Glen Schaefer

West End sex workers honoured with memorial

It wasn't your typical church social.

A crowd of 100 gathered Friday morning outside Vancouver's St. Paul's Anglican Church, at the West End intersection of Jervis and Pendrell, to unveil a memorial — a retro lamp post with a red bulb.

The memorial honours sex workers who frequented these streets until the early 1980s, when they were driven away by city hall, police and the provincial government.

"The early 1980s marked the full-fledged anti-prostitution crusade to purge sex workers from the West End," said Becki Ross, a University of B.C. sociology professor who has specialized in the sex trade. "Davie sex workers built the foundation of what would become this city's first Gay-bourhood, and yet hookers on Davie have never been honoured as the former fighters for gender, sexual and racial minorities."

Critics say the displacement of the sex trade, first from their apartments to the streets and alleys, and then out of the West End altogether, forced them into the unsafe conditions that eventually made them easy prey for serial killer Robert Pickton and others.

Ross and Jamie Lee Hamilton, a longtime advocate for the transgendered and sex workers, spearheaded an eight-year drive to install the memorial. Among Friday's crowd were representatives of the forces that had driven the prostitutes and hustlers out, there to apologize for what has since been deemed a tragic injustice.

The city paid for the new memorial, a cost that Coun. Andrea Reimer said was equal to that of the $28,000 in fines collected from sex workers through a 1982 city anti-hooker bylaw that was later deemed unconstitutional.

"These actions reflected how the community broadly saw safety at that time," said Reimer, who was near tears as she spoke. "We now know that that view and those actions resulted in great harm to others in the community, namely sex workers. Not just harm — that's a very soft word for the abduction, torture and murder of many women."

Reimer said the memorial served as "a reminder to me and our community that justice has to live for everyone or it lives for none of us."

The crowd brought past and present politicians together, including former mayor Philip Owen, whom Hamilton hailed as a champion of sex workers' rights. Vancouver Green Party city councillor Adriane Carr called for the formal legalization of prostitution.

Vancouver police Supt. Michelle Davey apologized on behalf of the force, after which Hamilton took a break from the solemnity of the occasion to remark "I like to see a woman with a gun."

Anglican Church rector Jessica Schaap hosted a lunch for the crowd in the church after the ceremony.

"One of the promises we make in the church, and we don't always live up to it, is to respect the dignity of every human being," Schaap said. "Maybe we don't remember this all the time, but Jesus was good friends with sex workers."