PROSTITUTES ARE PEOPLE TOO -- MOSTLY DRUG-ADDICTED ONES

A Designated Prostitution Stroll In The Provincial Capital? OH, My.

Local MLA Sheila Orr certainly stirred the pot this week with her musings
on accepting the existence of the sex trade and zoning a specific part of
town as the red-light district. Victoria Mayor Alan Lowe, whose
municipality would be most likely to end up the chosen one, was not amused.

Good on Sheila for getting everybody talking, despite there being not a
chance that any neighbourhood in this region would happily host a red-light
district. Victoria once condemned the street sale of balloon animals, remember.

In my heart, where I can still be idealistic, I hope the day comes when
nobody sells sex out of desperation and fewer men want to buy it. But in
the meantime, we could definitely make life a little easier for a whole lot
of sex workers just by acknowledging their existence. An official red-light
district may not be in the cards for the capital region just yet, but
there's still something going on in our streets that deserves our attention.

Designated or not, the capital region has a stroll: Rock Bay Avenue, and
parts of Government Street. Smaller strolls spring up from time to time at
Quadra and Hillside, Craigflower and Admirals, Beacon Hill Park. But the
busiest area is Rock Bay, the deserted little industrial street where the
stroll was pushed a few years ago to get it out of the downtown.

Any number of life paths can lead people into the sex trade, and there's no
way to generalize who ends up there. But the 40 or so women and teenagers
on Victoria's stroll these days -- the visible faces of a trade that's many
times larger than that -- do have one thing in common: Addiction. No
surprise why they're working the streets. They need money for drugs, and
there's always money to be had on the stroll.

We can hate the whole idea of sex as a commodity. We can rage against the
machine, and demand justice for all sexually exploited children. We can
circulate petitions, speak out at town-hall meetings, and call for an end
to prostitution, or at the very least a "john" school to shame those caught
buying sex on the street.

But what we aren't going to do is eliminate the trade -- not in a society
that has both a great appetite for sexual services and a boundless supply
of drugs and sorrow. Sex sells. Drug addiction happens. Disastrous families
breed troubled souls.

Such realities affect every community in B.C. My son reports seeing women
on the roadside every morning as the commuter crowd makes its way to the
Campbell River mill. Kelowna has suddenly awakened to its own problems.
Prince George is awash in them. The issues aren't new, but perhaps the face
is more public now, finally visible even to those who can't bear to look.

Drugs are certainly more available than in years gone by, and cheaper than
ever. And the demand for sex seems insatiable. As any business person can
confirm, those are ideal market conditions. They come together on our city
streets every night, whether we want to call it a red-light district or not.

What's the solution? Stop men from buying people for sex, and families from
disintegrating. If we start now, we could really make some progress over
the next decade. In the meantime, however, we need to see the sex trade for
what it is and act accordingly, both in the name of anxious homeowners
wanting to reclaim their neighbourhoods and the women who work in them.
Given that the stroll will always be somewhere, what's best for all concerned?

Part of the problem is a lack of addiction treatment. It's tough to get off
drugs and alcohol in B.C., especially for those who don't have anybody
holding onto them. But much of it begins with damaged kids, supporting
themselves in the sex trade because it's that or nothing and then getting
lost in its twists and turns.

If we could do only one thing, we would help families hang on to their
children, and learn the skills that their own families never taught them.
Ten years from now, those will be the policies that stem the flow onto our
streets.

Not that even that will stop the sex trade. As long as there are men eager
to buy, there will be women and children who will sell. It will happen in
our communities regardless of whether there's a designated red-light
district. Will we continue to force addicted women into even darker
corners, or finally invite them into the light?

I don't imagine that we'll ever right all the wrongs of the sex trade. But
hey, there's nothing wrong with trying.