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From the text of a speech given by Lee Lakeman for Vancouver Rape Relief, before 250 people on the corner of Broadway and Main, Vancouver, B.C., February 27, 1985. Mostly women, and some men, had gathered to mark the death that week of Linda Tatrai. Everybody is sad and upset about Linda Tatrai's death. Even local columnist, Denny Boyd, is upset, although he blames her for her own death. Everybody knows that it is an unusual occurance in Vancouver for a woman to be knifed to death. Everybody knows that this death has something to do with the fact that Linda was trapped by men who sold her cocaine and by men who bought and sold her body. But the people here tonight also know that this death had something to do with the government that controlled those drugs and where and when and to whom she must her body. Everybody here knows that we are being invited to think that all women can be raped and killed whenever men feel like it and that we can do nothing to prevent that. Or we are being invited to think that Linda was a 'special' woman, killed because she was 'special', a prostitute. It is suggested to us that as long as we don't look like Linda, walk where Linda walked, we are safe. We are invited to think that Linda voluntarily hung around with a special, dangerous man and that as long as we take only prescribed drugs and hang out we 'average' men, we are safe. The people in this crowd know that all women in Vancouver have to fear rape. Canadian statistics tell us that one woman is raped every 17 minutes. Of those, many are seriously hurt and some have been murdered, mostly by men that they knew. No one here will excuse the one man who took a knife to this woman in an underground parking lot. It is not especially important to us whether he was trying to prove that no one could challenge his control of his drug property. We ate here to protest his exercise of control over Linda's body. The terrorist who did this to her was not acting alone. Linda didn't like prostitution. She said so. She was abused as a child. She was fed drugs as a young teenager. We accuse the men who abused that child. We accuse the men who profited by the sale of those drugs and forced her to find the money to pay for them. We accuse the men who paid her to act like she 'didn't care about herself', to act like she didn't care about sex, to act like she didn't have the same romantic dreams as any other 18 year old woman. We accuse the men who paid her to act out their pornographic version of women. We accuse Jim Pattison and the other pornographers who supply Vancouver with stupid and dangerous materials in magazines and videos so that men can think that their pornographic fantasies are 'normal.' These collaborators exist in every North American-city, but Linda lived in Vancouver in 1985. She was coming of age in the years when Red Hot Video moved into town. Three or four blocks from here, up Main Street, damaging video pornography is now available 24 hours a day. She was 17 when the Socreds decided to cut off money to the women's groups which could be a limited source of comfort, of birth control information, of emergency shelter, of older, more experienced women to talk to, and of a resistance movement to fight for her civil rights. She was 17 when Vancouver city government and the Socreds cooperated with each other in exiling street prostitutes from the West End. The governments told us that the citizens of the West End had a right not to see her trap. They told us that Linda and the other young prostitutes were special. They called them a 'nuisance' to the public. Those governors told us that there was nothing wrong with prostitution, only that they wanted her 'customers' (and they do call them customers) not to pee on their sidewalks not to drive their cars down West End alleys, not to be so noticeable. They said that they didn't want the West End to become a 'red light district. So, the Socreds cut off money to the Emergency Services office and the Child Abuse Teams and they invented the injunction. We know that Linda was still legally a child. We know that they wrote her name and the names of 30 others on the injunction list. Before they even had an injunction, they posted those 30 names on public telephone poles and in welfare offices, and we know what that means. This is the 1984 version of branding her as a 'scarlet woman'. It meant that they gave public permission for men to believe that she was separate from other women and to believe that she had been abandoned by her community to their sexist abuse. It meant that she was forced to move, under pain of prison, from the West End streets. On Davie Street, she looked like the rest of the kids and therefore any man approaching would have less permission to treat her as sub-human. It also meant that she was not annoying any residents of the West End by not selling her body publicly or buying her drugs on their apartment stairs. But nobody here think that it is a big improvement that she was forced to stand on street corners alone along Broadway, where there are no cafes open, no theatre lineups, no rowdy kids to be ordinary among. And nobody here thinks that it is a big improvement that she walked into an underground parking lot alone, where no one could complain about the noise, to be murdered. Mayor Harcourt and Premier Bennett will tell us, in fact they already have, that the injunction is the fault of the West End residents. And I agree that there is blame on the people who valued their property rights over the terrible plight of young men and women being prostituted in the West End. The people of the West End can be blamed, too, for trying to solve a noise and rowdiness problem by exiling part of their population. But Harcourt and Bennett are trying to deceive us. They pretend that they are ever responsible to the ordinary working people who live in this city. We know that they used the residents of the West End. They gave money to the man behind CROWE to whip up the hatred of the West End residents against the prostitutes. They needed an excuse for the injunction. They were way ahead of us. They were planning for Expo, and they have big plans! They plan to have a 'red light district' where prostitutes would be easily found by tourists, where johns would be more anonymous to the public, and where the fight between pimps for the Expo dollars would be less visible to us. They plan to have extra power in the hands of the police to harass and bully any of us who might want to protest Expo or anything else. They plan to spend our social service money on this idiot mega-project and to hell with Linda and the rest of us in need. They plan to limit our ability to fight back by breaking unions, women's centres and progressive movements. They plan to serve landowners and developers and to ignore our need for housing. They plan to maintain prostitution as a calling card to the tourists. They knew that the pimps would arrive in droves before Expo. In the West End it was more difficult for pimps to operate because there were more places for young sex slaves to run. The activity of the women trapped in prostitution was highly visible. Do you know that the young boy prostitutes are now in clubs subject to club owner pimps? Do you know where the women from Georgia Street went? The men responsible for the injunction are responsible for driving Linda and other young women into dangerous isolation where they can be picked off one by one by violent, determined profiteers. Vancouver has never been particularly generous to, or safe for, women. Paid employment has been hard to find, human services hard to get and we are a port city. Everywhere in the world, men lurk in port cities trapping women into sexual slavery. This year, our city is getting worse for all women. Not only do we have to deal with the men in our community who refuse to support our rights and those who openly attack us, but we are also being made subject to the abuse of more men. Already we experience the addition of the drug sellers, the porn sellers, and the pimps who plan to control a playground for the men tourists yet to come with Expo. Already we are being notified by stories in our newspapers that the male American tourists carry guns and we don't for a minute believe that they will be checking them at the border. We believe that Linda has paid for Expo. It is important that we face these facts as women and as a community. The Socreds did not succeed in crushing the resistance movement in our city. Everyone must turn the shock and sorrow of this young woman's murder into activity Tonight, Rape Relief has called you together. From this corner of Broadway and Main, we could go in several directions: up Main to Red Hot Video; west on Broadway to City Hall and other government offices; down Main to the Expo site or back to the West End. For tonight, we plan to take the way east of here, to break the isolation of the young women still abandoned there in hopes that we can make this night less fearful, less dangerous. But every day there must be more and more activity planned against Red Hot Video, against the importing of hate literature against women, against the developers, against the power of the police, and against Expo. Make sure that you are part of this activity. Wear the Public Nuisance stickers to let people know that you understand the function of the injunction and that you refuse to let these 30 people be picked off. Take to the people who are protesting with you tonight, leave your name with the organisers, organise against Expo, organise against prostitution and for the prostitutes, organise against violence against women. Expo is probably going to happen, but we can still find ways to minimise its harm on our city. Tonight it may be difficult to know exactly what to do. Our enemies are numerous and powerful. But we are already taking a step by being together. Get together again and again and again. We have no right to despair. Young women's lives are at stake.
FRED BASS AND LINDA Joyce Tatrai had absolutely nothing in common except that they died last Thursday in Vancouver. He was 87, she was 18. He died naturally in Shaughnessy Hospital . She died horribly in an underground parking lot. He got full value from his lifespan. She squandered hers. He died at peace with the world. She died in terror, trying to keep a killer's knife out of her throat. I think it can be said that both of them chose the manner of their dying. When Fred Bass decided to make music his life and his living, he maximized his chances of dying naturally after a full span of productive years. Kids who work the streets and take drugs limit their chances of dying softly in bed, their own beds, certainly. Bass has been allowed to go quietly. His friends thought kindly of him, recalled the lively music he brought to tens of thousands of people and went on with their lives, feeling the better for having known him. But they won't let Tatrai go so quietly. She was too young too faceless to deserve a controversy. But they're doing it to her. They're trying to make a political martyr out of her with the callous opportunism that her narrow, profession lives by. Sally DeQuadros, the chronic nuisance who acts as spokesman for the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes is prostituting Tatrai's death. DeQuadros claims the murder of Tatrai is the fault of Vancouver city police and, by inference, of the attorney-general and the Supreme Court of B.C. Those three levels of law enforcement created the injunction that forced street hookers out of the West End and into other areas of the city. "It s happening, just like we said it would," DeQuadros says. "We said the injunction would lead to open season on hookers and it's happening." DeQuadros' ASP sister, Marie Arrington, also blames the police for Tatrai's death. "She was scared like all the women when she had to move because of the injunction. And the police kept them moving further and further into the unlit areas," Arrington says of Tatrai. I don't know how much brain power it takes to be a street hooker, but surely it requires more common sense than those statements reveal. Prostitution is not illegal. Conducted with discretion, it may be useful to a society. But carried on openly, aggressively, to a point where it constitutes a take-over of neighborhoods, it is incompatible with reasonable, urban life. In the West End, street hookers and their clients became a menace to the fundamental right to quiet, orderly living by the permanent residents. That was why the Supreme Court granted the injunction banning prostitutes from the West End last year, in the name of common law. No more than drug dealers can prostitutes and their pimps expect the police to guarantee their safety, nor can they expect the city to grant them squatter's rights to the most brightly lit street comers. Nor would permanent floodlights guarantee them immunity from attack by johns who are on the fringe of sanity. Hookers negotiate on street corners, but they conduct their trade in moving and parked cars, in dark alcoves, in underground parking lots and in tiny apartment rooms, where nobody can help them when they pick the wrong john. Hookers were knifed and murdered in the West End. They were knifed and murdered east of Main and if they continue to infiltrate the Mt. Pleasant area, the crazies will follow them there and kill them. Sally DeQuadros is a very vocal person. She says that women hook because they have no alternatives, no money and that governments attack them. (I find it hard to apply that rationale to the 15-year-olds who work Vancouver streets.) She has exploited Tatrai's death by claiming, with no evidence, that there is a Green River Killer loose on our streets, a dangerous tactic that might create imitators. But I wonder why DeQuadros doesn't just shut the hell up and do some life saving. I wonder why DeQuadros didn't take Linda Joyce Tatrai aside when she came on the street three years ago and talk some hard sense to her. She could have said. "Kid, you're 15. You can do other things. This life is too hard. You'll burn out early and it's dangerous. Go home." I'm not insensitive to the girl's death. It's a wrenching tragedy, a meaningless murder. On the last day of his life, Fred Bass told the man in the next bed at Shaughnessy Hospital that he was a musician. The man in the next bed, David Baker, asked the ward nurse if there was a piano in the place. The nurses took the two men downstairs, Bass' eyes lit up when he saw the piano. He pounded out ragtime, the nurses clapped hands and Baker, who has Parkinson's disease, got up and danced with his sister. A few hours later, Bass died in his sleep. What a better way to go than the girl who died the same night.
Denny Boyd is right: Fred Bass and Linda Tatrai had nothing in common (Hookers Limit Chances of a Peaceful Death, Sun, Feb. 27). Because he was a man chances are good that Fred always had more access to jobs, money, power, and safety than Linda or any other woman. Unlike all women, Fred did not live in the fear that he would someday become part of the one woman in four who is raped sometime in her life in Canada. Boyd manages to use Fred's life to drag out the well-worn accusation that women are responsible for the violence that men do to us. It is incredible that Boyd rants for a whole column about how Linda Tatrai concocted her own death, without his once acknowledging the responsibility of the man who actually slit her throat. Women are tired of being blamed for rape, for battery, for incest - and now for murder. We are tired of the lie that if we are good girls and stay home, or if we are good girls and learn to play the piano, we will somehow be exempt. We know that most of us are attacked at home, and that 60-70 per cent of the time we are attacked by men we know. We refuse to pretend that because Linda worked as a prostitute her murder has nothing to do with all women. When it becomes somehow more okay to kill prostitutes because they are "deserving" of the treatment they get, then the permission to violate all women is reinforced. We say Linda's blood is first and foremost on the hands of the man who took a knife to her in an underground parking lot. In his comments on the murder of Linda Joyce Tatrai, Denny Boyd wonders how much brain power it takes to be a street hooker. Judging from what he has to say, it doesn't take much brain power to be Denny Boyd. The headline "Hookers Limit Chances of a Peaceful Death" might more aptly read "Women Limit Chances of a Peaceful Death," since being born female in this society is the first strike against a woman's being able to die "softly in bed." Given that women and girls have far fewer real choices to make, in a society that pays lip service to their equality but enacts legislation and sells pornography that limit their ability to survive, it can't be said reasonably that a woman chooses to be a hooker any more than she chooses her sex at birth. Throughout the column Boyd reveals his narrow male bias. He doesn't reason - he baits. He doesn't compare two people with comparable possibilities - he stacks the deck. And he doesn't address the issue, which is violence against women, condoned and practised every day and as a matter of course by the average man, and the very occasional maniac. Boyd's claim that he is not insensitive to Linda's death, tossed in near the end of the column as an afterthought, isn't very convincing. Any real sensitivity would have resulted in a totally different view of that death. Any real sensitivity and he would have taken the advice he gives Sally de Quadros: shut the hell up and let the rest of us do some lifesaving.
There is a phrase that has puzzled me for years, but — slothful being that I am — I have never roused myself enough to clear up the mystery. However, here we are, a new year and all, so I now rouse myself to ask: why is it that prostitution is always referred to as "the world's oldest profession"? On mulling over human history it strikes me that, far from being the world's first profession, prostitution ranks 14th or 15th, or maybe even lower. I therefore proffer my own list of professions I believe were in existence before prostitution: 1 hunter; 2 thief (the other guy's steaks and furs); 3 soldier (the other tribe's steaks and furs, plus killing off the other tribe); 4 chief, king, etc. (I had difficulty with placing this one third or fourth. Who came first, the boss or the bossed?); 5 doctor, nurse (to mend the wounds caused when taking the other tribe's steaks and furs); 6 farmer (veggies to go with the steaks); 7 merchant (convenient trading of steaks, veggies and furs); 8 shaman, soothsayer, priest (in order to pray for more steaks, veggies and furs, foretell whereabouts of same, etc.); 9 taxman (for every three steaks, veggies and furs you own, you must give me one); 10 civil administrator (in order that cities built for the trading of steaks, etc., be well run); 11 chief cook, bottlewasher, garbageman (some poor soul had to clean up the mess from those steaks, etc.); 12 babysitter (somebody had to look after the kids); 13 pimp (I suggest it was men who traded women in for steak, etc. first, not vice versa). Given that women for millennia were objects of trade between men, I cannot see how prostitution can be classed as the "oldest profession" which would indicate choice on the part of free women. What are the facts to support the phrase "the world's oldest profession"? Or is it just a load of gobbledygook put around for some obscure (or, more significantly, obscuring) social reason? Please answer quickly, so I can get on with the rest of 1985.
At first we weren't sure what we thought of "Shame the Johns". Rick Ouston seemed to have the right idea in his article "Shame the Men Who Buy Our Children", only he didn't go far enough and include the women (a phenomena we have seen before with incest for example ... people are willing to be-really sympathetic towards children who have been raped, because they see them as genuinely innocent and blameless). And we as a collective were still grappling with "for prostitutes, against prostitution."… If this group of people were really going to give the johns a hard time and expose them - especially the politicians, the lawyers, the cops, the judges - that seemed O.K. to us at the time. But as "Shame the Johns" got going it became increasingly clear that they were doing more harassment of the prostitutes than shaming of any johns. The prostitutes themselves described them as a self-righteous nuisance at best, and physically dangerous to them at worst. Physical attacks on prostitutes by the "Shame the Johns" people were not unheard of; and they went so far in the Mount Pleasant area as to organise marches against the prostitutes including jeeps, and oldmilitary vehicles. Gordon Price, the man pictured here, and for a long time the spokesman for "Shame the Johns"in the West End, got a job with City Hall doing an "urban study" of the West End including recommendations of what to do about the "prostitution problem". Whatever ideals and principles the people in these citizens groups started with, it is clear that they ended valuing their property more than the lives and safety of the women on the street. Coincidentally, just when the West End "Shame the Johns" group threatened to start confronting prominent citizens in their wealthy neighbourhoods about buying women and children.... the Attorney General Brian Smith granted the application for an injunction banning prostitutes from the area.
A cocaine debt may have led to the slaying of teenage prostitute Linda Joyce Tatrai, her common-law husband said Tuesday. Martin Tiggeworth, who lived with the 18-year-old for three years, said Tatrai was not working the streets last Thursday, the night she was found with her throat slit in a parking lot on East Broadway. Area prostitutes have said that they fear for their own lives as a result of her death, but Tiggeworth said he feels her assailant knew her and sought her out and was not a "john" who picked her up. He said cocaine dealers threatened her on several occasions and she wasn't working the street because she thought the men might kill her. "She was terrified of them (the dealers) and she hadn't been working very much lately because of them, " Tiggeworth said. "Besides working wasn't her favorite thing." Tiggeworth, Tatrai and their friend Terry Wright were attacked by four men in an east Vancouver home Jan. 20. Brothers Daryl and Darwin Koo have been charged with sexual assault, assault, extortion, robbery and weapons offences in connection with the incident. A preliminary hearing is set for April 23. Police are still investigating her death, but confirmed Tuesday they are considering the possibility of it being linked to her dependency on drugs. At one point in the fall, Tatrai was spending upwards of $800 a day on cocaine for injection, Tiggeworth said. "She had a really rough summer. She didn't look after herself and was shooting up all the time," Tiggeworth said, adding that he was in Oakalla for assault from July to October. "She spent $40,000 in four months (on cocaine) and she owed these guys some money." "When she's with me, she's all right. But when I was in jail, she really fell apart." Police also said they have not ruled out the chance that Tatrai's killer was a psychopath, an unhappy client or another prostitute fighting her for territory. Tatrai's body is being flown back to her parents in Barrie, Ont. Today while friends here were to gather at St. Michael's for a service at 3 p.m. Later tonight, friends and other prostitutes plan to march from the church down East Broadway in memory of Tatrai and to protest the violence to which women on the street are subjected.
A West End Vancouver woman told city council Tuesday that she has never witnessed prostitutes "in states of intoxication, making excessive noise, or squealing the tires of their non-existent cars." "This behavior is much more noticeable among my neighbors," said Barb Janes, speaking on behalf of First United Church. She was one of several speakers making pleas both for and against proposed Criminal Code changes aimed at controlling street prostitution. Many West End residents see the amendments proposed by the House of Commons justice committee as a solution to noise and harassment problems. But social workers, gay rights advocates and feminists believe the lot of prostitutes will be made worse by the changes. A new section would be added to the Criminal Code making it an offence to either sell or accept an offer in a public place to engage in prostitution. This law would be punishable by a fine of up to $500 or 15 days in prison in default of the payment. Janes said, "Women who are hooking because they are in poverty obviously do not have $500 to pay a fine. The alternative ... jails women supposedly for the crime of prostitution, but in reality jails women for the crime of being poor."
City council has decided it wants to try the "business as usual" approach to prostitution. Council voted unanimously Tuesday to have its legal department draft a bylaw treating prostitution as a business and regulating its sale and purchase as it would with any other service. Council also voted unanimously to ask the provincial government to pass legislation increasing the city's powers to allow it to make bylaws regulating or prohibiting any businesses on city streets, parks and squares, and to make different regulations for different businesses and different areas of the city. The suggested amendment would give council the authority to regulate the activities of purchasers, as well as sellers of all kinds of merchandise and services, and the authority to regulate transactions in services as well as things, corporation counsel Terry Bland told council. Council now may only regulate the sale of merchandise on the streets and its power does not extend topurchase of things, or the sale or purchase of services, he said. Several aldermen doubted the bylaw would be more effective than earlier attempts at controlling street soliciting and agreed that the final solution lies in amending the Criminal Code of Canada to include prostitution. Council also rejected by a 74 vote a plan to have police stand on West End street corners as a deterrent to the sex trade in the area. This practice has been used in San Jose, Calif., where police have the power to arrest prostitutes. "What we need is an enforceable law that is not emasculated by the courts," Mayor Mike Harcourt said. The Supreme Court of Canada last year nullified Vancouver's previous attempt at regulating prostitution when it quashed a Calgary bylaw, ruling prostitution was under federal jurisdiction. But Bland says he believes municipalities should not lose all control over a business simply because the federal government controls certain aspects of it. "The federal government has not made prostitution a crime; it exists as a business," he said in a report.
Their support came from Concerned Residents of the West End, spokesmen for major hotels, and Progressive Conservative women's and riding groups. "We are virtually prisoners in our own homes and we are not free to come and go," said resident Carole Walker. "We are pestered by the johns…who assume that every woman is a prostitute in the West End. Our friends and relatives refuse to visit us, and we can't sleep at night." "If change to the Criminal Code is rejected as an alternative," said CROWE spokesman Gordon Price, ". . . one can only conclude that street prostitution is, inevitable, and that the West End will be written off as a red-light ghetto."
Now they're worried about street soliciting in the East End. Mayor Mike Harcourt and city police met last week with some of the members of the Mount Pleasant community Planning Committee (MPCPC) to discuss the problem. The Mayor is quoted as saying that if West End community attempts to brand prostitutes as public nuisances are successful, court injunctions will be applied to the Mount Pleasant district as well. According to the police, the number of prostitutes in Mount Pleasant-from Quebec to Alberta Street-has increased from 16 to anywhere from 30 to 50 hookers a night. A large "strategy meeting" has been scheduled for July to allow East End delegations to talk to police and city hall representatives. Two representatives from every church and social group in the area will present three minute verbal or written presentations at this meeting, which is closed to the public. One organizer of the strategy meeting, Chris Taylor, had considered asking West End community activist Gordon Price to speak to the meeting on recent efforts to discourage prostitution. But members of the MPCPC were not in favor of the idea, fearing increased media exposure. The community is concerned that media attention to the issue will only serve as "publicity" to potential customers, said MPCPC acting-chairman Aubrey Righton, and that is why the meeting is closed. As he spoke, a prostitute passed by the window of the Mount Pleasant Planning office. "It pulls the whole area down," said committee member Georgia Nelson. "It's really the kiss of death for the neighborhood."
VANCOUVER- Although it may be morally wrong and the Metropolitan Toronto Police Department disapproves, a Toronto police constable told a Provincial court in Vancouver yesterday that he personally sees nothing wrong with using the services of a prostitute. "My feeling is, it's my personal life," Constable Edward Allen King, 33 testified in response to questions about his involvement with three prostitutes in British Columbia during a 12-day vacation here last July. He is charged with sexually assaulting a prostitute by pretending to be a Vancouver policeman who would have charged the prostitute with disobeying a count injunction if she didn't have sex with him. The officer, with 13 years on the force, denies the allegation, saying he paid the woman $30 for oral sex and was "shocked" when two senior Toronto officers visited him at this home to tell him of her allegations two months later. The woman testified that she and the suspect had agreed to $60 for oral sex, but he showed her his police badge and warned her that she was violating a court injunction against plying her trade in Vancouver's West End. He then drove her to Stanley Park and forced her to have intercourse, she testified.
The B.C. Supreme Court came to the aid of West End residents today, issuing an injunction aimed at ridding their neighborhood of prostitutes. Chief Justice Allan McEachern, describing the situation in the West End as an "urban tragedy," said the attorney-general is entitled to an order enbling police to arrest prostitutes who cause a public nuisance in the area. But the judge went further, giving the attorney-general the option to of extending the court order to most of the downtown, an area stretching north of False Creek and English Bay and east of Granville Street. "A samll but persistent group has taken over the streets and sidewalks for the purpose of prostitution, to the great discomfort of the residents," judge said. He said the attorney-general "has established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the named defendants, and others unnamed, were using the West End for public, aggresive male, female and transsexual prostitution." Prostitutes arrested for allegedly violanting order would face contempt of court charges for which there are not set penalties. Noting that lawyers for the prostitutes said their clients have a right to ply their trade, Chief Justice McEachern said: "Blatant, aggressive and persistent prostitution has never before been practised in a residential area."
A Vancouver provincial court judge handed out different sentences Tuesday to two people who each pleaded guilty to the same offence - breaking Canada's new law against street solicitation. Maximum penalty on conviction of the summary offence is a $2,000 fine or six months in jail, or both. Last month, lawyer Tony Serka, on behalf of his client, Michelle, 19, challenged the validity of the new legislation, arguing that it violated a section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Judge Keith Libby is expected to render his decision in that case Monday. Since Vancouver police started their crackdown on street solicitation in early January, they have arrested more than 200 people, about two-thirds of them hookers.
"These girls are attracted by the glamour and adventure of the uniform. But they are inexperienced and impressionable. I wish the sailors would show a little more sense of responsibility." John Turvey The influx of thousands of foreign sailors in Vancouver this summer is attracting "inexperienced and impressionable" under-age girls into the downtown east side, street social workers who cover the docks say. In some cases, the girls are turning to prostitution. In others - such as the recent case of the three teenagers who ran away to California to follow some sailors they had met — the experience is causing a disruption in their family life. Street worker John Turvey, who has worked more than five years in the area, said Friday he has never encountered so many new girls hanging around the docks and in the Hastings and Main area as he has this summer. "These girls are attracted by the glamor and adventure of the uniform. But they are inexperienced and impressionable. I wish the sailors would show a little more sense of responsibility," he said. U.S. Navy officials say sailors are instructed to obey the customs and laws of the country they are visiting, but acknowledge they can't monitor their behavior on shore. An estimated 50 warships five times the usual number are visiting Vancouver this summer in connection, with Expo events. A 17-year-old hooker named Julie, who looks younger than her age, said she has been approached on several occasions by U.S. sailors asking if she can "line them up" with even younger girls. "No way I'm going to do that said Julie, who works around the 400-block of East Hastings. "I don't think anybody younger than me should be working." She said she has also been invited to work aboard the warships, but declined. "I wouldn't want to be trapped on board with all those men," she said. Alan Roscoe, another street worker, said he saw a 15-year-old girl he knows walking arm-in-arm with a U.S. sailor who looked to be in his early 20s on Powell Street near Oppenheimer Park. The girl was wearing his white cap. "I told him: 'Do you know how old she is - she's only 15, that's underage,' " Roscoe said. "He told me: 'Don't worry — we haven't done anything.' " Roscoe said he threatened to call the sailor's commanding officer and have his leave cancelled. But, Roscoe said: "This was a bluff on my part — there's no way a commander is going to cancel his leave." Roscoe said the girl told him to get lost —"only she didn't use those words" — and the couple walked off. The next day, he said, they were spotted pushing a shopping cart full of beer. "They had gotten a room for the night somewhere and were partying during his shore leave," he said. He got this information from friends of the girl. On one occasion, Turvey went on board a visiting British warship to talk to the officer of the day about reports that girls had been staying overnight on the ships. "He told me it was definitely not possible," Turvey said. "We knew it was possible because the girls came from group homes and the (group home) workers told us." Insp. Bob Sharp of the Ports Canada police said young girls who are loitering around the docks can be taken into custody and referred to the human resources ministry. But he said it's difficult to pick out those girls among the crowds of sightseers on the docks. "I can't see any way of restricting them from meeting sailors if they want to," Sharp said. He said he wasn't aware of any particular problem with the navy vessels. "There is an on-going situation with the freighters, though," he said. "It's not unknown for young girls to get on an in-bound ship at Prince Rupert and travel down in coastal waters, working until they reach Vancouver."
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