On the occasion of IDNP 2024, the Women’s Equality Coalition marks the 10th anniversary of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, 2014, which recognizes prostitution as an exploitative practice and criminalizes those who purchase sexual services and the third parties who profit from those offences, while immunizing those selling their own sexual services from prosecution.
We urge the committee to call on Canada to denounce and condemn any attempt to intimidate, threat, attack, silence and boycott women’s groups and individual women for speaking up on the unique experience and needs of female born women and girls and remind Canada that the “Attempts to silence women based on the views they hold regarding the scope of gender identity and sex in law and in practice and the rights associated with these, severely affects their participation in society in dignity and in safety, as well as their country’s prosperity and development.”
Routinely, men that are deemed dangerous by Crown prosecutors and judges, as evidenced by the granting of protection orders and/or no-contact as a bail condition, are released into the community and as a result, fatally harm women.
Canada’s Criminal Code and the corresponding Provincial Policy allow pre-trial detention “for the protection or safety of the public” (including a victim). Are women not considered “the public”? Don’t women deserve protection and safety?
