SEX WORK, LAW, AND VIOLENCE: BEDFORD V. CANADA AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF SEX WORKERS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Bedford v. Canada, two levels of Ontario courts ruled that a selection of criminal laws prohibiting prostitution-related activities unjustifiably deprive sex workers of their right to liberty and security of the person.The courts struck down or modified some of the offending provisions to ensure that sex workers are better able to take precautions against violence. While sex workers consider the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling a victory and the Ontario Court of Appeal ruling a partial victory, the government, some women’s rights groups, and other defenders of the provisions argue that courts ventured into a “policy thicket”, which is to suggest that they had stepped outside of their legitimate institutional role. Associated concerns include that the decisions effectively constitutionalize prostitution and will pre-empt or curtail Parliament’s consideration of legislative options. In this paper, the authors clarify misconceptions about the constitutional foundations and implications of Bedford, and explore how the ruling might affect legal and policy-based interactions among various stakeholders. Approaching constitutional rights as discursive mechanisms, rather than as “trumps”, we argue that Bedford will not hinder the continuation of democratic debate about whether, how, and why aspects of sex work should be regulated. To the contrary, Bedford is more likely to enhance the quality of debates by making them more inclusive of the perspectives of sex workers as well as accommodative of growing empirical research that has hitherto been ignored or misrecognized.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".