Margaret Dwight-Spore

p. 4.

BEAVER: Decriminalize prostitution or prosecute equally

BEAVER [Better End All Vicious Erotic Repression] is Canada's first organizational voice for prostitutes and other workers of the flesh; i.e., strippers, porno actresses, topless anything.

Legislation goveming prostitution in Canada is undergoing rapid change. The courts have been busy interpreting current laws, and the Minister of Justice has recently proposed amendments to the Criminal Code to tighten prostitution laws.

In order to understand the new developments, we have to review the evolution of the law in the past decade.

At one time the law allowed a woman to be incarcerated if she were known to be a street-walker who could not give a good account of herself (Criminal Code, Vagrancy C). In 1972 Vag-C was repealed because it was considered unjust to arrest a person for reasons of identity alone. You have to commit an illegal act. The current soliciting law was constructed and enacted in an attempt to focus on the illegal act.

In many cases the police were able to use the soliciting law as they had previously used Vag-C: to rid the streets of women they suspected of soliciting for the purposes of prostitution. Any number of physical gestures made by a wpman to indicate that she was available or interested in speaking with a man were brought· up in court as evidenee of soliciting.

The higher courts of Canada have refused to let the police use the soliciting law as another form of Vag-C. Deborah Hutt was arrested for smiling at a plainclothes officer previous to entering his car and agreeing to have sex with him for money. On 8 February 1978 the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously overruled her conviction, saying that her smile did not constitute soliciting according to the dictionary definition of soliciting as persiste11t and pressing importuning. Although the case had been appealed on the above grounds, Judge Spence added that in his personal opinion, the car, in which the monetary offer was made, was not a public place. Now all cases where the evidence of soliciting is based on a woman's physical overtures in public are being thrown out of court.

The result, according to police and certain local politicians, is an "alarming increase" of on-street prostitutes, and so the possibility that they may annoy pedestrians, Curiously enough, few men seem to be suffering from their advances. Local complaints of harassment have all been made about men; women who make these complaints have been told it is the fault of another group of women, prostitutes.

Sexual harassment varies more according to the ethnic character ·of a neighbourhood than the number of prostitutes working there. Furthermore, men do not distinguish between prostitutes and other females. All women, regardless of their status suffer public insult from the male sex. To suggest that laws to punish prostitutes will aid other womeri resist street abuse is heaping insult upon insult. After all, the desires of men keep prostitutes on the street, not vice versa.

One would hope that the recent emphasis of the high courts on the public-nuisance element of soliciting (as in "pressing and persistent importuning") might be extended to include as offenders those men who pressingly and persistently pursue women for the purposes of paying them for sex, getting it for free. or whatever. But no. The Ontario Supreme Court just acquitted Mr. "P" who offered money to a policewoman posing as a hooker. The Court defined the solicitor as the one who receives the money. The British Columbia Court of Appeal recently came to the same conclusion. "The crime," says Margo St. James of COYOTE, "is TAKING THE MONEY."

The Minister of Justice's proposal to amend the Criminal Code on prostitution reverses the progressive Supreme Court decision of D. Hutt, but does not touch the case of Mr. "P." The amendment would prohibit soliciting of any kind (winks, smiles, etc.) in any place and by either sex. The idea behind "by either sex" is to catch homosexual as well as heterosexual hustlers. Most people do not realize that presently a prostitute is defined by common law as a female person or sometimes a man dressed as a woman.

The definition of the solicitor as the one who receives the money, combined with Basford's proposal to outlaw all forms of soliciting, point toward the further repression of women who are struggling to survive in an already discriminating economy. If passed the new legislation means that what prostitutes do anywhere will be police and state business, while the client's privacy will continue to be respected. Unescorted women on the street may be subject to police surveillance. In the 1960s in the US South, archaic loitering and vagrancy laws were used to deter female civil rights workers.) Women as a whole will continue to be treated as the provokers of men's so-called natural, uncontrollable instincts.

Prostitution is not going to stop until the demand goes away. Meanwhile we have to find some way to improve the status of the women involved, not further demoralize them as criminals. It goes without saying that if prostitution is not decriminalized then both parties, client and prostitute, must be equally penalized.