BCIFV home > Newsletter > 2003 Archives > Fall 2003 articles

Katrina Pacey
A Woman of Distinction

Katrina Pacey, a long-time friend and supporter of BCIFV, recently received a YWCA Woman of Distinction Award. “It’s a huge honour,” says Pacey.

“It was a surprise, right up to the last minute.” Such a surprise that in her long list of thanks, “I forgot to mention my sweetie.” A law student and social activist, Pacey works with Pivot Legal Society, which advocates for the legal rights of disadvantaged people, especially in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Now the Director of the Board, Pacey became involved with Pivot two years ago when she began law school.

The society’s main project at the time was a ‘rights card,’ the size of a business card, containing information on basic legal rights such as the right to silence. Launched in the summer of 2002, “it was a tiny, little project but it was desperately needed,” says Pacey. “People were starving for that basic information.”

The success of the Rights Card Project led to the Affidavit Campaign. “We sat on the corner of Main and Hastings throughout the night and people would come up and give affidavits about experiences they’d had with the police. We’d record it on a laptop and swear it right there.” Once they had 50 affidavits, they produced them in a report called “To Serve and Protect.” It was submitted to the new Police Complaints Commissioner last November and included a request for an external investigation by the RCMP, which is now underway.

Pivot’s current project regards prostitution-law reform. Three sections of the Criminal Code affect prostitution: one against public communication for the purpose of prostitution, a second against running a bawdy house, and a third against procurement, or pimping. Volunteers are collecting affidavits from sex-trade workers about how these laws affect them. For example, the bawdy-house law makes it illegal to sell sex indoors, driving prostitutes into the streets where the risks to their well-being are obvious. The affidavits will be taken to parliamentary hearings in the fall, paired with a constitutional argument that the statutes don’t fit with Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But Pacey’s activism goes back before Pivot, to when she was a third-year political-science major at UBC and took a summer job at BCIFV.

She stayed for five years, becoming a researcher, coordinating the resource centre, and continuing as a contractor after returning to UBC for a Master’s Degree in Women’s Studies.

Pacey considers her time at the Institute crucial, particularly because of executive director Penny Bain. “Penny is one of my most important mentors,” she says. It was Bain who inspired Pacey to apply to law school. “It just seemed clear to me how much law school helped Penny in the work that she is doing.”

At the same time, Pacey spent three years working for Safe Teen, where she provided self-defense and assertiveness training to elementary- and secondary-school girls. After that, she worked for two years with the Vancouver City Police Department reviewing spousal-assault files to assess their consistency with the Violence Against Women in Relationships (VAWIR) policy.

Since beginning law school, Pacey has started the Social Justice Action Network at UBC, a law faculty-based organization that provides students with opportunities to get involved in social-justice work. She also coordinates the law faculty’s Centre for Feminist Legal Studies— “I think volunteer work is my excuse not to study,” she quips—and over the summer is working full time at UBC’s First Nations Legal Clinic.

At 28 years of age, Pacey has accomplished more for social justice than many people do in a lifetime. So what’s next? “I have one more year of classes and a year of articling. I’d like to start a practice and continue working with Pivot and developing the organization. And I’d like to travel and have a baby, eventually.”

And that thought brings us full circle to Pacey’s small-but-important oversight in accepting her award, an oversight that we can help her set straight: “My partner’s name is Evan Wood,” she says. “We’ve been together for four years—and I couldn’t have done it without him.”