A First Nations–led campaign to stop Canada’s first official brothel is “kind of pathetic”, according to the woman behind the safe house, sex-worker advocate Sue Davis.

The No 2010 Brothels campaign, organized by the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network (AWAN), is spearheaded by Fay Blaney, executive member of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, poverty-law advocate Carrie Humchitt, and elder Brenda Wesley, among others. The No 2010 Brothels campaign kicked off next to the Olympic clock on February 11, with AWAN member Carol Martin reading: “We refuse to…offer up our sisters and daughters as disposable objects for sex tourists.”

Humchitt later told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview: “There was an assumption that all sex-trade workers were going to be supportive of a cooperative brothel. They [Davis’s organization, the West Coast Cooperative of Sex Industry Professionals (WCCSIP)] said they consulted with aboriginal women, but they didn’t consult with us.”

Since its 1996 founding, AWAN has also fought against restorative justice in cases of family violence—a measure that was supposed to be empowering but that AWAN said instead entrenches aboriginal women’s victimization.

Meanwhile, WCCSIP is in the process of applying to the federal government for a two-year exemption from laws prohibiting brothels, so it can try it out. The safe house, Davis said, will feature a cooperative catering service, an art and publishing collective, and other activities to help build members’ résumés and offer an exit strategy to those who want one. Plus, she said, it’s impossible for Vancouver’s sex-work conditions to be worse than they are right now.

“Those women [AWAN members] don’t work on the street,” Davis said in a phone interview with the Straight. “They’re wealthy, privileged, and they don’t understand their actions. This is not carte blanche on brothels. This is one limited opportunity to bring the East Side sex trade inside. Residents tell us that they don’t want the condom mess; they don’t want to look out their windows and see a woman giving a blow job. And the girls want the opportunity to wash themselves between customers.”

These two opposing positions are nothing new. Is sex work a choice or a tragedy? Will decriminalization lead to empowerment or further marginalization? This year’s Canadian International Women’s Day Web page notes that “a woman’s place in society marks the level of civilization of that society.” For those women involved in sex work, both AWAN and WCCSIP would agree, the current level of civilization is pretty low. Davis noted that she’d “like one year in this city where a sex worker doesn’t die”. Everyone knows things need to change. But to what?

Internationally, the shape of the sex trade is fluctuating and presents few obvious solutions to Canada’s situation. Two of the world’s most famous decriminalized jurisdictions experienced major criticisms in 2007.

In December, Amsterdam’s council voted to clean up the city’s red-light districts. Eight years after legalizing sex work as a business (although prostitution had been technically legal in the Netherlands since 1830), the municipality is buying up brothels, conducting audits, and introducing zoning codes to crack down on two problems legalization did not fix: human trafficking and organized crime.

Similarly, after researching brothel-friendly Nevada, sex-trade researcher Melissa Farley published a book last year titled Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. In it she argues that sex workers there—even in the “protected” ranch system—frequently experience abuse and are still usually under the control of pimps and traffickers. It echoes research she published in the June 2005 issue of Transcultural Psychiatry. Farley and her coauthors interviewed 100 Vancouver sex workers; 52 were members of First Nations, 82 were sexually abused as children (by an average of four different people), 72 were physically abused as children, and 95 reported that they wanted to leave the trade.

“Just as wife-beating was historically viewed as having been provoked by the victim,” Farley, Jacqueline Lynne, and Ann Cotton wrote in Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence and the Colonization of First Nations Women, “prostitution is still viewed by some as a job choice.”

In the midst of the debate, Vancouver East MP Libby Davies said citizens shouldn’t look to the trio of upcoming elections for a solution to Vancouver’s sex-trade dilemma. Davies told the Straight that because regulating the sex trade is probably never going to be an election issue, and the solutions are a political minefield, most politicians are afraid to address it.

“It gets sensationalized,” she said. “So we need leadership from the federal, provincial, and municipal governments to allow the issues to be worked out. To me, it’s an issue of great urgency.”

According to Davies, AWAN versus WCCSIP is a false division. Everyone, she said, is really fighting for the same thing: the end of the survival sex trade, distinguished by its workers who are vulnerable because of drug addiction, a history of abuse, and no other choice. But getting commitments to better addiction services and poverty-alleviation strategies during an election campaign, she said, is the challenge.