Legal Changes and the Decline of Sex Work Arrests in Toronto Neighborhoods, 1992–2020

In recent decades, sex work in Canada has faced legal changes with efforts to enhance the criminalization of buyers and court challenges to uphold sex workers’ human rights. What are the consequences of these legal changes and challenges on the streets of Toronto where sex work and its enforcement have also changed? Leveraging an intersectional framework with annual data on Toronto police–recorded sex work occurrences and census data from 1992 to 2020 (29 years, 579 tracts, n = 16,791), we spatially and longitudinally analyze neighborhood counts of sex work arrests and their relationship to sex work policies and neighborhood effects. Our results show that (a) the policing of sex work in Toronto has dropped by 99.6% in the past 30 years, (b) neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage increases neighborhood arrests, (c) criminalizing policies that target buyers increase neighborhood arrests, and (d) the Supreme Court decision upholding sex workers’ human rights briefly decreased neighborhood arrests. Our study raises policy implications as to why laws do not do more to protect sex workers when it appears that arrests have become a low priority for police. Rather than criminalization, laws could prioritize harm reduction, especially for Toronto’s most marginalized sex workers and clients.