Sex workers rights

Human trafficking has become a meaningless term!

Politicians and activists often abuse it to push for moral panic and punitive laws. We constantly heard the word “victim”. People in power realized that they cannot criminalize victims, since one cannot be both a criminal and a victim at the same time.

Sex workers were saying that prostitution should not be criminalized under any circumstances because it is a form of exploitation. Many women are in positions of control in the sex industry and that this was a choice they had made. They were asking who we were “as a society” to impose something else on them. From my perspective, the role of the police is to ensure that this consent is real. They need to have the means to do that, and they do under the Criminal Code. Beyond that, this is none of our business. We certainly should not change the fact that people can, according to what they say, voluntarily choose to work in the sex trade and do so in safety.

Now, under new laws, there will be no exceptions. The purchase of sexual services will always be a criminal offense (even though the act in by itself is legal!); and the justification is always to use fear and pitch it as a form of humanitarianism to help save “Trafficked Victims”. The politicians are using sound bites and shocking stories about human trafficking, which are true, by the way, to try to tell us that making sex work illegal will address that. When in-fact certain provisions of the Criminal Code have a grossly disproportionate effect on persons who engage in prostitution by putting their health and safety at risk and making them more vulnerable to violence by taking away their safety net and making the whole industry go underground. Is that the same argument that we are hearing from the other side—that no one should trade sex for money, in order to protect children? Is that argument not indicative of the deception hidden in these laws? I think the politicians using children to justify a religious Conservative ideology, according to which it is wrong to pay for sex?

In other words the justification to make sex work illegal is to Simply put, we cannot condone this so-called industry for the benefit of those individuals who claim to freely choose it, because doing so would exacerbate the harm experienced by that vulnerable group who are most at risk of subjection to prostitution, and importantly, do not choose it. Like WAW, how stupid do you think a free thinking society is? Instead of tackling the problem from it's roots just take away our freedoms. So they are saying that they need to make prostitution illegal because it is too dangerous and poses too great a harm to those involved, the communities in which it is practiced, and society at large to entrench it as a form of work recognized by law

In other words prostitution laws recognizes that entrenching prostitution as a legitimate profession by facilitating it through decriminalization would result in more vulnerable persons being drawn into it. Politicians do not think this is the type of society to which we should aspire. My answer to that is who are you to tell me how to live. if adults who chose it, like to do it, it should be legal...DICTATED FREEDOMS ARE NOT FREEDOM! This legislation would drive the trade underground and put at risk the safety and security of those individuals. The politicians have failed to look at that point.

Consenting adults who chose to sell sexual services to other adults should be legal and not to be confused with exploited underage sex workers with few options for survival. If you want to talk about child exploitation then this is a big term and the approach should be geared towards focusing on social service help and not making the sex industry illegal and it's definitely not a law enforcement issue. Children and disadvantaged individuals exploitation is a big term taking many forms like child laborers in construction, agriculture, in ship yards and the steal industry...list goes on and on, children in military, children trained to shop lift, pan handling.....etc and sex work.

Unfortunately “Trafficking ” has become a new term for an age old problem which is largely a teenage runaway from abusive situations at home and who sell sex to survive; are considered “Trafficking” victims by default under many federal or state/province laws. This is despite hardly any teen runaways have pimps or traffickers. Most see sex work as the best way to support themselves on the street given the limited legal and social service options available for children who run away from home. And most of these runaways do not travel out of their town or city, much less out of the country. So in practice, “Trafficking” does not mean “modern-day-slavery”. Nor does it mean transported across borders for purpose of sexual exploitation. Instead it usually refers to one or more of the following: being under age selling sex, illegally immigrating, being subjected to any kind of forced labor or abusive labor practices, and now they added to the list “adults engaging in consensual sex work”. Do you see the problem here? A free thinker in a free society will never accept such mediocre hypocrisy nor do I. Freedom it either exists or it does not. Take away our freedoms by defining boundaries in which we can be free and you are no longer living in a free society!

Don't be ignorant by associating “Human Trafficking / Modern-day-slavery” with consensual sex work. Does forced prostitution exist? Yes off course. But the majority of cases prosecuted under the sex trafficking charges are very very rarely the case of forced prostitution. However, the media focus only on these cases thus making you believe that forced prostitution is a problem growing out of proportion.

The only thing I can see here when politicians and the media keep preaching the term “Human Trafficking / Modern-day-slavery” and associating it with sex work; They are using humanitarianism and heroism to push a religious conservative ideology being put in place dictating to the free society how things should be. This scheme has all the hallmarks of con-artists cheating the non-thinking ignorant people in order to justify new powers and boundaries being placed on the free society and condition people to accept the civil liberty trade-off and the illusion of security and piece of mind.