Thank you very much for having me here.
My name is Kate Sinclaire. I am currently studying law here in Ottawa. I'm a member of the Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition. SWWAC is a group of sex workers, activists, allies and researchers and is based back in my home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Treaty 1 territory, and was founded in 2014. We have a clear mission to fight exploitation, not sex workers.
We can't keep trying to end abuse by criminalizing and surveilling sex workers. These laws and policies often place the blame for trafficking directly on sex workers themselves, creating a simultaneous victim and abuser identity that is impossible to navigate. It encourages law enforcement to drop in on sex workers with “wellness checks” and empowers raids, arrests, deportation and other forms of state violence.
A story that might help you understand this comes from my own life working in queer adult film. I was contacted out of the blue by a sex worker I had never met. She was trying to double-check if she was going to have an audition with my company. This was the first I'd heard of it, because I don't hold auditions. As it turns out, someone was using my reputation and status as a filmmaker to lure sex workers to a rural address.
He was stealing my name to get free sex, which is abuse. He knew that the systems that criminalize workers and their clients actually benefited him, and he was right. We realized that we couldn't come forward to report this man to police. The worker was rightly, and from experience, more concerned about being arrested herself, losing her income and losing her kids. Why? It's because of laws and attitudes that cast sex workers as both traffickers and trafficked, victims and abusers.
We had his address and we could not come forward, so we did what we could to keep people in the area safe. We posted warnings online. We reached out to local sex worker groups. We tried our best to keep others from accepting his pitch. Keep in mind that policing the Internet and physical spaces to keep sex work invisible and as far away from the community as possible means that warnings can only go so far. It has only gotten worse in recent years with anti-trafficking legislation in digital spheres.
If we want to address harm, we need to step back and look at the circumstances that Canada has put in place to put people there, such as oppressive immigration systems, criminalization of sex work, poverty, access to housing, a race to the bottom in worker rights and minimum wages, poor support for those living with disabilities and police surveillance of marginalized communities.
Going forward, think of support, not more criminalization in a system that is already hostile to women, girls, and gender-diverse folks. Don't think in patronizing “deportation and incarceration will save you” attitudes.
Sex workers have been supporting our communities while being criminalized for a long time. Keep us at your discussion tables, fund sex worker-led programs and listen when we speak. Start with an end to laws against sex work. Provide immigration status for migrant sex workers, affordable housing and a guaranteed basic livable income.
We have laws around trafficking. We have laws, and if they aren't working or being used, we need to analyze why, not make new laws that will just uphold the status quo.
I'll wrap up with another story from an indigenous prairie sex worker, who wrote, “When I was a youth, I was houseless and participated in survival street sex work. Having been a sex worker is something I've always been open about in my writing, activism and scholarship. I'm not ashamed, because I am describing a common experience for indigenous prairie youth. Anti-sex work rhetoric is anti-Black, anti-indigenous, whorephobic, transmisogynistic and classist, no matter how you try to dress it up in the aesthetics of resistance and decoloniality. To circulate anti-sex work rhetoric is to have indigenous blood on your hands. The violent force that pushed me into sex work was Canada and Canadians.”
We as SWWAC remind you to fight exploitation, not sex workers. Together, we can make a safer world for everyone.
Thank you very much, and I do welcome any questions that you may have.