Hon. Julie Miville-Dechêne: I am honoured to introduce two remarkable, courageous women, Kathy King and Andrea Heinz — two survivors who chose to turn their hardship and trauma into action to change perceptions in Canada about the true nature of commercial sexual exploitation.
Cara King was found dead 30 years ago, one month after she disappeared from the streets of Edmonton. According to her mother, Kathy King, Cara was using drugs, suffering from psychosis and being sexually exploited. She was unable to find help.
After her death, Cara was labelled, stigmatized and practically blamed for the exploitation she had experienced, while no one concerned themselves with the abusers.
At the age of 22, Andrea Heinz was deeply in debt and coming out of a toxic relationship. She entered the world of prostitution by responding to an ad in the newspaper. She sold sexual services 4,300 times in seven years before realizing this was not a job like any other, but that she was suffering from dissociation, which had enabled her to endure strangers spitting on her, hitting her, removing their condoms without her consent, choking her and showering her with degrading insults.
Kathy King and Andrea Heinz stood up and took action to say loud and clear that a society like Canada’s cannot and must not tolerate the commercial sexual exploitation of women. Hence, their award-winning book, published in 2024, is titled When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?
In their book, these authors note that the condition and the so-called choices of women who sell sex get a lot of attention when the focus should really be on the people doing the buying, the clients. Why do some men choose to buy sex from women? Is it an inevitable outcome of gender inequality? Can financial compensation really make up for the harm done to the women being bought? No, of course not.
Rather than engaging in ideological battles with sex workers, King and Heinz decided to join Edmonton’s Sex Trade Offender Program as educators, working with first-time offenders convicted of purchasing sexual services. According to the authors, this program works. It reduces recidivism by raising participants’ awareness of the harm caused to women and by developing the participants’ empathy.
However, this is only a small part of the answer to reducing the demand for sexual services. Prevention, education for boys and girls, enforcement of laws and funding for implementing prostitution exit strategies are also needed.
Heinz and King want to combat inertia, indifference and the normalization of this exploitation, which in many cases is linked to the sex trafficking of girls and women. I admire these two women, who are in Ottawa to raise awareness. Let us applaud their efforts.
Hon. Senators: Hear, hear!