Justice committee  Thank you. Thank you for having me here today. I would like to begin by stating that I am not here as an advocate for any individual group, organization, or moral position on the sex industry. I believe the sex industry is incredibly complex, and that in order to understand it

Justice committee  I'd like to start by saying it's actually delightful to be here because these types of dialogues need to happen. They need to happen more frequently and they need to happen more publicly, because it is with this exchange of knowledge and experiences that we will actually arrive a

Justice committee  Sure they will.

Justice committee  I have submitted it as part of a team brief. I will be submitting a second brief tomorrow.

Justice committee  Yes. It's vitally important that we have an ongoing understanding of this industry if we are going to regulate it and provide services to people involved in this industry. So it's vitally important that however we go about regulating this industry, we keep those doors of communic

Justice committee  Adult, consensual, sexual exchanges.

Justice committee  I've thought about that but from all the information I've ever seen that's choosing to study a fraction of an industry at the expense of the majority of the industry.

Justice committee  I use the term “consent” very guardedly because the whole notion of consent, in and of itself, has to be discussed, understood, and defined more adequately. I do believe, purely on the basis of the research that I've done, that the vast majority of, particularly, the off-street s

Justice committee  No, I absolutely do not, particularly when we talk about.... If we take seriously the goal of ending demand and changing attitudes and behaviours around the purchase of sexual services, I don't see how that's going to happen with $20 million. If we are going to do this—and I do

Justice committee  It's the focus I've spoken of today. I have also participated in, as either a co-investigator or as an assistant, at least another nine projects around the sex industry in general.

Justice committee  I've done hundreds of hours of ethnographic observation in various virtual and physical spaces over the course of time.

Justice committee  Right. In the two projects that I referred to today, there were 50 in-depth interviews and a total of 2,004 surveys.

Justice committee  There's no way that anybody studying any portion of the sex industry can guarantee the truth of any account, whether it be a sex worker, sex buyer, manager, owner, operator, policeman, lawyer, or politician. What we can do is construct our instruments in such a way that we phrase

Justice committee  We've done that in the past. In my first study, in 1996, we compared people who purchased sex with members of the general population, males and females. We found very few statistically significant differences. Subsequently, I have focused specifically on getting at individuals

Justice committee  No.