Vancouver Massage Parlors: It’s time to reduce risk for sex workers
The effect today, as it was then, is that the work is more dangerous than it needs to be and the participants — mostly women — are excluded from the basic rights and protections enjoyed by everyone else in society.
The risk of arrest for soliciting forces sex workers and their clients into dark and dangerous neighbourhoods at night. Instead of discussing the transaction with a client, like any other business exchange, hurried judgments must be made before climbing into a stranger’s car.
The bawdy house laws make it legally impossible for sex workers to operate a brothel like any other business. They exist, of course, surreptitiously or as massage parlours or escort agencies. They pay taxes and licence fees and advertise. But they operate in a legal shadow that penalizes workers. The laws serve mainly to make the sex trade dangerous.