Two years have passed since the murder of Marylène Levesque by a client of prostitution. Although much ink has been spilled, she remains dead in vain.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
To honor it, I want to give myself the right to satisfy a pressing need: to reveal to you that I could have been the one who was killed.
Duty of memory
I started being a prostitute at 16, around the same age as her. However, I got out of it between the ages of 19 and 28 thanks to access to education. Since 2011, I have campaigned for the abolition of the prostitution system. Despite everything, or for that, I still found myself in prostitution for a few weeks at the time of the murder of Marylène Levesque.
Today, you could have not read me…
Unfortunately, her death is used to argue that the decriminalization of clients and (neo) pimps could have saved her. Rather, I implore you to make the effort to put yourself in the shoes of this 22-year-old young woman whom we have collectively escaped, like so many others.
Beyond the media image of the sex worker, Marylène Levesque actually wanted to “free herself and leave the community”. She hoped to resume her studies to move towards architecture or design. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to have no means of transport, to fall back on minimum wage, to have a past in foster care, to be systematically deprived of a good life.
His destiny, our destiny, is only the reflection of history.
In a cheap labor pool, french girls are sold in the ROC (rest of Canada), alongside the discriminated. The French Canadian described as easy and exotic, both uneducated and vulnerable in her culture, embodies an alluring return on investment.
Faced with such a continuum of constraints, propagating the idea of possible dignity within the so-called sex industry turns out to be misguided or malicious.
In the name of dignity
If you prefer to forget, at least remember the missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women.
Cherry Smiley, Indigenous feminist from the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) and Diné (Navajo) nations as well as a doctoral student in Quebec, teaches us this: “Like the Indian residential school system, prostitution is an institution that continues to have devastating impacts on the lives of Indigenous women and girls. […] Just as those who came before us were dragged into the residential school system “for their own good”, now there are attempts to drag us into the prostitutional system and uphold the rights of pimps and johns by asserting, wrongly, that it is for our own good and protection. […] Imagine if, rather than completely abolishing the residential school system, we had only decided to do a “better” job of regulating these institutions? »
Like my comrade, I ask you: how can we claim to move forward together towards reconciliation and a just transition if we completely decriminalize prostitution in Canada?
let’s not back down
For the survivors, what would have made it possible to avoid Marylène Levesque’s feminicide is a true abolitionist feminist model aimed at the urgent and concrete improvement of living conditions, all nations combined.
Dear Marylène, on your tombstone, I want it to be inscribed: “Here lies a queen of truth”.