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News + Events
UN Will Conduct Inquiry into MIssing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada
Aboriginal women are overrepresented in prostitution and suffer the brunt of poverty and racsim. We at REED are delighted that the UN has finally decided to pay attention to our missing and murdered women and will inquire into this epidemic of violence.
Ottawa, ON (December 13, 2011) – UN Will Conduct Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has decided to conduct an inquiry into the murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls across Canada. The Committee, composed of 23 independent experts from around the world, is the UN’s main authority on women’s human rights. The Committee’s decision was announced today by Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), and Sharon McIvor of the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA).
The inquiry procedure is used to investigate what the Committee believes to be very serious violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. In January and in September 2011, faced with the continuing failures of Canadian governments to take effective action in connection with the murders and disappearances, FAFIA and NWAC requested the Committee to launch an inquiry. Canada has signed on to the treaty, known as the Optional Protocol to the Convention, which authorizes the Committee to investigate allegations of “grave or systematic” violations of the Convention by means of an inquiry. Now that the Committee has formally initiated the inquiry, Canada will be expected to cooperate with the Committee’s investigation.
“FAFIA and NWAC requested this Inquiry because violence against Aboriginal women and girls is a national tragedy that demands immediate and concerted action,” said Jeannette Corbiere Lavell. “Aboriginal women in Canada experience rates of violence 3.5 times higher than non-Aboriginal women, and young Aboriginal women are five times more likely to die of violence. NWAC has documented the disappearances and murders of over 600 Aboriginal women and girls in Canada over about twenty years, and we believe that there may be many more. The response of law enforcement and other government officials has been slow, often dismissive of reports made by family members of missing women, uncoordinated and generally inadequate.”
“These murders and disappearances have their roots in systemic discrimination and in the denial of basic economic and social rights” said Sharon McIvor of FAFIA. “We believe that the CEDAW Committee can play a vital role not only in securing justice for the women and girls who have died or disappeared, but also in preventing future violations, by identifying the action that Canadian governments must take to address the root causes. Canada has not lived up to its obligations under international human rights law to prevent, investigate and remedy violence against Aboriginal women and girls.”
“The Committee carried out an inquiry into similar violations in Mexico five years ago and we expect the process will follow the same lines here in Canada,” said McIvor. “Mexico invited the Committee’s representatives to make an on-site visit and during the visit the representatives interviewed victim’s families, government officials at all levels, and NGOs. The Committee’s report on the inquiry spelled out the steps that Mexico should take regarding the individual cases and the systemic discrimination underlying the violations. Mexican women’s groups say that the Committee’s intervention helped to spur Government action and we hope to see the same result here in Canada, said McIvor.”
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Vancouver Man Arrested for Trafficking Teenage Girls
VANCOUVER SUN
October 28, 2011
Vancouver police have broken up a prostitution ring operating from a South Vancouver home in which four girls between the ages of 14 and 17 were allegedly intimidated into providing sexual services.
A total of 18 charges have been laid against Reza Moazami, 27, including four counts of human trafficking. This is only the second time such a charge has been laid in Vancouver and the first involving juveniles.
Sgt. Richard Akin of the VPD's vice squad said police believe other teenagers may have been involved in prostitution activities associated with Moazami, and asked them to contact police.
"Let's be clear these [teenagers] are victims. We believe there are others and we want these victims to talk to us," said Akin.
Akin said police began investigating Moazami in August when he was identified as being allegedly involved in prostitution activities.
"It quickly developed into an investigation into juvenile prostitution and suspected inter-provincial human trafficking," he said.
Moazami was arrested Oct. 7 and charged with two counts of living on the avails of juvenile prostitution and one count of keeping a common bawdy house. Two juvenile females were found in the residence at the time of Moazami's arrest and were taken into care.
The investigation continued and on Oct. 25 more charges were laid, amounting to a total of 18 offences alleged to have occurred between February 2009 and October 2011, involving four females below the age of 18 years.
Those charges include four counts of living on the avails of a juvenile, four counts of living on the avails of a juvenile while using or threatening to use violence intimidation or coercion, four counts of trafficking in persons under the age of 18, two counts of sexual interference and four counts of sexual exploitation.
Moazami remains in custody. His next court appearance is Nov. 21 at Vancouver Provincial Court.
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City Plan Does Little to Support Those Put At Risk by Prostitution
by
Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
If nine out of 10 fishermen got hurt at work, policymakers would likely question whether the job isn't so inherently dangerous that even regulating the industry might never keep them safe. If four of every 10 nurses were violently attacked every year, regulation alone might not be the solution either.
Yet those are the statistics for street and indoor prostitution respectively, and still most policy-makers simply shrug.
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In 2005, 90 per cent of street prostitutes in Vancouver had been physically assaulted, 78 per cent had been raped and 72 per cent met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a report in the peer-reviewed journal Transcultural Psychiatry.
Those working from home, in massage parlours or escort agencies fare better. Still, 37 per cent of them experienced some sort of violence, according to research done in 2007 by a graduate student at Simon Fraser University.
Citing municipalities' limited powers over the Criminal Code, education, health and social services, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and all of the city's councillors are the latest to shrug.
They passed a plan based on a 30-page staff report, which gave only a cursory nod to the 12-year-old Nordic model pioneered in Sweden, which outlaws all aspects of the sex trade but provides generous social supports
to at-risk youth and women exiting prostitution.
They didn't ask for more information about that model or anything else, even though the Aboriginal Women's Action Network and others among the 50 speakers at a public hearing urged them to at least consider that prostitution is a form of violence against women that ought to be stopped, not regulated.
In the end, Robertson and the others (including Suzanne Anton, the NPA's mayoral candidate in the November election) bought into the excuse given in the staff report. Municipalities can do nothing about criminal law and little about education, health and social services, it said.
Of course, council didn't use that excuse when it came to endorsing safe-injection sites for illegal drugs.
They didn't balk last year from endorsing Will to Intervene, an international report that recommended Canada and the United States take leadership roles in preventing mass atrocities.
Which is odd since some people consider that 720 missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada or that more than 100 women missing and murdered from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are slow-moving forms of genocide.
This council approved the report's sanitized language (sex work, not prostitution) and never asked why the report neglected to describe just what such work entails.
They didn't want to hear it. When 19-year-old Rachelle Rovner tried to read a graphic and disturbing description of the services that a Vancouver man bragged online about having purchased, she was told to stop.
Children might be watching the proceedings on TV, Coun. Andrea Reimer told her.
Rovner shot back. "If it's not appropriate for our city council, then maybe it's not appropriate for our city."
Nothing in the city's plan even hints at trying to lessen demand for prostitution in any of its guises.
Educational programs aren't aimed at the men who harm prostituted persons. The only recommended educational programs would be aimed at teaching children, vulnerable youth and women how to better identify pimps and predators.
"Stop putting the responsibility on us to survive," Trisha Baptie, a former prostitute, urged council. "Instead of abandoning us in the name of safety, health and verbal nonsense, you need to identify the problem: Men can pay for access to women's and children's bodies."
Council paid no attention.
Child prostitution was deliberately omitted from the report and recommendations. It's "strictly prohibited," the report's author Mary Clare Zak said at the meeting.
Yet, she also referenced a report that found 37 per cent of youth living on Vancouver's streets say they have exchanged sex for food or shelter.
Regulating where sexual services are delivered is part of the plan. The city's licensing department is urged to contact other cities to see how their bylaws differentiate registered massage therapists from massage and health-enhancement businesses that front for prostitution
Renfrew-Collingwood will get improved street lighting under council's plan. But whether it's in a car or alley, brothel or home, prostitution will never be safe.
There are hopes for housing, detox and rehab for at-risk youth, prostitutes and those exiting prostitution. But there's no money.
There's also no direction to end the long-standing practice of concentrating those services in the Downtown Eastside.
Bureaucratic not brave, it's hard to see how this plan will prevent anyone from entering prostitution or make it safer for anyone regardless of whether they're providing sexual services by choice, coercion, or out of desperation.