Yes, absolutely. When it comes to work exploitation, the concept of exploitation in a workplace context is not something that usually belongs in the Criminal Code. It's something that belongs in employment standards, where we as a society have given ourselves recourse in case of bad working conditions.
Sex workers don't have access to this. If our boss refuses to pay us, well, there's no tribunal we can go to for that. If our workplace is unsafe, there's no occupational health and safety commission that can come in and help us with that problem. A lot of workplace exploitation comes simply from the fact that we don't have access to those things. In every other industry, when workers in any industry have faced exploitation, we have focused on giving the workers rights as a way to end exploitation.
When we criminalize an industry, we're making exploitation the default setting in that industry. The worker's not protected. We're talking about power dynamics. A lot of people mention the power dynamics between sex workers and other people around us. Those power dynamics exist because we don't have legitimacy. We don't have rights. We can't turn to anyone. The only thing that exists that we could turn to, in theory, is criminal law. What that criminal law says is not that there's a difference between a good boss and a bad boss, or that there's a difference between a good co-worker and a bad co-worker; it says that all of it is inherently exploitative and inherently wrong.
What this means is that if someone works in, say, an escort agency, and everything is great, well, her colleagues are committing exactly the same crime as a boss who's beating the employees, taking all their money and doing all kinds of other things. What it means is that when we go to the police, if you look at the data in terms of charges that are given to people, very frequently the only charge given is a procuring or material benefit or advertising charge. If those charges don't need to prove exploitation, violence or anything bad happening, then what are we prosecuting, exactly? The best co-worker in the sex industry is committing the same crime as the worst one. That is illogical, obviously, and it incentivizes people to exploit us.
Then there's all of the other types of exploitation in our personal lives. What sex workers experience, and what is often portrayed.... Sometimes there are graphics put out about pimps exploiting their partners at home. It's the exact same pattern as any domestic violence situation. In domestic violence, abusers take control of family finances. That's a feature of domestic violence that is the same whether someone is a nurse or a sex worker or any other.
In a situation of domestic violence, the person will threaten and maybe force the person to work more than they want to work, and do all these other things. It's no different for sex workers. What is different, however, is that we have a law that doesn't even allow for domestic violence to be part of the conversation, because our partners are not even seen as our partners. The law goes as far as trying to establish what would even constitute legitimate cohabitation with a sex worker. When we go to police, instead of being directed towards domestic violence services, we get directed towards anti-sex work services that will tell us that we need to stop doing sex work, and then will try to convince us that we're actually victims of sex work and not of violence.
Beyond the criminal law, this is also what we see in community services. The vast majority of domestic violence shelters across Canada operate from an anti-sex work, prohibitionist perspective. They will not allow someone who's currently working in the sex industry to access services. We see countless women at Stella who are trying to escape violence and end up in a situation where, if they go to police, the sex work will be investigated. They do not want that. They cannot go to a shelter, because they are not welcome there. They have to find solutions on their own to get out of that situation.
Obviously, if someone wants to exploit the labour of someone else, they will pick someone whose labour is available for exploitation, and anyone who's criminalized will be a good target. That's why we see also exploitation of undocumented migrants. Anyone in our society who doesn't have legitimacy, who doesn't have access to services or who doesn't have access to human rights will be the targets of people who want to abuse people. We think there are many other laws in the Criminal Code that address many types of violence.
I also want to bring up human trafficking, which someone mentioned earlier. Human trafficking is not, as far as I understand, within the scope of this study, and there's this tendency to conflate trafficking and sex work, to use them interchangeably or to otherwise act as if all sex work is trafficking. It's very important not to get caught up in conversations about trafficking.
If we decriminalized sex work and repealed the provisions of the PCEPA, the human trafficking provisions at that point would still stand. If something met that threshold, those laws would still exist. They're used very problematically in our communities but, at the end of the day, they still exist.
We do not need to criminalize sex work in order to criminalize something that we would consider to be trafficking.