Enter keyword s to search for the articles,events,business listing and community content. You can use letters:a-z,A-Z and numbers I started my career at The Standard as a crime reporter and back then the Queenston Street area was prostitution central. Anti-prostitution police operations were common. Sometimes the Niagara Regional Police targeted the women selling sex. Sometimes the men buying it. The crackdowns suppressed the sex trade in the area, but never stamped it out. The women who walked Queenston Street would turn up in Niagara Falls.
The police would target the Falls, and the women would return to St. Story continues below. The sex trade was often an appendage of the drug trade. As often as not, the women were addicts. Crack cocaine was their drug of choice. A house on Division Street, just off of Queenston, was the area's hub of criminal activity. Part prostitution den, part drug flophouse, the building was a pitiless limbo from which few women escaped. Those who cover crime often adopt a gallows humour.
And so the Queenston Street area was labelled "Hooker Alley. I don't know anyone, myself included, who would use the term today. More than a decade ago, sex trade workers were not often reported on as people in the full sense of the word.
In those stories, prostitution was treated solely as a law enforcement issue. Underlying factors of poverty, drug addiction and abuse that often push women into sex work only receive tangential attention. All this came to mind following last week's recent NRP crack down on prostitution in the Queenston Street area. Police arrested seven women. Although the Supreme Court of Canada struck down anti-prostitution laws in , amended legislation makes it illegal to offer sexual services in a public place or impede the flow of pedestrian or vehicular traffic.
While that might provide some temporary relief to business and residents in the area, it doesn't solve the problem. Some of the gals who were arrested have already started working in other areas," said Krystal Snider, the skills development manager at the YWCA Niagara who works closely with sex trade workers. Aside from pushing the sex trade into other neighbourhoods, the conditions of release have other unintended consequences, she said.
