The Frey family is speaking out against a proposed 'legal safe haven' for sex trade workers.

Rick and Lynn Frey lost their daughter, Marnie, after she disappeared from the streets of the Downtown Eastside in August of 1997. Her remains were later found on convicted killer Robert Pickton's pig farm, a trial that was emotionally grueling for them to have to face.

Lynn Frey told CTV News she doesn't agree a brothel would be a safe place for sex trade workers.

"It just doesn't make any sense to me," she said. "Women are still going to be used and abused whether they're in a safe place or they're in a brothel or wherever they are. What goes on behind closed doors, who knows?"

Sex trade worker Susan Davis is advocating the idea for a brothel as a safe place for sex trade workers, partly as a result of Pickton's victims and partly out of a desire to give women a safer place to do business.

"They are engaged in the trade in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in North America, as far as this is concerned," she said. "(And) with the mortality rate, which is outrageous."

The Freys do not agree with the link between the Pickton victims and Davis' brothel proposal.

"It makes me angry," said Rick Frey. "God, the people out there now, you go down to the East end now and look at the people on the streets, the women on the streets, and how they're being used and abused and until we clean up that part of the problem, the prostitute problem is not going to change."

But experts say sex workers like Marnie Frey who survived on their trade would never have been allowed in a so-called legal brothel in the first place. That kind of brothel would be geared more towards women who have chosen prostitution, as opposed to those who are forced into the industry as a means to survive.

The Freys do not see the distinction -- they see it as exploitation.

The Conservative government has already refused the idea, so Davis' proposal does not have much potential -- for now.

But the idea will likely come up again with an expected increase in the number of sex trade workers leading up to 2010.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Stephen Smart