Why Decriminalize?: How Canada’s Municipal and Federal Regulations Increase Sex Workers’ Vulnerability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article highlights two sectors of the Canadian sex industry, massage and escorting, to explicate how current Canadian municipal and federal regulations violate sex workers’ basic labour rights and contribute to physical and economic vulnerability. We begin with a discussion of the impact of the radical feminist position on sex work and an introduction to Canada’s current regulatory context on both the local and federal level. The article then moves to the two sex industry case studies. Traversing a fine line between illegality and legality, regulations can stigmatize and penalize common job-related massage and escort activities. The article concludes with an international example of decriminalization in New Zealand. We argue that in order to put forth realistic social and policy recommendations, it is necessary to first look to an instance where policies are forged with and by sex-working communities and where sex workers’ labour rights and health and safety standards are prioritized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".