Actually, it would still be legal to sell sex, it would just be illegal to buy sex.
The Gazette
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Few current endeavours are nobler or more urgent than the effort to stamp out the worldwide trafficking in human beings, but the Liberals and Conservatives on the Commons committee on the status of women have come up with a pretty misguided way to go about it.
The committee's report, tabled this week with bipartisan accord, urges the government to make it illegal to buy sex - not to sell it, mind you, just to buy it. But put aside the illogic of that, as well as the absurdity of trying to outlaw sexual transactions in a culture that has pretty well succeeded in turning sex into a commodity, and we're not convinced this "war on johns" would do what it's supposed to do.
The argument goes something like this: As most modern slavery involves the sexual exploitation of women and children, then governments must do what they can to make their countries unattractive to traffickers. "If Canada is going to be charging the customer," Liberal MP Maria Minna said, "the chances are that the demand is going to go down."
Maybe.
But it's unlikely demand will go down enough to discourage traffickers. Attempts in other jurisdictions to fight prostitution by going after johns don't seem to have eradicated commercial sex. Even publishing the names of "found-ins" in newspapers and on websites hasn't had more than a fleeting impact on sexual transactions in the places it has been tried.
Sweden has recently made it an offence to buy sex, but it's too soon to tell whether Scandinavians have had any luck in curtailing the unruly passions of their citizens.
That such measures seldom succeed should come as no surprise. Prostitution is older than civilization and probably as old as speech, and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. That doesn't make it good or healthy, but it does underline the futility of trying to use legislation to outlaw what is essentially a private vice. The best you can do is limit and regulate it, and we already have laws that do that - laws that forbid soliciting, for example, and operating a "bawdy house" or living off the avails of prostitution.
It could even be argued some of these laws are excessive in that they create unnecessarily dangerous working conditions for prostitutes. As long as sex remains a legal activity, criminalizing its purchase seems illogical, provided buyer and seller are both consenting adults.
The target of any effort to wipe out human trafficking should be the exploiters, not the buyers and sellers, and police and prosecutors already have all the legislative tools they need to do that. Slavery is already a crime, and so is coercing women to have sex and sexually exploiting children. Surely, the solution is to enforce those laws, and not to harass a group of hapless Canadian citizens.
At the very least, perhaps Parliament should wait to see how the Swedish experiment turns out before adding yet more articles to the Criminal Code.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007
The Gazette
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Few current endeavours are nobler or more urgent than the effort to stamp out the worldwide trafficking in human beings, but the Liberals and Conservatives on the Commons committee on the status of women have come up with a pretty misguided way to go about it.
The committee's report, tabled this week with bipartisan accord, urges the government to make it illegal to buy sex - not to sell it, mind you, just to buy it. But put aside the illogic of that, as well as the absurdity of trying to outlaw sexual transactions in a culture that has pretty well succeeded in turning sex into a commodity, and we're not convinced this "war on johns" would do what it's supposed to do.
The argument goes something like this: As most modern slavery involves the sexual exploitation of women and children, then governments must do what they can to make their countries unattractive to traffickers. "If Canada is going to be charging the customer," Liberal MP Maria Minna said, "the chances are that the demand is going to go down."
Maybe.
But it's unlikely demand will go down enough to discourage traffickers. Attempts in other jurisdictions to fight prostitution by going after johns don't seem to have eradicated commercial sex. Even publishing the names of "found-ins" in newspapers and on websites hasn't had more than a fleeting impact on sexual transactions in the places it has been tried.
Sweden has recently made it an offence to buy sex, but it's too soon to tell whether Scandinavians have had any luck in curtailing the unruly passions of their citizens.
That such measures seldom succeed should come as no surprise. Prostitution is older than civilization and probably as old as speech, and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. That doesn't make it good or healthy, but it does underline the futility of trying to use legislation to outlaw what is essentially a private vice. The best you can do is limit and regulate it, and we already have laws that do that - laws that forbid soliciting, for example, and operating a "bawdy house" or living off the avails of prostitution.
It could even be argued some of these laws are excessive in that they create unnecessarily dangerous working conditions for prostitutes. As long as sex remains a legal activity, criminalizing its purchase seems illogical, provided buyer and seller are both consenting adults.
The target of any effort to wipe out human trafficking should be the exploiters, not the buyers and sellers, and police and prosecutors already have all the legislative tools they need to do that. Slavery is already a crime, and so is coercing women to have sex and sexually exploiting children. Surely, the solution is to enforce those laws, and not to harass a group of hapless Canadian citizens.
At the very least, perhaps Parliament should wait to see how the Swedish experiment turns out before adding yet more articles to the Criminal Code.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007
