When Caroline Newcastle first posted a photo of herself on an escort website four years ago, she wore a green dress.

Then 23 years old and studying for an undergraduate degree in Quebec City, she was nervous. She had never traded sex for money, and the encounter wasn’t exactly what she was hoping for.

Caroline, who uses a pseudonym, was half naked within five minutes. The sex lasted the full hour she had negotiated. She felt it was too formal, too black and white. But it was work, she figured, and once she counted her money, she decided it wasn’t so bad.

Caroline’s second experience, a two-hour visit with a client, was better.

“We talked for an hour, had a glass of wine, he was really nice and well educated and we really got along well — and the sexual experience was much better,” she said.

Now 27, the well-spoken, educated girl-next-door-looking Caroline is pursuing a PhD at an Ottawa university — and earning a living in the sex industry.

But she worries about her safety and the safety of her friends if Canada’s new prostitution law passes.

“It’s devastating,” she says.

*********

Caroline is young, but sophisticated. She speaks well, describing how sex work is like any other type of work — undesirable working conditions in the escort business are similar to poor labour standards elsewhere, she says. The only difference is that sex workers are denied the right to complain.

She has agreed to meet me at a local coffee shop, but prefers I don’t say where. She is wearing 60s style cat eyed glasses, a loose leopard-print grey sweater, jeans and Converse shoes. She seems down-to-earth yet well-groomed – no makeup, manicured nails and a dangling crystal on her neck.

After her second sexual encounter, she tells me, her career “just flowed.”

She started up a website that catered to men longing for “the girlfriend experience,” and built up a loyal clientele of men, women, couples and the disabled. She sees up to eight clients a week and makes enough money to live comfortably in one apartment, finance another for encounters with clients, and put herself through school. Hourly rates for escorts in Ottawa go between $200 and $600.

“I don’t anticipate stopping,” she says. “I’m in for the long haul.”

Even if the federal government’s new prostitution legislation, which criminalizes clients and prostitutes, passes, she says she’ll “just adapt.”

It won’t be easy, though, because she knows what’s at stake.

In addition to her studies and two jobs, she also works as a researcher on campus — Caroline advocates on behalf of Ottawa’s sex workers. Calling herself an “activist for sex workers’ human rights,” she volunteers for Power, a group that seeks protection and recognition of sex workers through decriminalization.

When the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s prostitution laws in December because they endangered prostitutes, Caroline was gleeful — and she felt safer. On Wednesday, when Justice Minister Peter MacKay tabled his bill — which could make it illegal for her to have a website, share a residence with other escorts where they take clients, and screen her customers — she was “heartbroken.”

During a news conference Wednesday, MacKay made clear that this is both a moral and legal issue for him, calling prostitution “degrading” and johns “perverts.”

“Minister MacKay in his press conference yesterday said no one chooses to do this, it is inherently degrading, inherently violent,” said Caroline. “The laws make it violent and this speech was degrading. The most degrading thing that happened to me yesterday was hearing his speech. It was awful hearing him speak about something he knew nothing about.”

Under the law, she could also be arrested if she is seen communicating for the purposes of sex near minors — a provision critics say encompasses every public place, forcing sex workers further into the shadows.

“The reality is this legislation will kill people, as the former legislation did before.”

Caroline has never had a bad experience with her clients. As an indoor escort, she arranges sex by phone or online and has sex indoors (her second apartment, a hotel or her client’s place, usually). Her screening rules are unbreakable: people must give their real name — first and last — their place of work, sometimes their home address, and they must be willing to talk to her over the phone before they meet. Once she has that in place, she checks a “bad date list” circulated by safe sex work groups, takes her cell phone to all jobs and prefers repeat clients she trusts.

She’s never had a real problem. But if Bill C-36 passes, her work could get much more dangerous.

“No one’s going to want to give me that information,” she said.

*********

Caroline admits she’s lucky. She knows those most at risk of violence and arrest are the poor, homeless, mentally troubled, drug addicted street workers who work when Ottawa sleeps.

Street workers also have unbreakable rules — make sure there are door handles inside the car to avoid being locked in, memorize a license plate, remember a face. But with johns or clients fearing arrest, Caroline says street workers will have only seconds to screen men looking for sex, and will be more likely to get in a car with anyone in the event demand drops as a result of the law.

“They’ll need to screen that much faster,” she said.

Ottawa’s street workers agree. Power brought several of them together at a Sandy Hill clinic in March to answer a government survey about prostitution. One anonymous worker told the group that a constant police presence often leads to danger.

“If we see cops around, that means we have to refuse dates until they leave or have to go hide,” the woman said. “We have to wait out in the cold. The longer you are out there, the more chances you have to run into a psycho.”

Another sex worker said criminalizing clients will lead street workers to “resort to stealing or other crime.”

Another forecasted an even more sinister future.

“What we do is important,” the woman said. “If we can’t do it, there will be more rape and more violence in families and on the street.”

According to Statistics Canada, 156 prostitutes have been murdered since 1991. Recent figures on other prostitution-related crimes such as battery and rape are less readily available, but Simon Fraser University professor and prostitution expert John Lowman said the evidence of crimes against prostitutes is “overwhelming.”

Sex workers, either street or indoor, also fear the new laws will make them more vulnerable to police – even when they are not trying to arrange sex in public.

In January, police from across Canada conducted sweeps of hotels, motels and massage parlors as part of “Operation Northern Spotlight” in an effort to free those who have been trafficked into the sex trade. They also visited, undercover, an indoor escort who later complained to the police and got few apologies. A police officer posing as “john,” a client, came to her door in plain clothes. In the elevator, he told her he was a police officer and three of his colleagues would be joining them.

All five entered her apartment and searched her home. They resisted giving their names, and refused to leave even though the woman, who goes by “Quinn,” told them she was safe and did this work willingly. When she tried to stop one of the officers from opening a closet, he told her not to touch him — that it could be assault.

“When they asked why I was so upset, I told them that as a woman, as a woman who has experienced sexual assault, and as someone who was not fully clothed or expecting police officers, that I was feeling harassed and intimidated,” Quinn told Power. “One of the officers laughed.”

*********

Caroline didn’t grow up dreaming to become an escort.

Nearly four years into the business, she says she has good and bad days, but that she’s something close to happy.

She feels offended that the federal government wants to abolish prostitution, which is a “job like any other.”

“I pay my taxes,” she says.

She enjoys her clients, who “love their families” and are usually more interested in intimacy than sex.

Most of her family, close friends and colleagues at university know what she does, and she is proud of it. And while she’s expecting her life to change under the new law, she’s not giving up on her job or her advocacy.

“It’s not the end but it’s not the beginning, and the fight will continue.”

Plus, she says, she can’t really think of a better alternative right now.

“Like a really shitty job at Chapters?”