Want to Make Sex Work Safer? Decriminalize It, Study Says

Michelle Gamage, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Tyee

When sex workers are able to form relationships with co-workers, they can boost their odds of accessing support services and decrease their odds of facing workplace sexual or physical violence, according to a new study.

The Lower Mainland study, peer-reviewed and published in PLOS One, looked at social cohesion and the ways sex workers support one another despite laws that work to isolate and criminalize them.

The more sex workers were able to service clients in formal indoor venues, such as massage parlours, the higher social cohesion they had with their co-workers, according to the study. On the flip side, working outside or alone increased the risk of violence.

This research supports the call to decriminalize sex work in Canada as a means of improving workplace health and safety, says lead author Jennie Pearson, research assistant for An Evaluation of Sex Workers Health Access, or AESHA, a research project housed in the University of British Columbia’s department of medicine. AESHA is a long-term project that has been running for 15 years and collects data from sex workers in diverse environments across Metro Vancouver.

What is legal, what is illegal

Canada changed its sex work laws a decade ago, introducing laws that were allegedly supposed to criminalize clients rather than sex workers.

But it’s not really possible to have one half of a transaction be legal and the other illegal, so the entire transaction, and therefore the work, is still criminalized, said Jenn Clamen, national co-ordinator for the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform.

In reality, these laws work to eliminate sex work and isolate and criminalize sex workers, she added.

For example, a sex worker can’t work from home if they’re a renter because leases have provisions banning illegal activity on the premises, she said. A sex worker setting up a working space for other sex workers is also illegal, so they’re not allowed to set up co-working spaces or purchase hotel rooms for one another.

The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, or Bill C-36, says that in Canada you cannot buy sex, advertise sex, make money selling sex, procure a person selling sex or talk about selling sex in public. Sex workers get an exemption for making money from and advertising sex.

This also prevents sex workers from working with third parties to help with advertising, find clients or run a business, Clamen added.

Bill C-36 also limits the help and services third parties, such as community organizations or charities, can offer sex workers. If a third party offers practical advice on how to do sex work, it could be viewed as procuring sex workers, which is illegal, Clamen said.

These laws also criminalize sex workers for helping each other, lead author Pearson said.

“That’s why we tried to show how these ways of working collaboratively are beneficial despite criminalization,” Pearson added.

The AESHA study interviewed 918 sex workers across the Lower Mainland between January 2010 to August 2022. Forty-one per cent of respondents said they’d worked with other sex workers as a safety strategy, 38 per cent said they’d serviced clients outdoors or in public spaces, 33 per cent said they’d worked in formal indoor settings, and 27 per cent said they’d worked in informal indoor settings.

Building community despite criminalization

There are still many ways sex workers support one another despite Canadian laws, Clamen said.

They can offer emotional support, offer a place to stay, lend money and share and uplift one another’s social media posts. Peer sharing of information through community-led online or in-person support groups, where they offer advice on how to stay safe and other work tips, is also allowed, Clamen said.

For the study, researchers measured social cohesion by asking sex workers to rate how often and in what ways they supported one another.

It was exciting to take a strengths-based approach and look at the community initiatives that are keeping sex workers safe, said Shira Goldenberg, principal investigator of the study. Goldenberg recently began working as an associate professor at San Diego State University.

There are many ways sex workers are marginalized beyond just sex work being criminalized, Goldenberg added.

Thirty-seven per cent of study respondents self-reported as Indigenous, 32 per cent as Black or women of colour, and 31 per cent as white. Slightly less than one-third had immigrated to Canada, and 71 per cent said they had had unstable housing in the last six months.

The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform’s website notes how Indigenous women, racialized immigrants and trans people, especially trans women, face disproportionately higher levels of policing regardless of their participation in sex work. “The criminalization of the sale or exchange of sexual services gravely exacerbates their stigmatization and marginalization,” the website adds.

Kit Rothschild, community co-executive director for PACE Society, a non-profit organization that provides confidential, non-judgmental services for sex workers, such as occupational health and safety education, support, advocacy and outreach, says there’s also policing that happens from neighbours, when sex workers are surveilled by neighbours and building managers who report them to strata boards, the police or the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

This pushes sex workers to isolated and more industrial parts of the city. It can result in eviction, loss of custody of children, seizures of funds by banks or payment processors, doxxing, loss of privacy and increased risks to physical safety, Rothschild said.

B.C. has sex work enforcement guidelines that allow police to apply the sex-work-related laws with discretion, but sex workers are still surveilled and experience raids on massage parlours and call centres, Rothschild said. This pressures them to follow local bylaws, which can be very restrictive, they added.

They point to Richmond, which has “really strict guidelines around who can be licensed to work in a massage parlour” and requires employees to have government-issued ID, a criminal background check and ID fingerprinting, which are similar to the requirements to work in nursing or with youth, they said.

The collected data can be shared with the Canada Border Services Agency and can affect people’s ability to stay in Canada or travel outside the country, Rothschild said.

Border security agents are using facial recognition software to identify sex workers and tie their online profiles or ads to their legal identification, Rothschild said. When these programs are successful at matching people’s faces to their ads, they can get banned from travelling to the United States for 10 years, or will have to pay $10,000 to be allowed to re-enter the country, they added.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations prohibit anyone without Canadian citizenship or permanent residence from doing sex work and presumes migrant sex workers need rescuing rather than supports that enable them to make their own work decisions, according to the Alliance for Gender Justice in Migration.

This prohibition, combined with strict bylaws like the background checks required in Richmond, means sex workers in the most precarious positions are pushed further into the margins, Rothschild said.

Rothschild said people are attracted to sex work because it offers an easier entry into the labour force than working at, say, a fast-food restaurant. A sex worker can make their own schedule, work around disabilities, afford medications the government won’t cover and earn a living wage, they added.

“The more people encounter things like racism or transphobia or ableism when they’re applying for regular jobs, the more sex work seems like it’s a great option,” Rothschild said.

Just under one-third of study respondents said they’d faced police harassment at work, which was overshadowed by 36 per cent reporting they’d experienced physical or sexual violence by any perpetrator.

Police will surveil and “check in on” areas where sex work clients are going to be present, such as outdoor spaces and massage parlours, to “shoo clients away,” Pearson said. For immigrants, that can have huge implications on their permanent residency or citizenship application, she added.

Police surveillance means workers might be afraid to meet clients in visible areas or communicate openly in a way that lets them conduct safety screenings, Goldenberg said.

It can also discourage sex workers from accessing the lower-barrier services, including health services, offered by supportive organizations.

All of this ties back to how decriminalizing sex work would improve occupational health and safety, Pearson said.

Pearson pointed to New Zealand and the Australian state of New South Wales as examples of decriminalization done well.

New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003, and since then there have been improvements to sexual health, rates of sexual health testing, access to health services and a reduction in exploitive work relations, according to a 2022 review of academic literature about sex work.

In New South Wales, which decriminalized sex work in 1995, similar benefits are credited to an increase in peer education, community, services and access to information. However, in New Zealand migrants are excluded from decriminalization, which increases their risk of deportation and exploitation, and in Australia local councils use zoning bylaws to control where sex work businesses can be set up, pushing businesses to industrial areas or to be unlicensed.

The Tyee contacted the Vancouver Police Department, asking how the force takes research like this into consideration.

In an emailed statement, media relations officer Const. Tania Visintin told The Tyee VPD officers value building relationships with those involved in the sex industry to increase worker safety and respond to community complaints, balancing the risks presented to the community or sex workers in its decisions around enforcement.

However, the force will not be changing its approach as a result of the study, she added, noting, “We support the current legislation as it provides the necessary tools to keep both sex workers and the community safe.”