Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm happy that I was finally able to join.
I'm here to share some insight from the research I conducted on sex work in Winnipeg, Manitoba, over the last decade. I completed a Ph.D. in community health sciences at the Max Rady College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba in 2020. My dissertation topic was on access to health and social services for cisgender and transgender women and non-binary people selling or trading sex in the city.
The methodology I used was ethnography in order to talk about access to health and social services. I needed to characterize what's happening politically and socially around sex work in Winnipeg and, of course, that's framed in the legal context, which for the entirety of my data collection was the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act.
My research indicated that sex workers and people who sell and trade sex have poor access to health and social services, experience a lack of safety, serious stigmatization and barriers in accessing what they need. This relates to a general climate of indifference and stigma, which is framed by the current legal context. My research points to, among other things, the fact that policies, programs and laws should focus on approaches that prioritize the safety, health and well-being of sex workers on their own terms. One of the ways towards achieving that is the decriminalization of all aspects of the sex trade.
Before I tell you a little more about my research, I want to give you a clearer picture of who it is I talked to. I did formal, semi-structured interviews with 39 sex workers and people selling sex, 12 interviews with stakeholders and over four years of participant observation with sex workers' rights activists in the city. That's in addition to document analysis and literature review of local, national and international literature.
Of the sex workers and people who sell sex whom I spoke to, the average age was 36, and the range was from 20 to 55 years old. Among this group, 52% indicated that they were indigenous, aboriginal or Métis, and 17% said they were white. I asked everyone where they mostly meet clients, and the most common answers were on the street, in bars and online in order to meet in person. I am telling you all of this to give you an idea that I spoke to a very diverse group of people.
I want to give you one example from my research that is about the climate of a lack of safety for sex workers in Winnipeg under PCEPA. It also happens to be an example of a very important documented dynamic in Winnipeg, which is the aggressive silencing and erasure of sex workers' voices if they do not see their experience as exploitative. This is shown in my dissertation, and it's noted in other research as well. I won't talk about it too much here, but I wanted to point it out.
The example is that, in 2017, at a town hall meeting, Chief Danny Smyth of the Winnipeg Police Service, answered a question from a local sex workers' rights advocacy group, the Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition, about the safety specifically of sex workers under PCEPA and he stated that he believes that "My general view around the sex trade is that most people involved are being exploited in one way or another." He then added that he refers to them as “exploited persons, whether they be men, women or children”.
Chief Smyth plainly stated that he does not think that sex workers exist in Winnipeg. I invite you to think about what that means when the chief of police does not think that you exist. Sex workers who were present who heard that said that it meant to them that they are not to expect recognition or protection from police services. This is especially true for populations that are already over-policed, like indigenous people and other racialized groups.
My research documents the unacceptable experiences of discrimination and stigmatization that most of my participants encounter in health and social services. Not everyone described experiences of discrimination, but everyone was concerned about it and used strategies to avoid it and to keep themselves safe from it. Stigma and the fear of it touched everyone.
Feelings that ranged from mistrust to outright anger and fear of the police were expressed by 12 of the people I talked to unprompted. One person I talked to, I called her “C” in my dissertation, was as 49-year-old indigenous cisgender women who worked outdoors. After she told me that she would never report a sexual assault to the police, I asked her if she would be willing to share why with me, and she said: “Because I don’t like the police. It’s like because you’re in that area they look at you like a “nobody”.... I don’t even trust them. They’ve done things to the workers that not any normal person would. They just tend to degrade the workers on the street I know that.”
People I spoke to asked for services to be more compassionate, to use appropriate language, to educate themselves on the varied realities that exist in sex work, to hire more sex workers and, above all, to respect their humanity.
This was the most devastating result—