Today marks the fifth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
The Toronto Sun reports that an advocate for sex workers believes that pop culture influences, including the popular Grand Theft Auto series, help legitimize violence against prostitutes. Anastasia Kuzyk of the Sex Workers’ Alliance of Toronto told the newspaper:
Sex work is a job, and violence isn’t in the job description… There’s a video game out there where you can run down prostitutes and kill them and beat them up and take their money. It feeds into the whole subculture of allowing the violence to continue. Violence against sex workers should not be normalized, but it is.
Kuzyk noted that between 1991 and 2004, 171 female sex workers were murdered in Canada. Street-level sex workers, she said, are 60 to 112 times more likely to be victims of fatal violence than the general population.
