Thank you. That's a great question.
Those are big questions. I will do my best to tell you, and maybe I won't go into the research.... First of all, I will send all of the research. I will submit a brief, as well as all of the literature I mentioned. It's very diverse.
The issue with the police and people not trusting the police is very complex. Recent movement like Black Lives Matter and initiatives that seek to defund or be critical of the police have broadened the understanding that has been the reality of a lot of marginalized populations since forever. It's made it clearer for the general population, and I am thankful for that.
What would be helpful in general is a better understanding of the realities. This is something that was said to me by the people I interviewed. At the end of my interviews, I asked, “What would you like to say to service providers if I gave you a mike?” They had all sorts of things to say.
First of all, they wanted to be treated like human beings, which was devastating to hear, interview after interview. However, they also had concrete suggestions, such as having sex worker-led training for police officers and different service providers, and programs to help police officers understand the varied realities that are included in the term “sex work”. They would understand the difference between sex work, sexual exploitation and human trafficking, which are not synonyms and should not be used as such. They also asked for compassion training. I'm not quite sure how one does that with an adult, but it signifies how terrible things can be. Those would be concrete things that came from my research.
More generally, in a context where sex work might be decriminalized, it might make it easier for sex workers, when they have situations of violence in their lives related to sex work or not, to reach out to police officers or to whatever service they require, without fearing that they might be criminalized for sex work or something else, or that they might be pressured into giving their list of clients. Their list of clients might be good clients, and that's why they keep them.
In a context where it's not criminalized, it would make it easier for sex workers to be able to call the police. It would also make it easier for clients who see something that seems dangerous to intervene or to call the police. That would never happen in the context....
I want to quickly give the example of New Zealand, where sex work has been decriminalized since 2003. A few years ago, there was the story of a massage parlour worker who was able to make a complaint against her boss, who was sexually harassing her. She won that complaint and was compensated, as any other worker would be. It is unthinkable in Canada right now that a sex worker might be able to do something like that.
I wanted to end here.
Thank you.