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My article on sex work decriminalization
To my surprise, my article on the decriminalization of sex work in Vancouver is up on the Tyee, front page top story no less. (Thanks, David!)

This is my first news-feature in a while, and I got a little nervous about covering such a complicated issue with so many divergent points of view and strong feelings attached.

Personally, I'm in favor of decriminalization. When you look at the people who are being chewed up and spat out by the sex industry, that's not an issue of sex, that's an issue of poverty. The prostitution is just the most visible and emotionally charged aspect of the larger social problems of drug addiction and poverty. I once had an argument with a friend who didn't understand why I didn't consider banning child pornography a higher priority, when she considered it essential to protecting children. I explained that, of all the children living in wretched and exploitative conditions in the world, most of them don't end up on film. Better child protection laws would help far more children than cracking down on child porn and weakening freedom of expression.

The sex industry is, if you'll pardon the expression, a "dark continent." Everybody knows it exists, but there is little hard information on how many people are involved, how much money moves through it, how the people within it behave. In the absence of facts, there are myths and legends, some romantic and some horrifying, propagated by a special, liminal caste of people who are not natives and who simplify a vast, diverse and complicated culture into simplistic narratives.

The really interesting development in this story is people who are sex workers forming their own organizations and speaking for themselves. That's the only way the sex industry and the people in it can stop being abject pariahs, the dark underworld.

No comments have yet been posted on the Tyee story, but I anticipate some strong feelings.