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“I was called b**ch, slut, whore and ‘piece of meat’. Stripped naked and raped—‘broken in’—by three goons who, along with my husband, held me captive in a windowless room handcuffed to a radiator.”

So heard the federal Justice Committee earlier this month during its examination of the new prostitution bill put forward by the Conservative government. Bill C-36 would criminalize the purchasers, not the prostitutes.

Nova Scotia nurses Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, who run Persons Against Non-State Torture, told the committee during the July 9 hearing the story of “Lynn,” an immigrant to Canada who suffered the most vile forms of human degradation imaginable as she was trafficked by her husband who became her pimp.

They estimate Lynn suffered thousands of “torture rapes” during her four-and-a-half year stay in Canada as a prostituted woman before managing to escape her captor and return home, where she has since died.

Most of Lynn’s story related by MacDonald is too gruesome and sexually explicit to publish. Lynn was tied down, sexually assaulted, raped, choked, whipped, and almost drowned.

“Starved, beaten with a baseball bat, kicked, and left cold and dirty, I suffered five pregnancies and violent beatings-forced abortions,” relates MacDonald of Lynn’s testimony.

“They beat the soles of my feet and when I tried to rub the pain away they beat me more.”

“Every time his torturing created terror in my eyes, he’d say, ‘Look at me b**ch; I like to see the terror in your eyes’. I never stopped fearing I was going to die. I escaped or maybe they let me escape, thinking I’d die a Jane Doe on that cold November night.”

Sarson and MacDonald, who say they work from a “relational feminist perspective,” told the committee that women like Lynn make up the majority of prostituted women and are largely “invisible to this country.”

They called the proposed law “historic” in that it would criminalize the “demand” while respecting prostituted women as “persons.”

MacDonald made it clear to the committee that in her 21 years of working with women who sell themselves, prostitution is synonymous with torture and abuse.

“I would like to say to you that from what you've heard and in my opinion, I cannot call torture ‘work,’” she told the committee.