Informant38

I�m not saying sex is bad � precisely the opposite. My question is, why do we, as a culture, want so badly for it to be? Why does it spur us to such zeniths of hypocrisy?

When a community-minded sex-trade worker like Vancouver�s Jamie Lee Hamilton attempts to reach out and provide a safe haven for her sisters on the street, she is persecuted for running a �bawdy house.� It�s as if we as a society find the idea of prostitutes as human beings needing essentials like food, community and shelter intolerable. Far better to know that our prostitutes are precisely where we most like to envision them � sashaying through the halls of a �massage parlour� or working the stroll. God forbid they have a place to call their own, like one of us.
This needs chewing over. It wasn�t the likes of Paul Bernardo advocating to shut down Hamilton�s establishment, which she called �Grandma�s House.� And it isn�t a consortium of pimps, johns and sex-murderers who are advocating, right now, to keep it from opening again. It was and is the police, City Hall, and, god help us, the neighbours. It was us. It is us. Back before all this happened there was one woman making a real effort to keep these women safe, and what did we do? We shut her down � for being �bawdy.�

Furthermore, much has been made, and continues to be made, of the inadequate response of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) when women started disappearing. The police themselves have acknowledged this. They were, they claim, �short-staffed and under-funded.� In 1997, with twenty-two women missing, precisely one officer was assigned to the case. The following year, prompted by increasing media coverage, a second officer was added. There were still only two officers on the case when rumours of a serial killer started to be publicly bandied about in 1999.