City flirts with prostitution

Should prostitution be legal? Some say it already is.

"When people ask me what a pimp looks like I say he wears a suit and tie and sits on city council," says SFU criminologist John Lowman.

A quick scan through the city bylaw that regulates business licenses is revealing.

Body-rub parlours, for example, are regulated under the bylaw. The description of a body-rub, sandwiched between ‘Billiard-room keeper’ and ‘Bowling alley’, is clear: It “includes the manipulating, touching or stimulating by any means, of a person’s body or part thereof."

By comparison, a license for massage parlours explicitly forbids female employees from attending to male customers, or vice versa. There are no such restrictions in place for body-rub parlours.

More obvious, perhaps, is the fact that the bylaw regarding ‘health enhancement centres’ specifically outlaws employees from engaging in “an act of prostitution”. No such stipulation is in place for body-rub parlours.

The costs of business licenses are telling as well. Massage parlour licensees are $202 a year; a license for a body-rub parlour costs $7,730 yearly – the third most expensive business license the city charges for, behind horse racing and the PNE.

The difference between licenses for dating services and escort services are subtle. Dating services require the names of customers be logged; escort services do not. Effectively, it allows customers of escort service companies, which also pay higher license fees, to remain completely anonymous.

At the end of the day, to say the city is profiting from licensing sex trade workers is extreme. But either way, it puts Vancouver in an awkward position, says Lowman.

"You have the municpality of Vancouver on the one hand taking money from escort services, taking money from prostitution," Lowman says. "And on the other hand pointing the moral finger at men, telling them that prostitution is immoral. If it's immoral why are the bloody municipalities running it?"

Related post: The sex trade, after the women went missing

Tags: vancouver, sex trade, downtown eastside, prostitution, robert pickton, prostitution law