Trying to come up with a clever Canadian Mountie quip and falling short, so I’ll just link the piece:
Ontario’s top court has legalized brothels, saying Canadian prostitution laws unfairly discriminate against prostitutes and their ability to work in safe environments.
A panel of five judges wrote that the law banning common bawdy houses “is grossly disproportionate” if all it aims to do is keep public order in a neighborhood and maintain public health standards.
“The record is clear that the safest way to sell sex is for a prostitute to work indoors, in a location under her control,” the judges wrote in a much anticipated ruling.
“The impact on those put at risk by the legislation is extreme,” the judges added.
However, the court stopped short of allowing prostitutes to openly solicit customers on the streets. The court ruled that prohibiting solicitation remains a “a reasonable limit on the right to freedom of expression.”
Whatever your opinions on prostitution might be, is there any doubt that from a public health standpoint, the absolute safest way to handle the issue is legalized and well-regulated brothels? From both a disease and criminal angle, that seems to be undeniable.
James Hare
It’s our neighbors to the north so it’s at least semi-likely that the question will be decided based on policy efficacy rather than “ick factor.”
If only they weren’t totally immune to the suffering of their neighbors to the South.
Jewish Steel
Drugs – BC weed. Check.
Sex – legal brothels. Check.
Rock n Roll – Loverboy. Check.
Anne Laurie
Stay away from the Dudley Do-Right jokes — Little Nell always preferred Horse to Dudley, back in those more innocent days…
Good for the Canadians, though. Sex workers deserve to be treated like other service professionals (for what that’s worth).
Dork
I smell a band name.
Brachiator
Not necessarily. There are not enough women willing or able to satisfy the demands of johns. At bottom, prostitituion is about forcing women, and some men, to perform sex acts.
__
And so, legal and well-regulated brothels soon take a back seat to less savory and safe establishments.
__
New Zealand appears to be one of the few exceptions. But that’s a long way to go for paid sex.
.
Steve
Why would you think the decision has anything to do with public health? Obviously it’s just a bunch of political hackery, or maybe the judges who voted in favor simply enjoy going to prostitutes. Didn’t we just learn that court decisions have nothing to do with the law?
Comrade Mary
Right now, your [federal] Supreme Court is considering whether mandates are acceptable.
__
Our [provincial] Supreme Court has come down firmly in favour of man dates.
Arm The Homeless
I see that BC is making a strong claim for all those international travelers who seem to be less than impressed with Amsterdam’s museums…
Perhaps Washington State will see some increased tax revenues from overflow? I hope someone is getting the data ready for comparison.
dan
That’s not maple syrup …
Comrade Mary
Anyway, one provision that was challenged but ruled against was “communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution”, although the decision as close. This still leaves sex workers on the street as more vulnerable than they should be.
__
See also:Sex trade workers hail victory includes these details:
Satanicpanic
Does the word undeniable really have any meaning anymore?
chopper
a well-regulated brothel being necessary to teh secks of a free state…
MattF
No solicitation on the street, but could they buy ads on Limbaugh’s show? Six ‘o one, half-dozen ‘tother, I suppose.
Added: Also, could have titled the post “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.”
Comrade Mary
Surprising support from a conservative newspaper:
When prostitutes in the Vancouver area started disappearing, some sex workers banded together to create a brothel called Grandma’s House so they could bring their customers indoors. The city shut it down, and Pickton went on to kill even more vulnerable women.
Daaling
Ooohhh Canada!
So glad I no longer live in that fucked up Lord of the Rings world of good vs evil down south. I love the fact Canadians do not think our gov’t run healthcare is the same thing as communist China and we can still pass progressive laws that just make sense when we need to without listening to right wing manufactured reality bullshit. No doubt that fuckhead Harper will try fight this at the federal level if he can but maybe not. British Columbia has had very similar laws in place for many years so this is nothing new in Canada. Just more conservative Ontario catching up.
Steve
@Comrade Mary: It’s worth noting that it was a 3-2 decision and the 2 dissenting judges would have struck down the solicitation law as well. So that’s a narrow loss on the solicitation issue and a 5-0 decision on the brothel question, wow. As I skimmed through the decision I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the sheer liberalness of it all and the fact that someone would sit back and think about the question: hey, what’s really best for the people who actually have to do this stuff to make a living?
wrb
I was surprised years ago when I’d go into any nondescript bar in the northern Alberta, the Yukon or the NWT
in the middle of the afternoon a naked girl would always come out and dance around for the handful of customers, who often were focused on the pool tables.
Beer just wasn’t drunk in Canada without nekkid girls a wiggling.
JenJen
Well, this Canadaphile is rather shocked that Montreal and the province of Quebec wasn’t all over this first.
FlipYrWhig
Post title should be “Going Down Up North.”
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
…then they came for the hookers….
Ruckus
@Dork:
Or a tag line.
scav
whew, what sort of a wall will they soon be screaming for on the north?
Amir Khalid
@Daaling:
Yay for you.
PeakVT
@Ruckus: A common bawdy house of blogging.
RedKitten
I think it’s a fantastic ruling. Anything that helps those women be safer, and that helps eliminate exploitation by pimps, is all right in my book. I never really HAVE understood why prostitution should be illegal anyway. It’s my body — if I wish to sell it for money, should that not be my right?
sam b
Well, as someone who lives in New Zealand, and on Auckland’s most busy intersection for street prostitution no less…
Legalising has mostly been a success. There are still problems, sometimes with brothel owners who are basically drug dealers too and keep women hooked and working for them to pay off the drug debt. That was probably happening before legalisation though, and now the police can intervene when they hear about these situations.
Prostitutes are safer in brothels, without a doubt. There are still problems for street-walkers, who because they are a)transgender b)physically unappealing or c) mentally ill/drug-f*cked aren’t taken in by professional brothels.
It’s illuminating how many women are willing to become prostitutes when it’s legal. A large number of Asian students studying here work as prostitutes, because it’s hard for them to find other work (and because they’re young, they can make money.) Maybe the biggest ‘victims’ of legalisation have been those who were running ‘classy’ ‘escort’ services before, the visit-your-hotel-room sort that a blind eye was always turned to by police. They now face competition from any number of cheaper outfits. From what I can gather from Herald classfieds, going rate seems to be NZ$40-70 (usually for ‘half an hour’.)
Zifnab
Nonsense, John. Abstinence is the best policy. If the sex workers just stopped having sex, they wouldn’t be getting attacked or infected or arrested. The Canadian government was just God’s way of punishing sex workers, and now that Ontario has decriminalized prostitution its only a matter of time before it gets hit by a hurricane or an earthquake or a stray meteor.
Tonal Crow
What’s your evidence for the implication that legalized, regulated prostitution is worse on this score than illegal prostitution?
kindness
Soooo….does this mean that Canada will offer brothels for women now?
Steve
@RedKitten: In a perfect libertarian world prostitution would be strictly a function of consent, and if people want to buy and sell then it’s nobody else’s business. In the real world, prostitution tends to be about third world sex trafficking as much or moresoo than it’s about free-willed young women looking to make a few extra bucks for college. I find it to be a complex issue where both sides have some reasonable points.
DMcK
@Tonal Crow: One of Sully’s dissenters provided pretty good case that — legal or illegal — conditions for prostitutes are pretty abysmal overall.
Joe Boehmouth
@Steve: I find that to be true as well, and I think specifically that radfem critiques of prostitution (and pornography) have a lot going for them.
Nevertheless it still seems to me that from a harm-reduction point of view the evidence is pretty overwhelming on the side of legalization and regulation. Am I mistaken?
DMcK
@Tonal Crow: One of Sully’s dissenters provided pretty good case that — legal or illegal — conditions for prostitutes are pretty abysmal overall.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
as long as there is no second hand smoke involved.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
as long as there is no second hand smoke involved.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
as long as there is no second hand smoke involved.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
as long as there is no second hand smoke involved.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
as long as there is no second hand smoke involved.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@JenJen:
Have you ever been to a strip club in Montreal? They’re, uh, hands on.
DMcK
@Tonal Crow: One of Sully’s dissenters made a pretty strong case that, legal or no, conditions for prostitutes are pretty abysmal overall.
ETA: sorry, thought my original comment didn’t make it through.
Peter
@DMcK: I think that what Tonal Crow is saying is that citations are needed on legal brothels making the trafficking problem worse. I doubt anyone will deny that sex trafficking is horrendous and horrendously prevalent, but if legalization doesn’t affect the rates one way or another it’s not really germane to the merits of legalization.
Tonal Crow
@DMcK: That’s an interesting anecdote of unknown providence. Do you know of any hard data on the question of how legalizing and regulating prostitution affects prostitutes’ lives?
ShadeTail
@Steve:
This is, unfortunately, very true. The real problem, it seems to me, is that our legal system seems more focused on the people being coerced rather than the people doing the coercing. Or, at the very least, it focuses on both the coerced and the coercers equally rather than dealing with the side that has the greater power.
__
One of the major unseen problems of anti-prostitution laws is that the people coerced into it think (usually correctly) that they’ll be the ones to end up in trouble if they go for help. Decriminalizing it, if not outright legalizing it, would mitigate that problem quite a bit.
Gex
Legal and regulated just doesn’t impose the puritanical judgment and maximum risks that are required by a loving and just God. This is okay for Canada, but not for God’s favorite nation.
RedKitten
@Steve: And that’s why I think that the law has been barking up the wrong tree all these years. Go after the exploitation, not the prostitution.
300baud
For those wondering what about the experience of actual prostitutes, I strongly recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Girl-Michelle-Tea/dp/0867196203
It’s a very readable and compelling description of the author’s time as a prostitute.
Liberty60
As with any business enterprise, legal is one thing; well regulated is another.
All the harmful effects of prostitution can be ameliorated by well written and enforced regulation.
But in order to get over the idea that the government can regulate our bodies, we have to accept that government can regulate our businesses.
Scott P.
In the same way that, from a public health standpoint, the absolute safest way to handle the issue of the slave trade is legalized and well-regulated slave ships.
russ
Just think, now we can spell Canuck with an F.
ShadeTail
@Scott P.:
Provided, of course, that you are dealing with prostitutes who were taken captive and forced into the job. Which is all kinds of illegal all by itself. But if you start dealing with prostitutes who, for good or for bad, willingly chose that profession, suddenly your analogy starts breaking down.
__
Furthermore, I would suggest that, if prostitution were legalized and regulated, most people working that job would be there willingly, and the people who weren’t would be a problem that could be dealt with quite easily. So your analogy ends up not holding any water.
El Cid
As long as they can combine forced ultrasound probing, no taxpayer funding of their contraceptives, and Stand Their Gound firearms training and possession, I’m good with it.
Joe Boehmouth
@Scott P.: There are a large number of examples of societies that have successfully eradicated slavery. There are not, to my knowledge, any examples of societies that have successfully eradicated prostitution – although I could be wrong. In any case, the current regime of prohibition is clearly a failure at its stated aim. I think it would be best if prostitution were entirely abolished, but I do not see a clear policy means of accomplishing that. Do you have any suggestions?
Retief
@RedKitten
I believe we fought a war about 150 years ago and determined that the answer to that question is “no.” The question is more along the lines of “Is renting my body for sex more like slavery or more like renting it for digging ditches or building websites?”
Brachiator
@Tonal Crow:
I posted a link to the issue of prostitution in New Zealand as one success story. But New Zealand is far away and relatively isolated. I posted links before about prostitution when there as one of the typical idiotic ED Kain threads.
__
You can google as well as I can, maybe even search for the previous Balloon Juice thread.
__
A few notes, though. When Heidi Fleiss was arrested years ago, it was not for hooking, it was for pandering. Madams, pimps and panders don’t really protect hookers; they exist to get the maximum money from johns and to make sure that the prostitutes provide maximum service. By persuasion or by coercion. And so, even though prostitution is legal in some places, the illegal trade flourishes alongside, because the demand and what johns want exceed what even many women in the business want to provide.
__
I used to do some tax work for former prostitutes. A number of them reminded me of former boxers. Looking at them closely through the makeup, you could see the result of an occupational hazard. The bones in their cheeks and noses and chins had been broken by blows rained on them by johns or pimps. Sometimes the john paid the agreed upon price, but figured that since the prostitute was now naked and vulnerable, he could get more or a better deal, or something that the woman did not want to do. And a lot of these fools didn’t want to take no for an answer, even if the pimp was nearby and would beat the guy’s ass.
__
People who want to play the philosphical game of talking about legalizing prostitution need to learn what really happens in that world.
@RedKitten:
It rarely really works that way.
__
Also, men and women work hard to keep prostitution underground. I know many people who argue that prostitution should be legalized. I don’t ask them if they would work the trade. Too easy. I ask women if they would date a man who said, “I’m glad you had a nice time at dinner. I’m am not going to pressure you to go to bed with me, because I’m seeing a hooker after I drop you off.” Or, “I want to marry you, but I need to hit the brothels at least four times a week. That’s all right with you, right?”
__
How many men would tell his buddies, “She’s the girl of my dreams. And she works the local brothel. It’s OK if you use her services now and again. It’s all money in the bank.”
__
When stories arose about John Edwards using hookers, many here were quick to brand him a douchebag.
__
Society works hard to keep prostitution underground.
.
El Cid
@Brachiator: One problem is, though, that we as a society won’t really be honest and ‘decent’ about it.
IOW, prostitution might be legalized, but we’ll make sure it’s still weakly regulated and favors the johns over everything else, and that as much cheapness and shame is also piled into it as possible.
Hell, we barely can keep regulations of meat and vegetable processing safety in place and even less successfully enforced.
Joe Boehmouth
Or cops. I don’t have any illusions that trafficking and coercion, in one form or another, wouldn’t still exist under legal prostitution, but it seems to me that it would provide some minimum level of protection against more egregious kinds of abuse, including abuse within the criminal justice system.
Omnes Omnibus
@Joe Boehmouth: One thing that legalization does is create at least the theoretical possibility of prostitutes reporting abuse without risking arrest.
El Cid
Hell, what am I talking about? We’re lucky to keep laws and regulations in effect and enforced against men beating up their wives, much less women who do sex work.
Linda Featheringill
@RedKitten: #25
Promises, promises. :-)
Cynthia D.
@Steve: The question was about whether hired staff of the prostitutes such as security guards could be considered the same as pimps. The law essentially had all hired staff as the equivalent of pimps even in brothels run by the prostitutes themselves. Being a pimp is still illegal but running a brothel and hiring staff for safety is now acceptable. Street prostitution is still unacceptable under the ruling.
Tonal Crow
@Brachiator: Maybe I need to ask my question more clearly. I seek actual data — not personal anecdote — on what influence legalizing prostitution has on prostitutes’ lives.
__
By “actual data”, I mean data gathered by researchers making a good faith effort to measure, in a quantifiable way, what effect legalization has on prostitutes. Basically, let’s see the science (in this case, sociology).
__
The article on New Zealand is a limited ad-hoc effort by one reporter to gauge the effect of decriminalization there. It’s rather better information than a single personal anecdote, but I wouldn’t call it “actual data”.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
Human desire is perverse, especially when money becomes involved. Prostitution is legal in parts of Europe, and yet many European and non European men fly to Asia because they what they want would never be legalized anywhere in any civilized nation.
__
I researched prostitution, drugs,and the issues of legalization for a contemporary ethics class. There used to be a thing on the web called the World Prostitution FAQ.Maybe it’s still around or cached. I got the impression that people were honest. There wasn’t much bragging. But consistently posters would ignore the pain, distress, misery of the prostitutes. They wanted what they wanted. And the most pathetic thing of all is how often they mentioned how they thought that the prostitute really liked them.
__
Also note that I have not written here whether I think prostitution should be legalized. I don’t know. I know some people who have been in the business. Even those who now lead “regular” lives were damaged by it. It’s not just society treating prostitution as shameful. It is that reducing a human to a commodity is inherently dehumanizing.
__
Some here are saying that a woman, any person has a right to do whatever they want with their body. Anyone here, aside from libertarian nutcases, want to defend a person’s right to sell himself or herself into slavery?
.
Joe Bohemouth
No, not really. A couple of posters here have trotted out the libertarian argument. I am with you in finding that repulsive. Some of us are more interested in harm reduction/public health arguments. I haven’t seen a compelling refutation of those here yet.
Brachiator
@Tonal Crow: Sociology ain’t science in my eyes. Not yet. But I take your point.
__
I am leaving for the day, so not much time. If you are interested, do some of your own research. Do a little google. The Economist has done some good articles on prostitution. PDF files of various studies are easy to find. And yeah, a lot of people have axes to grind, and overplay one side or another.
__
But you also have to look at police stats, since sociologists have blind spots. Some of them only look at health info, and there are few studies that look at a number of prostitutes over their entire working lives.
__
Hell, even biographies and memoirs of former madams can be enligthening.
__
There is a new book on Teddy Roosevelt’s efforts to battle vice in New York. Not sure how good it is.
__
On the other hand, what do you have to support your thoughts on the matter aside from a philosophical stance?
.
Anonymous At Work
As far as humor goes, this ruling provides the best grounds ever for stranding Congress in North Dakota over the winter. Especially with no internet access.
Brachiator
@Joe Bohemouth:
The people who talk harm reduction don’t know much about the lives of actual prostitutes, and also underestimate the degree to which prostitution will still remain underground.
__
The health issue, some good points, but still largely theoretical.
.
Tonal Crow
@Brachiator: You’re arguing strongly against legalization, based upon anecdote and perhaps also political philosophy, which is why I asked for data. I think we would be a healthier society if we based more decisions on science, or at least on best efforts to reach scientific understanding. I appreciate that you don’t consider sociology to be a science. Whatever the merits of that belief, the use of anecdote as a substitute for data is even less scientific.
__
I’ll say upfront that my bent is toward legalizing and regulating prostitution. That bent arises both from a strong belief in personal autonomy, and from a recognition that banning prostitution has some clear negative impacts, such as pushing prostitutes through the criminal system, fining and jailing them, burdening them with criminal records that impede their ability to get other jobs, and dissuading them from reporting abuse. It also has some clear negative impacts on johns.
__
The question is whether legalizing prostitution will, net, improve this situation, or whether it will cause or exacerbate other problems that will outweigh the benefits. Which is what actual data might help us determine.
__
That’s not to say that I would use a strict balancing test to decide the question. It is still my bent to support a person’s right to make decisions for herself, even if I think they’re bad decisions (such as taking meth, converting to fundie Christianity, or becoming a Republican). I would support continued criminalization only if I were convinced (by actual data) that legalization would substantially worsen prostitutes’ lives.
__
Just for completeness, I have no personal interest in hiring a prostitute, and never have done so, nor have I been one or even considered the option.
El Cid
@Brachiator: It would always be a difficult question in a private exchange based economy whether or not someone will choose to do something truly harmful to himself or herself for money.
In certain revolutionary libertarian anarcho-soshullist societies, not onl prostitution but alcohol and drugs were outlawed from the community for their vice effects; ideological successors aimed to have a non-market economy (i.e., based on methods such as labor exchange, etc) take care of the financial incentives (and pressures) to engage in such frequently self-harming activities while not outlawing the activities altogether.
Brachiator
@Tonal Crow: @Brachiator: You’re arguing strongly against legalization
Beauzeaux
@Joe Bohemouth: Even now there are certain things that are a violation of social policy. You can’t sell yourself into slavery. You can make lots of stupid conditions in a will that courts won’t enforce like who a beneficiary can marry.
You can’t sign away most of your civil rights. Your job may make you sign an agreement to not ever sue them for anything — but most of those aghreements are unenforceable.
El Cid
@Brachiator:
That’s true, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the point I was making, which was that anti-authoritarians too wrestled with the troublesome nature of sex as a market commodity. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its authoritarian society says nothing about how purported anti-authoritarians dealt with an issue that can be argued to be about a free and personal choice.
Jeana Bomzer
HI Liz, thanks for leaving the comment! The reason that I decided to present the idea of pursuing a coach is simply to identify another avenue of support that those watching their spouse battle bipolar disorder. Something that I found with traditional counseling is that many traditional counselors, therapists, psychologists, etc do not have the experience necessary to help guide you through the ups and downs of being married to someone bipolar. The counselors that I started seeing did not do a whole lot to encourage me to stay within the marriage. They KNEW the divorce statistics and knew that the odds were stacked against us. I believe that this happened because they did not have first hand experience with the illness themselves and as a result they were unable to support me in my marriage relationship with my husband. Do I think that a marriage or life coach should be a replacement for a traditional therapist? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that if your marriage is crumbling individual counseling is very important in identifying personal developmental areas that each spouse can work on. After these areas are worked on a life coach that has experience with mental illness can help you as you navigate your marriage with your spouse and helping you set boundaries in a positive manner that will help establish your roadmap to take your marriage relationships from where you are now to where you want to be.
Stan Wright
The Mounties won’t be involved – professionally, that is – with the changed law, because Ontario is one of two provinces (the other is Quebec) with a provincial police force, meaning that the RCMP does no retail policing in the province. They’re limited to federally regulated space, like airports, embassies, and Parliament hill. In other provinces the horsemen provide the default police force in areas without a municipal PD.
racing
Might as well comment… so, I’m, like, #442 or so…
Ronzoni Rigatoni
“Such a business! You sell it, and you still got it. You sell it again, and you still got it. Such a business!”
Told to me many years ago with a NY Yiddish inflection. Still cracks me up.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@Tonal Crow: Data certainly exists, for what it’s worth. Amsterdam comes to mind. I was also in Hamburg a few years ago when the girls were fighting for union recognition. Don’t really know what the data shows, and my Dutch girlfriend wouldn’t let me investigate further. But seems to me that the very puritanical Dutch were, above all, pragmatists in legalizing it, the idea being that a seafaring country needed it to protect the rest of society from the predations of returning sailors.
Tonal Crow
Brachiator Says:
You need to read your own posts. Nearly all of your arguments are against legalization, but you *say* you’re undecided. That’s just Boboism.