Sex workers find community, shed stigma as health advocates

When Victoria sex worker "Ricky" was brought to hospital after a traumatic incident, he felt discriminated against when emergency room staff were reluctant to provide a forensic exam, despite the urging of a police officer.

"Seeing me as an Indigenous male under the influence, they wouldn't see practically what my needs were," Ricky, who spoke on condition he would not be fully identified, told On the Island host Gregor Craigie. "They saw all of the stigma first."

Ricky said he couldn't articulate the impact of that emergency room encounter until he took part in a recent University of Victoria research project, which trained five sex workers as volunteer health educators for their peers, partners and clients.

"I couldn't visualize it and I couldn't verbalize it prior to this program, exactly how it felt to have these three women and this one male nurse saying 'Oh no, no, he doesn't need that kind of attention,'" he said.

Ricky said since the training as a peer health educator, he has accompanied friends and associates to hospital and was able to voice concerns and questions about their treatment.

"My presence has been really welcomed at places like Royal Jubilee Hospital, where I've gone with my friends and been the second set of ears they need or second set of eyes," he said.

"I've had nurses come after and thank me for being there with my friends who needed medical care."

Health providers challenged 

UVic sociologist Cecilia Benoit, the lead researcher, said the sex workers in the study were able to tell health providers during training about ways in which they were made to feel deviant or less than human when they received health services.

"Often they were running into kind of a particular person who kind of put them in some kind of a box as a sex worker," Benoit said.

"Another way they would stigmatize would be by asking them, once they've discovered they were sex workers, to have all these other tests when in fact they went in for a pap smear."

Benoit said the training led to bonding and a sense of solidarity between members of isolated subgroups in the industry, including those working in the outdoor, indoor and agency-based sex trade, as well as male, transgender and Indigenous sex workers.

Ricky said his social network was mainly female before the pilot project, but since then he is better connected to the men in the industry in Victoria.

After hearing firsthand accounts of the experience of Indigenous sex workers, another participant, who shared her journals from the study, wrote, "It was important for me to see how much of a privilege I have as a non-Indigenous person."

Rachel Phillips, the executive director of PEERS, which provides support programs for sex trade workers, said the Victoria organization has applied for government funding to renew the peer health educator program.