To browse Academia. It details the actual practices of owners and managers of sex businesses in the different organisational forms of massage parlours and escort agencies. The thesis concludes with a brief exploration of the dilemmas confronting those advocating the decriminalisation of prostitution activities. Decriminalisation recognises sex work as work; it provides opportunities for promoting the health of sex workers and therefore goes a long way to addressing health and human rights inequities for this sector of the population.
Although services for sex workers are available in many countries, they tend to focus on street-based sex workers, who are perceived as the most vulnerable and thus most in need.
A decriminalised context provides greater access to peer support Harcourt , which is much better positioned to address the complex needs of all sex workers. When I lived in Montreal in the s, a friendly young Mexican came to live in my shared flat for a summer-with a couple of her friends.
All were in Canada on tourist visas, all looked for work under the table, just for that long hot summer. While the men quickly found work in the building trade, the young communications studies student found a dependable income in the Montreal sex industry.
The illegal work sector is heavily gender segregated. And the two work sectors are differently policed. Whereas the building sector is under state supervision because of suspicion of tax and social insurance evasion-the workers thus being regarded as offenders, the sex work sector has long been policed by vice squads: prostitution has long been deemed morally damaging, to the sex worker, to the community as a whole, and sometimes also to the customers, victims of womanly wiles.
