I can go first, if that's okay, Kate.
I really appreciated when Krystal Snider corrected the misinformation you were being fed by the two people who actually don't have experience in the industry but who just have analysis based on their ideology. What Krystal was suggesting is most definitely the case.
For one, many sex workers and family members and communities are arrested with trafficking laws because of the ways family members or community members are labelled as traffickers or assumed to be traffickers. I think some of the racist undertones are the ways communities get racialized in this process.
A really good indicator of how that process works is that we often see cases of Black men trafficking white women, or there's the idea that foreign illegals are trafficking white women, so a lot of those ideas get translated through law enforcement.
What the committee members earlier were talking to is the way the sex laws under PCEPA work, and the sex work laws under PCEPA absolutely criminalize all people in the sex industry, including sex workers. One of the members of this committee asked for a copy of the clause. It's in the criminal law. It's under PCEPA, so you have access to it. It's in your own laws.
Those criminal laws most definitely criminalize sex workers in the industry. There's a clause that suggests that sex workers cannot be prosecuted for the sale of their own sexual services, but sex work and sex workers are criminalized at all times in every context. Just because sex workers can't be prosecuted doesn't mean sex workers are not operating and living in a context of criminality. That's the way the sex workers organize their work, and that will determine whether or not sex workers will report to police.
Everything about sex work is illegal, and sex workers are at all times criminalized, so when you have human trafficking laws plus sex work laws plus the additional immigration provisions plus the bylaws plus the loitering, etc., the context of criminalization for people working in the sex industry is unbearable and most definitely not a trust-creating one.