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| Naomi Sayers |
By May 2023, following repeated and escalating transgressions, I concluded I had no practical option but to relocate. I considered multiple destinations, including Ottawa, but I had a professional commitment in Toronto in late June 2023 that required me to be in the city for approximately one week. During that time, I assessed housing options and began re-entering sex work.
This was not a “reinvention.” It was not spontaneous. It was not glamorous. It was a survival decision made under pressure, in circumstances where institutional protections proved ineffective.
Institutional failure and the limits of ‘proper channels’
Before relocating, I attempted every conventional remedy that is routinely suggested to individuals experiencing stalking, harassment or targeting, particularly where the alleged perpetrator holds state authority.
- I filed complaints.
- I commenced litigation.
- I retained private investigators.
- I documented events systematically and persistently.
Despite these efforts, I was dismissed and discredited. I was characterized as irrational and unreliable. Meanwhile, the very institution suggesting my concerns were unfounded was accessing my personal information through police databases dating back to at least 2021. In addition, records from 2019, when I returned to start my own practice, were no longer available. It is unclear to what extent the queries into my background began.
After relocating, the pattern did not end. I experienced further indicators of police targeting, including apparent plate checks prior to traffic stops. That same vehicle the police were tracking before pulling me over was stolen a mere three months later. I was also accused of a traffic infraction at an intersection with a red-light camera, yet no ticket followed. The cumulative effect was not merely inconvenient. On the totality of things, all was destabilizing, isolating and dangerous.
When the state’s own systems are implicated in harm, and when protective mechanisms are not meaningfully accessible, the “proper routes” are often not routes at all. They become performative steps with no safety outcome.
Sex work as survival under conditions of constrained choice
In response to these circumstances, I adapted the way many women are forced to adapt when the system does not protect them: I made a plan to leave, and I pursued income streams available to me immediately.
I returned to sex work because I needed financial stability during an emergency relocation, while trying to maintain a demanding legal practice under conditions of ongoing stress and fear.
I worked through what was described as a high-end agency because I believed it offered a structure resembling harm reduction. The agency screened and vetted clients and controlled the booking process. I did not communicate with clients directly prior to appointments. Expectations were imposed regarding appearance, scheduling and conduct. I provided availability in advance, and at times I cancelled shifts due to professional obligations or exhaustion.
The critical point is this: I made deliberate efforts to reduce risk and to conduct myself safely. Yet even within that “structured” environment, I was still exposed to serious harm by the very people designed to provide the safety mechanisms via booking and vetting of clients through intermediaries. One such intermediary included a booker or bookers employed by the agency.
Criminalization increases vulnerability and empowers intermediaries
My experience demonstrated the central problem with criminalization: it does not eliminate sex work. It creates conditions where the workers are least protected and where intermediaries, gatekeepers and bad actors become more powerful.
I remained silent for a significant period because I reasonably feared that disclosure would be weaponized to further discredit me. The stigma attached to sex work functions as a pre-emptive credibility attack, and one that institutions and abusers rely on.
Even within an agency system, I was placed in danger due to the conduct of a booker, an individual responsible for arranging appointments and communicating critical safety details, including location and client information.
Over time, I observed what appeared to be a pattern: if I took time off unexpectedly for professional obligations, I experienced what felt like retaliatory treatment. On one occasion, I was sent to the wrong hotel room in a small hotel. That incident confirmed that my concerns were not speculative.
This conduct raised concerns consistent with worker-control dynamics, including attempts to control scheduling and impose a “uniform” presentation. This conduct suggestive of an employer/employee relationship, rather than a true independent contractor arrangement.
Yet because sex work is criminalized, there was no realistic avenue for labour-related enforcement or accountability. I had a good relationship with the owner of the agency, and after the final transgression by the booker, I reported that the booker sent me to the wrong room, inviting potential police oversight. Had I been in a different position, with less experience in the sex trade and even less knowledge about the law, I do not think I could have stood up for myself.
The booker and her friends tried to blame me for the error, but her task was simple: give me the correct hotel room. The numbers were not anywhere near the correct hotel room. I did not feel like I could trust the bookers, and I immediately withdrew from the rest of my shift. I asked to be dropped off and cancel the rest of my shift. I feared and do fear that I cannot report an unsafe work environment without exposing myself to legal risk or reputational harm. I value the relationship I had with the owner. I could not determine to what extent the booker was abusing her access to my information and who she was sharing it with. This is the structural trap criminalization creates: it removes the protection mechanisms that exist in virtually every other workplace context.
The inability to seek police protection creates a foreseeable safety gap
One of the most dangerous consequences of criminalization is that it makes access to police protection conditional, unreliable or practically unavailable, particularly for women already flagged as “untrustworthy” or “problematic.”
In my case, reporting harm to police was not a viable option. I had already been dismissed as “crazy,” “delusional” and “aggressive” in relation to serious safety concerns. I had no reason to believe I would be treated as a credible complainant. The same force that I would report to was the same force who allegedly investigated my now deceased stalker, who was employed by another force.
Further, the risk of police involvement carried consequences beyond immediate interaction: exposure, stigma, retaliation and institutional misuse of information.
Sex work criminalization does not create safety. It creates silence.
Criminalization invites coercion and ‘setup’ dynamics
I recall another incident involving a client who strongly resembled the officer who had stalked me (and who was, at that time, deceased). The similarity was so striking I nearly fainted upon opening the door.
During that appointment, the client attempted to bypass the agency process by insisting on paying me directly, attempting to extend the booking privately and pushing me to return alone.
At that moment, accepting payment outside the agency process could have exposed me to legal jeopardy. The request had the characteristics of coercion and potential entrapment. It also raised concerns about possible law enforcement affiliation, particularly given the nature of the hotel environment and its clientele. The hotel’s parking lot was filled with Ontario government cars — the kind with the Ontario’s flower logo on all white vehicles. It was not clear if he was employed by the Ontario government or there on his own business.
Criminalization creates precisely these conditions: scenarios where someone can pressure a worker to step outside a controlled process, where the worker knows refusal may escalate the situation and where compliance may result in criminalization of the worker rather than accountability for the person applying pressure.
Decriminalization is a public safety and accountability measure
When sex work is criminalized, the individuals who gain power are often not the workers. The people most empowered are those who control access, control information, enforce silence and rely on the worker’s inability to seek help.
This is why criminalization does not prevent exploitation — it conceals it.
Decriminalization is not a moral argument. It is a legal and public safety requirement.
- being able to report violence without fear of arrest, exposure or retaliation
- being able to implement safety planning openly and without legal jeopardy
- being able to share warnings and screening information without it being treated as unlawful
- being able to access health care and crisis supports without judgment or institutional punishment
- being able to leave unsafe conditions without losing housing, income, dignity or future stability
- most importantly, decriminalization acknowledges a basic truth: survival is not a crime.
The real harm is that the system forces people into silence and then blames them for adapting.
I am not advocating for decriminalization as a theory or abstraction. I am speaking from lived experience. I have previously been involved the sex trade as a young woman with no legal experience. I now come back as someone who has a law degree and a law practice defending those charged with criminal offences. I am the woman I needed when I was younger.
If these conditions can occur to someone who is educated, resourced, highly documented, persistent and legally trained — someone who exhausted institutional mechanisms — then it is no longer credible to claim the current system is functioning.
The question is not: “Why did you go back?” The question is: “Why was there no safer choice?”
I did what I had to do to survive.
Naomi Sayers is an Indigenous lawyer from the Garden River First Nation with her own public law practice. She sometimes teaches primarily on Indigenous rights and governance issues. She tweets under the moniker @kwetoday.
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