Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak today.
I'll start by introducing myself. My name is Jessica Stone, and I'm the project manager of the supporting workers' autonomy project Yukon at the Yukon Status of Women Council. We are located on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council.
Our project provides direct services to people who trade sex in the Yukon, and we predominantly serve indigenous women, who inform and guide our project.
I'm going to speak today to the harms that emerge when we use bad or non-existent data to inform our understanding, our frameworks, our systems, our policies and our laws.
Many witnesses before this committee are testifying for the need for policy-makers to differentiate between sex work and trafficking. When gender-based violence data is produced through a framework that conflates sex work and trafficking, all sex work is understood and defined as violence.
To be clear, we are not suggesting changes to the human trafficking laws per se, but we are asking to stop using the language of human trafficking in these studies to understand a broad range of violence. This conflation is not simply performative. By calling so many different kinds of violence “human trafficking”, you are obscuring the realities of those different kinds of violence. The human trafficking approach does not recognize the layered and complex violence that sex workers experience, most of which is not human trafficking. This causes harm in a multitude of ways.
Firstly, bad data practices are amplified. There is a fundamental difference between the act of sex work and the act of violence against a sex worker. Secondly, by requiring sex workers to identify as victims of trafficking to receive support, the data gets skewed. In turn, the number of people who are reported as being trafficked gets inflated. This invisibilizes the realities of human trafficking and enables an increase in funding towards anti-trafficking initiatives and policing, which then perpetuates this cycle.
This is a critical point for this committee to recognize in their recommendations: Human trafficking cannot be used as a framework for such a broad range of violent experiences.
Sex workers have agency to do sex work, and sex workers also experience violence. Sex work laws need to be repealed in order for violence against sex workers to be reduced. This is a clear recommendation to this committee. Autonomy and agency are consistently ignored with respect to sex work, and this hypocritical framework deters people who sell sex from accessing safety. It deters them from reporting occurrences of gender-based violence and enables the continual haemorrhaging of taxpayer dollars into systems that are largely ineffective.
Lastly, the anti-trafficking narratives used not only within this committee but within policies and practices at large are rooted in racist, infantilizing language and ideologies. Without addressing such colonial and patriarchal origins, indigenous, Black, migrant and other racialized workers will continue to experience a disproportionate amount of harm from the enforcement of these policies.
Indigenous communities have been very clear—police training is not what is needed, but rather support to the communities themselves.
In conclusion, when all violence experienced by sex workers is mislabeled and understood as trafficking, we create a false narrative and we perpetuate harm.
I'm going to break it down very simply here. There is a conflation between sex work and trafficking in the law and the application of a human trafficking framework. This conflation enables continued bad data collection practices that in turn emerge into harmful practices and policies. The process that I'm describing here is self-reinforcing. It's a process that is essentially flawed by virtue of its being a closed system that fortifies itself.
From a logical standpoint it is invalid. From a methodological standpoint it is ineffective. The very thing that's required to build systems, policies and programs that have meaningful impact to reduce harm—that is, accurate and reliable information about the lived experience of people—are negated by this conflation of sex work and trafficking. We see this parallel phenomenon in the north often, where the lack of access to good, reliable data reinforces the continual building of bad or ineffective systems.
If we do not have an accurate picture of the violence experienced by sex workers, we are going to continue to be unable to be effective in addressing it. Sex workers have repeatedly voiced the need to stop conflating sex work and trafficking. Sex workers are clear in reporting how violence is enacted upon them and who the violence is largely stemming from. If government and law enforcement are named as perpetrators of violence, there needs to be accountability from stakeholders and meaningful engagement with sex workers to create effective policy, law and supports that seek to reduce harm, not create it.
Thank you. I look forward to the opportunity to answer your questions.