FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 27, 2014
Will the Parliament consider Canada’s largest study of experiences of people who pay for sexual services when deciding on the future of prostitution laws?
Our research team recently completed the largest Canadian study to date on the experiences of people who have paid for sexual services. It is also the latest project in almost 20 years of research that members of our team have been doing with people who pay for sex in Canada.
We are finishing this study at a time when the Parliament has been given the task of deciding how, if at all, to replace Canada’s prostitution laws, struck down by the Supreme Court in the Bedford case last December. Discussions around the Bedford case have been focusing on the issue of harm in prostitution. Some believe that the purchase of sex itself should be criminalized in order to deal with this harm.
Certainly, there is nothing in the various projects that we have undertaken over the past two decades that would suggest that interactions between sellers and buyers of sex are inherently violent, and something that people who pay for sex should be criminalized for. In Canada and internationally, sex workers have been speaking against criminalization of their clients, warning that it would make their work more dangerous. Our research participants have talked about specific situations and circumstances where they have experienced or witnessed violence – these did not define all or every commercial sexual interaction.
Our study seeks to better understand why and how problematic interactions arise – something we feel is important to do before we can develop effective legal or social strategies to address them. Because they play an integral role in commercial sexual interactions, the voices of those who pay for sexual services are crucial to any dialogue about Canada’s sex trade. Recent conversations taking place through mainstream media about prostitution have largely been happening with little or no knowledge or interest in the experiences or insights of buyers of sexual services. Moreover, these conversations have largely ignored the growing body of ethically and methodologically rigorous social and health science research on this population.
As we continue analyzing and releasing data from this project, we hope that the Parliament and the general public will show interest in better understanding interactions that may end up being regulated through Canadian legislation. Not understanding these situations may lead to development of laws that continue to place people involved in Canada’s sex industry in harm’s way.
CONTACT:
Chris Atchison
Tel: 604.339.0069
Email: info@sexsafetysecurity.ca
Department of Sociology
University of Victoria
PO Box 1700 STN CSC
Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2
www.sexsafetysecurity.ca
