I will go first.
I want to begin by thanking the committee for inviting us to come and present on this important topic. It's great to be here. I also want to echo Julie's acknowledgement of the land that we're on today.
I'm an associate professor of criminology at Ryerson University and I've been engaged in research into sex work and human trafficking for nearly 15 years now. I've conducted several empirical and social scientific studies on the topic. My findings show essentially some of the same findings that Julie also just discussed, which are that laws and policies set up to reduce harm to people who are marginalized within the sex industry often instead result in increasing those harms.
I've also been quite involved in various capacities with sex worker groups and organizations over this time. I'm co-presenting here with Ann De Shalit, who is a doctoral student in Ryerson's policy studies program. She's currently conducting research on Ontario's strategy to end human trafficking. She also has years of experience working with non-governmental organizations on various issues related to immigration enforcement and access to services for undocumented migrants. Together, our knowledge is derived from both our grounded work within the communities and our academic experiences.
Over the past few months, you've heard from quite a few individuals, organizations, and agencies who have made claims about the scale or magnitude of human trafficking in Canada. Sometimes this is based on police or court data; other times it's based on witnesses' testimonies claiming that they've saved hundreds, or even at times, thousands of trafficking victims.
Some have actually estimated that the number of trafficked women in Canada is in the tens of thousands or that upwards of 70% or even 80% of women in the sex trade are trafficked or exploited. Ann and I are going to argue that it's necessary to think very critically about these kinds of claims. What's important is to look in more depth at how these numbers are derived and also to examine the ways in which these individuals, agencies, and organizations are actually defining both human trafficking and sexual exploitation to begin with.
Looking at the definitions of exploitation and trafficking is not just an academic exercise. It's not just a conceptual thing. As you know, definitional differences have enormous policy implications. They can result in significant hardships to the people whom we're aiming to help, as Julie also acknowledged, while skewing funding priorities in certain directions, particularly towards law and order frameworks and away from human rights approaches.
Currently, when media, policy-makers, and others refer to human trafficking, they're virtually always referring to instances of exploitation within the sex industry only. We see that across the board. Even this committee has heard almost exclusively about what is popularly understood as sex trafficking. Within this, the focus tends to be on indigenous or migrant women and girls. This limited lens neglects to consider the violence and coercion, abuse, exploitation, forced or coerced migration, and bondage that happens within a range of industries including agriculture and manufacturing. It also happens in Canadian homes with domestic labourers, including at times women who are here on temporary foreign worker visas.
It is also concerning that while human trafficking is being increasingly defined in very narrow terms, that is, as sex trafficking or even simply as sexual exploitation, NGOs and state agencies are simultaneously expanding how they interpret or understand what constitutes sexual exploitation to begin with. More and more activities, types of labour, and even relationships within the sex trade are being deemed exploitative and thus considered evidence of trafficking. Also, more and more individuals who do not identify as victims of trafficking are being automatically labelled as such by police or NGOs, or they're being de facto forced to identify in this way.
For example, many sex workers, just like many workers in most fields, have some kind of manager or supervisor or somebody else who is influencing the kind of work that they're doing, for example, arranging schedules, engaging in advertising, booking hotel rooms, organizing transportation, and so on. Since a third party is involved in these activities, however, some organizations or police will automatically define that sex worker as sexually exploited and therefore a victim of trafficking. This is especially the case if that sex worker happens to be indigenous or a migrant.
If you're looking specifically at migrant sex workers, what we've seen is that when they're caught up in an anti-trafficking raid at their workplace, they essentially have two options: one, identify as a victim of trafficking and potentially receive a temporary resident permit; or two, don't identify as a victim of trafficking and receive criminal charges and possibly be deported. Given those options in that context, of course many are going to say that they're victims of trafficking. Even for those who maintain that they are not a victim of trafficking, however, we still see police services imposing the label regardless, suggesting the victim is just too afraid to admit it, that she’s protecting her trafficker, or that she just doesn’t understand her victimization. A Crime Stoppers pamphlet on trafficking, for example, says that one of the key ways you can identify a victim of trafficking is that they themselves may not identify as a victim of trafficking.
There is absolutely no way out of this logic loop for marginalized women. In some cases, individuals may well be experiencing situations of violence, coercion, or some kind of problematic labour condition, but in other cases, that's not the case. Defining them as trafficked or de facto forcing them to self-identify in this way not only increases the statistics on trafficking, but also leads to unwanted state intervention, police or border security, which can then result in a series of harms and human rights abuses.
Conflating of trafficking, sexual exploitation, and sex work, as acknowledged earlier by peers, occurs in part because people don’t understand how labour is organized within the sex industry or because they are morally or politically opposed to the commercialization of sexual services. Some of your previous witnesses have suggested that this overemphasis on sex trafficking is in fact justified because the majority of human trafficking criminal charges and court cases are indeed related to sexual exploitation.
We argue instead that this disproportionality is based on police and immigration authority priorities. State agents target certain types of activities and certain individuals, often based on an anti-sex work agenda, while neglecting others. This then leads to inflated statistics on the numbers of trafficking victims and results in skewed understandings and misdirected policies, which can then harm all sex workers, whether experiencing exploitation or not.
Definitional issues and inflated statistics also play out at the community level, which Ann will show, in particular with organizations that are funded by the province to engage in anti-trafficking programming.