MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
In 2006, about 3 million soccer fans, mostly men, arrived in Germany for the World Cup soccer championships. And it's estimated that tens of thousands of prostitutes also showed up. Now, some people in British Columbia are expecting a similar surge of sex workers during Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics. And some prostitutes are asking the Canadian government to allow them to open at least one legal brothel.
Zac Baddorf takes us to the city's Downtown Eastside, one of Canada's poorest urban neighborhoods.
ZAC BADDORF: The Downtown Eastside is a 10-block ghetto, home to an estimated 5,000 crack and heroin users. That's a third the area's population. And according to a U.N. report, about two-thirds of everyone in this neighborhood has hepatitis C. Nearly a third has HIV. This is the environment where hundreds of prostitutes, like Susan Davis(ph), live and work. A sex worker for 21 years now, Davis says she's one of the luckiest prostitutes to have walked the streets here.
BLOCK: Because I lived and most don't. Suicide, drug addiction, overdose, disease, mortality, killed by your spouse.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN AMBULANCE)
BLOCK: They say that there's 100 ambulance calls down here a day.
BADDORF: In more than two decades as a prostitute in Vancouver, Davis has survived multiple attacks by clients and four heart attacks from smoking crack cocaine. But she doesn't see prostitutes and drug dealers lining the sidewalks when she comes to the Downtown Eastside. She sees her family.
BLOCK: I see my sister. I see my bro. I see people in the hardest times of their lives, trying to fight for something they believe in. This is not hos and drug dealers. This is people. Do you know what I mean? And every single person has a reason to be here. But I don't see it as the drug dealers are the bad guys and the hos are the victims. I see the greater community is the bad guys and we are the ones that are dying.
BADDORF: And she's trying to do something to help. Davis and about 10 other current and former male, female and transgendered prostitutes two years ago created a group they call the British Columbia Coalition of Experiential Workers. In what they say is a bid for safe working conditions, they have proposed opening a co-op brothel ahead of the Olympics. The sex workers proposed to have a range of rooms within the coalition-owned building for any prostitute in the region to use without any requirements of STD tests or age. They've got the support of Vancouver's mayor, but they say they won't go forward with the proposal without support from parliament.
In a catch-22, prostitution is technically legal in Canada. But laws against solicitation in public, living off prostitution and maintaining a body house(ph) essentially make it illegal to practice.
Opponents of the co-op plan say the city has hundreds of illegal brothels already in the forms of massage parlors and escort services, and that a legalized brothel would send a message that it's acceptable.
P: People will say, well, you know, prostitution is inevitable. It's been around forever. And so somehow, then we ought to just accept it and legalize it.
BADDORF: Janine Benedet is a University of British Columbia law professor.
P: But we don't accept other kinds of violence against women as inevitable. We don't say that, you know, wife beating has been around for a very long time, so why don't we just try to kind of regulate it around the margins and see if we can make it a tiny bit better for a very few women?
BADDORF: However, new Democratic Party Member of Parliament Libby Davies says prostitution doesn't exploit women, and that these workers are citizens who also deserve legal protections.
BLOCK: I've talked to enough sex workers who say they are making a choice. They may not like it. It's like any activity. You know, you might be working in a factory. It might be not terrific work. Does that mean that we don't uphold your rights?
BADDORF: Like Benedet, she says society needs to address the root cause - poverty - to allow women in the survival sex trade the option to leave.
For NPR News, I'm Zac Baddorf in Vancouver. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
