You and your local hooker

>> Centre-Sud street workers try to reconcile sex workers and residents

by CRAIG SEGAL

A small group of street workers in Centre-Sud just completed their first year in a project to ease tensions between residents and local prostitutes, squeegee kids and drug users. The municipally-funded group, named the Projet d'intervention milieu, say their work is more necessary than ever in an area where increasing gentrification is creating yet another neighbourhood "rich-versus-poor" conflict.

The street workers spend time speaking with residents and marginal groups and handing out pamphlets on topics like needle exchange, safe drug use and safe sex. They also attend community meetings and even picnics with residents and sex workers.

"The picnics give me an opportunity to talk about these topics with both sides," says street worker Lainie Basman, who also works with Stella, a sex workers' rights group. "Prostitutes are an easy target as an indicator or cause of everything wrong with the neighbourhood. It's to remind people that poverty is not the prostitute's fault and that removing the prostitutes won't make the problems go away. We try to remind people that sex workers are citizens who have rights.

"It makes sense to call the cops for incidents of violence," Lainie continues. "But arresting prostitutes or clients only makes sex workers less organized. When they are more disorganized they are more disruptive to the neighbourhood."

According to a 1999 Montreal study on street prostitution, the city has about 500 hookers plying their trade openly. Another street worker involved in the Projet d'intervention milieu says there are probably more. Patrick Berthiaume, also of the HIV/AIDS prevention and coping group Séro-Zéro, estimates there are 230 male prostitutes on Montreal streets a year, some as young as 13. He says men make up 25-40 per cent of the total prostitute population. "Prostitution is not something that's going to disappear in a day," he says. "So we're trying to make a way of life in the community that works for everyone."

Berthiaume says he usually handles local residents' complaints about needles or prostitution. But rather than telling drug users or prostitutes to take their action elsewhere, Berthiaume tries to act as a liaison between the two groups. "We try to speak with them to see what's the real problem."

Centre-Sud has unique problems. The Ste-Catherine East area is becoming hot property, and the influx of newcomers is increasing tension between longtime residents and the outreach groups that have been there for decades. In July last year street groups organized a protest against the increasing "criminalization" of poverty.

Sometimes, apparent solutions have the opposite effect. A press release put out in June last year by a St-Timothée street resident said the city should not have installed floodlights in the lot by her building to scare off illegal activity. "They certainly didn't realize that behind their stores and outside their tightly shut curtains this lighting would permit intravenous drug users to better see their veins and give prostitutes better light to do their work quickly and efficiently," read the press release. The resident said she found her own solution to needle use behind her home. "I installed a small plastic bag to invite people to deposit their syringes and condoms."

"There is no miracle solution," Basman says. "There is a lot of tension in the area, and all we can do is deal on a small scale with the kinds of problems that people have."