Charlee Beckett has perhaps one of the most common Vancouver dreams: she wants to save up some money and buy a home.
In order to buy a home she needs a mortgage, and that means showing a consistent income from her small business. Beckett spoke to her accountant, who suggested she set up a business account to manage and track her professional earnings. She went to Envision Financial, a local credit union, and asked to set up an account. The agent on the other end of the phone was happy to help her. Then she told the agent what she did for a living. A few days later, she remembers the agent called back and told her, “I’m sorry, we can’t do that.”
Beckett has worked for six years as a full-service sex worker. She shows her face openly online, and runs a lively Twitter account where she jokes with clients and other sex workers, sharing her unflitered opinions about video games, politics and weightlifting.
In Canada, what Beckett does for work is legal; but under a 2014 law, it’s illegal for her clients to buy her services and for anyone to help her advertise or benefit materially from her work. The law does carve out an exception for everyday services offered to the general public—she can still hire an accountant or a personal trainer. But because every business transaction involves the commission of a crime, financial institutions are often wary of taking sex workers on as clients, and will drop or deny them services without notice or explanation.
At the same time she was being denied by Envision, Beckett also reached out to Vancity, Canada’s largest community credit union. Vancity, she thought, was a values-based, progressive organization and might be willing to help her where others wouldn’t. An account manager listened to her, and then said she would send Beckett some forms to fill out. A few days passed, and Beckett followed up. This time, the account manager told her that there might be legal reasons why she couldn’t open an account.
From there, though, things got easier. Shortly after, Beckett recalls, a regional manager at Vancity called her personally and told her she would fight to get her a business account. Then, the manager called back again. “I’m really excited to tell you that we can do this for you,” Beckett remembers her saying. “And if anything goes wrong, you have all of Vancity behind you.”
After a pleasant, professional meeting with a branch manager, Beckett says, she got her business account, and a new business Visa card to go with it.
“Very excited that @Vancity has chosen to let me open a business account as a sex worker,” Beckett tweeted.
“We’re so happy to hear you had a great experience and feel supported,” Vancity’s Twitter account replied.
Beckett wasn’t the first sex worker to turn to Vancity. Alex, a Métis, disabled sex worker who sells content online under the alias GoAskAlex, joined the credit union as an ethical option after learning that many banks invest in resource extraction on Indigenous land. Last year, she incorporated and asked to open a business account. A business banking specialist told her that she was the first adult performer to try to open an account with Vancity, and she didn’t know if Alex’s business was in line with the institution’s ethical standards. The business specialist referred her to a supervisor.
After several more phone calls, interviews and lengthy conversations, Alex says, the supervisor finally approved the account. Sitting down to discuss Alex’s business, however, the supervisor explained that adult entertainment was, in fact, not generally in line with Vancity’s ethical standards.
“This could well be the catalyst we need for real change.”
Since then, Alex says, she’s pushed Vancity to update its standards. In a recent election for members of the board, Alex says she called as many candidates as she could to ask them about the rights of sex workers like her to open accounts. They were supportive, she says, but didn’t make any concrete commitments. She’s not sure how much of a difference it has made.
“It would be amazing to see a business like Vancity make a public statement advocating for the fair treatment of sex workers,” she says. “It could well be the catalyst we need for real change.”
For sex workers, managing money can be endlessly frustrating. Many payment processors that other businesses rely on, such as Paypal, refuse to work with sex workers and will seize money if they discover it is being used to pay for sexual services. Independent online performers are forced to rely on third-party websites that sometimes skim half their earnings, or have to pay exorbitant fees for credit card services or wire transfers or wait for cheques and cash in the mail. Credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard hold sway over which performers can get paid and what content is permissible online. While credit unions can’t replace the services of big payment processors, the small, mission-driven institutions can be a last resort.
Lyra McKee, a volunteer at Vancouver sex work support organization PACE, says it will take real social change to end financial descrimination against sex workers. She’s frustrated that although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals campaigned in 2015 on reviewing criminal law reforms brought in by their predecessors, and former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said the party was committed to reviewing prostitution laws, nothing has been done after more than six years in office. The Nordic model Canada follows—the criminalization of purchasing but not selling sex—has countless knock-on effects for sex workers, of which financial barriers are one.
Two years after the passage of Canada’s current laws on sex work, FINTRAC, the federal bureau responsible for policing money laundering, issued guidance to banks about how to detect human trafficking for sexual exploitation. The guidance is extremely broad, and makes no distinctions that would protect sex workers who are working of their own volition. “Red flags” include behaviour common for independent sex workers, like the use of cryptocurrencies, escort advertising agencies and pseudonyms.
The FINTRAC guidance is evidence that the Nordic model does not protect sex workers, says Sandra Wesley, executive director of Montreal sex work advocacy group Stella. “From the perspective of the federal government, every policy about human trafficking is an anti-sex work policy,” she says. “The government of Canada, through sex work laws, has legislated that sex work is inherently sexual exploitation.”
“The government of Canada, through sex work laws, has legislated that sex work is inherently sexual exploitation.”
Financial institutions, Wesley says, act with the guidance of FINTRAC to block sex workers from banking and to seize their money—usually making their circumstances even worse. “I’m pretty sure most bank employees that see this and get to work spotting sex workers and seizing their money, they do it because they’re being sold a lie that they’re saving people,” she says.
Wesley and McKee agree that for many sex workers—especially those working on the street, living in poverty and marginalized in other ways such as because of their race and disability—banking is not the most pressing issue. But McKee says basic financial services are still important for some. “I think the mere fact that any other kind of business is valid for a business account means that sex workers should have access to this option too,” she says. “I do think it’s an urgent issue that should be confronted by financial institutions, and not just those that are more progressive.”
In the meantime, McKee says that if a credit union like Vancity were to make it clear that it welcomed sex workers to bank there, it would make a real difference. “I think there would be a lot of sex workers who would do that,” she says. “If it were an official stance that Vancity took, as opposed to a one-off, I think it would benefit a lot of people.”
In an interview, Vancity vice president Jindy Bains drew short of explicitly saying that the credit union was willing to work with sex workers. Instead, she stressed Vancity’s general inclusiveness to all people in their community.
“We try to support everyone that we can, regardless of who they are. Whatever barriers there are, we move towards removing those barriers. That’s who we are,” she said.
Bains pointed to Vancity’s history as one of the first financial institutions to allow women to take out mortgages without a male cosigner, and one of the first to advertise directly to the queer community. But what about reaching out directly to sex workers?
“We don’t call out this community or that community. It’s not about that,” she said. “Our history shows that we take risks, and we help everyone that we possibly can. That’s based on the needs of the community. Our approach is very organic.”
Vancity declined to comment on either Beckett or Alex’s stories, citing privacy reasons.
Wesley, executive director at Stella, says she is not at all surprised that Vancity would not openly welcome sex workers. She believes crossing that line could lead to serious legal consequences for the credit union, and to clients like Beckett and Alex. “The reality is that sex work has been criminalized since 2014, and this is what that means, that sex workers cannot access bank accounts,” Wesley says. “The law is trying to eradicate sex work. So I totally understand why nobody working in that business could ever admit to helping sex workers. It could be very problematic, and ultimately dangerous to any sex workers who were using their service.”
Wesley is skeptical that any one bank will flaunt the federal government’s guidance. At best, she thinks, a credit union like Vancity could offer support by saying that it would serve sex workers if the law were changed.
“It’s nice when there are success stories,” she says, “but it’s so far from the reality of most people, and we have to be very mindful not to give a false sense of safety.”
If banks remain unwelcoming to sex workers, there is one other path that offers financial liberation: cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are secure, anonymous and decentralized from banks and payment processors—ideal for a criminalized industry. Allie Eve Knox, an online fetish performer from Austin, Texas, has made a name for herself in the crypto sex work world, even joining a company working on a cryptocurrency specifically for the adult industry.
But even Knox says that cryptocurrencies have their limits. Without conventional banking, you can’t pay your taxes, take out a loan or buy a house. Schooling clients on how to use online currencies can also be a barrier. “Crypto is a pain in the ass,” she says. “I’ve had really excellent success with crypto because I’m particularly well known in the crypto space. The problem is converting people to using it.”
“In the end, it’s a social issue, whether we’re going to be accepted or not. Technology is not going to solve these social issues.”
Knox also banks at a credit union, though her institution doesn’t know about her real job. With the assistance of a former partner who helped her take out a mortgage, she bought a home. But now, she has no way to move.
“I don’t have a plan,” Knox says. “I’m just going to have to live and die in the house that I’m in.”
She says it will have to be social change, not cryptocurrency, that gives sex workers financial freedom: “In the end, it’s a social issue, whether we’re going to be accepted or not. Technology is not going to solve these social issues.”
Beckett is glad that Vancity gave her a business account, but also says the process was more difficult and laborious than it should be. Beyond managing her own money, she also wants to make it easier for other sex workers to access the same services—sex workers without the money, time and privilege that she was able to throw at the problem.
“I want to normalize sex work,” she says. “As a thin, white provider, I feel a responsibility to normalize my industry as much as I can for the more marginalized members of it. I feel like if anyone is going to pave the way, it’s going to be someone of my demographic. So I wanted to do that.”
Fighting to open a bank account is one more barrier she thinks sex workers shouldn’t have to climb. “It’s just tiring,” she says. “It’s not surprising, but it’s exhausting.”
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