Study finds lack of violence in survey of off-street sex workers
Contact:
Tamara O’Doherty, 778.772.2998 (cell), tco@sfu.ca
John Lowman, 778.782.3185, lowman@sfu.ca
Marianne Meadahl, PAMR, 604.291.4323
Sixty-three cent of the study participants – who work in massage parlours, for escort agencies or independently out of their homes – have never experienced violent behaviour.
Those who did said the majority of incidents were related to a client’s refusal to pay or to wear a condom.
Tamara O’Doherty, a graduate student at SFU’s School of Criminology who conducted the study, says her findings suggest that the off-street sex trade is safer than it is for the 10-20 per cent of prostitutes who work at the street level.
The results raise questions about the assumption of danger involved in all forms of sex work as well as the issue of decriminalization.
“The lack of violence as shown in this study doesn’t reflect what many people typically fear about prostitution in general – that it is a dangerous profession,” says O’Doherty, who surveyed 39 off-street sex workers and conducted in-depth interviews with 10 women involved in the sex industry.
The women are mainly Caucasian, between the ages of 22-45, and make an average of $60,000 annually working four days a week. Ninety per cent had some post-secondary education and more than a third had a university degree.
O’Doherty says the findings suggest that potentially violent men target prostitutes who work at the street level.
“It should be no surprise that misogynistic men turn to the women who work the streets of Vancouver to abuse them,” O’Doherty says. “Street sex workers, forced to work in isolation with little or no protection from police, are ideal prey for violent men.”
O’Doherty argues that exploitative working structures and the quasi-legal status of prostitution severely compromise sex workers’ safety. “Instead of doing our best to protect these vulnerable women,” she adds, “we have enacted laws that further marginalize and expose them to harm.”
John Lowman, an SFU criminology professor and O’Doherty’s thesis supervisor, says the research provides a significant stumbling block to the rationale underlying the Conservative government’s prohibitionist approach to prostitution.
“This research suggests that Canadian prostitution law exposes street prostitutes to extreme violence, while many women working in the effectively legal off-street trade work violence free,” he says.