportionately young, indigenous and poor, and they are the people on whom we need to be focusing our legislative efforts. We all know this. Yet you are being asked to decriminalize sex purchase, pimping and procuring.
I ask what happens when there are not enough Canadian women who will resort to prostitution to meet this legalized, validated demand? What happens is that we will traffic women into prostitution; we will scoop girls up from state care and we will import women from the inexhaustible supply of poor women in other countries. More of all of these things will happen if demand is legalized. Canada is not an isolated island; it is a country that shares a large porous land border with hundreds of millions of American men who will also take advantage of this legalized market.
The second point I would make to you today is that the silence of the johns before this committee is deafening. The centrepiece of the 2014 amendments is the direct criminalization of sex purchase. Despite this and despite the fact that johns outnumber those in prostitution by many orders of magnitude, they remain largely invisible. They're not appearing before this committee to defend their insistence on being able to buy sex on demand from a woman who does not want that sex, and who wants only the money they have which she needs. Instead, they hide behind women and prostitution and shift the focus onto them as if their demand is somehow natural and unchangeable like the tides or the seasons. They get to hide behind the concerns for the very safety of the women they are harming. We can acknowledge women's decisions to enter the sex trade in the face of whatever constraints they might face without validating the choice of these men to buy sex.
Finally, I would say that it is male sexual entitlement that is at the root of sex purchase. This is a key barrier to women's equality in Canada, generally; we criminalize sexual assault, but more than 99% of sexual assaults result in no criminal consequences for the perpetrator. The Me Too movement is just the latest expression of decades of organizing against the impunity for male sexual violence; impunity that fuels male sexual entitlement.
I would argue to this committee, and in fact I argued in my written submission, that prostitution itself is a form of sexual harassment in which being groped or otherwise used sexually becomes the condition of work. We recognize that as a violation of women's human rights in other spheres, but we don't seem to recognize it for prostitution. When men who buy sex are asked what would stop them, they consistently say a real risk of punishment and publicity. I do not want to legitimize male sexual entitlement. I don't want to make it permissible for men to buy a submissive Asian woman, an indigenous woman, to act out their colonial fantasies or some kind of group sexual encounter as a male bonding ritual with their friends. Telling men that they can do this without consequences does not make women safe and it does not make women equal. Decreasing demand does.
Talking about how to make things a little less bad for some small subset of women, whom these men buy, completely misses the point. We can and must do better for Canadian women than this unrestricted male market in women's bodies. The liberty and equality of all Canadian women depend on that.
Thank you.