VANCOUVER – Indoor sex workers enjoy potentially life-saving
benefits, including less violence, reduced exposure to HIV and improved
relationships with police, says a new study.
Published
Thursday in the America Journal of Public Health, the study was done by
the Gender and Sexual Health Initiative of the BC Centre for Excellence
in HIV/AIDS and the University of British Columbia.
Researchers
interviewed 39 women who previously worked on the street and are now
living in two Downtown Eastside housing programs in Vancouver operated
by Atira Women’s Resource Society and RainCity Housing and Support
Society.
They are women-only buildings (residents and
staff) that offer supportive guest policies that require clients to
sign-in at front desk, have 24-hour staff available to call police in
case there is violence and on-site security cameras. The buildings also
offer health and safety resources, including bad date sheets and
condoms. Bad dates sheets include licence plates and descriptions of
violent customers.
The study shows that indoor sex work is much safer for women than working on the street and negotiating through car windows.
“This
is a really innovative model where sex workers are being able to
operate in the confines of their own rooms and have supportive policies
allowing them to do that,” said Dr. Kate Shannon, the senior author of
the study and assistant professor of medicine at UBC.
The
new study follows the landmark decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal
that allows sex workers to work legally in safer indoor spaces starting
next year.
The court concluded that laws preventing sex
workers from working together under one roof or hiring security staff
fail to protect sex workers and exacerbate harms. While the decision is
not currently binding outside of Ontario, the case is expected to be
ruled on by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The study is also
timely since violence against vulnerable street sex workers is an issue
being probed by the Missing Women inquiry, said Shannon, who earlier
testified at the proceedings.
The inquiry is investigating
the circumstances surrounding serial killer Robert Pickton’s murder of
vulnerable women from the Downtown Eastside.
Previous
research showed that the lack of safe indoor options for street sex
workers is directly associated with elevated rates of violence, HIV risk
and displacement, Shannon added.
The new study found that
the supportive housing programs increased the women’s control over
negotiating sex work transactions, including the capacity to refuse
unwanted services, negotiate condom use and avoid violent predators.
That
contrasts dramatically with the risks taken by women who negotiate sex
work in clients’ cars, dark alleys and industrial areas, Shannon said.
“The
evidence is clear: We need to scale up access to safer sex work spaces
and remove legal barriers to their formal implementation and
evaluation,” she said.
Shannon pointed out that the
previous experience of women who work the streets was that they lived in
single-room occupancy hotels dominated by men at the front desk, who
charged women to bring in guests or refused to allow guests.
“Now
the sex workers are working in their own spaces,” Shannon said, adding
managers and support staff in the Atira and RainCity buildings don’t see
money changing hands and so cannot be charged with living off the
avails of prostitution.
The woman using their own rooms for
sex work still have to solicit customers in bars or on the street, but
are facing greatly reduced incidents of violence and HIV infection, she
said.
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