Grant: Operating Grant: Population Health Intervention Research

Sex workers, as a group, experience common barriers to health and well-being, including pervasive stigma and discrimination in health care and social services. At the same time, they also report many individual differences in health, and in the vulnerabilities and risk factors they experience. The last two years have marked substantial changes in the Government of Canada's approach to the sex industry. The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) amended the Criminal Code to criminalize - for the first time in Canada - the purchase of sexual services, and to further modify certain prohibitions related to advertising and communicating the sale of sexual services. This project will examine whether the PCEPA - a natural experiment out of the control of the research team - has alleviated or exacerbated health inequities for sex workers as compared to before the new laws were implemented. We will compare policing and outcomes associated with the practices surrounding the sale of sexual services by sex workers of different genders and working in diverse venues before and after the implementation of PCEPA. We will build off our existing data set of 210 interviews with sex workers in five metropolitan areas (Victoria, Calgary, Montréal, St John's and Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge) by recruiting a slightly larger number (250) of new and repeat participants from these same sites. The proposed research promises to a) advance our knowledge of health equity for marginalized populations; b) reduce avoidable risks and unmet health needs for sex workers in Canada; and c) develop community-based policies and practices in an effort to reduce the health inequities which exist between sex workers and other Canadians.