Legal regulation of the sex work Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Legal regulation of the sex work - Essay Example Against the background of the heritage of Canadian laws on prostitution or sex working, this essay discusses how prostitution laws in Canada currently stand and takes into consideration law enforcement patterns, as well as the non-enforcement patterns. It also discuss what or who is being controlled by sex working laws and their enforcement. The history of lawful regulation of sex working in Canada is one of the countrys intervention to try and bring to a stop prostitution under public annoyance provisions in and attempts to utilize the Contagious Diseases Act in Canada in the 1870s, as well as the 1880s (Moscucci, 2012). From about 1910, every Canadian state began using criminal laws on sex working, wherein the act of sex working itself is not an illegal act, but various prostitution-related events are considered illegal. These regulations are mostly based on Canadian laws on barring under-aged individuals on areas used by prostitutes, soliciting, brothel keeping and renting rooms to prostitutes (Moscucci, 2012). The legacy of Canadian law borrowed four notable elements from English law on prostitution. First was the stress on regulation of prostitution under the appearance of public nuisance regulations or the avoidance of annoyance. Under the Criminal Code, it is illegal for a sex worker to publicly importune or solicit with an aim of selling themselves to others and also under the Canadian 1959 Street Offenses dictated that prostitutes are likely to create annoyance or disturbance simply because of their presence, even if no one is annoyed (Moscucci, 2012). Secondly, the critical phrase, common prostitute that applies to women alone, initially appeared in the 1822 English Vagrancy Act and was later incorporated into Canadian law concerning sex working. The effect is that law enforcement officers can overlook a number of formalities in order to arrest common sex workers (Moscucci, 2012). Thirdly, the 1864 Contagious