PROSTITUTION WON'T GO AWAY

If Nothing Else, The Notion Of A Designated 'Stroll' May Prompt Politicians
To Seek Solutions

Victoria-Hillside MLA Sheila Orr must have known how people would react to
her proposal to create a prostitutes' "stroll" in the city. To her credit,
she made it anyway.

Premier Gordon Campbell said it's not a good idea. Mayor Alan Lowe said he
wouldn't "give up" any neighbourhood for such a thing. Coun. Dean Fortin
said men and women should be helped out of the sex trade. One merchant
thinks business-owners should be compensated for having to put up with
prostitutes in their area.

Oh, dear. Let's go on pretending that prostitutes on our streets are just a
nuisance -- like squeegee kids and panhandlers -- who can be treated like
dirt and swept under the nearest carpet. Let's go on pretending that
prostitution can be stamped out by getting those who work the streets off them.

Let's, above all, make sure those prostitutes ply their trade in any
neighbourhood but ours.

Even Orr shares that concern. Though she says allowing them to work in a
designated area of town at certain hours would keep them safer, it would
also keep them off her own residential street. And calling it a "stroll"
doesn't make hanging around on Store Street on a chill winter's night a
more pleasant pastime.

Sex trade workers, as they're called these days, have been around since sex
and trade were invented. Those we see on the streets, if we don't avert our
eyes in time, are only about 20 per cent of them. The rest work in massage
parlours, escort services, hotels, bars, strip clubs, private homes.

The street-walkers are those who are so wretched -- drug addicted or
mentally ill -- that they can't work off-street. In places like Vancouver,
where they're far more visible than here, 90 per cent of them have been
physically assaulted, sexually assaulted or robbed. Over the past 10 years,
more than 70 have been killed across Canada -- not including those who are
simply shrugged off as "missing."

As police in Vancouver have found, rousting prostitutes from one
street-corner simply drives them to another corner in another
neighbourhood. Orr's proposal to keep them in one designated area of town
at least acknowledges this.

In European cities like Amsterdam, prostitutes can work openly out of
licensed brothels, enticing customers from their windows, under the care
and protection of health-care workers and police. There are even
drive-through brothels for in-car sex.

Some prostitutes choose, still, to work underground -- the addicts and
mentally ill just like those we find on our streets. But the system at
least keeps minors out of the trade. Dutch police are turning up about 100
16- and 17-year-old girls in the trade in the whole country. But there are
no 12- and 13-year-olds roaming the streets as there are in some Canadian
cities.

When we can't even decide where to put a needle exchange in Victoria, it's
not likely we'll suddenly embrace strolls for prostitutes, let alone
store-front brothels. But we should be talking about new approaches, and
Orr is right to start us talking.