What seems to be the perfect job can sometimes turn into a nightmare very quickly.

Isabelle Wolf recalls taking trips to Greece, drinking expensive bottles of wine and having great conversations. However, she also has memories of bruises, prank calls and financial insecurities.

Wolf, who previously lived in Ottawa but recently relocated in Montreal, started working as an independent prostitute about 15 years ago. She says there is a lot that has changed in the industry in the past years, but according to her, Bill C-36 didn’t change sex-workers’ life for best.

“Prostitution is becoming more and more hidden, which can be dangerous for us”, she says.

Bill C-36 made it illegal to purchase sexual services, but legal to sell them. One of the main goals was to protect sex workers instead of victimizing them.

Between 2009 and 2014, the number of police-reported prostitution offenses has fallen in all metropolitan of Canada and it keeps falling since the implementation of Bill C-36, according to a document released by Statistics Canada.

According to Sgt. Jeff LeBlanc of the Ottawa Police, a number of reasons could be linked to this immense decrease of reported prostitution offences. “Bill C-36 and other new projects in Ottawa help residents look for Johns (sex buyer) instead of prostitutes”, he says.

He also adds that the new law helps protect sex-workers, according to him. “We are trying to identify sex workers as victims and their safety comes first.”

Although having been through physical violence with some of her clients, Wolf said she would never report an incident to the police. “We should probably trust them, but when we talk to them about our job, they aren’t open”, she says. “They don’t want to deal with us, they want us to deal with our own mess.”

Wolf says that although sex-workers are often scared of reporting physical violence or “bad clients” in fear of ultimately loosing their only income, other resources are available for them to refer to if needed. The Daisy’s Drop-In Centre in Ottawa is one of them.

Running every Friday morning from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., it provides women of all ages with a warm breakfast, clothing donations, clean needles, counselling and STI testing: a warm and cozy heaven for some of Ottawa’s sex-workers.

Counsellor Nikki Jalbert explains that if the women recently had a bad experience with a client, a bad date list report is offered to them where they can report the event and make other women aware of certain people.

Those resources are a must for the sex-workers to do their jobs safely, especially for the newer and younger sex-workers who, according to Wolf, “enter the job fully blind about the consequences that could happen to them.”

“The new generation starts this job much younger than we used to and there is an increase demand for younger girls”, says Wolf. “It’s really dangerous for them because they don’t have a clue what they are getting into.”

Not only the women and the girls don’t know what they are getting into, but Wolf also says that 75 per cent of her clients don’t know about Bill C-36. Seeing three to four clients a day for six days a week, she says that the only that has changed in the industry since the implementation is that those who know about it are trying to hide themselves and do it more “underground.”