Serial killer Robert Pickton’s trial started in 2006, when I was 11. In the 1990s, women, mostly sex workers, had started to go missing from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Despite warnings and a previous attempted murder charge in 1997 (which was dropped), the pig farmer wasn’t arrested until around five years later when police were searching his property for illegal firearms. They had also ignored a tip in 1999 that Pickton had human remains on his farm.

Pickton is believed to have murdered at least 26 women between 1995 and 2001. Though he eventually confessed to an undercover officer disguised as his cellmate that the real number was 49 women.

The details of his crimes are harrowing and heartbreaking. The case exposed just how deeply seated the police’s systemic bias towards sex workers was. Just how vile and entrenched its institutional racism towards Indigenous people was – many of the missing women were Indigenous.

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The failures in this case made one thing crystal clear. To the police in Vancouver, sex workers had no value. Pleas from families and the community to trace missing women were ignored over and over again. To say the results were devastating is an understatement.

It is for this reason that I do not think sex workers or the people (men) who buy sex should be criminalised. Because the involvement of police with prostitution historically does not bode well for the women involved. It also ignores the agency of women in sex work and ensures the industry remains stigmatised. And marginalises those within it further.

This week, Alba MSP Ash Regan introduced her “Unbuyable Bill”. The Prostitution (Offences and Support)........

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