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Easy targets >> A prostitute's bare-breasted protest highlights the everyday indignities of the sex worker on the street by JACQUIE CHARLTON
She displayed those very breasts one night on the seedy corner of de Champlain and Ontario last week. Weary of the feeling-up, the fines and the jail sentences, the police searches on practically any excuse and the condemnation from just about everybody, Rêve announced she was going on strike. "I am a transvestite and I sell my body. But my soul belongs to me... I'm calling attention to the fact that I want to be left in peace," reads a part of the manifesto she passed around. Police arrested her for gross indecency two weeks earlier when she staged a similar protest, similarly under-attired. But this time police peaceably watched as Rêve's protest unfolded. The presence of city councillor Sam Boskey, Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality head Yves Manseau, and half a dozen rapt television news cameramen may have provided Rêve with the shield against the law she needed. Having sex for money is not illegal under Canadian law, although there are various other sex-trade related charges, like solicitation and living off the avails of prostitution. Rêve and other prostitutes are still subject to harassment on such charges as loitering, mischief and resisting arrest. The sight of a prostitute is still a red flag to the police, and Rêve and many other sex workers want this to change. Rêve was recently stopped by police while having a bite at a Lafleur's, searched and then let go with a warning from police that she was a marked woman. Another time Rêve spent three days naked in a four-by-four solitary confinement cell after she refused to give her name to police. Stumble a little during your arrest, or say something like "What...?" and police will land you with an "assaulting a police officer" charge, she says. And jail for the transgendered can be a particularly hellish experience. "Ever see a female fish in a tank with two males? By the time they've finished with her, she has no fins left. She's completely torn apart. That's how it is in jail." Claudia, another transgendered prostitute supporting Rêve's protest, says she's received "ticket after ticket after ticket," for vague offences like loitering. "All I'm doing is walking on the street. I'm allowed to walk on the street, no?" At least 10 times in her 13-year career, she says, a police officer has demanded sexual services in exchange for letting her off with only a warning. MUC Police spokesperson Pierre Verge says any harassment complaints Rêve and other prostitutes might have should be directed to the police ethics commission. Sex workers, however, think there's a lot more to it than that. "The law tolerates prostitution, but keeps prostitutes isolated, endangered, criminalized, always on the run, destabilized," says Anna Louise Crago, a Montreal activist for the rights of sex workers. Social reinsertion What's really disturbing, though, says Crago, is the more insidious forms of sex-worker repression that have begun to find favour among legislators in major cities across Canada and the U.S. These are the so-called "John School" and "Jane School" "social reinsertion treatments." They're offered to johns and prostitutes instead of a fine when either of them have been arrested. In these schools, students spend several hours being lectured on violent pimps, shown graphic slides of horrible STDs, have community leaders paint vivid pictures for them of the dangers of prowling johns, while reformed johns describe the destruction of their marriages. And accompanying it all is a clear message that prostitutes are diseased, dirty, disgusting, wayward weakeners of men's resolve, says Crago. One filmstrip apparently shows a prostitute asking a john why he has come to see her when she's such a lowly specimen of humanity. "These schools do nothing to foster a sense of respect, dignity or humanity in the sex trade," says Crago. The problem with prostitution right now, says Nathalie Duhamel of the Montreal branch of the Elizabeth Fry Society, is that changing the law doesn't do anything to change the community's reactions to prostitution. Street prostitution, naggingly visible, is a prime target for the community's wrath. And police, she says, will act on the complaints in the only ways they know how. But John Lowman, a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University, says street prostitutes are a prime target of police crackdowns because they provide the police with a sense of control over prostitution. What the police have chosen to ignore--and Lowman calls this hypocritical--is the beehive of prostitution activity now happening in escort services, massage parlours and strip joints: "They will not acknowledge that all these other things are prostitution. As long as it's out of mind and out of sight, nobody does anything." The street prostitutes, many of them poor, young or addicted to drugs, are an easy target simply because they don't have a place to work discreetly, Lowman says. Prices going down Many street prostitutes have also faced an alarming deflation in the traditional prices of sexual services, due in part to the influx of more and more part-time prostitutes selling their bodies on the streets when their welfare cheques begin to run out. Last winter, Rêve tacked flyers up in certain parts of the city asking sex workers to "respect yourselves" and "stick to your prices," providing a list of standardized sexual-service prices along with it. A committee to study street and juvenile prostitution was set up by the city at a major sex workers' conference held here in 1996. It's due to release its final report to city council's executive committee within the next month or two. Made up of about 15 municipal councillors, police representatives, academics, public health officials, community organizations which work with prostitutes, and prostitutes themselves, the committee, a first in Montreal, has a mandate to study the way prostitution is handled in other cities in North America and Europe. "Often this kind of committee has a tendency to speak for prostitutes who aren't there," says committee coordinator Serge Bruneau, who works for the city's urban safety department and the crime prevention unit Tandem. "What's interesting with this committee is that prostitutes themselves were around the table. They were able to speak for themselves." But prostitution activists are wary. Though she's reserving judgment on the committee's findings until they are released, Crago, who was a member of the committee, says that the traditional power balance between police and prostitutes was still apparent around the committee's conference table at its monthly meetings. "You put police and prostitutes around a nice shiny table in a beautiful room in an expensively renovated building, and it doesn't change that power imbalance," she says.
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Jackie Reve, a transvestite and a prostitute, says she runs the gauntlet every time she's carted off to the police station. The officers surround her and each one feels her breasts.