Transcript: Sex workers face criminalization and state abandonment because our autonomy and power threaten violence of the status quo
Speech from the 2026 Prisoners’ Justice Day rally at the Claire Culhane memorial bench
By Kayla Leroux and Kit Rothschild
This speech was read by Kayla at the Prisoners’ Justice Day rally at the Claire Culhane memorial bench on Aug. 10.
Hi everyone, my name is Kayla. I am a sex worker, a drug user, and the daughter of a man who has experienced incarceration. I am here today as an ally. I am also one of the SWIFA organizers. I am going to speak to the impacts of criminalization on sex workers.
In 2014, Bill C-36 was introduced to the Canadian Criminal Code. Bill C-36 takes an end-demand approach to sex work. This means its main goal is to reduce, and ultimately end the demand for sex work altogether. The bill is framed by the federal government to “protect” those who work in the sex industry, but has been proven again and again to instead severely limit sex worker safety by restricting the spaces, communication, and support networks sex workers rely on. End-demand approaches to sex work, like this one imposed across the country, have never really ended demand. Instead, the law pushes sex work into more isolated and less visible environments, reducing the ability to screen clients and negotiate safer working conditions.
Call to Action 4.3 in the Missing and Murdered Women and Girls report calls on all levels of government “to support programs and services for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people in the sex industry to promote their safety and security.” To be effective, these programs must be designed and delivered in partnership with people who have lived experience in the sex industry. They call for stable and long-term funding for these programs. Despite these recommendations, it feels like we are going backwards. Recently, sex workers in Vancouver have faced multiple disruptions that deepen existing criminalization:
Two weeks ago, the Vancouver Police Department unilaterally ripped up their Sex Work Enforcement Guidelines, which were created in 2013 with input from five sex worker-led organizations. There was no community consultation this time. The changes to guidelines removed language that centers respect for people doing sex work, shifts us further away from a safety-focused approach and toward more enforcement, and removes references to the Downtown Eastside, erasing an important part of history behind these guidelines.
FIFA brought an intensive police presence, with as many as 1,300 cops deployed per match, disrupting and displacing a diverse community of sex workers, particularly those who rely on visible or public space.
There was an increase in anti-trafficking training provided to restaurants which expanded the already heightened surveillance and moral panic targeted at sex workers by encouraging staff to call the cops in situations as ordinary as customers sitting alone for extended periods of time, a couple appearing to be on a short first date (whatever that means), or paying cash for large takeout orders.
And changes to the provincial Name Act denies folks with certain criminal records, including sex work offences, to legally change their names, excluding access to name changes for those who may need it the most.
These disruptions come at a time when the city just cut one of its two sex work safety planning positions–and when multiple sex-work based organizations have lost funding, been forced to close, or have significantly reduced services, further limiting the resources and support available to sex workers.
Taken together, these targeted enforcement tactics demonstrate a failure to uphold Call to Action 4.3 and a feature of Canada’s endless campaign against sex workers’ rights. And it shows how sex workers are once again being overlooked and ignored, reflecting a broader pattern of organized abandonment and state neglect.
The result of this ignorance and discontinued funding, is that, once again, people will be hurt by predators exploiting the vulnerability created by state neglect and a lack of services, and once again, the state will overlook our deaths, the same as they will those who die in police custody.
It is within this context that the organizers at SWIFA decided to create a drop-in during FIFA Game days to provide refuge and direct relief from the increased police presence, and hundreds of extra surveillance cameras alongside renewed dehumanization driven by newly installed anti-trafficking billboards near where people work.
We were concerned with how this increased surveillance would impact those that the laws already target the most. Throughout SWIFA drop-ins, we had roughly 991 self-identified sex workers attend. We also partnered with P.O.W.E.R. (Police Oversight with Evidence and Research) who provided parallel outreach and an overdose prevention space to more than 643 people.
In short: a small group of sex workers stepped up to provide essential services when the city refused to do so.
Why the lack of action from the state? Because our existence as sex workers challenges the status quo.
Existing as a sex worker challenges the rigid ideas that colonialism and white supremacy has constructed around jobs, gender, sexuality, relationships, family. These systems have long sought to define and enforce whose bodies are valued and worth protecting. It tells people how they are allowed to live and what labour roles they are expected to occupy. It tells us what work is considered legitimate and how we are expected to exist in our bodies.
When we exist outside those prescribed roles, we disrupt that system, and that disruption threatens those who benefit from existing power structures.
So here we are: being surveilled through billion dollar systems, seeing anti-trafficking initiatives that dangerously conflate sex work to trafficking, censorship in the media, criminalization by the state, and evidently, left at the end of organized abandonment. Because to meaningfully support us and to recognize our rights and autonomy would require acknowledging a few things that the state nor society is not ready for: that sex work is a legitimate form of work. That consenting adults can make decisions about our own bodies and labour, and will do so regardless of the state’s relentless attacks.
But the systems that seek to control us evidently are not working so well, because we are still here, doing solidarity work and mutual aid, despite their attempt to deny our existence. And they cannot control our underground networks of care. The way we have and will continue to show up for each other in unconditional, loving ways that the Canadian state would never—and could never.