Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. Thank you for your invitation to testify before you this afternoon. I'd like to begin by providing a brief overview of my journey and my work regarding human trafficking.
When I returned to my home province of Manitoba 10 years ago, I started to meet with community leaders, including a number of indigenous women leaders, as part of developing a new human rights degree program at the University of Winnipeg. When I met with Diane Redsky, who at the time was the national coordinator of the commission on sex trafficking in Canada, I asked her what I could do as a professor to respond to the work that she was leading at the community level in communities across Canada.
She told me to create a course on sex trafficking, addressing the connection between prostitution and sex trafficking, because indigenous women leaders in particular do not agree with the popular notion that is pro-prostitution: legalize it, and everything will become fine. There's not enough knowledge that supports our analysis, because most of the work has not been done in Canada, because pro-prostitution is such a popular position, and because very often those who take that position argue that there would be less sex trafficking if there was more legalized prostitution.
Let's take a look at this. First of all, gender is highly relevant. In the 2017 global estimates of modern slavery, a collaborative effort between the International Labour Organization, the ILO, and the Walk Free Foundation in partnership with the International Organization for Migration, IOM, there were a couple of findings. Women and girls accounted for more than 99% of all victims of forced sexual exploitation. More than one million of the victims of forced sexual exploitation, 21% approximately, were children under the age of 18. We live in a global society where women and girls are vulnerable in every society. Like any predator, pimps and traffickers exploit these vulnerabilities.
In Canada, the majority of traffickers have been male. We are seeing females charged, but it is usually in relation to working with a man. For global estimates, in 2016, the ILO estimates that 4.8 million people were victims of forced sexual exploitation. Countries that fail to address the demand that fuels sex trafficking or have legalized or decriminalized the commercial sex industry have experienced increases in prostitution and higher numbers of trafficked women and girls to meet an influx of demand.
Between 2009 and 2014, there were 396 victims of police-reported human trafficking in Canada, the vast majority, 93%, female. In Canada, the 2013 RCMP study reported that victims of all domestic sex trafficking cases prosecuted in Canada have been female. The majority have also been youth, and the majority have also been indigenous in origin. It's very important to look at, not only the gender, but also the racialization of sex trafficking.
Victims of human trafficking are generally young. Among victims of human trafficking reported between 2009 and 2014, close to half were between the ages of 18 and 24. Between 2009 to 2014, police identified 459 persons accused of trafficking, 83% male, most commonly between the ages of 18 to 34, 77%.
Ninety-one percent of trafficking victims knew the person who trafficked them, the most common relationships being 23% business, 22% casual acquaintance, and 18% non-spousal intimate partner.
There is a myth about prostitution being the revered oldest profession. We cannot normalize prostitution by thinking of it in terms of a profession. A society that respects the dignity of women does not accept a profession where rape, assault, and humiliation are very real occupational hazards. Prostitution is not the oldest profession, it is the oldest oppression.
Prostitution is a transaction that reflects inequality. As Shelagh Day states in her publication, Prostitution: Violating the Human Rights of Poor Women:
The bargain inherent in prostitution is that women have unwanted sex with men they do not know, and feign enjoyment, in exchange for money. Calling this sex between consenting adults ignores the fundamental inequality in the sexual and human transaction for the women and the men. This is not a transaction in which a woman and a man together, voluntarily, seek to give and receive sexual pleasure. Prostitution is a [business] transaction in which women provide commodified sexual services to men, in exchange for money. It is a form of social and sexual subordination—
—fuelled by our economy.
The majority of prostitutes entered prostitution between 14 and 20 years of age. In the much-vaunted Bedford decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, what was largely still not known or not acknowledged is that one of the main plaintiffs in the case admitted very clearly to prostituting her own daughter before she had reached the age of 13. There is a nature to the type of exploitation that happens that can become endemic and the perpetuation is linked to substance abuse and all kinds of self-harm.
Marginalized women, including indigenous women, particularly indigenous youth, are particularly vulnerable to prostitution and more likely to face violence, including assaults, sexual assaults, and murder.
Street-level prostitution in Canada represents between 5% and 20% of all prostitution. The rest occurs indoors. The majority of prostitutes are female, while almost all clients of prostitution are male. Gender matters.
Did you want me to close? Okay, let me then go to—