Justice committee  I think that, in general, race definitely plays a role. We see with male violence across the board, whether women are in prostitution or not, there's often a problem, like “she asked for it". We see these issues of sexism. I do want to point out that when I was in the Netherlands, I was speaking with a worker there who was going around to the women in the windows.

Justice committee  It's a totally misguided...a total lack of understanding of male violence against women and how it functions in the culture that we live in today. It's not possible to make it safer. Women who go in, I think, have different ideas about what it's going to be like, but the impact of having sex with men you don't want to have sex with every day, multiple times a day....

Justice committee  A good, solid recommendation—and I know there have been rumblings about this for years—is to have a guaranteed livable income, so that people in Canada have the income that they need to survive. I live in Vancouver. Housing here in ridiculous. If we were to implement measures so that everybody had a house to live in, and if we had services for women who have experienced male violence....

Justice committee  No. In my view, prostitution cannot be made safe. This is because the inherent harm of prostitution is engaging in unwanted sex acts with men that you don't want to have sex with. That happens way more commonly than where women are wanting to engage. Being in that circumstance where you're engaged in unwanted sex acts over and over....

Justice committee  There are a few ways that could happen. One is that we know that PCEPA hasn't been applied consistently across the country. There are lots of areas, for example, the City of Vancouver, where the police force has said it's the lowest priority and that they're basically not going to enforce these laws.

Justice committee  It would be absolutely horrible. It's so embedded. It's like going to the grocery store—this idea that it's totally okay to buy women and girls. There are lots of Maori women and girls who are still out on the street. You see women being brought in from Asian countries. It's a mess.

Justice committee  I'm going to make three points. The first point is about the construction of knowledge. The second is about the source of harm in prostitution. The third is what I learned from doing research for three months in New Zealand. Our default way of thinking about the world is patriarchal.

Justice committee  Yes. I can send these in?

Justice committee  Okay. Thank you. I'll skip ahead a bit. If you believe that sex is work, then you believe that men are entitled to sex acts from women and that women are obligated to provide sex acts to men. Instead of in marriage, however, now the context is prostitution. This is how the idea of sex work is inherently patriarchal.