Decriminalizing Sex Work: How The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act Harms Consensual Sex Workers and Creates Further Stigmatization in Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will explore the current legislation in place in Canada regarding sex work, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA), and how it harms and stigmatizes those engaging in consensual sex work. The PCEPA was established as a response to the decision made in Bedford v. Canada in that the previous provisions governing sex work were unconstitutional. The intention of this Act is to criminalize the payment of sexual services, the procurement of sexual services and third party advertising of sexual services. Its main goal was to reduce the human trafficking that often occurs within the sex work environment. While human trafficking is undeniably an issue in today’s society, the PCEPA fails to acknowledge other perspectives of individuals that it is impacting including those choosing to engage in sex work. Throughout this paper, topics such as the harms the PCEPA has had on sex work, the stigmatization and discourses that exist around sex work, and what decriminalization of sex work would look like will be explored and deconstructed. This paper will argue that a move towards decriminalization of sex work will be beneficial for those engaging in sex work and reduce the harms and stigmatization that many sex workers face and that finding a balance between combating human trafficking and protecting consensual sex workers is essential.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".