[IPSM] Prostitution of First Nations Women in Canada

[usman x]

http://sisyphe.org/article.php3?id_article=1803 -

Prostitution of First Nations Women in Canada
1er mai 2005
par Jacqueline Lynn, researcher


I'd like to begin by talking about prostitution of first nations women in
Canada. There has never been a time in Canadian history since European
contact that first nations women have not been sexually exploited in
prostitution. In its earliest days, when Canada functioned primarily as a
military and commercial outpost of Great Britain, the Hudson's Bay Company
prohibited European women from immigrating to Canada. European men demanded
sexual accessibility to first nations women, so Canada's first brothels were
established around military bases and trading posts. First nations women
were used in prostitution from first contact, and I propose to you today
that present-day prostitution of first nations women is a particularly
sexual and violent legacy of colonialism.

There are two essential ideas we need to know in order to understand how
first nations women are prostituted in Canada today. Firstly, we need to
know that the supply side of prostitution requires a devalued class of
women. Secondly, we need to know that colonialism, through its powerfully
oppressive and interlocking forces, subjugated first nations women and
produced such a class.

Most of the urgent needs that first nations people are trying to heal today
as a result of being colonized, such as poverty, childhood sexual abuse,
childhood physical abuse and neglect, husband violence, family addictions,
and alcoholism, are the same issues that render first nations women highly
vulnerable to being recruited into prostitution.

A highly organized sex economy

Canadian first nations prostituted women form part of a highly organized sex
economy that exploits millions of indigenous women globally. Prostituted
indigenous women are the most disenfranchised women in the world.

Article 4 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women recommends that state parties recognize that
some groups of women are rendered particularly vulnerable to sexual
exploitation, such as minority and indigenous women, women subject to racial
discrimination, rural women, ethnically and socially marginalized women, and
women with disabilities caused by substance abuse.

I'd like momentarily to talk about the essence of this thing called the
prostitution exchange. If Canada truly wants to stop the violence--and I
believe the committee is here to hear different people's opinions about how
to do so--perpetrated against women in prostitution and particularly those
who are most vulnerable, specifically first nations women, then we must
understand that the prostitution exchange in and of itself is intrinsically
violent.

A bought rape

Putting aside for a moment, but not forgetting, the everyday violence
prostituted women experience, such as the assaults from pimps and johns and
the social contempt of society, I want to tell you what prostituted women
have told me about their experience of being used in prostitution. Women
have described what johns do to them as bought-and-sold acts of rape, which
are unwanted, violating, and assaultive. The bought rape of prostitution is
not just one rape, as in stranger or date rape. Prostitution is continuous
rape by multiple strangers day in and day out, year after year. To be
prostituted is to be gang-raped over and over.

Johns buy women's bodies so that they can masturbate on, in, and around
them. While they're doing this, they expect from prostituted women the
appearance of pleasure and consent. While a john masturbates in, on, and
around a woman's body, he also verbally assaults her. Almost 90% of the
Vancouver prostituted women I interviewed in a recent study reported being
verbally assaulted by johns. Verbal assault is a taken-for-granted part of
the prostitution exchange.

For a moment I want you to recall, if you will, the last time someone made a
remark that embarrassed or insulted you. Think about how that remark made
you feel, and remember how you chose to respond.

For another moment, I want you to imagine that you are a woman who is being
used in prostitution. Every time a john buys your body to masturbate in, on,
or around, he has pornographic vignettes running in his head, and he
re-enacts these vignettes on your body. While he is masturbating, he tells
you that you are a dirty whore, or a nasty skank, or that sucking is really
all you're good for. You are nothing more than a sexualized, commodified
collection of body parts to him.

While he is sexually and verbally assaulting you to achieve his pleasure,
you have to listen to his verbal degradation. You have to spread your legs,
you have to open your arms, and you have to open your mouth. You have to
seemingly invite and embrace this continuous onslaught of sexual and verbal
assault. This is the so-called work of prostitution. It demeans, it
humiliates, and it devastates the women in prostitution who are used this
way.

A sexualized male violence

If we are to intervene effectively in the lives of Canadian prostituted
women we must educate ourselves to understand that prostitution is
sexualized male violence. We must then create public policies, programs, and
service delivery that reflect this knowledge.

If we viewed prostitution as violence, we would know that no matter where it
takes place, whether a prostituted woman is on the streets or in a
decriminalized prostitution zone ; whether she is being sexually exploited
through online prostitution or on a strip club runway ; whether she is in a
private room in a massage parlour or in a house ; or whether she's being
prostituted from reserve to city or across international borders, she is
being bought. We would understand that the process whereby a prostituted
woman comes to view herself as product and merchandise is the worst form of
dehumanization imaginable, and that prostitution in all its forms is sexual
assault against all women and a violation of their basic human rights.

Sweden's reform an inspiration

If we legislatively recognize prostitution as violence toward women, we
would stop men from buying women, and we would stop men from profiting from
the sale of them. Canada needs to look to Sweden concerning solicitation law
reform. In Sweden, prostitution is officially acknowledged as a form of male
violence against women and children. One cornerstone of its policies against
prostitution is its focus on its root cause : the recognition that without
men's demand for and use of women and girls for sexual exploitation, the
global prostitution industry would not be able to flourish and expand.

Sweden penalizes men who exploit women sexually, and penalizes men who
profit from this exploitation. Sweden does not penalize women who are
prostituted, because the government recognizes it's not reasonable to punish
a person who sells a sexual service. Sweden's law reads, "In the majority of
cases at least, this person is a weaker partner who is exploited by those
who want only to satisfy their sexual drives".

The desire to quit prostitution

Most of the Canadian prostituted women I have spoken to, half of whom were
of first nation ancestry, voiced several needs in terms of making their
lives safer and better. One of their first and foremost needs is to leave
prostitution. Women have also said there are virtually no programs or
services that can help them do so. I believe that we Canadians have
confounded the issue of prostitution, and we have also confused ourselves.
While we are busy touring nationally and perhaps internationally seeking
answers from other countries, some of which have normalized and legally
sanctioned prostitution, Canada's prostituted women remain trapped. I am
deeply concerned that Canada will legislate for decriminalization of
prostitution to all parties concerned. If this occurs, we will offer no hope
for a better future ; a future in which women are free from the sexual
exploitation that is prostitution.

Sweden defends the principles of legal, political, economic, and social
equality for women and girls because it rejects the notion that women and
girls, mostly girls, are commodities that need to be bought, sold, and
sexually exploited by men. To do otherwise is to allow that a separate class
of female human beings, especially women and girls who are economically and
racially marginalized, is excluded from these measures, as well as from the
universal protection of human dignity enshrined in the body of international
human rights instruments developed during the past 50 years.

I would like to end with a quote from Kathleen Barry's work entitled "The
Prostitution of Sexuality" :


Strategies to confront sexual exploitation should be as global as the
economy is international, and as the dimensions of women's subordination are
universal, and as radical as is the rootedness of the prostitution of
sexuality. As domination produces despair, struggle for liberation is the
act of hope. Hope shatters the conviction that domination is inevitable,
especially in a case of sexual exploitation, particularly in regard to
prostitution.

Source

March 30th 2005, audience of the Subcommitte on Sollicitation Laws.

On Sisyphe, May 17 2005.

Jacqueline Lynn, researcher


Source - http://sisyphe.org/article.php3?id_article=1803 -


---------------------
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That ís the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image!  What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well.
- Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's "The Tempest"
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