VIDEO: Database aims to keep sex workers safer

Too often, when a sex worker takes on a client, they end up the victim of an assault. So new funding for a reporting tool designed to help sex workers avoid the risk is welcome news.

Angela Lohr heads up H.O.P.E. Outreach in Kelowna.

It's a non-profit society that looks out for the interests of women (or men) who are living lives where they are at risk. She hopes that a recent $1 million donation by the BC Law Foundation and an anonymous family foundation will help keep people in the sex trade a bit safer.

The new funds are expected to look after three years of operating funds for the new tool. It's a peer-to-peer, provincewide database for sex workers to report or be warned about 'bad dates'.

Lohr said the hardships of 2020 have driven more into the sex trade, putting more people at risk of coming into contact with predators.

"We're very excited about the province-wide bad date reporting system," said Lohr. She's glad to see something more formal than the unofficial 'bad date' reporting that goes on in different parts of the province.

"We've all done our own little 'bad date' reporting system,' she said. The plan is to bring it all together into one system. "We're all coming together to how can we can we more protect the women that are in this field."

Still, Lohr believes that an even better way to protect sex workers would be to take it out of the dark corners. To decriminalize the business of prostitution.

"I truly believe that it should be decriminalized, just like the drug issue that we're currently looking at, the demand is there, the need will never go away," she said.

"Women or men should have the ability to work in a field that they want to work in that is safe, that you can get a business license, that you can get workman's comp., you can get EI, you can file your income tax just like anything else."

The new reporting system is just being developed. It's expected that the final product will likely be an app that takes in reports of bad dates and makes them searchable for people in the sex-trade.