Three sex-trade workers have filed a constitutional challenge in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice of three sections of the Criminal Code relating to prostitution.
The challenge argues that the Criminal Code sections – keeping a bawdy house, living on the avails and communicating for the purpose of prostitution – violate Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by "depriving sex workers of their right to liberty and security in a manner that is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."
While the act of prostitution is legal in Canada, the code's provisions operate in a way to deny sex workers safe legal options for conducting a business, the challenge maintains.
The sometime dominatrix Terri Jean Bedford along with Valerie Scott, a former sex workers and executive director of Sex Professionals of Canada, and Amy Lebovitch, a current sex worker, say they launched the challenge on behalf of all Canadian sex workers.
"It's a great day for Canada and even more so a great day for Canadian women everywhere," Bedford told a news conference yesterday in downtown Toronto.
Before operating a sex dungeon in the 1990s, Bedford spent several years in the 1970s and 1980s working the streets and encountering the many dangers faced by prostitutes.
She closed her dungeon – Bondage Bungalow as it was known – in 1994 after a police raid and was convicted of keeping a common bawdy house for the purpose of prostitution in 1998, a conviction upheld in 2000.
"I would like the federal government to have the guts to come out and say: `We have an official death penalty against prostitutes or decriminalize it (prostitution),'" said Scott, who estimates there have been between 400 and 500 sex-trade workers murdered in Canada since 1985. "This has to end."
"We must be treated equally," said Lebovitch who currently works as a sex-trade worker in her home where she feels safe.
The case – dubbed the Safe Haven Initiative – is being handled on a pro bono basis by Alan Young, a law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, and a team of lawyers and law students.
Young said homicide figures for 2001 show 73 sex-trade workers were murdered over 10 years, 70 of them women.
http://www.thestar.com/article/194809
