source - http://sisyphe.org/article.php3?id_article=1616 -
Letter sent to the Québec health Minister
Helping the prostituted women or promoting prostitution ?2 mars 2005
par
I have just been informed that you have chosen Stella, a Montréal-based community group, as the recipient of an excellence award in the Health and Wellness Prevention, Promotion and Protection category. Is that a reflection of the new vision of the government of Quebec on the well-being of populations ? While distributing condoms and information about HIV, the group Stella has never made mystery of its determination to obtain the total decriminalization of prostitution.
There is in Québec a consensus in favour of the decriminalization of women in prostitution who are undeniably the victims of the violence inherent to this so-called "profession", if only in the context of the "paid rape" of their intimacy. But nothing could justify a decriminalization of the pimps and the johns, without whom this marketing of women’s body - and that of a growing number of children - would not exist.
In the short run, your government should provide the women in prostitution with the sanitary, social, legal and police services as well as the emergency and long term shelters that they need. Your government should equally ensure that the authors of violence against them are prosecuted, and that the mission of the police consist in protecting them and not in harassing and prosecuting them. The struggle should be against prostitution, not against the prostituted women. We already have a universal system of social welfare, by virtue of which all citizens have access to free health services, allowance of social security and an old age pension which is not dependent on the fact of having worked ; but only the guarantee of a decent minimal income to every citizen would insure that nobody is forced to prostitute oneself to survive.
By granting this award to a group which makes the promotion of "professional sex", the government of Québec seems to give its approval to the liberalization of prostitution, giving weight, albeit unwittingly, to the common belief that prostitution, in most cases, is a question of free choice, as if the social pressure, the relations of gender power, the emotional, social and economic conditions of the concerned persons did not play any role in their decision to sell their body.
By the granting of this prize and the recent report of the Permanent Youth Committee recommending the decriminalization of young prostitutes’ customers, does your government actually intend to show that it favours the recognition of prostitution as a "profession like any other", subjected to the labour code and eligible to the creation of unions which, like Stella, would represent the rights of the "sex workers" ?
Does the government see in the perspective of a complete liberalization of prostitution the promise of new fiscal returns and an interesting outlet to reintegrate into the labour market the unemployed and the people on welfare ? While the need for philosophy, literature and history courses in college is questioned, will the ministry of Education of Québec, swept by the same wind of liberalism, add courses to teach "sex work" to girls so that they better satisfy the fantasies of their customers, let themselves be transformed into simple, malleable and exchangeable goods in their hands and be able to satisfy the increasing requirements of a globalized industry which produces more income for organized crime and pimps than the sale of weapons and drugs ? Is it such a choice of society that our government is about to make in a pure neoliberal logic of maximal profits ?
It is frightening to note that the credits necessary for the implementation of effective measures for the reintegration of prostituted women, the rehabilitation of customers and, if necessary, the criminal pursuit of recalcitrants, are not given to groups who would apply such measures, as the CLSC or any group of women possessing competence and enough convictions to achieve such a work. I believe that nothing should be done to legitimize the system of prostitution, which is based on the sexual exploitation of women and constitutes a blatant violation of their integrity, of their dignity and of their fundamental human rights.
I cannot trust a government or a Health minister who grants a public recognition to a group which makes the promotion of prostitution and pimping. Your ministry and your government are thus demonstrating that they prefer to mitigate superficially some of the consequences of this exploitation system rather than work to eliminate it.
Sunday, June 24th, 2004,
On Sisyphe, March 11th, 2005.
P.S.
French Version, « Aider les femmes prostituées ou promouvoir la prostitution ? », Sisyphe, le 24 juin 2004.
Source - http://sisyphe.org/article.php3?id_article=1616 -