Canada could decriminalize sex work — here’s how it could help support organizations get more funding

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A coalition of sex workers were at the Superior Court of Ontario last month, arguing that the country’s sex work laws are a threat to sex workers’ constitutional right to security. The week-long hearing that began on Oct. 3 is challenging the laws making sex work illegal. 

Richochet Media reported that on the last day of the hearing, Chief Justice Goldstein, the judge overseeing the case, did not indicate when or if the decision to decriminalize the sex work laws would be passed. This leaves sentencing around customers’ and sex workers’ activities to municipal courts, on a case-by-case basis.

Sex workers argue that Canada’s legislation creates financially and physically vulnerable work environments for decades — so sex worker support organizations and networks provide financial aid, food, health resources, and other assistance to those in need.

But what happens when these organizations are not adequately funded? And what about when their lack of funding is because of the criminalization of their community members’ work?

In some cases, sex worker organizations are cautioned about publicly sharing if or how much funding they receive because of the potential backlash that could come from appearing to fund sex work.

“Sex worker rights organizations are rarely funded for advocacy work alone, because funders don’t necessarily recognize the importance of community and its impacts,” says Jenn Clamen, national coordinator for the Canadian Alliance for Sex Workers Law Reform (CASWLR). 

CASWLR is an organization working to establish legislation that supports sex workers’ rights. The coalition is made of 26 sex worker member groups around Canada that support sex workers’ rent, food security, financial and health services, and more — and is among the advocates challenging the Superior Court of Ontario. 
 

Where the money – and the sex worker – goes

Some sex worker support organizations can receive funding through governments’ health grants.  

But sex workers’ wellbeing goes beyond physical health. “It’s about creating community,” says Clamen. “It’s about building movements. It’s about being able to know what your rights are. Health is a lot more than just taking care of the physical bits of your body. It’s about mental health and community health [and] financial health as well.”

Common funders sex work organizations can rely on are the Red Umbrella Fund, which is a global sex worker fund guided by sex workers. Another organization is Mama Cash, an international women and LGBTQ2S+ fund. However these are both examples of international funders who review applications from grantees all over the world. 

In Canada, sex worker organizations have said gender-based violence grants are another typical route to secure funding. 

GTA-based Butterfly Asian and Migrant Sex Worker Support Network (Butterfly) is one of them. Executive director Elene Lam says her organization has also applied to the City of Toronto’s Urban Health Fund in the past.

“Butterfly now only has one full time staff,” says Lam. “Instead, we provide honorariums to pay for different research workers or community workers for different kinds of work because we really value the work and effort. But it also makes a very precarious situation, right?” 

She uses the example of being awarded $50,000 funding. Instead of paying for another full-time staff member, they may use the money for legal training or support since they are grassroots and community-based, lacking such resources to help their community members. 

“We do not come from lawyers, we come from people with experience. They contribute [their] experience and how they are oppressed and what their legal issues are,” says Lam. “We need to use the funding for them because we recognize the contributions of their stories and the people working with the community instead of having a professional or consultant do this work. So this is a very very different model.”

Advocacy Normalizing Sex Work through Education and Resources Society (ANSWERS) is a mostly volunteer-based organization that directs their funding to sex workers’ immediate needs.

Mona*, who has been a sex worker for thirty years, and Sophie Hallée* co-founded this Edmonton-based sex worker support organization in November 2020 as the pandemic put a strain on sex workers’ income and health.

Some sex workers are still feeling the heat from the pandemic on top of their existing income issues, they say.

“Besides the houseless, I would think we were probably the second hardest hit group, because a lot of people stopped coming to see us. It just slammed the door shut very quickly for a while,” says Mona.

ANSWERS provides grocery and VISA gift cards, STI testing, birth control, and more. 

“After two years of pandemic, we have a lot of recovery to catch up on. We’ve helped almost 300 people so far with at least something,” says Mona.

ANSWERS continued with these services as sex workers’ needs rose with the public health crisis. They also connected sex workers with accountants if they had trouble paying taxes or needed help claiming CERB or CRB. 

Mostly, ANSWERS provided mental relief when sex workers would otherwise not be able to afford it themselves.

“Counseling is actually one of the biggest demands that we get,” says Mona. “I’m gonna say more than 50 percent of the people that apply for some form of support are very likely to reach out to us specifically for counseling therapy. It’s not a big surprise that during the pandemic especially, it made everything [that was] bad already, worse.”

ANSWERS also helps sex workers with housing. 

“When we had funding for it, we helped people with damage deposits or rent relief or catch them up if they had $1,000 rent and still needed $200 or $300 so that they weren’t behind,” says Mona. “We helped where we could.”

ANSWERS has also supported the costs of medications and physical support like physiotherapy. 

Hallée says ANSWERS hears frequent touching stories about how their services changed some workers’ lives, whether it was the medication, counselling, art therapy, or housing support.

“If you can meet your basic needs, we’re gonna bring you a little bit more freedom in your life,” says Hallée. “Some people have dependents as well, and it just brings less anxiety and stress into one’s life of being able to make it to the next month by getting your rent paid.”

But the philanthropic and government funding enabling this work is not consistent. In ANSWERS’ case, most of the funding they received was pandemic-related. 

The Canadian Women’s Foundation provided ANSWERS with a grant through Women and Gender Equality (WAGE) Canada. While Hallée says ANSWERS was fortunate to have this funding, they now have to find ways to diversify revenue for their organization.
 

Competing for funds

Other sex worker organizations are expressing their frustration around competing funds for anti-human trafficking organizations and the conflation between sexual exploitation and sex workers. 

Under Canada’s Criminal Code, keeping or working in a brothel, living on an income from prostitution, and communicating about prostitution publicly is against the law. 

The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) was created in 2014 to make purchasing and soliciting sex illegal, while selling sex is legal. This keeps those people who are providing the sexual service from being prosecuted by the courts. 

This change was made to protect sex workers, minors, and people trafficked for sex by preventing opportunities for exploitation. Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harbouring, or transporation of individuals for the sake of selling sexual services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion. 

But sex workers are telling the Superior Court of Ontario that the PCEPA is not enough. They argue this legislation pushes sex work underground, threatens their customer base, and increases the risk of violence. 

When customers know the risk of arrest for buying sex, they do more to hide and protect their identify. When customers cannot discuss their purchase in public areas, they must meet sex workers in private areas. This does not give sex workers enough space or time to know and trust their customers before entering a vulnerable position. 

“It creates a situation where violence can flourish because people who prey on sex workers…know they don’t have access or want to go to the police,” says Clamen. “So people target sex workers for violence because predators know that sex workers will not report to police.”

These parameters are more than safety threats – they also stunt workers’ income. 

Fewer customers and working hours means more precarious work. And with less funds for sex workers’ support organizations, there are fewer resources draw on for their financial needs. 

Meanwhile, over the past few years, millions of dollars has been granted to anti-human trafficking organizations, federally and provincially. 

In 2019, the Government of Canada launched the five-year and $57.22-million Public Safety-led National Strategy to Combat Human Trafficking. It brings initiatives under one strategic framework – the Canada’s Human Trafficking hotline, tips and referral services for local law enforcement, emergency shelters, and other trauma-informed supports. The Strategy will provide $10.28 million in ongoing funding.

As part of the five-year Strategy, WAGE is funding $14 million for 41 projects in support of survivors of human trafficking and at-risk populations.

While WAGE requires organizations to report how many people access their WAGE-funded services, they do not require organizations to make a distinction between gender-based violence, human trafficking survivors, or sex workers. 

The distinction between sex workers and human trafficking survivors is important because sex workers are not necessarily victims or survivors of exploitation –– just people trying to work. 

“We see that government funding often makes you rely on certain ideologies, so now we see so much anti-trafficking funding. We also see how many organizations, in order to take that funding, need to change all the sex workers to become traffic victims,” says Lam. “That’s why Butterfly is the position that does not have that funding. We do not see that they are the victims of violence. We really see that they are the powerful community members that need to have that support to resist them becoming the victim.”

After PCEPA was established, the Measures Against Prostitution Initiative (MAPI) followed. MAPI began receiving funding in 2015 to support and improve services that assist people who provide sexual services to exit the sex trade.

Despite being aimed at people leaving the sex trade, people who were reported leaving the sex trade, exploitation, and trafficking situations were also included as clients of this initiative in the reports’ program outcomes. 

“Even gender based violence funding is now really headed towards trafficking as well,” says Clamen. “It is interesting reading about how when the government creates a framework for funding how that really pushes different groups to shift their own framework in their organization.”

Sex worker organizations represent sex workers who struggle with finances, housing, food, and other essential needs. Other organizations are represent trafficking survivors and people who want to leave the sex trade. The distinction draws millions in funding for the latter group, but Lam refuses to mislabel her community members of sex workers.

“They’re not victims, it’s the system,” says Lam. “And I think this is difficult for many funders to understand.” 
 

Vital for the community

When sex workers have trouble supporting themselves financially and their community organizations are still securing funding, where can they turn? 

Lam worries about increased police surveillance as anti-sexual exploitation organizations collect information about their clients and more police forces establish human trafficking units and attend human trafficking training. Migrants without official immigrant status can also be arrested and deported if they are found to be engaging in sex work. 

“This is the real risk people try to avoid,” says Lam. 

Not everyone is willing to take the risk and not everyone is ready to leave the trade.

“Sex work lays at the intersection of many different kinds of oppression,” Teddy Basham-Witherington, the deputy director of US-based Impact Fund, writes in an email. Impact Fund provides funds for legal cases that advance economic, environment, racial, and social justice. 

“People of color, especially trans people, facing poverty and destitution, discriminated against and denied employment opportunities, turn to sex work as their best option for survival,” writes Basham-Witherington.

Hallée recalls having many conversations with women who assure them they are going to exit the sex trade when seeking ANSWERS, to which she frequently replies, “You don’t have to exit for us to support you.”

Basham-Witherington writes that to an extent, “the philanthropic community mirrors public sentiment” and speculates that the lack of philanthropic funding may come from “a lack of awareness, good information, and support.”

Impact Fund funds legal cases that protect and advance human rights for people who are detained in correction facilities, but not received inquiries from sex workers (in the US, sex work is only legal in Nevada).

“As society changes for the better and improves its understanding of sex work and sex workers, we hope that an increasing number of philanthropic donors and institutions will recognize and meet this need,” writes Basham-Witherington.

The decision of the Superior Court of Ontario hearing has not yet been made public, so the future of Canada’s sex work laws and sex workers’ reliance on mutual aid and charity resources has yet to be known.

Clamen says such community organizations will continue to help relieve some of the pressure sex workers face trying to make a living and finding community.

“The organizations are really important mechanisms for people to have this community and support,” says Clamen. “Arguably, in the decriminalized context, that community will still be important because it takes a really long time to dismantle and undo a lot of the stigma and its consequences. Community organizations are really vital in that process.”

*The sources have requested to withhold their full name and use their pseudonym to keep their identities private.

An earlier version of this story mistakenly wrote that the advocates were at the Supreme Court of Canada. The story has been updated to reflect that they were at the Superior Court of Ontario.

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