Trafficking and sexual exploitation is about gender, race, and class, and services need to be guided by a women-centred approach and a gender analysis of violence against women, so there are intersections between trafficking and prostitution.
Trafficking, in its legal definition, is forced prostitution when there is coercion, and force is a part of that. What we do know is that we've heard from police agencies across the country that because of the human trafficking legislation, the bar set for evidence, the threshold for evidence, is high, so oftentimes police officers in an immediate situation will fall back on the prostitution legislation when there is a very vulnerable woman who's in a situation where they need to separate and protect that woman or girl.
We know that the vulnerable women and girls across the country are the ones who are aboriginal. It depends, again, on which part of the country you are in, but particularly in western Canada, they are aboriginal women and girls. That's who you're seeing in the visible sex industry. That is who is being sexually exploited on the streets.
We're going to need unique strategies. The problem that needs to be solved is how we create laws that will always protect vulnerable women and girls from sexual exploitation. As the Canadian Women's Foundation, we're working on that answer through the task force, and we'll have those recommendations in the fall. We do know there is significant legal reform that's needed, not only with the trafficking legislation and working with that piece of it, but also policing agencies need tools to be able to intervene at the time. I would like to see that they have multiple tools available to them.
We are taking this position of reframing the issue. Why are men buying sex from girls? Our answers and recommendations will be around law reform, services, and public education awareness. How do we shift that? We're just entering the recommendation phase on our task force at this point, so collectively, we will be identifying those.