September 12, 2016
MEDIA RELEASE-
First in Canada: West End Memorial To Honour Sex Workers
In 2008, the West End Sex Workers Memorial Committee was co-founded by Indigenous trans sex work activist Jamie Lee Hamilton and UBC professor Becki Ross. Our mandate is commemoration of the once vibrant, diverse, pimp-free community of sex workers whose members were violently and illegally expelled from the Vancouver’s West End through a Supreme Court injunction in July 1984. For the past two years, we have worked in close partnership with the City of Vancouver’s Social Planning and Engineering departments, and with St. Paul’s Anglican Church, to establish a Memorial at Jervis and Pendrell Streets. To pay for the Memorial, we secured financial reparations totaling $28,000 from the City, commensurate with fines illegally collected through enforcement of the City’s ‘street activities’ bylaw (deemed the ‘anti-hooker’ bylaw) in 1982.
On Friday, September 16th, at the corner of Jervis and Pendrell Streets our Memorial will be unveiled. We have an outdoor program of speakers at 11:00 am, and in indoor program of speakers (Lower Hall, St. Paul’s) at 12:00 pm. Speakers include sex workers, elected officials, researchers, and community leaders. We invite journalists to witness this historic occasion – the first of its kind in Canada.
We seek to remember and honour sex workers who once lived, loved, worked, and contributed culturally and economically to West End life. The mass displacement of this ‘outdoor brothel culture’ from the Davie Street stroll sowed the seeds of lethal violence against street-based sex workers in the downtown Eastside decades later.
Contact co-founders:
Jamie Lee Hamilton, 604 446-2489, tricia_foxx@yahoo.com
Becki Ross, 604 685-3840, becki.ross@ubc.ca
