Denial of Service – Sex Workers Rights are Human Rights

You can find the complete presentation notes here;

Denial of service presentation

We recognize and honor the many great Nations upon whose lands we work, live, love and fight across the span of Turtle Island. We are deeply grateful to be guests in these lands, and we give this gratitude to the rightful guardians who have inhabited and stewarded these lands since time immemorial.

Hello everyone and thank you for taking the time to attend today’s event and hear about 8 human rights complaints currently underway at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

For those of you who do not know me my name is Susan Davis and I am a sex worker and the Executive Director of the BC Coalition of Experiential Communities.

Since 2002, the BC Coalition of Experiential Communities (BCCEC)  are a democratic organization of sex workers representing diverse race, gender and genre in sex work across the BC Region. Our work focuses on law and policy reform being based on evidence and fact and on placing the voices of sex workers at the centre of all work that could impact our lives and safety.

I am 56 years old and from Halifax. I finished High school in 1986 and also completed the Royal Conservatory of Music in piano. I played french horn and flute and took part in girl guides and pathfinders. My parents are scientists and I had an amazing childhood. I did not experience any exploitation or abuse as a youth. I did not attend University.

I have worked in many jobs through the years but in 1986 I became an escort. I did out calls to hotels and clients homes and had a Madame who arranged my clients for me.

Since then I have been actively working in the sex industry as an independent escort with experience in many areas of the industry and as many sex industry workers do; I migrated across the sex industry and this country with the availability of work; I worked in micro brothels, businesses run from a residential space, escort agencies, massage parlours,adult film and on the street in Halifax, Monotonic,Montreal, Toronto, Surrey, New Westminster, Barnaby, and Vancouver; I spent time in prison,survived numerous assaults and several attempts on my life, battled cocaine and heroine addiction and survived 4 overdoses.

I have worked for the rights of our community since 2002 and have been privileged to witness successes and set backs throughout the decades. I would like to take time here to honour all of you and those who came before us for the hard work, blood, sweat, tears and sacrifices you made for us to have come this far. It may not feel like it but there have been changes. Some subtle, some more obvious…but change is change and we will get there….

On September 18, 2023 when the Canadian Alliance Charter case was dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court I was angry. We have worked collectively on decriminalizing our community for decades and the decision in this case was beyond disappointing, it was infuriating.

I felt desperate so I started trying to figure out how we could work to change the way our lives are viewed by the courts and government when they are making decisions which affect our lives. How could we force them to adhere to the facts and take the rhetoric out of the equation….

Many sex workers across the globe are engaging with human rights processes and working to establish sex workers as human rights holders. I was inspired by that work and wondered is sex workers in Canada could do the same….

We have also recently discovered The Population Project research which has better defined the numbers of sex workers in Canada than ever before. There are a minimum of 169,000 people who have lived experience with sex work in Canada….the number is much higher than that but those were individual sex workers who were counted during the study.

So, I phoned the CHRC and had an emotional conversation with the intake person there..ehem.. in which I expressed the population project numbers and my frustration with the courts and government ignoring the lives, rights and safety of sex workers.

During that conversation I also demanded that they be honest with me about our chances and to “not waste my time”…

The young man on the phone was very polite and asked if I could hold so he could speak to his manager…..when he came back he confirmed that yes… sex workers are rights holders…and that they would be willing to discuss further a path forward…

From there I began to explore the CHRC website and complaint filing processes. I quickly realized that the human rights path for sex workers would be very narrow and that I would have to be creative and bend the interpretation of law to fit the issues our community is facing.

It was my hope that I would be able to work towards improving the day to day lives of sex workers by trying to address discrimination and stigma which has affected so many of us, including me, in so many ways as well as to build more evidence to support the Canadian Alliance efforts to bring down the laws.

Decriminalization is a critical feature of sex workers freedom in Canada which the Canadian Alliance are already working on and doing a great job!! So I was hoping to support that effort and to also try to begin to unravel some of the multitude of issues caused by criminalization and the stigma it perpetuates

After a series of back and forth emails, the CHRC set a date for meeting with me to further discuss hearing complaints from sex workers.

For context, the CHRC receive more than 46,000 complaint inquiries a year and only about 460 are accepted to go forward.

In that meeting I went down the list of all the ways I could think of in which sex workers human rights were being violated in Canada. The Department of Justice, Members of Parliament and Judges all ignoring and dismissing our experiences, police refusing to reform their approaches to sex worker safety, health care structures exclusion of sex workers, discrimination in housing, discrimination in child apprehension, discrimination against children who were the victims of crime, Financial exclusion, Internet exclusion, Municipalities discriminating against us and writing our exclusion into all planning and development spaces, Parliamentary clerks denying sex workers service by not doing their jobs and vetting “evidence” presented in committee for ethics when decisions were being made about our lives….

At the end of the meeting I provided the CHRC with my speaking notes and they agreed to investigate where they thought I might have the most success in settling complaints about denial of sex workers human rights in Canada.

They came back to me with a list of 8 complaints they felt would have the greatest chances of success.

These were Health Canada – one complaint, the RCMP – 2 complaints and FINTRAC and 4 of the major banks – 5 complaints.

All of the complaints are based on something called denial of service which I will explain in more detail as we go along.

So, this is how I came to file the 8 complaints I would like to discuss today.

I have been working on these cases for a year and half at this point and I have to say, it has been difficult. The language in this sphere is terrible and degrading. I have been forced to find a path forward which was not ideal and felt uncomfortable to me. I tried to be careful with language and to be as inclusive as possible but as you will hear later, it was not always possible to describe our community in the ways we have become accustomed to.

So please, try to understand as we go through that the language I used and the path I took to bring these complaints forward may be difficult for some people here. It is difficult for me too and I hope in the future we will be able to take part in modernizing the CHRC process to be more inclusive and accessible going forward.

I want to also say and be clear…this work has not changed anything….yet…as it stands we are not done and these cases are not resolved. I just want to be sure people don’t misunderstand.