2   Zoned Out

Regulating Street Sex Work in Kamloops, British Columbia

Lorry-Ann Austin

It’s when it’s visible on the streets and interferes with daily life that people get concerned. (Mel Rothenburger, quoted in Koopmans 2003)

Prostitution may indeed be the oldest profession, and yet, in contemporary Western societies, the visible presence of sex workers on city streets is typically perceived as a cause for alarm. The above comment, made by the mayor of Kamloops, British Columbia, from 2000 to 2005, seems to epitomize a widely shared conviction that, if sex work cannot be wholly eliminated, then sex workers should at least be rendered invisible—hidden away to protect the public from unsightly scenes of degraded morality. In fact, those involved in the sex trade are more often the ones in need of protection. In the words of the United Nations Population Fund, “Social stigma and discrimination against sex workers create an environment that perpetuates a culture of violence. Their basic human rights to protection and redress are commonly disregarded; they are more often penalised and regarded as criminals” (UNFPA 2006, 39). The criminalization of prostitution contributes to this culture of violence, encouraging a view of sex workers as members of the underworld.

In the media, sex work has generated what John Lowman (2000) terms a “discourse of disposal,” that is, a focus, in reportage, on efforts to banish sex workers from relatively affluent residential areas and associated business districts and to consign them instead to a city’s lower-class neighbourhoods and criminal ghettoes. Lowman argues that this discourse played a role in the steep rise in the murder rate among Vancouver sex workers beginning in 1980. Many of the more than sixty-five women who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between 1997 and 2002 are known to have been involved in the street sex trade (Oppal 2012, 1:32–33, and see also 1:98–111). Given the association between some of these disappearances and the work of serial killers, most notably Robert Pickton, the case of the Vancouver missing women acquired a sensational element, attracting much attention in the media both before and after Pickton’s arrest in 2002. The discourse that Lowman identifies, however, which implicitly equates sex workers with social garbage, not only remains prevalent but continues to exert an influence on social policy, contributing to exclusionary approaches that aim to “get rid of” sex workers by banishing them from public view.

A diverse body of academic research (see, for example, Francis 2006; Hubbard 1998; Lowman 2000; O’Neill et al. 2008) centres on the potential for public responses to the sex trade to provoke policies intended to conceal the existence of sex workers. Criminologist John Lowman asserts that the dangers associated with sex work increase when sex work is hidden from public view (Keller 2011). At the municipal level, we encounter a wide range of regulatory approaches to sex work, from law enforcement by local police and community surveillance in the form of neighbourhood patrols to the relaxed regulation of brothels and the enhancement of support services that assist sex workers in exiting the trade. Yet we need a more complete understanding of how the perceptions and interests of community members influence local policy with respect to the sex trade.

With a focus on the period from 2002 to 2009, this chapter examines the reaction of residents and business owners in Kamloops’s North Shore area to the growth of the street sex trade in their community, in an effort to analyze the impact of local responses on the evolution of policy in the context of municipal governance. As John Minnery (2007) argues, in contrast to the notion of government, which places the emphasis on a single actor (the state), the term governance is more inclusive, extending beyond the interests of the state to encompass those of the market, as articulated by members of the business community, and of civil society at large. Local governance includes all forms of collective action directed at the development of social policy, from the decisions of municipal government to the activities of business lobby groups and community activists (Healey 2006, 302). At the same time, the formulation of social policy at the municipal level is influenced by political and economic ideologies that prevail at higher levels of government.

In 2001, the BC provincial election moved governing philosophy sharply to the right, with the landslide defeat of the New Democratic government and the election of the BC Liberal Party by an overwhelming majority. Premier Gordon Campbell’s 2002 provincial budget reflected a firmly neoliberal orientation, evident in major tax cuts, reduced expenditures, and the elimination of thousands of civil service jobs (Laanela 2009). The provincial government cut funding for women’s centres and legal aid, froze health care and education budgets, increased medical services plan premiums, and lifted the freeze on postsecondary tuition, actions that translated into an increase in social needs and a decrease in social resources. In the small city of Kamloops, marginalized populations became increasingly visible, while city administrators struggled to find ways to manage the problems associated with their presence. The street sex trade in Kamloops generated considerable controversy and debate among citizens and in the local media. Rather than attempt to develop a consensus-based approach to the issue, however, Kamloops pursued two discrete strategies, consisting of heightened law enforcement and efforts to suppress the sex trade, on the one hand, and, on the other, programs intended to provide social and health support to sex workers, with the goal of both encouraging and enabling them to exit the trade.

The Regulation of Sex Work: Contextual Considerations

Cities in Canada are bound by provincial and federal laws, which constrain their scope of governance. With respect to sex work, cities must abide by the provisions of the federal Criminal Code (Canada 1985), which outlaws activities integral to the sex trade. During the period under study here, it was, for example, illegal under section 213(1)(c) of the Criminal Code to communicate with someone in a public place “for the purpose of engaging in prostitution or of obtaining the sexual services of a prostitute.” In 2007, however, a former sex worker, Sheryl Kiselbach, and an organization of street-based sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside challenged the federal legislation, arguing that existing prostitution laws violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by impeding what their legal counsel described as the right of sex workers “to work safely and live in safety, to be free from arrest and to be free from the inequalities they currently experience as a result of the laws” (Katrina Pacey, quoted in “Supreme Court” 2011; see also Pacey 2012). Two years later, in Ontario, a group of sex workers mounted a similar challenge, and, in 2010, an Ontario Superior Court judge struck down three sections of Canada’s prostitution laws, observing that “provisions meant to protect women and residential neighbourhoods are endangering sex workers’ lives” (Tyler 2010).

Although the Supreme Court of Canada ultimately dismissed the first case, in December 2013, the Court upheld the Ontario ruling, declaring that the three sections in question infringed upon the rights of prostitutes under section 7 of the Charter “by depriving them of security of the person in a manner that is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice” (Canada 2013, 1104). Sex workers celebrated this victory, although it proved to be a brief one. The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, which became law in November 2014, effectively reinstated laws against prostitution (see Canada 2014, “Summary”). Whether these new provisions will be successfully challenged remains to be seen, but the focus in litigation has clearly fallen on the potential for policy responses to endanger sex workers’ lives and violate their civil rights.

Even though provincial governments have no direct jurisdiction over the legal status of prostitution, as this is the domain of the federal Criminal Code, they do, of course, have some control over the interpretation and enforcement of federal laws. Provincial officials may regulate sex work in a variety of ways, using their jurisdiction over highways and traffic, community safety, and child protection. While city governments must similarly operate within the provincial framework, they retain some independent power to respond to the sex trade via municipal bylaws that regulate the use of streets, business licensing, and the zoning of off-street sex services (Barnett 2014).

In addition, approaches to regulation surrounding the street sex trade are informed by the sociopolitical context in which the work takes place; thus, regulation will look different in different localities (see, for example, Francis 2006; Kohm and Selwood 2004; Larsen 1992). Community dialogue about the street sex trade influences this local context, producing specific city-level responses. These responses include unofficial policies that tolerate the street trade in specific areas of a city, gentrification of other areas in an effort to push out sex workers, local campaigns aimed at shaming the purchasers of sexual services, and increased funding for enforcement. Within the limits of federal and provincial legal frameworks, municipal governments are free to pursue their own policies, placing both the sex worker and neighbourhoods in which the trade takes place at the mercy of local social and political interests and dynamics.

As research on the street sex trade reveals, the discourses produced or repeated by local government, business owners, and community members interact to produce specific policy responses (see, for example, Hubbard 1998; Lowman 2000; O’Neill et al. 2008; Tani 2002). A study of the discourses surrounding sex work in Victoria, British Columbia, from 1980 to 2005 noted the prevalence of themes of contagion, which conceptualize the sellers of sex as diseased or otherwise amoral and hence as a threat to the community. As the authors point out, “Solutions are aimed at containment in order to protect the innocent, as well as business owners, from the unsightliness of outdoor sex industry work and the supposed attendant crime and disease” (Hallgrimsdottir, Phillips, and Benoit 2008, 271). In the realm of policy, such solutions typically entail efforts to restrict the street sex trade to certain spaces within a city in order to protect other spaces from its socially disruptive potential (see Hubbard and Sanders 2003). In contrast, a number of cities in Britain and Europe have experimented with formally delimited “tolerance zones,” where sex workers can operate free of police harassment (see Jones et al. 2005). In June 2012, the mayor and council of the Montréal borough of Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve proposed the creation of such a zone within the borough, but Montréal’s city council was swift to reject the idea, on the grounds that prostitution is illegal (“Montreal Borough Wants a ‘Zone of Tolerance’ for Prostitution” 2012).

The existing research also demonstrates that policy responses to the sex trade are highly sensitive to spatial configurations. Yet, to date, studies of sex work have tended to focus on major metropolitan areas: the regulation of the street sex trade in smaller cities remains largely unexplored. Not only does the sex trade occur outside of large metropolises, however, but it is, in fact, more difficult to conceal in a small city. In large cities, street sex work is usually confined to a specific “red-light” district (or districts), and buffer zones exist between these spaces and other areas in the city. As a result, most residents are insulated from the sight of sex workers plying their trade. Within the relatively concentrated space of a small city, however, the street trade may be witnessed daily by residents as they go about their routine business. This visibility generates hot debates, fuelled by emotional reactions, that escalate quickly and that demand a response from small-city governments.

As our social attitudes and political programs continue to align with right-of-centre, neoliberal orientations, sex workers and other marginalized individuals seem to face intensified scrutiny, all the more so within the small city. The conditions of modern society have produced growing numbers of people perceived as a threat to a shrinking sense of neighbourhood and community (Deutschmann 2005; Hubbard 2004; Hubbard, Matthews, and Scoular 2008). Within the small city, vocal citizens assert opinions about what they feel is missing from their community and what values they believe are in need of protection. They may also adopt a revanchist stance, exerting their collective will in an attempt to reclaim spaces perceived to have been lost to groups of marginalized individuals (MacLeod 2002).

A Visible Presence: The Sex Trade in Kamloops

Situated in the southern interior of British Columbia, at the junction of the north and south branches of the Thompson River, Kamloops is the service hub for the municipalities and rural populations within the Thompson-Nicola Regional District. The region’s main hospital is located in Kamloops, as is Thompson Rivers University. The central downtown area lies on the south side of the Thompson River, near the confluence of its two branches. Across the river is another downtown business area known as the North Shore, located on the west side of the north-south flowing North Thompson River, while on the river’s east side is the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc Reserve (also known as the Kamloops Indian Reserve). Billing itself as the “Tournament Capital of Canada,” Kamloops is the frequent host of sporting events and is also home to a vibrant arts and culture scene. Upscale restaurants and shops, as well as a range of business and corporate headquarters, create the impression that this small city has all the amenities found within larger metropolises. Yet, like all small cities, Kamloops is relatively self-contained, rather than forming part of a sprawling metropolitan region containing many satellite communities.

As of 2011, the population of Kamloops stood at 85,678 (British Columbia, BC Stats 2011). As is typically the case in small cities, Kamloops’s administrative infrastructure is not as well developed as that of larger urban centres, and the city had relatively little experience to draw on when forced to confront the range of social issues thrust upon it in a neoliberal political climate. Sociologist Linda Bell Deutschmann, who taught at Thompson Rivers University during the early 2000s, observed that the province’s cuts to social services, decreased access to legal aid, and a freeze in social assistance rates resulted in a sharp increase in visible homelessness and other social ills in Kamloops (Deutschmann 2005, 335–36). Faced with the need to attract new investments to expand its revenue base, in part to support a growing population, city administrators tended to view the visible presence of sex trade workers and other marginalized individuals as threats to economic growth. In this, the city was often joined by members of the business community, while local citizens voiced concerns about violence and safety, as well as about the impact of the sex trade on specific neighbourhoods. Together, these concerns gave rise to a discourse of exclusion, one that demanded strategies that would remove sex workers from sight. At the same time, other members of the community, and to some degree the city itself, adopted a more inclusive position, regarding sex workers as victims in need of rescue and looking to social programs for solutions.

At the time Gordon Campbell’s Liberals came to power in BC, Kamloops already had one program in place designed to address the needs of sex workers: Social and Health Options for Persons in the Sex Trade, locally known as SHOP. Launched in 1997, SHOP aims to provide support to street sex workers, with a view to assisting them in abandoning the trade and becoming integrated into the social mainstream. In pursuit of this goal of inclusion, the program also offers education to the broader community about the nature of the street sex trade and the exploitation entailed in the commodification of sex. Using tax dollars and revenue generated from licensing fees levied on the city’s massage parlours and escort agencies, Kamloops initially provided SHOP with an annual operating budget of $5,000. Some years after the program was implemented, an article in the Kamloops Daily News proclaimed that Kamloops was the only city in Canada to be the sole provider of taxpayer funds for a local program aimed at getting sex trade workers off the street (Young 2005).

As the existence of SHOP demonstrates, the street sex trade was a source of concern in Kamloops well before Campbell’s victory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a small city, Kamloops contained no spaces, such as those so often found in larger metropolises, within which the existence of the sex trade is informally tolerated—the sex strolls in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, for example, or the tippelzones in Dutch cities. It appears from newspaper reports that, during the late 1990s, the street sex trade became a source of concern in the city’s downtown core, on the south side of the Thompson River, but that, early in the 2000s, the trade moved to the North Shore, apparently shifting its location in response to law enforcement efforts in the downtown. It was not long before North Shore community members began to react. In 2003, a delegation of North Shore residents and business owners visited City Hall to demand that the mayor, Mel Rothenburger, address their concerns about the influx of sex workers by banning the trade from certain public spaces. In response, Kamloops City Council considered enacting a bylaw, similar to one drafted by the City of Surrey, that would fine sex workers caught in areas near schools, parks, and residential homes, only to discover that the proposed bylaw would be unenforceable owing to constitutional issues (Hewlett 2003). The city’s first attempt at “people zoning” thus ended in defeat. But the war was only beginning.

The Struggle for Territory

As a review of articles in the city’s two main newspapers reveals, concerns about the street sex trade began to escalate in 2004, with community members generally adopting a revanchist stance, implicitly staking a claim to the ownership of public space on the North Shore and demanding help from the city in their efforts to defend “their” territory. Following the demise of the bylaw idea, the mayor had convened a task force charged with developing local solutions to the street sex trade, and Kamloops City Council then sponsored a series of community meetings at which North Shore residents were encouraged to take their own action to protect local neighbourhoods (Hewlett 2004a; 2004b). Various suggestions emerged from these meetings, including efforts at gentrification—cleaning up streets and local properties with a view to discouraging sex workers—as well as the formation of a block watch to patrol neighbourhoods (“Creating Safe Places Meeting Dates” 2004).

A community meeting held in July 2004 resulted in the formation of the North Shore Community Working Committee, made up of representatives from community groups and local service providers. The committee aimed to develop what Kamloops This Week described as a “made-in-Kamloops” solution to the related problems of drug use and the street sex trade, a process that would involve trying out various strategies to find a combination that worked. The committee sought to develop action plans and form neighbourhood associations that could represent the issues of the neighbourhood with the city (“Team Tackles Crime” 2004). Although the chair of the newly constituted committee remarked on the compassion for sex workers shown by many of those present at the July meeting, he also acknowledged that local residents did not want the sex trade in their own neighbourhoods (“Team Tackles Crime” 2004). In other words, despite an apparent recognition that sex workers were not simply criminals, the prevailing discourse remained one of exclusion: the overriding goal was to rid the area of sex workers.

As the growth of a visible sex trade continued unabated into 2005, revanchist sentiments intensified, with North Shore residents and business owners complaining loudly about sex workers lining the lower section of Tranquille Road, the area’s main business corridor. Their complaints were compounded by a series of three murders, the first in 2003, in which the victims were identified as women involved with the street sex trade. The media contributed to a rising sense of peril, portraying the North Shore as dangerous and detailing residents’ fears that the trade was threatening irreversible harm to the community. The owners and employees of local businesses spoke out, demanding that city staff increase the number of foot and bicycle police patrols, with the goal of moving the trade out of key business areas, while the North Shore Business Improvement Association organized meetings with city officials and the police in hopes of finding a solution (“Sex Trade Meeting” 2004; “Creating Safe Places Meeting Dates” 2004).

The idea of a neighbourhood block watch group, first proposed in 2004 during the series of community meetings hosted by the city council, became a reality in 2005 when a group of concerned citizens, men and women, joined together to create the North Shore Citizens’ Safety Patrol. According to an article in Kamloops This Week, the patrol aimed to “step up pressure on unsavoury characters who have contributed to the problems of what some local residents describe as an area out of control” (“Taking Back the Streets” 2005). The volunteer group patrolled areas of the North Shore known to have high levels of sex trade activity, identifying and accosting possible offenders and often interacting with the police (“North Shore Patrol” 2006). Kamloops’s crime prevention officer, a former member of the RCMP who strongly supported the effort, provided the volunteers with training to assist them in their activities. In groups of six, wearing brightly coloured safety vests and equipped with cellphones, flashlights, and cameras, the patrol walked the neighbourhood, trailing sex workers and snapping photographs of people seeking to purchase their services (“Crime Gets Unwelcome Shadow” 2005; “Taking Back the Streets” 2005). The patrol was accused of engaging in vigilante justice, but the group’s coordinator denied this, insisting that the objective was simply to keep the neighbourhood safe (“North Shore Patrol” 2006). So did the crime prevention officer, who was quoted as saying, “This is not a vigilante group. It’s a group of concerned citizens. It’s prevention through presence” (“Crime Gets Unwelcome Shadow” 2005).

A few months earlier, in April, another group of concerned citizens had attended an evening presentation by an Edmonton vice squad officer and representatives from the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton. The officer painted a grim portrait of the sex worker, often little more than a child, trapped in a dangerous and abusive system. He warned against law enforcement efforts that serve only to move the trade from one location to another, usually temporarily, without getting to the root of the problem—namely, the customer. He urged the city to set up a local “john school” that would seek to rehabilitate those arrested for purchasing sex by offering them an alternative to prosecution (“Local Solution Needed” 2005). The city council and the local RCMP considered the possibility, but, in the end, the idea generated little enthusiasm. The underlying attitude seemed to be that boys will be boys—that the male sex drive was just too powerful to contain. Beneath that, one detects a familiar reluctance to hold men accountable for their actions, especially when, instead, one can blame the woman.

In addition, the SHOP program had been obliged to close down in 2005, owing to safety and liability issues resulting from a lack of adequate funding. Its closure prompted impassioned pleas from the executive director of the AIDS Society of Kamloops (ASK)—the organization under which SHOP operated—for an increase in its current annual budget of $13,500 (Young 2005). These pleas did not go unheard within the community, especially among those who were critical of tactics of exclusion and who regarded sex workers as victims of exploitation in need of protection and support. The existence of this countervailing discourse provoked considerable debate among local citizens about the merits of approaches that sought to offer help to sex workers, rather than simply remove them from sight, with Kamloops City Council coming in for criticism for its failure to provide adequate funding for the SHOP program. Especially in the wake of the three murders, however, questions also arose about the capacity of social programming such as SHOP to curb the problems associated with the sex trade. The mayor, Mel Rothenburger, expressed his skepticism on this score, arguing that, while he supported the SHOP program, harm-reduction approaches were insufficient: “We have to continue to look at enforcement, drug addiction and other areas,” he said (quoted in Young 2005).

The issue of how far to tolerate the existence of the sex trade and pursue harm-reduction strategies surfaced during the November 2005 municipal election. All three mayoralty candidates (Rothenburger did not seek re-election) weighed in on a suggestion made by a progressive city councillor in Vancouver about the possible development of a city-owned, nonprofit brothel. One candidate voiced tentative support for the idea, pointing out that, if Ottawa were to legalize prostitution—brothels were, and still are, illegal under section 210 (1) of the Criminal Code—then the “controlled” environment of a licensed brothel might help to sever the link between sex work and the drug trade. The others disagreed, however, with the winning candidate, Terry Lake, declaring that “you can’t solve prostitution without solving the drug problem first” (“Pondering Prostitution” 2005). As a solution to the drug problem was nowhere in sight, the question remained how best to cope with the situation on the North Shore.

In the eyes of North Shore residents, the increased visibility of the sex trade was connected to the displacement of sex workers from the city’s more prosperous South Shore. This shift in location was blamed in part on the city’s decision to close down low-income housing on the south side of the river and focus instead on the construction of high-density low-income housing on the North Shore. “We on the North Shore are getting fed up with the way city council keeps dumping crap on our doorstep,” said one angry resident, arguing that city council had “chased all the hookers and drug dealers over to the North Shore” (Morgan 2006). Frustrated community members continued to demand that the city council increase law enforcement efforts, accusing administrators of viewing the North Shore as a lower-class area not worthy of the same quality of attention as the more upscale South Shore. Their anger reached a boiling point when they learned that the city council had approved, without prior consultation, a three-year increase in the annual budget of SHOP to $68,000 on the understanding the program would now include a drop-in centre and counselling services for street sex trade workers. These were to be housed in ASK’s new headquarters, which just so happened to be located on the North Shore (Duncan 2005). In response to an outcry from North Shore business owners, the city council postponed implementation of the changes to the SHOP program, eventually signing off on a watered-down version that eliminated the drop-in component (“City to Hire Crime Officer” 2006).

As it became increasingly apparent that residents of the North Shore were simply unwilling to tolerate a visible sex trade, municipal administrators began to lean more towards exclusionary tactics, to the neglect of other options. As part of the city’s initial response to citizen complaints, a subcommittee of its Social Planning Council was asked to review the sex trade policies developed in Victoria and Vancouver and to prepare a series of recommendations. The resulting report laid out a multi-pronged plan that incorporated measures aimed at prevention and harm reduction, along with treatment and healing programs, and housing and political initiatives, in addition to policing and prosecution (Hewlett 2005; Rothenburger 2005). The report met with criticism from city council members, however, with some arguing that it placed too much emphasis on social programming while failing to give adequate priority to community protection. The consensus was, moreover, that this combined strategy would have little immediate impact on the main source of complaint, namely, the visibility of the sex trade.

Faced with what was clearly a growing crisis, city administrators turned instead to the RCMP, with which the city had for many years collaborated via its Police Committee. In 2005, at the request of the city, the RCMP stepped up enforcement efforts on the North Shore with a series of undercover sting operations targeting both the purveyors and purchasers of sex services. While this crackdown did have the short-term effect of clearing prostitutes from the streets, it also provoked a debate in the community about the ethics of using undercover RCMP officers to entice marginalized sex workers into situations leading to their arrest (Bass 2007; Begley 2007; Koopmans 2007). Nor was it effective in the long term. Following their release from jail, many of the sex workers simply returned to the North Shore.

Despite the efforts of the volunteer citizens’ patrol and the increased attention of the RCMP, the North Shore continued to be depicted as territory in peril. Insisting that their community was on the verge of destruction, residents and business owners relentlessly pressured Kamloops City Council, demanding definitive action. As one local resident told council members, “It’s pure hell over here. I’m fed up. I want you guys to deal with it” (“Royal Pain” 2006). The city had its marching orders; what it still seemed to lack was an effective battle plan.

A Thick Red Line

In 2006, with fear and outrage escalating among North Shore business owners and residents, the RCMP worked with the city to create such a plan (“No-Go Zones Considered by Police Group” 2007; “Red Zones to Target Criminals” 2007). The new approach, which was already in use in the nearby cities of Vernon and Kelowna, involved the creation of “red zones.” Borders were drawn around two areas in the city known to have a high incidence of sex trade activity and other street crime, one on the North Shore, from Tranquille Road down to the river, and a second in the South Shore downtown. The new policy aimed to prevent criminal offenders—notably, in the case of Kamloops, sex trade workers—from returning to the red zone area following an arrest. If a sex worker was apprehended within the red zone, the RCMP officer could note this fact on the criminal charge report submitted to the courts, and the courts could then prohibit the sex worker from returning to the area once released from custody (“Red Zones” 2007). People zoning had arrived in the small city of Kamloops.

With the red zones in place, the RCMP carried out a series of undercover operations in 2007 and 2008, arresting street sex workers and their customers, who were then barred from returning to the red zones after their release. In the first such operation, which took place on the North Shore in May 2007, seventeen women identified as sex workers were arrested. The action was applauded by some, especially business owners and volunteer members of the North Shore Citizens’ Safety Patrol, who noted a marked improvement in the area as a result of the arrests and exclusion orders. Others, however, reacted with anger and dismay, including a writer for Kamloops This Week, who was incensed by the heavy-handed police action and complained of “headline-grabbing moves by the police to show they’re tough on crime” (Bass 2007). As multiple critics pointed out (see, for example, Koopmans 2007), exclusion zones merely displace criminal activity from one area to another, rather than attempting to reduce crime by addressing the underlying social and economic inequities. The Chairman of the city’s Social Planning Council, Ray Jolicoeur, observed that: “Enforcement just moves it around. Moving it around is not the answer. If we choose to move them, there should be a where” (“Will Gang Control Prostitutes?” 2007). Many also expressed concerns about a policy approach that appeared to drive the sex trade further underground. Following the May sweep, a local street nurse told Kamloops This Week that the area was “like a ghost town.” This worried her. Prior to the sting, the paper reported, “most mornings, she would encounter up to a dozen women on the known strolls,” but this had changed since the arrests: “I could not see a soul and that’s what’s scary,” she commented (“Will Gang Control Prostitutes?” 2007; see also “Red Zone Forcing Prostitutes into Hiding, Councillor Claims” 2007).

Located within the red zones were social service agencies that often provided assistance to sex workers—including the ASK Wellness Centre, located on Tranquille Road. Other critics thus questioned the lack of advance consultation with local service providers. Bob Hughes, the executive director of ASK, was shocked: “The sting was ill-conceived and ill-implemented,” he declared. “There was no indication they were going to do this” (quoted in Koopmans 2007). At least one city councillor agreed that the agencies offering support to sex trade workers should have been consulted about the potential effects of the new policy. The council member, Arjun Singh, sparked further public outcry by suggesting that, instead of banishing sex workers from the red zones, the city should take steps to tolerate the trade by zoning the areas as sex strolls after midnight. He also proposed that the city council actively lobby the federal government to legalize, regulate, and tax prostitution (Singh 2007; Young 2007). Amidst the heated debate that ensued, Hughes reminded the Kamloops community of its history of support for social programs such as SHOP. “We have not only acknowledged our sex trade,” he wrote in the Kamloops Daily News. “We as a community have taken the unprecedented step of funding programming to assist those caught in its tight grasp” (Hughes 2007).

Concerns over the implications of the red zone policy for the safety of sex workers prompted Cynthia Davis, agency coordinator for the Kamloops Sexual Assault Counselling Centre, to join with other women in the community to organize a demonstration. The women, dressed in black, took to the streets in the North Shore’s red zone early in July 2007. “We are very concerned that a large social action has been taken against the street workers without anyone discussing it,” said Cynthia Davis, while other demonstrators spoke to reporters about the need to take action against a “flawed and discriminatory system that puts the victims at greater risk of danger and victimization.” The protest provoked the wrath of one local business owner, a man who had recently been president of the North Shore Business Improvement Association. As if to illustrate the problem, he allegedly assaulted Davis during the match, twisting her arm and reportedly forcing her to her knees (Olivier and Bass 2007, quoting Davis).

The creation of the two red zones happened to coincide with the initial legal challenge to Canada’s prostitution laws brought by Vancouver’s Pivot Legal Society on behalf of Sheryl Kiselbach and the alliance of Downtown Eastside sex workers, and the red zone policy raised similar questions about the possible infringement of individual rights. As Cynthia Davis of the Kamloops Sexual Assault Counselling Centre pointed out with regard to sex workers, “Their civil rights are really being violated because of the red-zone tactics” (quoted in “March to Veer Through Red Zone” 2007). This was also the opinion of one of the writers for The Galloping Beaver, whose attention had been caught by the local newspaper report on the protest march. “The establishment of the Red Zone and the prohibitions imposed would be unlikely to survive a ‘charter challenge,’” he wrote. “The implementers of the idea probably know that, but they also know the people they are banning from an area of the city are not likely to mount such a challenge and, unless they do so, the ban can be imposed at will.” Indeed, the constitutionality of red zones could be called into question on a number of different grounds, depending on the circumstances—but, as one group of socio-legal commentators wryly observes, “zone restriction orders, like other similar orders issued by the courts, seem to be protected from legal and constitutional challenges” (Sylvestre, Bernier, and Bellot 2015, 290).

As a public debate over the ethics of red zones waged on in local newspapers, dissatisfaction began to emerge with exclusionary approaches to the regulation of the street sex trade. The city seemed somewhat caught off guard by the backlash against the red zone policy, which clearly required that it make some sort of accommodation to critics. The courts did recognize that the red zone exclusion orders posed a problem for sex workers trying to access social services and so allowed a temporary exception to the order for those who wanted to enter the zone in order to access such services (“Woman Gets Pass Into Red Zone” 2007). In addition, in response to public criticism over the 2007 RCMP stings targeting prostitutes, the city council unveiled a program that it had taken a year to develop. The Sex Trade Worker Diversion Program aimed to spare sex trade workers conviction and incarceration at the hands of the criminal justice system by offering them the option of enrolling in social programs and addictions treatment to assist them in exiting the trade (Hewlett 2008; Petruk 2008). Unveiled in the spring of 2008, the program was evidence of the city’s commitment to longer-term solutions that would provide sex workers with an alternative to life on the street.

In short, in an effort to mediate between citizens who were demanding police action and those calling for more compassionate approaches, the municipal government tempered its reliance on law enforcement by continuing to support the SHOP program, complemented by the introduction of the Sex Trade Worker Diversion Program. Although law enforcement was effective in reducing the visibility of the sex trade in the two red zone areas, displacement—not only of the sex trade but of drug dealers as well—was an ongoing outcome of the enforcement approach, with one resident repeating a familiar complaint in March 2008: “Producing a red zone doesn’t solve any problems; all it does is move them to a new location” (Phillips 2008). Indeed, the borders of the downtown red zone were eventually expanded in the wake of concerns about assaults and drug dealing in Riverside Park, located along the river immediately north of the downtown (Young 2010).

By the start of 2009, the streets in Kamloops’s two red zones had been virtually cleared of sex trade workers—to the point that, early in January, the Kamloops Daily News ran an article titled “Seeking Sex Trade Workers,” in which ASK’s executive director, Bob Hughes, remarked on the dearth of visible sex trade workers. In late February, another article in the paper, “The Red Zone Effect,” noted that “Tranquille Road and the nearby streets and alleys are remarkably different,” citing Hughes’s observation that “while it’s still possible to find signs of drugs and prostitution on the North Shore’s streets and alleys, the open trade in society’s dysfunction isn’t easily seen anymore.” The article continued: “The reason? A thick red line, drawn on a map around a several-block area of the neighbourhood” (Koopmans 2008). The exclusionary tactics adopted within the small city of Kamloops had indeed resulted in a dramatic reduction in the visibility of the street sex trade and, with it, an equally marked decrease in public discussion of the issues raised by its presence. It was as if the adage “Out of sight, out of mind” had settled in Kamloops. Whereas citizens of this small city had once debated how best to safeguard the rights of marginalized individuals and ensure the safety of sex trade workers while at the same time protecting community interests, the discussion seemed to vanish into thin air as the sex workers themselves vanished into the night.

Conclusion

In the wake of the 2002 provincial election, the small city of Kamloops was obliged to cope with increased social dysfunction resulting from cuts to funding for social services in a newly neoliberal environment. Faced with the need to regulate a growing street sex trade, the city adopted two principal strategies: continued support for the SHOP program and the creation of the Sex Trade Worker Diversion Program, on the one hand, and red zone exclusion areas, on the other. In pursuing these strategies, the city was attempting to steer a path between two apparently competing bodies of community discourse, one that called for compassionate, inclusive approaches and long-term solutions and another that demanded decisive action to remove sex workers from view. Both perspectives were predicated on the conviction that, ideally, the sex trade should not exist. But whereas the former sought to assist sex workers in exiting the profession, the latter insisted only that sex work be concealed.

As the mayor of Kamloops observed early on, complaints about the sex trade arose “when it’s visible on the streets and interferes with daily life.” In a small city such as Kamloops, spatial proximity to a visible street sex trade challenges residents’ perceptions of normalcy and their sense of community safety, as evidenced in the revanchist sentiments voiced by many North Shore residents and business owners. The implementation and enforcement of the red zone policy in 2007 and 2008 resulted in the virtual clearing of city streets, as sex workers moved to other neighbourhoods to avoid arrest during ongoing undercover police operations. Once the sex workers were (temporarily) out of sight, public debate about the sex trade—including discussions of whether red zones jeopardized the safety of sex workers and infringed on their constitutional rights—was stilled. Residents and business owners had succeeded in reclaiming ownership of the public space they once perceived as polluted by the street sex trade, and, in their eyes, that victory marked the end of the war.

In connection with funding for social programming (notably SHOP), the Kamloops city council periodically reviewed reports on program outcomes, which indicated that supportive measures did encourage sex workers to quit the trade. With regard to red zones, a similar process of assessment does not seem to have occurred. Although research indicates that policy responses that seek to conceal the sex trade, typically by means of law enforcement, place sex workers at greater risk of physical violence and expand the possibilities for exploitation, the City of Kamloops apparently made no systematic effort to evaluate the impact of its red zone policy on the safety of sex workers. No evidence exists that city administrators attempted to evaluate the effects of the policy as employed in other small cities prior to accepting the RCMP’s recommendation that it be implemented in Kamloops, nor was an assessment subsequently conducted to determine whether the policy had produced any unintended outcomes.

In responding to concerns about the sex trade, city administrators tended to adopt a reactive, rather than proactive, approach, seeking to quiet citizens’ complaints about the visible presence of the sex trade rather than investing time and money in developing more complex, long-term solutions. This pattern is in keeping with policy making in a neoliberal context, where tight budgets and uncertainties about future funding often frustrate efforts at long-term planning. All the same, despite its extensive reliance on exclusion zones and law enforcement, the city did continue to support social programming. What seemed missing was a framework capable of integrating these two approaches. In reporting on community opinion, local newspapers may have heightened the sense of opposition, isolating two bodies of discourse that in fact overlapped. Perhaps mirroring this division, law enforcement and social programming tended to be conceptualized as alternatives, rather than as parts of a whole.

The sex trade still exists in Kamloops, and so do the red zones. In fact, as a recent news report (Legassic 2016) indicates, the RCMP has created a third red zone, in the area of the Northills Mall (“although RCMP could not confirm when it was implemented”). As is evident from this report, the debate about the effects of the red zone policy has not subsided, with the RCMP continuing to insist that red zones do not simply displace criminal activity from one place to another and social advocates arguing that exclusion zones are not a solution. However, in the course of a public address, the superintendent of the Kamloops RCMP evidently agreed with ASK’s Bob Hughes in supporting the adoption of a Four Pillars approach in Kamloops (Legassic 2016)—an approach closely similar to that discussed in 2005 by the city’s Social Planning Council. Originally developed as a method for addressing street-based drug abuse, the Four Pillars model incorporates prevention, harm reduction, and treatment, in addition to law enforcement. While, in practice, the model is far from flawless (see Weaver, this volume), the implementation of such an approach in Kamloops would represent a much-needed step towards a comprehensive, long-term strategy, one that would not only integrate supportive and punitive measures but would also acknowledge the relationship between the sex trade and the drug trade.

It is probably impossible to eradicate prostitution, which has, after all, been with us since time immemorial. Moreover, no regulatory approach can overturn the poverty that gives rise to so many social ills. Programs like SHOP can, however, help us to develop the empathy needed to create caring and inclusive communities that work together to help marginalized individuals get their lives back. To the extent that we pursue approaches founded on compassion, we may slowly shift our own perceptions and come to demand that our governments do the same.

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