Sex trade workers co-op okayed

If this works out well, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't, it could be a step in the direction of making life a lot safer for Canadian sex trade workers. A group of Vancouver ST workers has won approval to incorporate in order to set up a brothel for the 2010 Olympics:

"A group of Canadian sex trade workers hoping to set up a legal "co-op" brothel in time for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver said on Friday they have won approval to incorporate themselves.

The provincial government's designation of the group as a business co-operative is the first step in what organizers say will create a safer working environment for sex trade workers in the Pacific Coast city." [...]

"The group hopes to win an exemption from Parliament by showing it would be safer to have prostitutes work in a single facility in Vancouver that they control, rather than plying their trade on the streets."

That sounds great: a safer, healthier environment where sex trade workers would be in one location, and as members of the co-op, would no longer be the vulnerable anonymous shadows they are on the street. But... and you just knew this was coming... oh, the swooning and the clutching of pearls... quick! To the fainting couch:

"The Conservative federal government has warned it will oppose the effort, which critics have said will only perpetuate the idea that prostitution is acceptable."

Yes, of course they'll oppose it, just like they said they would. Because it's so much better for sex trade workers to be left to work the streets at the mercy of the pimps and Picktons of the world. Anyone who can still deny that Conservative policy regarding the sex trade is about anything but punishment needs a crowbar to pull their head out of their ass.

Would Pickton's victims be alive

if prostitution had been legal? In the wake of the justice finally done for the horrific crimes that took the lives of at least 6 (though probably 26 and possibly over 50) women, it's a question that needs to be asked.

Ever since the Pickton trial started and the magnitude of the disappearances became known, I've wondered if this would have happened had those women not been forced to live on the shadowy fringe just outside the perimeter of society. That place where few notice when someone is suddenly not around and even less care if they do notice, so consumed are they in keeping together their own body and soul. And tragically, those who cared enough to ring the bell were fringe-dwellers themselves who didn't command the respect of society's attention. Our legal apparatus is punitive rather than protective to such people -- they're by definition living outside the law, and apparently undeserving of the legal rights the mainstream enjoys. Like the right to have their reported disappearances taken seriously. So the predator was allowed to continue stalking and killing unimpeded.

Sanctimonious pearl-clutchers tut-tut and finger-wag and even suggest that women like Pickton's prey have it coming to them; after all, it's the life they choose. But while they may choose (or more accurately, be driven into) drugs and prostitution, they don't choose to be social and legal non-entities -- that is foisted upon them by society's phony morality. Play by the rules or suffer the consequences. That some of the rules are stupid -- the illegality of drugs and the sex trade only engenders even worse illegalities -- never occurs to these self-righteous dickheads. Out of sight, out of mind.

It's anathema to these idiots to think that a legal, regulated sex trade would offer some measure of protection to the women involved -- because they don't want the women protected, they want them punished. To do that effectively means consigning the offending women to a netherworld where they're such non-persons that it's possible for them to literally vanish into thin air unnoticed.

The same querulous voices that demand "legal personhood" for the unborn fetus see no hypocrisy in their refusal to grant the same to the women who dwell in society's shadow. It would almost be funny if the repercussions of their bigotry weren't so tragic.