BY BEATRICE LAUFER
PERTH — Western Australia's infamous "prostitution bill" became law on July 29. Eagerly awaited by some and feared by others, the bill renders street sex work illegal. Any involvement in street sex work will bring heavy jail sentences for sex workers and clients.
There were several attempts in the Legislative Council to get it amended, but in June the Labor Party agreed, for politically opportunistic reasons, to back it. The ALP was afraid it would lose the seat of Perth in the next state election; that seat is where most of Perth's street sex work has been happening.
The bill contains many serious flaws and breaches human rights.
It gives police the power to enter and search premises suspected of being connected with sex work without a warrant. It enables them to detain, search and seize anyone or any conveyance without a warrant, and to order a search of body cavities by a medical practitioner or nurse nominated by police officer. "Any force that is reasonably necessary" can be used for such searches.
Police officers can participate in undercover operations which give them statutory protection; that is, they can solicit for sex and not be charged. This amounts to legalised entrapment. As well, the accused persons' right to remain silent has been revoked; they can be charged for not answering a police officer's questions.
Breaching article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the bill reverses the onus of proof: anyone picked up by police for soliciting for sex or seeking a sex worker has to prove that s/he is not guilty. Carrying a condom may be used as evidence of being engaged in sex work.
Street sex work makes up only about 5% of the sex industry, but street workers are the most visible of sex workers. Their situation is precarious, and the new legislation will make it worse.
The bill's aggressive police powers will force street sex workers underground to avoid harassment. This will undermine the effectiveness of essential services provided by outreach agencies, such as Phoenix, a health education project for sex industry workers managed by Family Planning WA, by making it harder for outreach workers to contact street sex workers.
Because sex workers are often poorly represented legally, the reversal of onus of proof will hit them hard. It is likely that they will be more frequently imprisoned, causing increased family and social breakdown. The legislation ignores the fact that many sex workers have dependent children.
The legal system is already unsympathetic towards sex workers, so sexual assaults on the workers frequently go unreported. This situation will be exacerbated by the fact that, to avoid police harassment, street sex workers will have to work in less frequented, darker, more dangerous areas.
Just days before the bill was proclaimed, a street sex worker was charged by the police with misconduct and a restraining order was sought to stop her from working in inner-city suburbs of Perth. The magistrate decided that "the attempted use of a restraining order for what was a social issue was an abuse of power" X0X0 . In a 1994 case in which police sought a restraining order to ban a sex worker from Perth streets, Justice Neville Owen rejected the request as an attempt at "social engineering" and a measure "to clean up the streets by removing socially disadvantaged people".
However, the new bill provides for a particularly designed restraining order and police move-on powers which go far beyond those sought previously.
The police have set up a special task force which hit the streets of Perth a few days after proclamation of the bill. According to the July 29 issue of the suburban newspaper Voice News, the police minister has welcomed the reversal of onus of proof and the Perth district police superintendent has pledged not to rest until the streets are "cleaned up".
Sex work is a highly political issue and the major political parties have been inclined to follow the calls for a simplistic, short-sighted solution to a complex problem. Making street sex work illegal does not solve anything; sex work will not be made to go away simply by prohibiting it.
Real solutions have been ignored in favour of anachronistic, populist pseudo solutions. The bill legalises grave abuses of women's human rights and imperils people who are, because of the structural inequalities in our society, already in a subordinate position. This bill has to go.
[Beatrice Laufer is a member of the Sex Worker Action Group in Perth.]