Sex Professionals of Canada New Forum!

[Cyberite]

Sex Professionals of Canada (http://www.spoc.ca) now has a forum which you can all participate in. SP and client alike.

SPOC's main mandate is to decriminalize prostitution (not legalize, the difference is explained on their website) but they also provide services to sex workers like a Bad Client List, access to legal counsel and other benefits to all who work in "the business".

If you would like to participate in their forum, just go to http://www.spoc.ca/phpBB2/index.php and register. No personal information is requested aside from an e-mail address and anonymous web-based ones are ok to use.

Why am I posting this? I am hosting their website as my contribution to their organization.

 

[Dave in Phoenix]

SPOC's main mandate is to decriminalize prostitution

Gee seems odd they would want to decrim what never has been a crime! Prostitution has never been a crime in Canada for heaven sakes!

 

[MarkII]

Cyberite...good move hosting their site!

Had a quick look at the site, it's quite valuable and worth a look see.

I had no idea SP's were being robbed and attacked to that extent. Too bad the news media ignores this.

The news media is so quick to run senastionalized stories about SP's during ratings yet they fail to mention how many are victimized.

 

[Cyberite]

Gee seems odd they would want to decrim what never has been a crime! Prostitution has never been a crime in Canada for heaven sakes!

There are other issues that most people don't know about....

Did you know that a sex worker is not allowed to get married or even have a significant other? The partner can be charged with "Living off the avails" even if they have their own job and income. Valerie Scott (head of SPOC) has many examples of this and can back that statement up.

Also, sex workers tend to be ignored mostly when they are victims of crime since society as a whole generally views prostitution as a crime when its not really. Just the things around it are a crime like communicating, or even wanting to work out of your own home are illegal.

Sex Workers are also leary of going to police if they are victims of crime for fear that they will be scrutinized themselves. SPOC helps by providing things like a bad date list and legal counsel specific to the concerns of a sex worker.

The impression I get is that their long-term goal is to get sex work viewed as a legitimate, necessary and decent job that should be treated like any other job and also charged the same income taxes as everyone else. They however can't do that until certain things are decriminalized. They are smart doing things one step at a time.

 

[Cyberite]

10 new people signed up today. Looks like a good start so far!

I had no idea either. I've met up with and spoken with Valerie many times and seen her speak at demonstrations and I can't believe some of the things that happen to these girls and even more unbelievable that the legal system seems to turn a blind eye to them.

How can these girls feel safe doing their jobs when they have nowhere to turn when something bad happens to them? Imagine going to work every day worrying if "This will be the day"... It's terrible, and that's why I support Valerie and SPOC.

Cyberite...good move hosting their site!

Had a quick look at the site, it's quite valuable and worth a look see.

I had no idea SP's were being robbed and attacked to that extent. Too bad the news media ignores this.

The news media is so quick to run senastionalized stories about SP's during ratings yet they fail to mention how many are victimized.

 

[Dave in Phoenix]

I'm curious when was the last time a husband of a provider ever got charged with living off the avails, assuming no drugs or other crimes involved. Agencies dominate the outcall industry in most of Canada with no real problems, arguing they don't sell sex just services.

On the other hand, obviously the law needs changing because laws that aren't enforced very often can be used selectively or based on the whims of local officials.

Obviously procuring law needs to be changed - I know of a agency owner now charged simply for answering questions of a cabbie who was an undercover cop when the cabbie asked about the industry based on helping his girlfriend decide to go into sexwork or not.

Bawdy of course is the same rarely enforced but can be selective. The key issue is do you go more with the current U.K. model, limiting the number of gals in a place (only one allowed per flat currently in U.K. but should be more), or the publicly owned brothels in Australia/New Zealand.

I was in Victoria in Sept and almost all the great agencies are incalls. The police inspect periodically to be sure all the escorts have licenses and no under aged but could care less about bawdy. So you have de facto decrim of bawdy. And rarely bothered in other cities unless complaints or other crimes.

But none of this is decrim of sexwork. One of my pet peeves is how often I have to teach Canadians that prostitution is not illegal. Maybe most dramatic when I was detained for 1.5 hours at Victoria airport since I had a name it seems close to someone in Florida they had in their computer. But that resulted in a complete search of my laptop with all my sexwork articles, link to terb etc. I had to teach them the Canadian Criminal Code, and that private sexworkers are legal vs public solicitation street hookers. Four immigration officers had no idea that prostitution was legal in Canada !!! The fact my passport showed Asian trips might have raised concerns about trafficking or something.

In the end as they said I obviously knew a great deal about the industry and after teaching them Canadian law the mood changed from confrontational to curious interest. I did a big post here at the time and on perb and sexworkvictoria.com

But my biggest concern about "decrim" both in Canada and the U.S. is that they defeat any chance of success by including decrim of public solicitation. The public is never going to accept decrim that results in more public nuisance street hookers in their neighborhoods. That position of the decrim groups has doomed and will continue to doom any liberalization in other areas.

Just like the Immigration officers most people assume prostitution is street hookers even though that is about 10% of prostitution. 90% is in private respecting the public desire not to have it in their face on the streets.

In fact when I explained the difference legally to the immigration officers one said, " I didn't think there was any difference". That is what I think most Canadians think and no way are they going to stand for decrim related to street hookers.

Now I do support doing whatever needed to get the street hooker off the street into rehab to get off drugs which is usually the case, to move on with their lives in safer ways in or out of sexwork industry.

I am reading all the testimony before the subcommittee of Parliament regarding the "decrim" proposals. Most of it is by anti-sex feminists that think all forms of sexwork is abuse of women or neighborhood groups so upset about the negative effects of public solicitation and how out ranged they are at any decrim of such a nuisance.

So far very little even discussion of the difference with private consenting adult sexwork related to agencies, bawdy etc. It's mostly about either abuse of women as the definition of all sexwork or the public nuisance street hookers.

My main point is don't toss out terms like decrim since most people assume that is for prostitution - i.e. street hookers in their minds. What is needed is education of the public about the issues, but not insisting on decrim of public solicitation which will never happen and dooms any attempt at liberalizing bawdy, procuring or agency issues in my view.

We have the same thing in the U.S. A voter referendum in Berkeley had the opportunity to be a great day for private sexwork. But it was doomed from the beginning since it included public nuisance street hookers, and was overwhelmingly defeated by the voters - and for good reasons.

 

[Dave in Phoenix]

Sex Professionals of Canada in my view is run by very immature people who have no interest in any mature discussion. They seem to think they need to mislead the public about having to decrim something that has always been legal - prostitution. They hide their agenda to impose street soliciation on neighborhoods that totally reject it

I have made suggestions to respect the public and keep sexwork private as it should be. That is not their agenda, but to deceive the public in my view vs their real agenda of promoting decrim of public soliciation which makes it very unlikely the important changable issues of bawdy and procuring will be addressed since their was such an uproar of rejection at the subcommittee hearings about decrim of public nuisance street solicitation.

I took the time to post what I considered intelligent thoughts on their site similar to the above I posted here. Instead of any discussion they just delete my post with a crazy excuse. Probably shows they know what I say is true but it's not their agenda. Or, don't have the intelligence to discuss so they just delete!

Here is their silly response which shows they can't tolerate intelligent details discussion if it it is not in support of their agenda:

Dear Dave,
I have deleted your letters because they were way too long and preachy. This forum is for lively , intelligent debate. I felt that your letters were navel gazing, in fact almost as though you were jerking off on our pages. It is not as though you don't have a forum of your own, what with your 4 websites.
Feel free to write again, but keep it to no more than 200 words.
This forum, while interested in discussing the tough questions and issues will not tolerate someone hogging our readers time.

 

[AMWBT]

Actually Dave..

Here is their silly response which shows they can't tolerate intelligent details discussion if it it is not in support of their agenda:

Dear Dave,
I have deleted your letters because they were way too long and preachy. This forum is for lively , intelligent debate. I felt that your letters were navel gazing, in fact almost as though you were jerking off on our pages. It is not as though you don't have a forum of your own, what with your 4 websites.
Feel free to write again, but keep it to no more than 200 words.
This forum, while interested in discussing the tough questions and issues will not tolerate someone hogging our readers time.

Lots of us would totally agree with their comments!

 

[Dave in Phoenix]

What do you disagree with? Can you discuss the issues instead of not liking detailed well reserached dicussion. Or are one sentance insults the only thing some folks are capable of?

I think the issue is very important since I am supportive of getting changes in your bawdy and procuting/agency related laws for Private consenting adult sexwork.

The best way to be sure that never happens is to attempt to force the public to accept public street soliciation which is a doomed cause since it is clearly a public nuisance issue very vividly shown by testimony to Parliment's subcommittee earlier this year.

I am supportive of changes the legal risks for 90% of Canadian sexworkers, not have 10% that insist on violating public communications law on the streets doom the reform efforts for the 90% (10% figure used in testimony at the subcommittee.)

And they should get off the streets for their own safety! I am concerned about them to get them of drugs and off the streets.

Athough maybe this tread should be moved to the General Disucssion area.

 

[AMWBT]

Agreeing

I said "agree", not "disagree". I agree that you're longwinded, insufferably preachy, that you set yourself up as an expert, giving very definitive answers to legal questions that don't have definitive answers. If anyone had said it, I'd also agree that you are an obviously self serving apologist for anything and everything that has to do with the sex trade, good and bad - everything you write is clearly your elaborate justification for your own lifestyle! If you got off the high horse once in a while, maybe you'd find people more receptive to what you have to say.

 

[Dave in Phoenix]

All acts associated with prostitution is a punishable crime by law..... how's that for "not a crime".

Not hardly. Outcall prostition which is probably 90% of all prostituion is 100% legal, no restrictions.

The Communications Law was changed a few years ago due to the public nuisance of street solicitation. Most citizens want it to be an indictable offence, certainly there is no support to decrim it.

So lets concentrate on what can be changed and not much opposition - bawdy, procuring and agency issues. Those are about private prostition, 90% of the trade which has no public nuisance secondary effects.

We can still be arrested, we can still have our children taken away, we can still have a criminal record, our family and partners can be arrested and we can still go to jail for doing our job THAT doesn't sound "not a crime" like.

90% of sexworkers do not face those issues. If you choose to violate the Communications law on the streets that is your choice. There is no way 90% of prostitues are at legal risk. Yes the agency law should be changed but can you cite me a case where the family or partners were arrested (for procuring or living of avails) if it was only outcall sexwork with no drugs, or other crimes involved? Yes there is a risk and I 100% support repeal of the living off the avails, although should still be able to go after pimps that abuse women.

I don't remember the last time an accountant had to face those odds just by going to work. Not to mention the fact that I can't report my taxes as a prostitute, I have to file it under a bogus business.

As an outcall prostitute you have none of those risks. Why can't you report your taxes? Many on terb say they do. It would be easy to get you for tax evasion, but since prostitution is not a crime, unless you solicit on the street violating the Communications law, you have no risk. Just respect the public by not being a public nuisance and you have no issues being outcall.

I agree as I have always said Bawdy needs to be changed. But its seldom enforced unless neighborhood complaints or other related crimes. But yes I am 100% supportive of liberalizing bawdy.

Happy hookers call themselves hookers, so the term is not derogotory. And many studies have shown most street prostitutes that are dumb enough take such a risk by being on the streets are addicted. No, not all. But why not stay off the streets, be safer yourself, not be a pubic nuisance, and join the 90% of Canadian prostitutes that respect the public by being private with the only issues being bawdy. (you are not at risk for living off avails, the person getting your money is but that should be changed also.

But when you toss in changes in the Communications law, you defeat progress on bawdy and agency issues since it will never be changed if you inlcude street solicitation. No where in the world that I know of other than in a few zones of tolerance is public soliciation legal. It was in Amsterdam until it was changed due to uproar of citizens who won't tolerate it. Zones have been tried in Europe and allmost all have failed.

The decrim/legalization issue is quite clear I think, until the Government in Canada decides if they want to acknowledge prostitution in all it's forms as a legitimate form of work and income, we as prostitutes will never be treated properly by general society.

Maybe if you would get off the streets like 90% are, you would get respect. People don't care what you do in private. They will not tolerate them on the streets in their neighborhoods - the 10% that don't respect the public yet want the public to respect them.

No it is not like gay marriage which I do support. Gay marriage is about private sex between two consentinng adults. It has nothing to do with being a public nuisance on the streets. Yes gays should have the same rights as all, there are no negative public effects like there are with street hookers.

Continued

 

[Dave in Phoenix]

Continued

Cops still harrass us, serial killers are still targeting us,

So respect yourself enough to GET OFF THE STREETS! Seems quite simple. Yes there can be bad dates on outcalls, but far rarer, and you can go to the cops since its perfectly legal as private outcall and far safer for you.

it's about our right as women to make choices associated to our bodies and our life, it's about removing the interdependance that we have to have with third parties like pimps, agency owners and various other third parties that make money off our bodies through these "grey" laws OR through legalization. Either way (Legalization or current legislation) we are treated like we have to be heavyily regulated for public safety, my business is just a business, why do special laws have to apply to me as a prostitute?? Is that in itself not discriminatory or society trying to place "their morals" on me as a private citizen?

Don't use a pimp, be an indepedent no one forces you to work for them.

The laws are not "grey" themselves just how they are enforced. outcall 100% legal. Incalls are illegal but rarely enforced. Living off the avails and procuring are illegal but rarely enforced. They should be elimiated. But your right ends when it has secondary public nuisance effects.

This is dramatically seen in the testimony to the Canadian Parliament which is debating decriminalization of bawdy house (incalls) agencies and street soliciting. The street issue is the most controversial with arguments for making it a more serious offense to decriminalize (very unlikely). And again the huge negative testimony is mostly about street hookers, not indepedent legal outcall prostitutes.

Just a few of many examples:
Ms Liz Bennett (Individual long-time resident)
She lives in the Strahcona area - the cute little houses of old next to what has been long accepted as the red light district. She talks about drastic changes for the worse over decades she has lived in the area and how the stroll has become more of a tourist attraction. She tells of stories of residents being harassed by hookers and johns today vs years ago when she viewed them as free spirits working independently in a far less offensive way

Mrs Lynne Kennedy Member, Vancouver Police Board
She brings up their report "What Can Be Done Differently - Recommendations From the Addictions, Sex-Trade Prevention Consultations Sessions". The conclusions are that legalization of prostitution is simply harmful to women Instead of protecting women, legalization is just as easy way for the government to rid itself of the problem it cannot control while making money off the misery of women. The legalization of prostitution does not prevent the abuse of women, bit it does make any legal recourse even more difficult. She referenced the study "10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution" by Janice Raymond of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International.

"Why would we legalize an activity that causes so much physical and emotional pain and leaves to many women feeling hopeless?"
---
Again I support everything being legal except public nuisance street solicitation. Insisting on that dramatically decreases the liklihood of making progress on bawdy, procuring, living off the avails.

 

[dreamer]

Did you know that a sex worker is not allowed to get married or even have a significant other? The partner can be charged with "Living off the avails" even if they have their own job and income. Valerie Scott (head of SPOC) has many examples of this and can back that statement up.

This is one of the most misrepresented issues regarding sex workers. It has been discussed previously on this board. The courts look for "parasitic" relationships. All of the laws from living off of the avails to bawdy house were designed to go after the pimps and those that take advantage of the prostitutes. I do think it is clear that those laws are not working.

My understand is that SPOC favours total decriminalization. They do not provide answers to such issues as the family that lives in the apartment next to an escort having incalls all day. They do not seem to acknowledge that street prostitution is very dangerous and a nuisanse, even though their Bad Client list supports this.

I am all for reform. I am all for a safe environment for the sex worker to work without having to give a significant portion of their earnings to someone else. However I have not yet read any such solutions. So off I go to the new SPOC site to read up. Maybe they will change my opinion.

 

[Aircraft]

Cute in a Kilt

You are dead on, cutey, (I can comfortably call you that now, I hope, since heretofore my very sporadic readings of Terb had somehow given me the impression that you were a man in a kilt. I mean, men wear them after all, and a couple of your comments here and there had left me a bit puzzled now and then.
But I digress: your argument is an accurate, intelligent, and above all, a realistic appraisal of the social and legal dimensions of the daily life experience of hordes of sex-workers in Canada. In particular you stress two issues which, if I were not so indolent and had more time, I would like to have addressed:1) the contemptuous dismissal of street prostitutes as a "public nuisance", a "social disease", a "blight on society", etc. etc; and 2) the complete failure to grasp the distinction between "de facto" Municipal "innovation" as a workable but undependable and unpredictable strategem to get around the criminal law, and the "de jure" status of sex work as it unravels from the criminal code. An associated oversimplification is the tendency to conflate what is "not illegal" with what is "legal".
The first, imports into the smug, self-satisfying, desirable, but delusionary comprehension of the realities of sex-work, an attitude of dehumanization of persons who live in the muck of contemporary "civility". The literature is rife with examples of the manner in which street (and also "off street") sexworkers have been treated as less than human by the socially comfortable, the police and the law. As Liv Jessen, the head of the Norwegian centre for prostitutes in Norway has stressed:"By objectifying the other person, you attack that other person's freedom. You turn the other person into a fact, an object in your world.....This gives me a nasty taste in my mouth...who am I to say to these women that I know better than they do, what their life is like, what they feel and think?" The suicide and serial killer rate with sex-workers, and particularly street workers, is a vivid reminder of this to anyone who cares to consider these people human beings.
The second, I could go on about ad infinitem; so I shall simply say that it is irresponsible to both clients and putative sex-workers to spread abroad the half -witted notion that prostitution is completely legal in Canada.
Sure,that is what may be desirable, but it is such an unconscienceable oversimplification that it is difficult to consider it less than vicious.

____________________

Huck: "We blowed out a cylinder head."
Aunt Sally: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
Huck: "No'm. Killed a nigger."
Aunt Sally: "Well its lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt..."
Mark Twain

 

[dreamer]

but it is such an unconscienceable oversimplification that it is difficult to consider it less than vicious.

Do you watch Boston Legal

 

[Aircraft]

Do you watch Boston Legal

No, I don't. But then I don't watch much television anyway - though I have got a set somewhere around here. At your suggestion I shall try to catch an episode or two if I can locate them.

I hope its a comedy.


______________

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

 

[Aircraft]

Legalization

Gee seems odd they would want to decrim what never has been a crime! Prostitution has never been a crime in Canada for heaven sakes!

I certainly wish all those parliamentary committees, wasting millions of dollars of our money trying to determine whether or not Canada should legalize prostitution and sex-work, would sit up and pay attention to this wise insight.


__________________

'Contariwise' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'

 

[Svend]

The SPOC does good work in advancing knowledge for hookers, but their message is tainted when they have Winston on their "undesirable clients" list. These public lists shouldn't be used because you don't like a person, they should be reserved for dangerous or dishonest clients.
http://www.spoc.ca/undesirable.html

 

[TheNiteHwk]

The SPOC does good work in advancing knowledge for hookers, but their message is tainted when they have Winston on their "undesirable clients" list. These public lists shouldn't be used because you don't like a person, they should be reserved for dangerous or dishonest clients.
http://www.spoc.ca/undesirable.html

What he said.

 

[dreamer]

It is nice to see Winston's name finally removed from the list.