First, the legislation criminalizes not only the purchase of sexual services, but also all activities related to sex work. This means that the sex worker commits a criminal act every time she sells her sexual services. This is much broader than simply criminalizing clients.
The impact is enormous. All sorts of information is available to show the impact.
In our community, we can see very clearly that this puts us at high risk of contracting HIV. We know that decriminalizing sex work in Canada would reduce new infections among sex workers by about 33%.
Moreover, as a result of the legislation, it's much more difficult to report violence and to access protection.
There are also many crackdowns on sex work. We've seen extreme and very traumatic cases of police crackdowns. For example, we've had 10, 20 or 30 police officers come into our establishments to catalogue our tattoos and piercings. They told us that they'll be able to identify our bodies when they find us dead. The police officers now have a mandate to convince us to stop working in the sex industry.
The criminalization of sex work has also exacerbated the overdose crisis.
With regard to missing and murdered indigenous women, we've seen that the criminalization of sex work creates vulnerabilities. The women in our communities who are most likely to be arrested or to have hostile contact with the police are also the women who are most at risk of being victims of murder, violence or other criminal acts.