1. In Canada, Report of the Special Committee on Prostitution and Pornography (Chair: Paul Fraser) (Ottawa: Supply and Services, 1985)Google Scholar; Report of the Committee on Sexual Offences Against Children and Youths (Hereinafter the Badgley Report) (Chair: Robin Badgley) (Ottawa: Supply and Services, 1984)Google Scholar. In Canada, also see National Action Committee for the Status of Women, Prostitution in Canada (Ottawa: NACSW, 1985)Google Scholar. In Britain, Criminal Law Revision Committee, Sixteenth Report: Prostitution in the Street (London: HMSO, 1984)Google Scholar; Criminal Law Revision Committee, Seventeenth Report: Off-Street Prostitution (London: HMSO, 1985)Google Scholar. In Australia, Neave, Marcia, Inquiry into Prostitution, Final Report, Two Volumes (Melbourne: Crown Law Office, 1985)Google Scholar.

2. Criminal Law Revision Committee, Sixteenth Report: Prostitution in the Street, 6Google Scholar.

3. See Neave, , Inquiry into Prostitution, Volume 2, 38ffGoogle Scholar. Total charges ranged from 666 in 1977 to 1,728 in 1980, declining to 586 in 1984. Soliciting accounted for about forty percent of the charges, followed by bawdy house charges which accounted for another forty percent.

4. Hutt v. The Queen [1978] 2 S.C.R. 476 gave a narrow meaning to “soliciting” by holding that it required conduct that was of a “pressing” or “persistent” nature.

5. In Calgary alone 530 notices were issued between June 25, 1981 and the end of 1982 under the anti-soliciting by-law (Brief presented to the Fraser Committee by the Calgary Police Commission, 1984). The municipal controls were declared ultra vires in Westendorp v. The Queen [1983] 2 C.C.C. 3d 330 (S.C.C.).

6. “Crackdown on Soliciting is Boon for Escort Services,” Globe and Mail, September 28, 1987, 1Google ScholarPubMed. The more sensational tabloid press made a recurrent theme of this: “Child Hookers,” The Calgary Sun, December 12, 1983Google ScholarPubMed; “Forced into Prostitution,” The Calgary Sun, February 1, 1984Google ScholarPubMed; “Officials say Criminals Control Sex Industry,” The Calgary Sun, February 8, 1984Google Scholar; “Teen Hookers,” The Calgary Sun, July 18, 1986Google Scholar.

7. Based on an InfoGlobe computer search in June, 1989. On-line storage of stories carried by the Globe was unavailable in the period prior to 1979.

8. Charles McCaghy and Tina Beranbaum traced one such figure to Robin Lloyd who reported that his estimate of 300,000 juvenile prostitutes was based “on a gut feeling.” To estimate how many children were working in Los Angeles, police divided this national estimate by twenty and then multiplied the number by two to include both sexes to obtain their figure of 30,000 child prostitutes and pornography models working in their jurisdiction. See McCaghy and Beranbaum, “Child Pornography: The Rise of a Social Problem,” American Society of Criminology, Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, November 1983. The Defence for Children International's estimate of 60,000 children involved in the making of Canadian pornography appears to result from similar social welfare arithmetic: double the estimate to compensate for gender, then divide the U.S. estimate by ten for the Canadian figure.

In a similar procedure, a Montreal street worker estimated that in 1981 the population of teenage prostitutes in Montreal was 5,000. He arrived at the figure by estimating that one percent of Montreal's 530,000 juveniles over ten were working as prostitutes–though he could furnish no grounds for the percentage on which the estimate was based. “Montreal Officials Doubt 5000 Figure of Young Prostitutes,” Globe and Mail, July 22, 1981, 8Google Scholar.

9. The DCI figure is cited in Buys, H.W.J. (European Committee on Crime Problems), Report on the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Young Persons (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, April 17, 1989)Google Scholar.

10. So commonplace has the link between abuse, runaways and prostitution become that it appears as investigative journalism tucked unobtrusively between articles on dieting and desserts in a recent “lifestyles” section of Canadian Living. Kaye, Marcia, “Kids on the Street,” Canadian Living 14 (1989), no. 6, 46–47, 49–51, 53, 55Google Scholar:

Kunchi is the street name of a 16-year-old girl who ran away from her North Toronto home last August. … Her lower lip trembling, she talks about how her real father raped her repeatedly when she was only four, and probably younger. … Kunchi is one of tens of thousands of young runaways in Canada, at least 10,000 of them in Toronto. … For these kids, the street, with all its drugs, prostitution and violence, seems safer than home. … A 1987 survey conducted by a Toronto crisis shelter for youths found that 90 percent of runaways interviewed had suffered repeated physical and/or sexual abuse before leaving home.

Such agency figures recurrently discover epidemic levels of abuse. The national study of missing children conducted by the Solicitor General reports more modest results (See Fisher, Joan, Missing Children Research Project: Findings of the Study, Executive Summary (Ottawa: Solicitor General, 1989)Google Scholar). The point here, however, is that the sexual abuse/juvenile prostitution argument has become part of the conventional wisdom.

11. What this entails has been given some expansive interpretations. The discourse over “public” nuisance implies a broadly-based consensus over the peace which is disturbed. However, practically all the concern arises over the competing interests of those who would conduct prostitution–a legal activity in Canada–and those who would conduct other more traditional businesses, or whose residential land-use is the site of the prostitution business. Though not the only element implied by “nuisance,” the land-use conflicts are nonetheless central. Concerns over morality are sometimes intertwined with land-use conflicts, the idea being that legitimate activities and persons will be smeared by contiguity to immoral activities. “What will our children and/or customers think?”

The Criminal Law Revision Committee, writes in the following terms about nuisance: “According to police evidence heard by the Police Advisory Committee the nuisance to the public involved men being seen leaving the premises showing obvious signs of injury or distress, behaving indecently, vomiting in the vicinity and depositing offensive litter (such as soiled and blood stained linen) in nearby litter bins. The Policy Advisory Committee heard details of a number of cases which make it plain that men who visit such places do so with the deliberate purpose of subjecting themselves to torture, humiliation and pain” (Criminal Law Revision Committee, Seventeenth Report: Off-Street Prostitution, 16Google Scholar).

Is seeing signs of injury a form of nuisance? Or putting refuse in a dust bin? Here the perversity appears more relevant than nuisance. Indeed, nuisance appears as a screen for suppressing the immoral:

What the law should be concerned with are offers, whether made by men or women, in circumstances which can cause a nuisance. We say “can cause a nuisance” because an act of soliciting by a single prostitute or kerb-crawler does not necessarily amount to a nuisance; but when prostitutes and clients congregate in numbers, as commonly occurs, there is no doubt that this does amount to a nuisance. In this sense every act of soliciting has the potential for causing a nuisance. (Criminal Law Revision Committee, Sixteenth Report: Prostitution in the Street, 4Google Scholar).

Later–“the new offence will cover the man who solicits from a vehicle at whatever speed the vehicle is moving (or whether it is stopped) even though the vehicle is not itself creating a nuisance” (Ibid., 13). And finally, “the successful prostitute will not be on the street for long enough for evidence of persistence to be obtained. Those who support the introduction of “persistence” here concede that this would result in making the offence less effective. Most of us consider that this is not a price the public at large … would be willing to pay” (Ibid., 8).

Consequently, the crime is committed despite the absence of nuisance–the formal rationale for the original control. Our review suggests that there are at least four competing issues which seems to become confused in this and other legal proposals which talk about nuisance: (1) sexual exploitation or victimization–here self-inflicted, though usually we reserve this concern for the prostitutes; (2) nuisance in the sense of noisy behaviour, traffic, shouting, blocking the sidewalks; (3) nuisance in the sense that the site of the soliciting activities conflicts with other land-use designations; and (4) morality–though these appear to be intertwined. This explains the generous range of issues evoked by the term.

12. Badgley Report, 1960-1961.

13. Proceedings of the National Consultation on Adolescent Prostitution (Ottawa: Canadian Child Welfare Association, 1988)Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 7.

15. Though the law was greeted enthusiastically by social workers and children's rights advocates, as of 1989 the police have been virtually unable to implement the last provision for both ethical and procedural reasons. The use of undercover adolescent decoys would appear to risk public wrath–and the passive surveillance of adolescents involved with real customers might open the police to charges of abrogation of duty for failure to rescue the child at risk as required by provincial child welfare legislation. However, at least one case has been reported in Toronto involving a twenty-three year old pimp and a juvenile female. “14-Year-Old runaway forced into prostitution, police say,” Toronto Star, June 1989Google ScholarPubMed.

16. Badgley Report, 967ff.

17. Report of the Special Committee on Prostitution and Pornography, 658.

18. Alberta, , Child Welfare Act, Revised Statues of Alberta, 1984, Chapter C-81, section 41(1)(b)Google Scholar.

19. See Street Prostitution, Assessing the Impact of the Law: Synthesis Report (Ottawa: Department of Justice Canada, 1989)Google Scholar.

20. The reviews of the new anti-soliciting law created by Bill C-49 were conducted in 1987 and 1988 in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, though statistical and interview data were gathered from other regional centres. Key respondents included police, prosecutors, defence counsel, social service authorities, social agency workers, community leaders, politicians and, where they existed, prostitutes' rights groups.

21. Hancock, Linda, The Involvement of Young Persons in Prostitution (Melbourne: Crown Law Office, 1985), 6Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 11. By contrast there were between 2,000 and 3,000 adult women working as prostitutes in Melbourne. See Neave, , Inquiry into Prostitution, Volume 1, 46–47Google Scholar.

23. See Brannigan, A., Knafla, L. and Levy, J.C., Evaluation of Bill C-49 in Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg (Ottawa: Department of Justice, 1989), ch. 11Google Scholar.

24. In 1984 and 1985 there were twenty-six and twenty-five actions respectively under the Manitoba Baby and Child Welfare Act employed to seize persons under sixteen years of age. There were a total of eighty-one and 184 charges of all types against prostitutes–making the BCWA interventions a fairly significant part of the overall pattern, though this may have resulted from deliberate efforts to target juveniles. At any rate, in 1986 and 1987 the number of BCWA actions shrank to six and two cases respectively while the total charges involving prostitution rose to 306 and 207 charges in the two years.

25. Silbert, T. and Pines, A., “Entrance into Prostitution,” Youth and Society 13 (1982), 471–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brannigan, , Knafla, and Levy, , Evaluation of Bill C-49 in Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg, ch. 9, Table 9.1Google Scholar.

26. If sixty percent of the San Francisco sample (120) were under seventeen years of age (with an average age of, say, fifteen), and if the average for the entire sample was twenty-two, then the average age for those seventeen and older must have been thirty-three years old–with forty persons even older than this. This distribution appears to be skewed abnormally to include two rather different age populations. It would appear to be unrepresentative of the age cross sections identified in Canadian studies of active street prostitutes.

27. Badgley Report, Volume 2, 970Google Scholar.

28. Buys, H.W.J. (European Committee on Crime Problems), Report on the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Young Persons, 22Google Scholar.

29. Kiedrowski, J.S. and van Dijk, J.J.M., Pornography and Prostitution in France, The Netherlands, West Germany, Denmark and Sweden, Working Papers on Pornography and Prostitution, Report 1 (Ottawa: Department of Justice Canada, 1985)Google Scholar.

30. One reservation which should be explored regarding the representativeness of Calgary data is oblique evidence about the unusually high levels of STDs and teenage pregnancies. Calgary leads the country in both figures–suggesting that entry into prostitution at a younger age may be a function of wider sexual precocity.

31. Report of the Special Committee on Prostitution and Pornography, Volume 2, 373–374Google Scholar.

32. Badgley Report, 977.

33. Data from Covenant House has been cited widely in the Canadian media. See Kaye, “Kids on the Street.” Adele Ritch and Margaret Michaud, “Juvenile Prostitutes–A Profile,” 1985 and “Equinox Program Evaluation,” 1987 (Victoria: West Coast Consultants); Badgley Report; Badgley, C. and Young, L., “Juvenile Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse: A Controlled Study,” Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health 6 (1987), no. 1Google Scholar; Northcott, Heather and Gordon, William, “Exodus House: An Evaluation,” (Calgary: University of Calgary: Faculty of Social Work, mimeo, 1989)Google Scholar; Silbert and Pines, “Entrance into Prostitution”; Boyer, Debra and James, Jennifer, “Easy Money: Adolescent Involvement in Prostitution,” in Davidson, Sue (ed.), Justice for Young Women: Close-up on Critical Issues (Tuscon: New Directions for Young Women, 1982), 73–97Google Scholar; Ayne Meiklem, “Street Report: Preliminary Research Document,” Victoria: Coastal Community Services, 1989; National Youth in Care Network, “Juvenile Prostitution Survey,” (Ottawa: NYCN, 1987). The estimate of thirty percent was based on twenty-nine out of ninety-eight responses from forty female and thirty male prostitutes which indicated self-reported prior sexual abuse; Crook, Nikita, A Report of Prostitution in the Atlantic Provinces (Ottawa: Department of Justice, 1985)Google Scholar; Mathews, Frederick, Familiar Strangers: A Critical Study of Adolescent Involvement in Prostitution (Toronto: Central Toronto Youth Services, 1988)Google Scholar.

34. Badgley Report, 978.

35. Ibid., 180.

36. For example, Baglen and Young, “Juvenile Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse,” 5-26.

37. Hancock, “The Involvement of Young Persons in Prostitution,” 17.

38. Canadian Child Welfare Association, Proceedings of the National Consultation on Adolescent Prostitution, 3Google Scholar.

39. Mathews, , Familiar Strangers, 13–14Google Scholar.

40. Brannigan, Knafla and Levy, Evaluation of Bill C-49 in Calgary, Regina and Winni-peg.

41. Fisher, Joan, Missing Children Research Project: Findings of the Study, Executive Summary (Ottawa: Solicitor General, 1989)Google Scholar.

42. Kufeldt, K. and Nimmo, M., “Youth on the Street: Abuse and Neglect in the Eighties,” Child Abuse and Neglect 11 (1987), 531–543CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

43. The Solicitor General Study focussed on 341 repeat runners–chosen because they appeared to present the most pathological populations; approximately eighteen percent became involved in prostitution. In the Kufeldt and Nimmo study, “Youth on the Street,” interviewers sought runaway subjects from many locations, including the main Calgary prostitution stroll–and discovered that twenty-five percent of their total respondents were engaged in prostitution. However, methodologically neither sampling procedure allows for a reliable identification of the proportions of the total runaway populations which gravitate towards prostitution.

44. Alexander, Priscilla, Working on Prostitution (San Francisco: National Organization for Women, Inc., 1982)Google Scholar. Cited in Buys, (European Committee on Crime Problems), Report on the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Young Persons.

45. Inciardi, J.A., “Little Girls and Sex: A Glimpse at the World of the ‘Baby Pro,’” Deviant Behavior 5 (1984), 71–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Matthews, Roger, Policing Prostitution: A Multi-agency Approach (London: Centre of Criminology Series, Middlesex Polytechnic, 1986)Google Scholar.

47. Phongpaichit, Pasyk, From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1982)Google Scholar.

48. Report to the Calgary Police Commission, September 1989. While some 312 charges were laid between 1977-1987, police arrests jumped dramatically to 348 between March 31, 1988 and April 7, 1989–more arrests in one year than in the previous eleven. The decline of persons on view may have been further affected by the natural deterioration of the sex industry in Calgary. This is suggested indirectly by the shrinkage in the number of escorts registered in the city. Between 1983 to 1988 the chief license officer registered 125, 119, 133, 173, 135 and 110 escorts consecutively. The economic and demographic complexion of Calgary may have precipitated a downturn in the sex trade at the very time when police initiated aggressive practices of arrest.

49. Reference re Criminal Code Sections 193 and 195.1(1)(c) 1987 6 W.W.R. 289.

50. This view contrasts that of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women which holds that under certain conditions a prostitute can operate as an independent operator, for example, by employing the telephone to contact customers. However, in Manitoba procurement charges have succeeded against prostitutes who have tried to arrange a rendezvous with an prospective client (usually an undercover officer). Arguably, prostitutes who initiate such contacts are procuring their customers for “illicit sexual acts or acts of prostitution.” See National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Prostitution in Canada.

51. See Pheterson, Gail (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Whores (Seattle: Seal Press, 1987)Google Scholar.