Poverty is a whole conversation. I know that another standing committee is looking at poverty issues.
Poverty really keeps women trapped. When women are trapped, it makes them vulnerable. When women are trapped and then objectified and seen as valuable primarily for their bodies, that poverty keeps women in extremely vulnerable situations.
When we're looking at who lives in poverty, we're looking at racialized women, indigenous women, and women with disabilities. We're looking at women who have a really tough time breaking out of the poverty they grew up in, accessing education, or after education, accessing the kinds of employment they need in order to have economic independence. That's one of the factors that keeps women trapped very often.
I'm going to tell you a story.
Two of our staff did a workshop for Mount Saint Vincent University on girls. They were sitting in the cafeteria at the library in Halifax. They overheard a conversation of two high school girls sitting beside them. The girls were being offered money for sex, and the conversation was about what an insult is. Twenty dollars is an insult, so at $20 you're not validated. It's kind of a blow-off, a comment about who you are. The higher the offer of money is, the more you're validated. These are high school girls.
There is story after story I could tell you about some of this stuff, but that is an everyday casual conversation girls are having that was overheard. That's some of what we're dealing with. That's on your question about poverty, but it really is a very clear marker of the way in which women's sexuality has been attached to some kind of access either to men with wealth or to other ways of trying to earn an income. It's a really big question, Sean.