Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for very much for inviting Dr. Goldenberg and me to today's hearings.
We are both assistant professors at the University of British Columbia at the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity in Vancouver.
I'm here to speak to our empirical research on the occupational health and safety impacts of PCEPA, which was summarized in our brief.
Our longitudinal research project was initiated in 2010 and was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The project includes qualitative research on the lived experiences of sex workers and third parties, and an epidemiologic cohort of over 900 cis and transgender women sex workers across diverse work environments in metro Vancouver.
As a rigorous, prospective, mixed-methods study, our research is uniquely positioned to empirically evaluate the impact of PCEPA on sex workers' occupational health and safety. We drew on longitudinal data, collected with the same participants prior to and after the implementation of PCEPA in December 2014. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most rigorous research available evaluating the health impacts of PCEPA.
This research highlights the ways in which PCEPA reproduces the harms of previous legislation deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada. Of note, findings from our study were submitted as evidence in the Bedford case as well.
I am now going to very briefly summarize the main findings of our research, all of which have been peer-reviewed and published in highly reputable scientific journals.
We found that after the implementation of PCEPA, 72% of participants reported no changes in their working conditions. Thus, they continued to work under unconstitutional and unsafe working conditions. Concerningly, 26% reported experiencing negative changes. The most common negative changes reported included a reduced ability to screen clients and negotiate terms of transactions, which are essential for consensual sexual transactions. Immigrant sex workers were significantly more likely to report negative changes.
Our research indicates that sex workers continue to face significant barriers to reporting violence to police. This is despite the objective of PCEPA to encourage the reporting of violence, as stated in the preamble. In the analysis of access to justice over nine years, rates of reporting violence did not improve post-implementation of PCEPA. Only 26% of sex workers who experienced violence reported it to police. A staggering 87% of racialized immigrant sex workers and 58% of Canadian-born sex workers did not report violence to police.
Our research also highlights the negative effects of the criminalization of clients and the communication provisions. Key mechanisms by which criminalization and targeting of clients impact sex workers' working conditions identified by our research include barriers, again, to screen clients and negotiate terms of transactions, and displacement to isolated areas.
Our research, in line with other important Canadian research by Professor Bruckert, debunks important myths around the role of third parties. While our research demonstrated that third party security and administrative supports are linked to improved access to occupational health and safety, results showed that after the implementation of PCEPA, there was a 31% reduction in the odds of accessing third party supports for sex workers.
Finally, our research indicates that after PCEPA, sex workers experienced a 41% decrease in access to health services and a 23% reduction in the odds of accessing community-based services.
In conclusion, public health evidence from Canada and internationally is unequivocal. The criminalization of sex work undermines sex workers' occupational health, safety and rights. Prohibitionist scholars argue that sex work normalizes violence and gender inequalities. However, the public health literature suggests that it is, in fact, criminalization which achieves this by undermining sex workers' working conditions, restricting access to justice and reinforcing the marginalization of already marginalized sex workers, including those who are indigenous, those who face immigration policy restrictions and those who work in street-based settings.
Thus, our evidence points to the full repeal of all provisions of the PCEPA.
Thank you.