Hi. I'm Sandra Wesley. I'm the executive director of Stella, l'amie de Maimie. We're an organization by and for sex workers based in Montreal.
While we do advocacy, our primary mandate is to provide services to sex workers. We make on average 5,000 to 8,000 contacts with sex workers in every possible sphere of the sex industry in Montreal. We're also accountable to our sex-working community, which is large, diverse and complex.
We have a policy at Stella and in most sex workers' rights organizations that we don't tell personal stories. We can identify as sex workers, but we owe it our ourselves, to our self-respect and to our community to not give you our horror stories to be used against us, to not make you cry, to not focus on emotions. For one thing, those are always used against us, but we also have something called a charter, which promises us that we have rights regardless of public opinion. We shouldn't have to give you drama in order for you to listen to us, and you shouldn't take our more dry focus on human rights as somehow indicating that we're denying there is violence or that we're not giving you what you want to hear.
The first point I want to make is that trafficking as a concept is absolutely useless to address violence against women and violence against sex workers. It is an ideology. For most of the 20th century, the term commonly used was “white slavery”, or in French traite des Blanches, and it was only when that became so obviously racist that the language started to change a little bit.
This is entirely about the racist notion of racialized men coming after pure, innocent, white women, and it hasn't changed since. Using the word “trafficking” is a deliberate strategy of a movement that aims to eradicate the entire sex industry, because in this day and age just saying we hate sex workers and we want to eradicate them doesn't work the same way.
You don't necessarily have to take my word for it. I invite you to refer to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights report on trafficking from a few years ago—I believe in 2018 or maybe 2019. Chapter 2 of that report very clearly lays out that there are two types of witnesses. They heard from people who believed that all sex work is trafficking and they heard from sex workers who had a more nuanced perspective. Obviously, your colleagues at the time chose to ignore sex workers and just take wholesale everything that was said by people who aim to eradicate sex work.
It's your job to look at the evidence, to reject witnesses who have an ideology that is explicitly stated and to question what you're hearing.
I heard in previous meetings of this committee absolutely outrageous things being said, including that having 12-year-olds is somehow common in the sex industry. There is no evidence to support that. If you look at every single sex work location in this country that is raided over and over, 12-year-old girls are not commonly found in the sex industry. That is absolutely false. The average age of entry into sex work is not 14. That is absurd. If you have fourth grade math you should be able to understand that. We are tired of constantly having to fight against absolutely absurd things when what we say is not heard.
The reality is that there has been a massive theory on trafficking for many years in this country. There have been hundreds of millions of dollars poured into it, and the evidence does not support it. It's not because it's so hidden. It's not because the victims are so afraid. We are the victims you claim to be concerned about, and we are here to tell you that this approach is not working. This ideology does not respond to our needs.
There are not two separate groups. We don't have sex workers on one side and victims of trafficking on the other side. Just because we don't choose to use that ideological language to identify does not mean that we are not specifically the women who anti-trafficking experts come to talk to you about. Most of us would be identified as victims of trafficking based on the definitions of anti-sex work advocates.
Parliament decided in 2014 through the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act to set as the objective the eradication of sex workers. That is incompatible with any objective to make sure that we are protected, that our human rights are respected or that we have good working conditions. Ultimately, trafficking is about bad working conditions. It's about forced labour or labour conditions that are so horrible that they meet this definition of trafficking.
When we as a group do not have access to basic labour standards, when we don't have minimum wage, when we don't have any maximum working hours, when we don't have sick pay, vacation pay, maternity leave or access to occupational health and safety, it is impossible to even start to talk about what trafficking could possibly look like in such an industry. Trafficking is a concept that is useful when we are talking about workers who have rights and things that go outside of the norm.
Focusing on trafficking hides the violence that we actually experience. We are telling you there are serial killers who are murdering us and that's not interesting. If we don't phrase it as trafficking, no one cares. We're telling you we are being sexually assaulted and that we are....
Yes, I see that my time is up, but I will finish talking about the violence we're experiencing. Thank you.
We are telling you we are being robbed. We are being—