Canadian Press

p. 51

Hooker harrassment protested by group

TORONTO (CP) – Proposed federal legislation that would make life tougher for prostitutes will end up pushing the world's oldest profession further underground, says a former prostitute and spokesman for a women's group.

Baba Yaga, organizer of the 30-member Committee Against Street Harassment, refuses to use her real name because she wants to protect herself.

She says the legislation would cost more tax dollars and fill jails with prostitutes.

"It's going to put a lot of power into the hands of the police," Yaga said at a news conference Thurday.

The group, formerly known as BEAVER (Better End All Vicious Erotic Repression), plans to present a protesting brief to the Commons justice and legal affairs committee.

The proposed legislation would make it an offence for a man or a woman to offer his or her services as a prostitute in any manner, including a wink or a nudge.

As the law now stands, only a female can be a prostitute and a conviction for soliciting requires proof of persistence.

"The courts will be filled with women charged with this vague notion," said the 29-year-old former prostitute who practised the trade for three years before deciding to organize BEAVER in the fall of 1977.

Yaga said the group would like to see the offence of soliciting dropped from the Criminal Code and replaced with a new offence of "pressing and persistent importuning, which would allow women as well as men to lodge complaints."

Priscilla Piatt, a Toronto lawyer representing the group, said it would be business as usual for the higher class of prostitutes such as call girls, while the "lower class, the street level" would feel the brunt of the legislation.

"The level they're approaching is very shallow," Piatt said. "The irony is that the behavior will never change. The behavior is here to stay."

She said there is no law against the client because "many men on all levels of society want to buy sex from time to time."

Yaga said street harassment works both ways and women, regardless of their occupations, are victims of it at least as much as men are.

"Nobody prosecutes soliciting but police. No section of the Criminal Code protects women against street harassment. The offenders in these cases go scot-free."

The law of supply and demand will determine when prostitution will, if ever, end and "meanwhile we have to find some way to improve the status of the women involved, not further demoralize them as criminals."

Both women referred to a year-old Supreme Court of Canada decision which, they said, gave police specific guidelines for prosecuting prostitutes.

In that judgment, the court overruled a woman's soliciting conviction, saying that her smile did not constitute soliciting according to the dictionary definition of pressing and persistent importuning.