Death of a woman

Greeve St is a pick up zone in St Kilda and the site of the murder.

Tracy Connelly is dead.  She was murdered at her work place last week. Few are surprised for her work place is frightening and dangerous.  No, Tracy did not fight in Afghanistan or walk a tight rope traversing the Grand Canyon.  She was a street sex worker in St Kilda.  And so another avoidable murder of a street sex worker occurred to apparent public indifference.  Her relatives will mourn the bubbly character taken too soon.  The rest of us, however, will shrug our collective shoulders, and many will think but not say out loud, “well what can one expect” and move on. 

Ms Connelly was murdered in a street across the road from mine.  It is a street where violence is not unknown and I am aware of several murders in the past decade.  These were not the quick clinical killings by bullet or lethal injection.  These were the slow, agonizing, awful murders by bashing or knife. 

It is a pick up zone for the street sex workers. Street sex work is illegal and this sets up these often vulnerable women for violence and sexual assault.  The police cannot easily protect a group in an illegal vocation.  I am sure that the police will vigorously pursue this murder investigation but there are ways bloodshed could be minimised. 

In 2002, I served on the Port Phillip Council and we finished a law reform process with the State government via the Attorney Generals’ Street Prostitution Advisory Group (AGSPAG) which included police, residents and one worker.  That law reform process was motivated ostensibly by activists in the community sick of the detritus of sex litter, the constant leering of the men and the public sex.  But there was another less publicised reason. In 2000 there were a string of unspeakable assaults, rapes and the occasional murder.  The situation was out of control and no council could abide such ferocity without trying to do something.  Remember that street sex workers are really vulnerable.  Street sex workers are often (but not always) drug dependent and that dependency is frequently seeded by sexual assault as kids.  So I sat on AGSPAG cognisant of both the concerns of the residents and the terror of the women.

People outside Melbourne might have heard of the rape and murder of Jill Meagher.  That murder has now exposed what was happening.  Her murderer was the main culprit.  In 2002, Adrian Bayley was prosecuted regarding 16 counts of rape committed between September 2000 and March 2001. He pleaded guilty to the charges, all of which were committed against prostitutes working in St Kilda.  Bayley had driven his victims to a lane behind a group of shops in Elwood, before parking against a fence so they could not open the passenger door.  http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/bayleys-life-of-brutal-crime-20130611-2o1c1.html#ixzz2ZwpzTi3w

This information closed the circle for me. It was a partial explanation why there was such violence at the time of the AGSPAG process. Even though the Bayleys of the world may come and go, there is still an endemic culture of violence that rules street sex work. It needs to be addressed. And moreover, Bayley showed that those who assault prostitutes easily alter their MO to visit violence upon the wider community.  Women at large are not safe if they rely on the “Ripper Rationale” – murderers of sex workers are gentle with and respectful of the rest of the gender.  

This man has terrorised women in St Kilda and across Melbourne.

 The AGSPAG group chose the concept of “tolerance zones”.  (Remember in NSW, street sex work is lawful as long as it is not near or within view of a dwelling, school, church or hospital) Many other reforms were implemented but AGSPAG is known for the one infamous idea that failed to get up.  The rationale for these zones, places where street prostitution would be tolerated, was to limit the areas of prostitution, increase the monitoring and safety of the women and lessen the impact of the litter, public servicing and perceived intimidation from pimps.  There was a sense of unanimity when AGSPAG reported. http://www.popcenter.org/problems/street_prostitution/PDFs/Victoria_prostitution_2002.pdf

That unanimity dissolved in an instant when the community was consulted.  We made errors in the process but it was clearly controversial. If the bipartisan support at the State had stayed intact, the proposal might have been modified to an acceptable extent.  That did not occur. The Liberal Opposition went opportunistically ballistic and the Labor Government went weak at the knees. Moralistic hypocrisy prevailed and the flawed prohibition model is still with us today with all of its cruelty and inefficacy. The one chance we had to have a fundamental rethink of the safety both of the community and the sex workers has probably been lost for decades.  And so more lives will be lost and many women will be bashed and/or raped because sex workers apparently don’t matter.

It will not surprise you, but I blame the Abrahamic religions of the Judaeo Christian tradition.  These are faiths which are punitive.  They set up moralistic schemes where the evil are punished in some afterlife.  Sin is dealt with by prohibition not sophisticated harm minimisation techniques needed in a modern time where the prohibition exacerbates harm.  Drugs, prostitution and some socially stigmatised practices like abortion have their harms increased by legal prohibition.  These are biblical in their nature.  They are wrong.  I know that Mary Magdalene was perhaps a sex worker and that in St Kilda, churches do wonderful things for street sex workers.  But the ideology of the creeds still inform those who cannot cope with law reform.

The time has come to revisit this issue.  I know that the world will not mourn Tracy Connelly like we mourned Jill Meagher but they are both blameless women victims of appalling violence.  The Jill Meagher case, though not involving a sex worker, reminds us of the need to organise our community in such a way as to make it safer for sex workers.  Bayley has shown, those who assault sex workers can cross over and assault (and murder) the general public.  Thus this is an issue for both a vulnerable sub group and the whole female population.

 Tolerance zones are probably out of the question. At the last Council election, the notion of the zones was used as means criticising candidates.  The incumbents at State and local levels will not go near the idea.  A review is needed. The current prohibition model fails our most vulnerable and indeed the female gender.