Surviving as an indigenous sex worker is a radical act

During Shawna’s illuminating talk today about her work at Kindred House, I couldn’t help but draw a few connections between the subjugation of indigenous women in survival sex work and prisons. Though I usually align with a sex-positive feminist framework, Shawna’s presentation highlighted some key issues that demand a critical lens on the “choice” discourse surrounding sex work.

I was particularly struck by Shawna’s assertion that the majority of her clients (97 per cent of which are indigenous women) find encountering sexual assault is just “part of the job.” And this violence is not only encountered with johns, Shawna said, but from police as well, citing anecdotes of women being asked to perform oral sex on officers.

These harrowing details align with Angela Davis’ depictions of women’s abuse in prisons in Are Prisons Obsolete? The strip search, for example, is a normalized mode of non-consensual sexual touching of inmates, and the abuse of inmates by staff hardly go reported. Sexual violence in prisons, she says, is not separate from the gendered, racialized and colonialized violence existing outside the prison’s walls: “sexual abuse — which, like domestic violence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punishment of women — has become an institutionalized component of punishment” (77).

The indifference to street sex worker’s sexual assault, I’d argue, is another “institutionalized component of punishment.” Shawna discussed how difficult it is for sex workers to have their story believed by the police or courts, if they do report. Not surprisingly, Shawna said many of her clients already have a deep discomfort with the police, highlighted by her story of one women being violently arrested. In short, there is little being done to intervene (i.e. act before a sex worker dies or goes missing) on the sexual violence endured by sex workers despite the knowledge of it happening, thus making this an institutional issue.

This parallel, I believe, says less about a similarity between sex work, homelessness and prisons as it does the deeply sexualized, racialized and institutionalized nature of social inequalities in North America.

I do also, however, want to step outside of Davis’ work to acknowledge the resiliency of survival sex workers, as Shawna alluded to. In the colonial Canadian state, I believe surviving as an indigenous woman is a radical act in itself. I want to recognize that women on the street are working a legitimate lifestyle, although their means of subsisting and creating safety for themselves (opting for group “housing” in the River Valley, or banding together in gangs) aren’t typically considered ”legitimate” (and, often made deviant through law: people are often ticketed for panhandling or smoking with friends in Churchill Square, for example).

When we consider sex work something to be ignored or outlawed outright, we’re readying the sex worker’s body for erasure (if sex work was outlawed, these women would not immediately have another way of living). Though I believe a critical look at sex work as a “choice” is wholly necessary considering the imbalanced poverty and violence experienced by sex workers in Canada, we must recognize personal resiliencies used by sex workers. After all, as Shawna said, it’s nobody’s job to “save” sex workers — all we can do is “journey” alongside them, if we so choose.