Okay, I'm very close.
The front-line worker further indicated that they're vulnerable to the charges that come with human trafficking. The worker said, “It's great for criminalization. That's...part of the history as well. [That] significant criminalization of a racialized group.... We can't have people saving us anymore.”
This criminalization occurs alongside a strong mistrust of the criminal justice system reported by indigenous women. Women and girls also in sex industries particularly report experiencing derogatory or degrading interactions with police and criminal justice actors.
It was in this context that policies and responses to trafficking must be attentive to not further criminalize and reproduce inequalities experienced by indigenous and racialized women. As my mentor Patricia Monture indicated, every oppression that aboriginal people have survived has been delivered up to us through Canadian law.
Like the legal system in other colonial systems, involvement in sex industries is a space where colonization is both reproduced and resistant. However, sex workers are particularly stigmatized in their resistance to colonial violence and blamed for perpetuating colonial violence.
In summary, in response to the legislation, particularly the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, but also in definitions of exploitation, what we have found is rather than reduce violence, criminalization reproduces another version of a long history of colonial state violence executed against indigenous women for their own good. There's real and disproportionate violence faced by women engaged in sex industries and by indigenous women and racialized women within this country, and much of this violence comes from the systemic inequalities. We must be attentive to not further produce such inequalities through ongoing forms of criminalization within our legislation.