About four years ago, people across Canada started to ask a question that we didn't have an answer for. That question was, should prostitution be legal?
We wanted to focus on sex trafficking and to keep prostitution as a separate issue altogether. But as we continued to meet with and hear the stories of survivors, burnt-out front-line workers, and parents of victims, we started asking what it could look like to go far upstream and put systems into place that would prevent sexual exploitation from happening in the first place.
As we started to look at the issue through the lens of prevention, we realized that we could no longer ignore the legalization conversation and that sex trafficking and prostitution were in many ways connected.