For years, the intersection of Ste. Catherine Street and St. Laurent Boulevard was the epicentre of the city's bustling red light district. Over the past decade, though, nearly all the strip clubs and street-level prostitution has been pushed to the outskirts to make way for a city-backed development of office buildings and trendy shops.
The changes may be good for business -- but they also have sex workers worried about their own safety. Repression from police has pushed prostitution into more dangerous, isolated parts of the city, making sex workers more vulnerable to violence, said Anna-Louise Crago a sex worker and a clinical co-ordinator at a sex-trade support and advocacy group known as Stella.
Experts say the same pattern of repression has been repeated in other cities across Canada, making prostitution a more dangerous job. In Vancouver, police engaged in a decades-long campaign to move prostitutes into the more isolated Downtown Eastside, where serial killer Robert Pickton spent years hunting his victims, said John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University.
That made it easy for Pickton and other predators to target women, said Lowman, who testified at the Pickton inquiry. It's not illegal to be a prostitute in Canada, but many of the activities associated with prostitution are classified as criminal offences. Lowman said the ambivalence has caused confusion in the courts and made it difficult for police to do their job. Efforts to protect sex workers often appear to be at odds with the police's attempt to crack down on prostitution.
That seemed to be the case in December when Ottawa police chief Vern White, faced with a possible serial killer targeting prostitutes, warned them to be extra cautious. Advocacy groups countered that it was the force's very own tactics of aggressive policing and repression that had forced them into more dangerous situations. The report, based on interviews with more than sex workers between and , found a link between prostitutes who reported having been harassed or assaulted by a police officer and the likelihood they were victims of violence in future.
