Prostitution added to the Olympic Agenda 2010 The sex trade was prominent in Turin, Athens and even Salt Lake City. Some fear the pushing of legalization here
Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, December 09, 2006 www.canada.com/vancouversun

World Cup soccer fans could buy a beer at one stall last summer in Germany and then wander over to another and buy oral sex.
But as with all prestigious and well-attended sporting events, there were different price points for sexual services.

The Love Truck, a mobile brothel and erotic show equipped with an outdoor stage as well as a small bedroom and jacuzzi, cruised the country promoting a Prague-based brothel and its website.

Prostitution is legal in Germany. Before the World Cup there were 400,000 licensed prostitutes. During the competition, police in cities like Munich, Berlin and Cologne reported the number increased as much as 63 per cent.

It's estimated that 90 per cent of prostituted women in Germany are foreign-born. How many were trafficked, coerced or falsely enticed into the country is impossible to know.

There is an increasingly vocal lobby in Canada -- and particularly Vancouver -- to legalize prostitution. It could happen in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Supporters of legalization include: Vancouver MPs Libby Davies and Hedy Fry; former mayor Senator Larry Campbell; former councillors Tim Louis and Ellen Woodsworth, and the Pivot Legal Society. The recent Living in Community report done for the city and paid for by the three levels of government recommended safe zones for prostitutes in addition to education programs to teach them how to be less of a nuisance when they walk their neighbourhood stroll.

Mayor Sam Sullivan hasn't specifically talked about it in his Project Civil City. But in the introduction, Sullivan links the project to the Olympics and promises to reduce "public nuisance" by 50 per cent in time for the Games.

If the Living in Community proponents have their way, that could mean safe zones where buyers and sellers of sex will be out of sight and out of mind.

Public nuisance is the same argument that was used in the 1970s to move the sex trade off Davie Street and resulted in the current soliciting law. The law is supposed to target the buyers, but is mainly used against the prostituted women and children instead.

Lee Lakeman of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres adamantly opposes legalization and believes that the Games will be used as an excuse for legalization as part of the city's pre-Games cleanup campaign.

"There is this Potemkin-village nonsense going on to hide the problems of Vancouver and people are using the Olympics as an excuse to further various agendas," she says.

In Vancouver, prostitutes are already being "herded" into the Downtown Eastside, so Lakeman says it's not a big step for some people to consider just declaring it a red-light district.

Lakeman noted that the number of prostitutes spiked before and during Expo 86. The same thing happened before the Olympics last year in Turin, in 2004 in Athens and even in Salt Lake City in 2002. Besides, Vancouver already has an international reputation as a sex-tourism destination.

Like the many women's groups at last Saturday's roundtable discussion in Vancouver about how to stop legalization of prostitution, Lakeman's organization says prostitution is not only inextricably linked to the global trafficking of humans, it is not work. It is the exploitation of and violence against women and children.

In introducing her private member's bill aimed at developing a national strategy to combat trafficking, Conservative MP Joy Smith urged quick action, noting that there could be an explosion in the number of women and children rounded up by pimps and prostituted for the pleasure of Olympic visitors.

And while we might prefer to think that trafficking involves only foreign-born women and children, it does not. The sentencing last month of Vancouver man, Gerard Parker, to 30 months in jail for pimping and trafficking Caucasian Vancouver teens and young women into New York and Las Vegas provides a glimpse of the local business. And, as his victims were willing to testify, being prostituted is not glamourous, it's not safe and it's not even economically enriching for anyone other than the pimp.

What legalized prostitution looks like is little different and in some ways worse than the temporary brothels rigged up for the World Cup.

In Rotterdam, one red-light district is set up for maximum efficiency. No women other than licensed prostitutes can enter. It keeps out unlicensed prostitutes who are either illegally in the country or have HIV/AIDS, but it also keeps the women inside isolated.

The gate opens at 6 p.m. Men in cars -- virtually all of the purchasers are men -- drive down a winding roadway until they come to aluminum stalls not unlike those for cattle or horses. Women stand outside. Once the deal is made, the driver drives his car into the stall, the woman gets in, they have sex and he drives out.

Because an estimated 90 per cent of the licensed prostitutes in the Netherlands and Germany are from somewhere else, the stalls are organized for easy browsing in a manner reminiscent of the slave trade. Want a black woman? Go to the African zone. Want an Asian woman? Head to another zone. Women from the Baltic region are in another area.

Is this what we want for 2010? Is this what we want any time for our city?

But if legalization isn't the answer to protecting women and children who are prostituted, what is?

Next Saturday, I'll look at some alternatives.

dbramham@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2006