THE HIDDEN FACE OF PROSPERITy

feature report
The Hidden Face
of Prosperity
In northern Alberta, a sharp rise in prostitution
is a devastating downside of the boom.
p h o t o b y J a m e s M ay
By CHERYL MAHAFFY
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S
The hidden face of Prosperity
Six years ago, when RCMP constable Scott Hagarty
moved to Grande Prairie, prostitution was almost invisible
in the city of 31,000. Today, Grande Prairie’s population
is pushing 50,000, plus a significant shadow population of
resource workers. And prostitution is overt, complete with
an identifiable stroll. Drive downtown, particularly when
it’s shift-change time at nearby oil and gas operations, and
you’ll see wasted youngsters staking out corners beside the
abandoned York Hotel or climbing shakily into throbbing
four-by-fours. Some do their business in the willows of nearby
Muskoseepi Park, where drug deals dominate the skate zone
and overnighters bed down among the trees.
“The massive impact of the Alberta boom in our area has
certainly had an effect,” Hagarty says. “We’re told time and
time again that young men in company trucks are picking up
our street workers.” As many as 50 individuals are selling their
bodies on the street, while dozens more offer massage and
escort services, whether licensed or fly-by-night.
In a province where cities have grown at up to five times the
national average rate, Grande Prairie is far from alone in this
regard. “I travel rural Alberta, and prostitution is epidemic,”
says Derek Chewka, chair of the Edmonton Aboriginal Urban
Affairs Committee (EAUAC). “Small towns that you thought
were unaffected—it’s not like that anymore.” It’s no coincidence
that the Edmonton Sun has sprouted escort ads for outlying
communities such as Slave Lake, High Level, Grande Prairie
and Fort McMurray, he says. “The men… go back up to work,
and the women follow. And not only women—boys as well.”
Edmonton police detective Jim Morrissey discovered Alberta’s in-your-face prostitution during a recent trip north.
“I couldn’t go down an elevator in Fort McMurray without
somebody offering sexual services for money,” he recalls. “The
mayor will shoot me for saying that, but it’s the truth.”
Indeed, communities struggling to hold their social fabric
together don’t always welcome having the spotlight on such
issues. University of Alberta professor Sara Dorow discovered
this in June, when she visited Fort McMurray with a class
studying the impacts of the oil boom. An October 2006
Chatelaine article, “Down and Dirty in Fort McMurray,” had
come under particular fire for highlighting high-income
escorts while ignoring riverside trails and other assets locals
hold dear. Mayor Melissa Blake called it “drive-by journalism.”
Such “circling the wagons,” Dorow says, reflects how fragile
the sense of community can become.
But averting our eyes won’t make the problem go away. “I
think we need to recognize that in a boom economy there will
be new issues,” says MacEwan College corrections instructor
Kevin Hood. “The largest share of the boom is young males
coming into Alberta, men 18 to 25 who have huge buckets of
money. What does that mean to our social fabric? When some
of us have way too much money and others have too little,
those are the issues that brew.”
So look it in the face, folks: here’s another downside of the
boom. Not that sexual exploitation wouldn’t be here without
the boom. Not that it will disappear when the boom sputters.
But, as in other aspects of life in Alberta, the speed of the influx has left communities across Alberta scrambling to cope.
The consEquences of prostitution range from
severe to fatal. This concerns Chewka of the EAUAC, since
more than half of Alberta’s prostitutes are Aboriginal.
Gonorrhea rates across Alberta doubled between 2000 and
2005, to 261 per 100,000 among First Nations people and
37.4 per 100,000 among everyone else. Not only are First
Nations Albertans seven times more likely to have gonorrhea,
but 68 per cent of those infected are female. Tellingly, the
preponderance flips among other Albertans: 75 per cent of
those with gonorrhea are male.
Prostitutes are also vulnerable to murder. In Grande Prairie,
Constable Hagarty is all too aware of the 26 bodies unearthed
on the Robert Pickton farm 13 hours west in BC—and of the
strikingly similar number of women in high-risk lifestyles
missing or killed less than five hours southeast in greater
Edmonton.
“What if the person or persons responsible for the deaths
in Edmonton decide to come?” he says. “We don’t want to be
the next place parents come to say, ‘My daughter worked here,
and I haven’t heard from her since.’ ”
With that in mind, Hagarty teamed up with City of Grande
Prairie crime prevention manager Karen Gariepy to form
the Citizen Action Committee on Prostitution. Through
Communities struggling to hold their
social fabric together don’t welcome
having the spotlight on such issues.
“conversation cafés” and other forums, the committee
learned that sexual exploitation isn’t only about outside and
outsiders. It’s reaching deep and young into Grande Prairie
neighbourhoods. “Parents and teachers talk about a blow job
club where girls as young as Grade 6 learn that if they give oral
sex, they get money, an iPod, drugs, a ride home—and they’re
considered one of the ‘in’ crowd,” Hagarty says. “We need to
address the myths and concerns of the young women and men
in our community who may look at this as a viable way to
make money as they get older.”
Having talked with Grande Prairie Regional College students who carve out study time by working one night a week
at escort wages rather than six nights a week in a restaurant,
Hagarty knows the lure of quick money, particularly in a town
with boom-inflated cost of living. “But down the road, is that
going to destroy their self esteem? Are they going to be sucked
into the drug culture? Become a victim of violence?”
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A needs assessment conducted on behalf of the prostitution
committee reinforces those fears. Based on input from 14
street workers, researcher Cheryl King recounts gruesome
details of women being thrown from moving vehicles, beat
up or forced to do more than promised. A john might agree to
wear a condom, then stop in mid-act, take off the condom and
proceed. “Often there’s intent to violate,” says King.
Many live without the basics they need to even contemplate
quitting the street, King adds. Often driven by poverty, addictions or both, and unable to find affordable housing in
Grande Prairie’s squeezed market, most are homeless or barely
housed. They lack access to showers, let alone health care, addictions treatment and something positive to do during the
day. “Many of these girls have been abandoned all their lives.
If they decide to leave the life they’re in, you have to catch
them right at that moment; it may never come around again.”
Edmontonian Kate Quinn knows exactly what
booming Alberta communities are living through. In the
early nineties, her inner city street was a thoroughfare for
circling johns. Drug houses pocked the neighbourhood, and
her two young sons walked past condoms and used needles
on the way to school. Fearing for all involved, Quinn banded
with neighbours, politicians, bureaucrats and social service
agencies to seek solutions.
“Working together over a 10-year period, 1992 to end of
2001, we saw that we could reduce the numbers of individuals
on the street, advocate to get more resources in place, and
effect some change,” says Quinn, now executive director of the
Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton
(PAAFE). “But in these next years, we’ve suffered loss of
housing and the boom, and everything’s overwhelmed.”
To gauge the depth of the crisis, in late 2006 the crime
prevention collaborative Safedmonton asked me to create
a snapshot of the scene. Interviews with more than a dozen
groups whose work intersects with prostitution confirmed
what many Edmontonians already know: sexual exploitation
is on the rise in our city, and agencies trying to heal the pain
are running in crisis mode. As in Alberta’s boom communities,
everyone is hurting.
The snapshot was supposed to focus on street prostitution,
but interview after interview veered into angst about sexual
exploitation where it’s harder to track—behind closed doors.
In Edmonton, escort services, massage parlours and exotic
entertainment are licensed under 1993 bylaws aimed at moving
sex for hire off the street and into a safer environment. Those
businesses are proliferating now, invading neighbourhoods,
and there’s an uneasy sense that those involved remain at
risk. Experience from cities such as Amsterdam tells us that
sanctioned prostitution attracts organized crime.
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p h o t o b y J a m e s M ay
FEATURE Report
The hidden face of Prosperity
p h o t o b y J a m e s M ay
When organized crime moves in, its baggage includes
human trafficking. As journalist Victor Malarek points out in
his 2003 book The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade, this
modern form of slavery, in which human beings are coerced,
transported and forced to perform sexual acts, is the perfect
money-maker, with fresh goods available for the taking and
wasted ones dispatched.
Is it happening here? Albertans tend to think not, but Changing Together, a centre for immigrant women, saw enough
red flags to launch a study, funded by Status of Women, that
is proving us wrong. Definite patterns are emerging and
kingpins are becoming established, says study coordinator
Sherilyn Trompetter. Aboriginal women from reserves are
being lured into bigger cities, then moved between such
centres as Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton. Victims are
also coming from overseas, an act made easier by Alberta’s
hunger for foreign workers to fill employment gaps. “People
[running] the sex trade are preying on people’s hopes and
dreams,” Trompetter says. “We’re living in a society that is
implicitly allowing that. It makes me very sad.”
Such findings prompted the Edmonton Police Service to
assign a full-time trafficking officer. Jim Morrissey was given
the job. Six months later, he said that his notebook was full of
hard evidence that people are being trafficked in and out, and
that organized crime is involved. “Every time I look,” he says,
“I find it.”
Is it inevitable that wherever men (and sometimes women) congregate with money and time on their
hands, sexual exploitation will proliferate? Morrissey believes
that addressing what many call “the demand side” is vital.
“If there’s any place we don’t put enough emphasis, it’s the
customers,” he says. “Take the money out of the equation, and
the girls will have to go do something else—maybe something
not as desperate and nasty. And we can really reduce the demand, I think, through education.”
Skeptical? Consider recent shifts in attitudes toward
drinking and driving. “Back in the seventies,” Morrissey says,
“you could say you were so wasted on the weekend that you
had to drive home because you were too drunk to walk, and
people would think it was funny. Now if you say that, they’ll
say you’re an idiot and threaten to phone you in. It’s not
socially acceptable anymore.”
Morrissey points to Sweden as a model. “They really, really
take a dim view of men using women and children for sex,
whether they pay for it or not. Guys go to jail and lose their
houses and their wives. And you know what? Maybe they
should. When you leave your 15-year-old daughter at home to
go have sex with someone else’s child, you deserve it.”
Sweden does not criminalize sellers of sex, but since 1999
it has prohibited the purchase of sexual services. Speaking
at an Edmonton conference last fall, Swedish-Canadian
lawyer Gunilla Eckberg contrasted that approach to Holland’s
sanctioning of its red light district, which she termed “the
politics of resignation.”
Positive results in Sweden, including a reduction in human
trafficking, have prompted Lithuania, Finland and South
Korea to pass similar laws. Might Canada follow suit? Not
likely. As it stands, Canadian law does not outlaw adult
prostitution, but does prohibit many of the activities that
surround it, including solicitation, operating a bawdy house
and living off the avails of prostitution. On paper, segments
of the law apply to sellers, buyers, pimps and traffickers. In
practice, the women and men on the streets, already the most
vulnerable, are most often arrested.
Discontent with the current regime prompted a Parliamentary review, but the committee failed to reach consensus
on legislative change. In a report released late last year, it conceded that both human trafficking and sexual exploitation
of minors under 18 must be treated as serious crimes. They
urged increased attention to the thorny issues surrounding
prostitution, including poverty, social inequality, addictions,
ill health, lack of exit support and spotty law enforcement.
But regarding the laws, they split. The majority recommended
against prohibiting “sexual activities between consenting adults
that do not harm others, whether or not payment is involved;”
a minority called for heavy fines on perpetrators, with the
proceeds used to address the resulting harm.
Those two positions reflect an unresolved divide between
those who see all prostitution as exploitative and those who
say adults have the right to choose it. The latter argue that
attempts to regulate prostitution drive it underground and
deeper into neighbourhoods, bringing stigma and danger.
It’s a perspective I hear from “Hazel,” whose blog is a forum
for people in prostitution. “In the years since regulations
came into effect, the number of sex workers murdered in this
country has skyrocketed,” she writes in response to my e-mail.
“The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is rotten.” It’s
also a position held by the Toronto-based Sex Professionals
of Canada, which launched a constitutional challenge this
March charging that federal laws violate the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms.
Many who know prostitution’s effects beg to differ. I think
of Dawn Hodgins, who left the streets 13 years ago and now
serves as project coordinator for PAAFE. “I don’t feel like I have
the scarlet ‘P’ on me,” she says, “but I do feel like some part of
me will never be right because I have information others don’t
have. There is a cruelness and meanness most of us will never
see.” I think of Charlene, an Aboriginal mother and writer who
has tried repeatedly to rise above prejudice, rape, addiction,
self-loathing. Her description of one awfully normal night
includes rape, robbery and a back-alley miscarriage.
During her address in Edmonton, Eckberg noted that the
history of sexual exploitation in Canada stretches far back,
encompassing fur traders’ use of Aboriginal women, and
abuse in residential schools.
“I hope one day Canada is able to achieve some monumental
strides,” she said. “You don’t change the world in 20 years, but
you can have a political vision on which direction you want
the world to change in.”
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Particularly in light of an uncertain federal future,
Alberta’s situation begs for provincial leadership. Where
minors are concerned, the province has taken a stance:
prostitution involving children is sexual abuse. Under the
Protection of Children Involved in Prostitution (PChIP)
Act, passed in 1999 and groundbreaking at the time, police
and child protection workers can take a child involved in
prostitution to a safe house for up to five days of assessment,
care and exit planning.
“Before, it was assumed kids were making bad choices,”
recalls Kevin Hood, who helped implement PChIP while
working with Alberta Children’s Services. “PChIP was a very
clear statement: ‘No—this is child sexual abuse.’ ”
Like many I interview, Hood sees the need for a global
response similar to Manitoba’s comprehensive strategy to
address sexual exploitation and community safety. “The work
in Alberta is somewhat piecemeal, so it may not have the
desired impact,” he says. “If you don’t know why you’re doing
something, it’s not necessarily going to happen.”
Under Manitoba law, adults in prostitution are considered
victims, and are promised support for leaving the streets and
building new lives. Buyers of sex face criminal consequences
ranging from “john school” to licence suspension, vehicle
seizure, fines and jail. Neighbourhoods have tools to
battle drug houses, massage parlours and other impacts
of prostitution. Preventive measures include the Cybertip
website for citizens concerned about online exploitation of
children, and a Neighbourhood Solutions resource book.
Certain aspects of the Manitoba strategy are being imported
into Alberta. For example, a bill emulating Manitoba’s Safer
Communities and Neighbourhoods Act, which has already
helped shut down more than 200 drug and prostitution houses,
is wending its way through the Alberta Legislature. Other
Manitoba techniques are already here. Alberta police can now
seize the vehicles of apprehended johns. AADAC’s Enhanced
Services for Women initiative is working with sex workers in
Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie.
But all those efforts add up to not enough, particularly
since the boom struck, says PAAFE’s Quinn. Her office has
received numerous calls from smaller communities and she is
acutely aware that other areas would benefit from initiatives at
work in Edmonton, including career transition programs with
Alberta Employment, Immigration & Industry, and alternative
sentencing programs with Alberta Justice. “It seems to me we
need a massive investment right now,” Quinn says. “Not two
years, not three years, but strategic five-year investments in
the programs that have demonstrated they really work.”
A prostitution strategy could move forward quickly by
borrowing from the field of family violence, where police,
courts and social workers have put numerous protocols in
place to protect family members who report abuse. “While the
situation is more complicated for people exiting prostitution,
there are lots of parallels,” says City of Edmonton community
development social worker Dorian Smith. “I think we are
where they were 15 years ago.”
Edmonton Police Service’s vice unit recently took a step in
that direction by incorporating sex workers into a vulnerableperson strategy that already embraces other abused women,
children and seniors. “In spousal violence, the courts have
really tried to take the onus off the women to put their
husbands in jail,” says sergeant Bill Spinks, who heads the
unit. “Women in prostitution have just as much to lose, and
their safety is just as much at risk, yet we’ve expected them to
get up on the stand and provide evidence. We need to take the
onus off the women.”
Dymphny Dronyk drives through Grande Prairie’s
four-block downtown most mornings to drop her son at
Milano for Men, where he sells upscale suits just steps away—
yet a world apart—from destitute people making desperate
deals. It’s as if an invisible but powerful wall separates the two,
with people on each side wilfully blind to the other. “It feels
like everything has been stripped down to being a commodity,”
Dronyk writes. “And it becomes a two-way sickness. The
men are also so used to being ‘used’ that they have very little
respect for the women. Because men make so much more than
women, typically, there is a real power over them. I know this
has always been true, but I believe that it is exacerbated in this
surreal climate of extreme incomes and extreme costs.”
“The men are so used to being
‘used’ that they have very little
respect for the women.”
For many, the extended reach of this infection is
suprising. The RCMP’s Hagarty recalls the stunned silence
at a conversation café when the owner of an escort agency
nonchalantly mentioned that 95 per cent of her customers
are married. “This is not just a policing issue, this is not an
AADAC issue; this is a community issue,” he says. “We as a
community have to work together.”
Indeed, collaboration among front-line agencies is
essential. Grande Prairie, Edmonton and other communities
are proving as much. But it’s equally clear that provincial and
federal policies and strategies, both economic and social, can
do much to enable—or undermine—local success.
Six years from now, will Alberta cities be more deeply mired
in sexual exploitation—and still scrambling to respond? I prefer Quinn’s vision: “I think if we work together strategically, we
can overcome the chaos and crises of the last three years.”
A contributor to the anthology Edmonton on Location, Cheryl
Mahaffy last wrote for Alberta Views on daycare.
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I l l u s t r at i o n b y i s t o c k p h o t o
P
FEATURE Report
CITIZEN ACTION
Social Solutions
5 ways to tackle prostitution.
1. Count Everyone
The government of Alberta must recognize the province’s shadow population, which consists of people who
work in one place but have their official
residence in another. The Northern
Alberta Development Council (NADC)
estimates the shadow population to be
30,000, but the Alberta census does not
take it into account. This means that
government funding based on demographics ignores the effects of this
seasonal surge. It may seem unrelated
to prostitution. It’s not. “Small” towns
like Grande Prairie are forced to stretch
police, health and social services far
beyond capacity. In an area where
prostitution is epidemic, the funding
shortfall has terrible consequences.
The NADC has been asking for census
recognition of shadow populations
for years, but to date only the Regional
Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which
includes Fort McMurray, has received it.
I l l u s t r at i o n b y i s t o c k p h o t o
2. Create Affordable Choices
Dymphny Dronyk, who has worked at
the Grande Prairie agencies HIV North
and Odyssey House, sees prostitution
daily and knows how easily women
become trapped. She says there’s no
question it’s driven by poverty and drug
abuse, both of which are tied closely to
the enormous difficulties women have
surviving independently. Even with
legitimate jobs, many cannot cope on
their own with Alberta’s cost of living.
Some turn to men to help make ends
meet—not as prostitutes at first, but
eventually the desperation can encourage them to sell themselves. Dronyk’s
observations are backed up by the
numbers. According to the 2006 annual
report for the Edmonton organization
Creating Options Aimed at Reducing
Sexual Exploitation, 63 per cent of prostitutes in the area had no housing of their
own. As a society, we need to provide all
women with the means to independence:
affordable housing, childcare, formal
education, equal pay.
3. Invest in People
When Cheryl King did a situation
assessment for the Grande Prairie Citizen Action Committee on Prostitution,
the sex workers she interviewed told
her precisely what they needed to
escape. A safe place to wash and sleep,
daycare, long-term counselling, and
drug rehabilitation beyond the typical
three-week programs, which provide
no transitional aid, forcing addicts back
into the conditions in which they first
got hooked. King says none of this can
happen without immense government
and community support. Rescuing an
individual is an investment, and can’t be
viewed in terms of immediate profits.
In simple terms, this requires a great
deal more public funding for support
programs, social service operating
costs and salaries.
4. Educate
Schools have to play a role. We already have sex education and in-school
presentations about drug abuse, so
why is there so little about prostitution,
especially in a province where the problem is so serious? People should know
the circumstances that can lead to this
lifestyle. RCMP constable Scott Hagarty
of Grande Prairie says he has managed
to introduce the subject to junior high
schools through the PACE program.
However, Edmonton vice detective
Jim Morrissey has encountered far
greater resistance when attempting
to teach children and their families
about prostitution and related problems.
Morrissey says most prostitutes enter
the sex trade between their 11th and
13th birthdays. But he has found that
few people will admit that prostitutes
are anything but immoral adults, and
parents don’t want their children to
learn about the sex trade in Grade 5 or 6.
Indeed, it’s a terrible thing for children to
have to learn about—but education may
help keep them safe.
5. Involve Employers
If the surge in prostitution and drug
abuse is linked to the economic boom,
employers share the responsibility.
Law enforcement, social support organizations and local businesses can
team up to find solutions. Constable
Hagarty says he has aggressively lobbied local businesses and resource
employers to help fight drug use and
prostitution, with encouraging results.
Many businesses, he says, want to
maintain a good corporate image—but,
much more importantly, they realize
that tolerating such behaviour destroys
the community. Oil patch employers
already conduct drug screening and
safety training; they could provide education about this as well.
— Suzy Thompson
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