Olympics create demand for prostitution

Trisha Baptie “worked” on the streets and off the streets. She prostituted to feed a drug addiction, and to feed a Gucci addiction.

Now she is working to stop demand and normalization of human trafficking and demand for prostitution.

“It was never the law that raped and beat me,” she told a crowd, while holding back tears, but staying strong. “As a society, do we think men should be able to pay to sexually access women’s bodies?”

In the only speaking engagement outside of Vancouver, Michelle Miller – Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity (REED), Trisha Baptie – Experiential Voices Educating (EVE), Cherry Smiley – Aboriginal Women’s’ Action Network (AWAN) along with Kate Quinn, Executive Director of the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton (PAAFE), spoke last Wednesday at the Sherwood Park Alliance Church about putting a stop to human trafficking and prostitution.

A panel of experts spoke to Sherwood Park residents about stopping human trafficking and abolishing prostitution. Human trafficking is happening in the community, and the upcoming Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver exacerbate the problem, the panel found.

The women advocated the Swedish or Nordic model, which clearly identifies prostitution as violence against women, decriminalizes “selling”, and criminalizes the buying of sex, including a public education campaign and increased exit strategies for women.

The average age women are recruited into becoming prostitutes is 14; of those in prostitution, 92 per cent in five surveyed countries, including Canada, said they wanted out of the business.

Miller said prostitution is paid rape, not a transaction, and that it disproportionately affects women of colour, especially Aboriginal women in Canada. She said women who have already suffered sexual assault are more likely to become prostitutes.

“Women are dying; women are being murdered,” she said. “Horrible violence is happening to our sisters.”

Smiley and Miller both thanked the Cree people for allowing them to speak on Cree land.Smiley works as an anti-violence worker and is against total decriminalization and legalization of prostitution.

“Right now in Ontario, there is a challenge to prostitution laws and if this challenge is successful, it will mean that men will be able to legally access women’s bodies on demand,” Smiley said.

The AWAN came out with a statement against the idea that indoor prostitution is safer.

Aboriginal girls and women have a long history of colonization, marginalization, displacement from homelands and rampant abuses, Smiley said.

“Aboriginal women are often either forced into prostitution, trafficked into prostitution, or facing that possibility,” she said. Smiley added the AWAN is also speaking out against the abuses of children.

She opposes legalization and regulation that would entrench Aboriginal women in the sex trade.

“Contrary to current media coverage of the issue, the available evidence suggests it would be harmful, expand prostitution, and would promote trafficking.”

“It would only make prostitution safer and more profitable for the men who exploit and harm prostituted women and children.”

Miller said single-owner operated brothels, even when made legal, were infiltrated by mafia.

Baptie said the women could not get out of prostitution as long as pimps and brothels profited from renting out their bodies.

The group sold pins and T-shirts that said ‘Buying Sex is Not a Sport.’ Visitors signed petitions.

With the Olympic Games coming up, demand for prostitution rises, as is the case with all sporting events.

“As a former prostitute, I can tell you, major sporting events always caused an increase in men who wanted to access prostituted women’s bodies, mine and my friends,” Baptie said. “Whether it was to celebrate a win or a consolation prize in a loss.”

She said she had no hard numbers for how many women will be trafficked, but that shouldn’t matter as one trafficked woman was one too many.

The women made it clear, they are not anti-men, and they are not anti-sex.

Baptie said she is troubled by the fact the discussion on prostitution revolves around how much harm women are exposed to.

“Apparently, society thinks there is a certain level that is acceptable for women to face in the so-called name of sexual liberty and sexual freedom,” she said.

She said while she was prostituting, she and her friends’ need to choose who raped them based on pay was not a form of empowerment. She said looking and acting like the johns wanted was submitting to patriarchy. She said accepting money did not put her in control.

“I remember how much I flinched when they moved too quickly, how I would lay under them and be anywhere else in my mind, how they always seemed to have a sob story for why they needed to buy me, but my sob story of not wanting to be underneath them was never as urgent a need as theirs,” she said. “In my 15 years, men paid to rent out my body to do with it what they wanted, with no regard for the forces that kept me there or drove me there, or if I actually wanted to do what they said. If I was courageous enough to say no, they just offered more money or did it anyway. Under any other circumstances this would have been rape. In some cases it would have been sexual assault with a weapon, but because of the money none of this was the case. The money is what bought my silence, what bought my consent and assured their conscience that what they were doing was not rape.”

Miller said many women in prostitution have the same level of post-traumatic stress disorder as combat veterans, women who had just been raped and survivors of state-sponsored torture.

Quinn said she experienced an eruption of street prostitution in her neighbourhood of McCauley in Edmonton. When she and a group of concerned residents asked the city to do a traffic count around the local elementary, there should have been around 700 cars. They were getting 3,700 cars per day.

Her daughter once asked her why a man in a car was circling her and asking her if she was a working girl. She was eight years old at the time.

Posted By Catherine Griwkowsky News Staff