Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that three sections of the Criminal Code of Canada pertaining to sex work were unconstitutional. In response to this ruling—otherwise known as the Bedford Decision—the Conservative government introduced the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) in 2014. In this paper, I ask: to what extent does the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act meet its stated goal of addressing the health and safety of those who “engage in prostitution”? In exploring this question, I first trace the legal terrain leading to the PCEPA’s conception. Following this, I show that the PCEPA has failed to address its stated goals in two central ways. First, by co-opting the progressive framing of the Bedford Decision in a way that obscures the situations of violence it seeks to address, and second, by making the most precarious category of sex work even more dangerous through its implementation. In order to render the actual foundations of the PCEPA visible, I draw upon critical race and feminist theory. Through this analysis, I show how gendered and racialized hierarchies regulate violence along and within the sex work spectrum. Overall, this paper argues that the PCEPA has failed to address the health and safety of “those engaged in prostitution,” and instead, has facilitated racialized patterns of gender violence against vulnerable populations.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.069 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| 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".