Thank you.
My name is Kate Sinclaire. I'm currently studying law here in Ottawa, and I'm a member of the Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition. We're a group of sex workers, activists, allies and researchers back in my home of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Treaty 1 territory. We have a clear mission to fight exploitation, not sex workers.
We need you to understand that many groups that call themselves anti-trafficking organizations are centred on a goal of “eradicating” sex work—their word. To people among these groups, sex work is inherently dangerous and sex workers are making a conscious choice to do something dangerous, so if we experience violence while we work, we chose it, we asked for it and we even created it. This gets taught to our police, who then use that basis to interact with workers.
We can't keep trying to end abuse by criminalizing and surveilling sex workers. Laws and policies often place the blame for trafficking directly on the sex workers themselves, creating a simultaneous victim and abuser narrative 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 to illustrate this comes from my own life working in queer adult film. I was contacted out of the blue by a sex worker I'd never met. She was trying to double-check with me to make sure that she was auditioning 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 system that criminalizes sex workers and their clients actually supported him, and he was right. We realized that we couldn't come forward to report this man to police. The worker was rightfully, from experience, more concerned about being arrested herself, losing her income and losing her kids. That's because laws and attitudes cast the sex worker as both trafficker and trafficked, victim and abuser.
We had his address and we could not do anything, so we did what we could to keep people in the area safe. We posted warnings online and reached out to local sex worker groups. We tried our best to keep others from accepting his pitch, but keep in mind that policing the Internet and physical spaces to eradicate sex work from public view and away from community means that warnings and community initiatives can only go so far. That has only gotten worse in recent years with anti-trafficking legislation in digital spaces. It's getting harder for us to warn people.
If you want to address harm, you need to step back and look at the circumstances that Canada has put in place to put people there—an oppressive immigration system, 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 supports and not more criminalization in a system that is already hostile to women, girls and gender-diverse folks. Do not patronize “deportation and incarceration will save you” attitudes. This may surprise you, but people aren't excited to go to prison for reporting workplace violence.
Sex workers have been supporting our communities while criminalized for a long time. We're often the first to see when something is wrong, but if we get arrested, are exposed to further surveillance or are even just written off when we come forward, it will not work. Start with decriminalization of sex work, immigration status for migrant sex workers, affordable housing, a guaranteed basic livable income so that people can make choices about the work they do, and comprehensive and inclusive education systems that don't shame women's sexuality. We have the laws around trafficking. We have the laws. If they're not working or being used, we need to analyze why and not make new laws that will just uphold the status quo.
I'll wrap up with another story. This comes from an indigenous sex worker in the Prairies. These are their words: “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, transmisogynist, 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 only place I found support to survive was in the streets. 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, but not if you're trying to eradicate us.
Thank you very much. I do welcome any questions you may have.