Canada's Sex Trade Workers

Prostitution is a squalid, seamy, miserable occupation. It is demeaning to women, certainly to the women who sell the use of their bodies to men eager to take advantage of the opportunity. Women in the sex-trade profession labour under difficult conditions, to say the least. Not the least of which is public censure and the odium relating to the very thought of surrendering one's most intimate orifice to a stranger's fleeting possession.

No one could argue for prostitution as a polite social convention. It makes a mockery of the social and emotional bond that exists between men and women.

The casual trade of sex-for-hire represents a breeding ground for the transmission of disease, beyond that it is a degrading act. For the women-for-hire, in any event. For the men, not so much, as it happens, since a certain classification of men have always assumed that women's bodies are useful conveniences, and those men who prefer such casual encounters over more emotionally meaningful ones feel comfortable with the process of sexual barter.

The clients of prostitutes are represented by men from the entire spectrum of society. Young, footloose men, and men of social and political influence, as well as men engaged in the rough and physical trades. Lawyers and engineers, health professionals and high school kids; fathers of young families, and grandfathers for whom the remotest thought that one of their granddaughters might end up in the profession would represent an intolerable outrage.

So if someone were doing a feasibility study to determine whether the profession was a worthwhile one as a business venture they would have to conclude that there would never be a shortage of clients. There never has been, throughout recorded history. And then there are the women, most of whom must struggle with their own opinion of themselves as lacking self-respect at the very least, living a life of bleak horror at the worst.

Not all, of course, since there are women for whom social standing as a professional whore is meaningless; they do what they do because this is what they choose to do; mostly for the remuneration involved, and because for them their body is a convenient and useful tool of the trade.

The public can stand in judgement of these women, but this is who and what they are, and what they do; some through personal preference, many more because they have somehow become trapped into the lifestyle as a byproduct of drug dependency or some similar life misadventure.

But it is there, and there is little that polite society can do to stop it; condemn it certainly, but stop it, never.

And because prostitutes are considered to be the lowest of the demi monde, whose outrageously overt activities conjure up imagines of furtive, night-time grapplings, and cash tossed carelessly aside to be scooped up by the humiliated woman of tarnished reputation, society doesn't much care what happens to these women, young and not-so-young.

If we cared for these people as human beings we would be concerned even at a low level of awareness for their safety. Because we cannot find it in ourselves to have any sympathy for the trade and for the purveyors of the trade other than the contempt we feel they deserve, law enforcement agencies and society at large accept that they live dangerous lives by choice and if they fall victim to violence that too was their choice.

When women are murdered, as happens not infrequently, and it becomes known that they were sex-trade workers, the violence that was inflicted upon them seems explicable. Women can disappear and no one is alarmed because they don't live normal lives and what occurs to them does not reflect what could occur to women who do live normal lives.

Wrong - on every count - but this is how society sloughs off its responsibilities in such uncomfortable situations.

No one has to really like the fact that prostitution occurs. It is a shameful thing, in fact, but it is a transaction between consenting adults, for the most part, one where money changes hands for sex to the satisfaction of each partner.

When a woman in the trade becomes a statistic, a victim of violent crime because there have been no protections extended toward her under the law, society itself suffers in the quality of its values and certitudes that we are equal under the law.

The ruling that three federal prostitution laws are unconstitutional is a good one, under these circumstances.

Sex-trade workers, like any other workers in society, must have assurances of certain protections and security under the law. We don't have to admire the profession they have chosen, but we do have to admit they are human beings, just like us.