Racialized, Gendered, and Sensationalized: An examination of Canadian anti-trafficking laws, their enforcement, and their (re)presentation

Abstract

In Canada, there are persistent allegations and some empirical evidence suggesting racialized police bias; certain (non-White) groups appear to face over-enforcement as criminal suspects and under-enforcement as victims. Yet, it is challenging to prove or disprove these claims. Unlike other countries, where governments routinely publish police-reported crime and criminal court data identifying the race/ethnicity of criminal suspects and victims, Canada maintains a ban on the publication of such data. In this article, using an intersectional and critical analysis, we examine 127 prosecuted (predominantly domestic sex) trafficking cases and explore related claims of racial and gender bias together with sensationalism in the enforcement of Canadian anti-trafficking in persons laws. Our findings align with other empirical research observing the racially selective identification and prosecution of sex trafficking cases through a heteronormative and gender binary lens. Whether real or perceived, racial—alongside gender, sexuality, economic, citizenship, and occupational—bias has significant adverse consequences for the equality, liberty, security, mobility, labour, and access to justice rights of the Indigenous, Black, Arab/Muslim and other racialized communities being policed. Our data reveal a clear and pressing need to publish race-disaggregated crime and criminal court data and to challenge deeply ingrained stereotypes using various means.

The protection of whose communities? : A comparative municipal case study of sex work bylaws & their enforcement in the wake of Bill C-36

“…This panic was and continues to be primarily directed towards human trafficking for the purposes of the sex trade. Millar and O'Doherty (2020) explain, "In Canada, the conflation of human trafficking and prostitution and a consequential reductive narrative that trafficking is mostly, if not entirely, related to sexual exploitation, serves to invisibilize the multiplicity of other forms of trafficking" (p. 26). The Domotor case in conjunction with the release of damning provincial statistics on human trafficking, in which the country's "two most populous provinces (Ontario and Quebec) account for approximately 85%" of trafficking charges (Millar & O'Doherty, 2020, p. 29), began to paint the province as a nexus of human trafficking rings in Canada.…”

“…While the fight against human trafficking is of grave import, the vast sums of funding and the intensity with which anti-trafficking policies have taken root in Ontario have produced correspondingly negative effects for licensed indoor sex workers in Toronto. With Ontario being pinpointed as a hotbed of incidentsdue to Ontario and Quebec accounting for approximately 85% of trafficking charges nationwide (Millar & O'Doherty, 2020) efforts to curb this crime have incurred a spike in bylaw enforcements and inspections marked by sexist, racist, and other derogatory harassments towards licensed indoor sex workers in Toronto. Despite fewer recorded instances of human trafficking in BC, the province's increased focus on anti-trafficking initiatives has had an analogous effect on racialized sex workers in Vancouver.…”

“…Stigmatization in the form of an increase in the frequency and invasiveness of enforcements is markedly rising for im/migrant sex workers (SWAN, 2018). Millar and O'Doherty (2020), suggest that enforcement practices of sex workers vary depending on skin colour and thus question "whether the Canadian criminal justice system effectively 'protects' the safety and security interests of racialized and marginalized groups, especially migrant, Indigenous, and Black sex workers" (p. 25).…”

Courting Victims: Exploring the Legal Framing of Exploitation in Human Trafficking Cases

“…At the same time, it constructs (the mostly male) legal actors as the standard of reasonableness, leaving room to label the experiences of (the mostly female) complainants as “subjective,” fallible, and incapable of recognizing exploitation (or calling it something else), even in cases when they might directly experience it. Though race is not explicitly referenced in the cases discussed above, Millar and O’Doherty (2020b) show that the enforcement of human trafficking also tends to reproduce narratives of the racialized “trafficker” who exploits young white female victims, which in turn continue to inform how sex trafficking is constituted through a racialized and gendered lens. Such constructions reproduce the now widely debunked nineteenth- and twentieth-century panic around so-called “white slavery,” in which legal and policy interventions sought to rescue young white women from racialized and immigrant men who were purportedly trafficking them (Doezema 1999).…”

A protocol for a qualitative study on sex trafficking: Exploring knowledge, attitudes, and practices of physicians, nurses, and social workers in Ontario, Canada

“…Durisin and van der Meulen [ 9 ] delved into the shift in discourse (i.e., from a focus on international to domestic human trafficking) within Canada’s legislative efforts to end human trafficking. Others have taken a legal perspective such as Millar and O’Doherty [ 10 ]. In the context of predominantly domestic sex trafficking cases, for example, they discussed the ways that anti-trafficking laws overly scrutinize and under protect racial and gender minority groups.…”