Gordon Hardy
Opinion

Gordon Hardy: Rewriting the history of West End prostitution is 'fevered concoction'

Did a gang of racist vigilantes drive sex workers from the safety of Vancouver's West End into the dangerous streets of the Downtown Eastside, where they were murdered by sexual predators?

This is the fevered concoction put forward by long-time activists Jamie Lee Hamilton and University of B.C. professor Becky Ross, who've successfully pushed for a memorial in the West End to commemorate the sex workers who've lost their lives as a result of their expulsion from the West End in 1984.

The most disturbing element of this story is that the West End residents, Vancouver city council and the late B.C. Supreme Court Justice Allan McEachern have blood on their hands for having forced the young prostitutes out of the West End and into the hands of Robert Pickton. Nobody has tracked the whereabouts of the sex workers since they were ordered out of the West End by McEachern's injunction in 1984 and Hamilton and Ross cannot provide evidence of this allegation. Their allegation makes for a gripping story but it is nothing more than conjecture.

What we do know from eye-witness accounts is that the male sex workers simply relocated a few blocks outside the area covered by the injunction to Yaletown and that many of the female sex workers moved to Mount Pleasant. In time, some of the female prostitutes moved to the Downtown Eastside but there is no evidence that they were murdered.

The assertion by Hamilton and Ross that vigilantes drove the sex workers from the West End is equally disturbing to those of us who lived in the West End in the 1980s. The West End residents most affected by the noise and squalor of the sex trade in their residential streets formed a citizens' group called CROWE — the Concerned Citizens of the West End — or took part in a Shame the Johns campaign.

While some members of Shame the Johns had some noisy altercations with truculent sex workers, the majority of beleaguered West Enders peacefully sought a remedy from their elected representatives at city hall, their member of parliament, then-Vancouver Centre MP Pat Carney, and the courts.

In response to the lobbying efforts by CROWE, Vancouver city council passed a bylaw in 1982 prohibiting solicitation for the purposes of prostitution in the West End. The bylaw later became inoperative because the courts found that similar bylaws in other cities infringed on the federal government's authority to regulate criminal activity.

Other claims made by Hamilton and Ross are laughable and easy to repudiate. Hamilton's recollection of the West End in the early 1980s as "a dignified outdoor brothel culture" angers West End residents who remember the all-night noise, drinking, drug-taking, public defecation and the used condoms and syringes that littered residential streets at that time. Residents who were young women at the time have come forward with their accounts of how they were harassed and intimidated by Johns who mistook them for prostitutes.

Ross, Hamilton's fellow fabulist who describes herself on her UBC websites as a "queerly feminist, anti-racist historical sociologist," implies that racism was at work when she says there was "a consensus that the West End needed to be whitened and cleansed of the so-called public dangerous nuisance of street prostitution on the cusp of Expo 1986."

Again, this is innuendo and devoid of any truth. The majority of the sex workers were white street kids and there is no evidence in news coverage or editorial comment from the time to support this inflammatory charge.

Gordon Hardy has lived in the West End since 1980. Before retiring in 2010, he was executive director of the People's Law School in Vancouver.