Increased repression & moral panic during F1 puts sex workers in danger
Jenn Clamen and Sandra Wesley
June 6, 2024
Every year, Montreal’s Grand Prix brings loud cars, lots of tourists, and a variety of road closures. It also brings with it a wave of anti-sex work sentiment and heightened police repression and surveillance of people working in the sex industry.
The launch of the yearly campaign by anti-sex work prohibitionist campaign “Un Trop Grand Prix” creates a culture of fear and is based on exaggerated and unfounded claims of an increase in human trafficking, and youth and sexual exploitation.
These false claims have enormous impact on the health and safety of sex workers. This unwarranted attention places sex workers at greater risk of violence as police and law enforcement increase their presence in private and public places where sex work takes place. Sex workers who work outdoors and are already oversurveilled and underprotected by law enforcement, experience harassment and profiling in attempts to invisibilize them from public space. Indoor sex workers experience raids and extra “visits” from police under the guise of “safety”. In both contexts, sex workers double down on work practices that help to avoid police detection, but put security at risk. Police repression is one of the biggest factors in creating vulnerability to violence. A context of repression makes it equally difficult to report crimes.
Despite the hysteria created by campaigns like this, there has been a long line of evidence-based research that debunks the myths of increased exploitation during sporting events.
In 2006, a report produced in Germany by the United Nations for their Sustainable Development Goals, entitled Trafficking in Human Beings and the 2006 World Cup in Germany, provided “strong insight that human trafficking did not increase” during its World Cup – important insight that people should heed of as Germany gears up this week for UEFA Euro 2024. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/migration/trafficking-in-human-beings-and-the-2006-world-cup-in-germany_2fb3af8a-en
Similarly, when Vancouver hosted the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, a publication from the Sex Industry Worker Safety Action Group — a Vancouver police initiative established in 2007 that involved several community groups active in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood – that was paid for with a provincial government grant demonstrated that concern for increased trafficking was “inconsistent with the evidence in this research document, that trafficking and mega-events are not linked.” http://vancouver.ca/police/assets/pdf/reports-policies/report-human-trafficking-2010-games.pdf
In 2011, the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) produced a report entitled What’s the Cost of a Rumour: A Guide to Sorting out the Myths and the Facts about Sporting Events and Trafficking to demonstrate not only the enormous waste of funding that goes into propelling myths about sporting events and increased sexual exploitation– funding wasted on ad campaigns, repressive street “clean-ups”, and constant police presence – but also the harms that come to the most marginalized communities in the sex industry who are already oversurveilled and social and racially profiled. http://www.gaatw.org/publications/WhatstheCostofaRumour.11.15.2011.pdf
Most recently, and locally in Montreal, in response to the yearly anti-sex work and prohibitionist alarmist claims of increased sexual exploitation during Montreal’s most infamous sporting event Formula 1, the Conseil Montrealaises commissioned a study in 2021 and released a report later that year that stated, “les estimations souvent exagérées et alarmistes du nombre de victimes sont pour beaucoup une façon d’instrumentaliser le phénomène de la traite afin de justifier un renforcement des contrôles migratoires et des actions policières dirigées vers l’industrie du sexe et les populations marginalisées en general.” http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/cons_montrealaises_fr/media/documents/conseil_montrealaises-avis_securite_femmes_gp_web.pdf
This scathing report laid bare the prohibitionist agenda and dismantled the myth of increased exploitation during sporting events in Montreal.
Prohibition feeds on manufactured fear and morality-based panics. The cost of this is hefty: funding from the city, law enforcement, and resources that are needed elsewhere get tied up searching for exploitation that doesn’t exist. And the people that really pay in the end through increased repression, are the most marginalized sex workers in our communities.