OTTAWA, Canada – At the same time the Canadian government is poised to impose a new anti-prostitution law that will paint sex workers as victims and johns as criminals, a national survey conducted by the government-funded Canadian Institutes of Health Research has discovered 70 percent of sex workers actually like their jobs. The results are based on a survey of 218 sex workers in six Canadian cities.
Evidently sex workers are happier than their counterparts in other occupations: A 2013 survey of Canadian workers by the employment site Monster.ca found 64 percent of workers in mainstream professions like their jobs.
The CIHR survey also discovered 82 percent of sex workers feel they are fairly paid, and 68 percent say that they have good job security.
“They don’t see themselves as victims in the sense that they’ve been portrayed in the current [prostitution criminalization] bill,” said lead researcher Cecilia Benoit. “They’re actually a lot like you and I. They just haven’t had quite so many advantages in some cases.”
The Conservative federal government is trying to push through a morals-based anti-prostitution bill in order to please its right-wing base prior to a general election in 2015. In pushing the new bill—which is intended to replace one Canada’s Supreme Court struck for violating sex workers’ human rights—the government has painted sex workers as powerless, underage victims exploited by pimps and clients alike.
Unfortunately for the Conservatives, the facts don’t appear to agree.
“Sex workers are average Canadians,” said Benoit. “They’re Caucasian, in their 30s and 40s, and have education and training outside of high school. Most of them don’t feel exploited, they don’t see buyers as oppressors…. They are people trying to do the best they can with the tools they have to live their lives.”
The sex workers who were interviewed reported a median annual income of $39,500. That’s just above the Canadian national average of $39,350 for single-parent families but far below the $74,540 reported by all families surveyed by Statistics Canada in 2012.
Benoit said the income figures reflect the kinds of sex workers the CIHR was able to interview—likely not those at the very highest or lowest ends of the pay scale.
“If you think of the sex industry as a continuum, there are people over here who have a lot of control and make a lot of money, and you have people over here who are forced,” she said. “Our study probably got people in the middle and towards the ends, but not at the extremes. Those people are very hard to capture.”
