Thursday, January 31, 2008

Who's behind the push for legal brothels in Vancouver?

Interesting point raised in this article in the Montreal Gazette:

This bizarre notion that laws on prostitution should be altered, even temporarily, to accommodate the sexual desires of fans at large sporting events is not unique to British Columbia. ...

Germany, host of the 2006 World Cup, campaigned against "forced" prostitution, based on trafficked women and children, and the head of FIFA, soccer's world body, urged soccer fans to use only prostitutes who were "voluntarily" in the business. But voluntary was hardly the order of the day, with reports that as many as 40,000 women and children were trafficked into Germany to service the [sex-obsessed soccer fans].

In an essay this year, [University of Ottawa sociologist Richard] Poulin criticized proposals to relax prostitution laws for sports events ... [He] argued that simply removing prostitution from the streets, as Vancouver's Susan Davis suggests, does not turn prostitution, the business of selling one's body to strangers, into a safe activity. ...

With an estimated 90 per cent of prostitutes having been forced into the sex trade, increasing the number of prostitutes is not a good idea. ...


No kidding. Makes one wonder who exactly Susan Davis is working for. Because very few prostitutes are allowed to work for themselves, especially if there is big money involved.

Which raises the question of whether Vancouver's mayor can't grasp that concept or just doesn't want to. Or, worse, is being influenced by well-placed vested interests to legitimize the very profitable criminal activity of pimping and trafficking.

2 comments:

carpedia said...

Janine Benedet, a professor at UBC Law, put on an amazing lunchtime lecture at the law school on this very topic. While she discussed the forced-prostitution and how legalizing helps the oppressors and not the oppresed, my favorite aspect was the way she used the word "prostituted" reather than "prostitute". This language showed the reality of women in the "sex industry"--their bodies are used by others to further their own financial gain, much to the women and children's detriment.

Pawlina said...

I'm sorry I missed that lecture. Prof. Benedet sounds like a brilliant woman and hats off to her for, among other things, such expert use of the English language.

And hats off to you for putting "sex industry" in quotation marks. That "industry" is far more exploitative than anything that ever came out of the Industrial Revolution era, yet it is unbelievably, and reprehensibly, considered "progressive" in this one. The more of us who buck that disgusting trend the better.

Thanks for stopping by, and good luck with your law studies.