Committee
Consult the user guide
For assistance, please contact us
Consult the user guide
For assistance, please contact us
Add search criteria
Results: 1 - 10 of 10
Trisha Baptie
View Trisha Baptie Profile
Trisha Baptie
2021-06-22 11:32
Thank you so much for having me.
I just found out I was going to do this late last week, so like the speaker before me, I have notes that are a little cobbled together. I hope you'll have patience.
Six minutes is not enough time, but I hope I have constructed something vaguely coherent here.
I am speaking to you from Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Traditionally, for the last 20 years or so, events have been started by acknowledging the traditional lands on which we stand, which I think is a good tradition to remind us of where we are, but as non-indigenous people speaking to those who look like me, this acknowledgement needs to drive us to look further into the history of where we are. Traditional territory acknowledgement is a not-so-subtle code for stolen land, and today especially, as we discuss indigenous women and girls, it is imperative for settlers to understand how stealing land equates with the complete destabilization of indigenous people, and particularly women and girls. We need to sit with these words, clearly identifying the issues and how it feeds into the topic we will be discussing.
I want to state clearly, for the record, that I am not an indigenous woman. The father of one of my sons is from a band in [Technical difficulty—Editor], but I cannot speak from an indigenous experience. I can, however, speak to what I have lived through with my friends and their families as they invited me into their lives, as well as about the amazing people I have met all over the country as I do this work. I can speak to the abuses I saw my friends suffer at the hands of police, social workers, and men and society at large.
I'm going to quickly explain who I am. I am a survivor of government care. I was apprehended just before my 13th birthday, which was also when I was exposed to the world of trafficking and prostitution. I would get out at 28, with a total 15 years of being exploited. Some of my friends are still being sexually exploited.
So many of my friends and I started being sexually exploited as minors. I find it infuriating that there are those who wish to draw an arbitrary line—say, at 18—for when girls and women choose prostitution. I would like them to tell me what we could have accessed and how we could have gotten out of that lifestyle. Being Caucasian, I had one or two extra options, but my aboriginal friends had few, if any, options that would have saved them from the violent ongoing sexual exploitation.
We lost loved ones to a serial killer and lived through horrors I will not go into. I was a citizen journalist at the Pickton trial, and my CV can go on for quite a while.
We have a question before us, although it is written like a statement. Why is sex trafficking among indigenous people so high, when they do not make up a high percentage of the population? What if we did not look at that question, actually? We know why. Women and girls are trafficked to meet the male-driven demand for paid sex. They are more vulnerable because on their territories, or in the case of the high numbers of youth who find themselves in foster care, life can be horrible, and they [Technical difficulty—Editor].
What if we flipped the whole question and conversation and asked why we think men should be able to pay for sex? Where is the legal binding policy or human right that states that men paying for sex is a protected act? How does allowing any Canadian man to pay for sex help create a safer society for indigenous women and girls—or anyone, for that matter?
We keep sex consensual by not commodifying it, and PCEPA helps us do this.
I am a big policy law person. I quite like the finite details, so I really want to talk about the challenge to Canada's prostitution laws that's happening right now in Ontario, because it would affect not only all women but particularly indigenous women and girls. In Ontario, they would like to strike down impeding traffic, which is section 213; public communication, which is subsection 213(1.1); purchasing, which is the buying of sex; materially benefiting, or making money off the prostitution of someone else; and recruiting. They want recruiting decriminalized.
Whose neighbourhood would we have street prostitution in? I live in a poor neighbourhood. That's where they go: my neighbourhood. Whose schools or job fairs will the recruitment tables be at? Where will the billboards be? Pretty much all of the prostitution provisions they're looking at are predatory, because they rely on a third party making money recruiting, selling and advertising—a third party. Also, it's all young women, right? We're not talking about educated 40-year-old women secure in their careers; we're talking about marginalized, vulnerable youth. We need to really be thinking about that.
Now prostitution is euphemistically called being a “sugar baby” or something like that, but the core of it is the same: men taking advantage of women. Pimps and traffickers would become businessmen. If the tearing down of the Criminal Code happens, all of this will be legitimate exploitation and abuse. All these laws stop the parasitical and predatory benefiting from another's abuse. PCEPA benefited women and anyone being sold, because it changed the way they were viewed. They were supposed to get assistance.
I know that my time is done and I don't want to go over. I know there are a lot of other people. I'm just going to say two last things.
There was never a time in my friendships, which I have to this day with my friends who are indigenous, that I wasn't aware that we were treated differently because of the way we look. That's a really bad feeling, but I learned really early in life how to try to interject myself into situations, if I could, to benefit from the way I looked. Women and girls who are being exploited, who are at risk for trafficking and who live around man camps and resource extraction sites and live with that very real threat every day need intervention that benefits them, not anyone else. That's my last little item.
I know that my time here is done, but there's so much to say, so I'm going to end with this. Indigenous people—women, girls, my friends and loved ones—deserve a million times better than the way they live today. I mean, no clean water? How can we fight human trafficking if we're still fighting for water?
I want to live the rest of my life without burying one more friend. Now we are burying daughters, unfortunately.
If things don't drastically change, if indigenous people aren't given what they need to recover from the trauma that haunts them daily and given what is rightfully theirs, and if Canada does not bend to the ways of its original keepers rather than demanding adherence to colonial ways, things won't change, and I will bury more friends. That rips my heart out.
Thank you.
Bridget Perrier
View Bridget Perrier Profile
Bridget Perrier
2021-06-22 11:43
Aaniin.
First I'd like to acknowledge that I am standing here on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, who fall under the Two Row Wampum Treaty.
I represent Sextrade101 and the many Anishinabe women and girls who are enslaved in prostitution and/or trafficked.
My name is Wasayakwe. My English name is Bridget Perrier. I was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and put up for adoption. I was adopted by a good family who tried to raise me the best way possible, but as I got older the effects of colonialism, intergenerational trauma and child sexual abuse made me a perfect candidate for prostitution.
I was lured and debased into prostitution at the age of 12 from a child welfare-run group home. I remained enslaved for 10 years in prostitution. I was sold to men who felt privileged to steal my innocence and invade my body. I was paraded like cattle in front of men who were able to purchase me, and the acts that I did were something no little girl should ever have to endure here in Canada, the land of the free.
Because of the men, I cannot have a child normally, because of trauma to my cervix. Still to this day I have nightmares, and sometimes I sleep with the lights on. My trauma is deep, and sometimes I feel as though I'm frozen—or even worse, I feel damaged and not worthy.
I was traded in legal establishments, street corners and strip clubs. I even had a few trips across the Great Lakes servicing ship men at the age of 13. The scariest thing that happened to me was, at 14 years of age, being held captive for a period of 43 hours and raped and tortured repeatedly by a sexual predator who preyed on exploited girls.
My exploiters made a lot of money and tried to break me, but I fought for my life. My first pimp was a woman who owned a legal brothel, where I was groomed to say that I was her niece or her daughter's friend, if the police ever asked. My second pimp was introduced to me when I was in Toronto. I was a prostitute for money. He was supposed to be a bodyguard, but that turned out to be one big lie. Both are out there still, doing the same thing to more little girls somewhere here in Canada.
After many years, I was able to exit prostitution and rebuild my life, and with that, my education became a tool. I was recognized for my tenacity and my strength, and I am now able to be an asset to my community and my people. I am a mother, grandmother, activist and warrior woman. Now my experiences may be sacrificial at times, but I am doing them for Canada's Anishinabe women and girls who are being bought and sold, who have disappeared or been murdered.
We must look at who is doing this. It is the men.
I have a letter. The birth mom of my oldest daughter was murdered by Robert Pickton, and my daughter asked me to read this to you.
Dear Senate,
My name is Angel Wolfe. My birth mom's name is Brenda Wolfe. My mom was murdered by Robert Pickton.
Her murder was one of the first six that he was charged with. I was six years old when she was murdered and nine years old when her jaw bone was found in a pig trough. I am one of the 98 orphans who were left behind because of that monster.
I do blame the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP. I believe that Bills such as [PCEPA] will save vulnerable women like my mom. I'm sickened that my mom's death has been used to legitimize such indignity and sadness.
I'm also sickened by the term “the Pickton bill”. It's insulting and a slap in the face to the 98 orphans, and the organizations and the prosex work lobby movement should be really ashamed for speaking on behalf of the families who lost their loved ones.
I blame prostitution, addiction & mental Illness for my mother's death, and on behalf of the 98 orphans, we do not want our mothers' deaths to be the reason prostitution is legitimized.
I will make it my mission in life to carry her story and educate people about addictions, prostitution and the murdered and the missing.
Sincerely, Angel Wolfe
PCEPA will protect my daughters and granddaughters and other young native girls from predator sex buyers who have the nerve to solicit in public. Just last week, I was in Thunder Bay where buying vulnerable women is not on the agenda of their police department or MAG or any other organization.
If prostitution were such a healthy path, then why are the sex buyers not telling their wives, girlfriends and families that they use or have used sexual services from prostitutes?
Sextrade101 believes that prostitution is not a choice, but it's lack of choice that keeps women and girls enslaved. We believe that everybody should be shown a viable way out of the sex trade and not be encouraged to stay in it. We believe in helping people understand the full price of life in prostitution before they become involved and in helping women get out alive with their minds, bodies, and spirits intact. We have all been collectively afraid, raped, beaten, sold, disregarded. Most of us were also children who were forgotten, neglected, abused, used, led astray, abandoned and not protected.
Sextrade101 members and advocates are current and former prostituted women. We have a huge concern with the criminalization of prostituted women and girls. We have seen that diversion programs for prostituted women and girls are not the only the solution for everyone. We also have seen that a lot of money has gone out for support services, but we're still in this kind of silo.
Some 85% of Sextrade101 advocates and members have experienced pimp violence. This is pretty far from the picture painted by the Supreme Court of Canada, which is that pimps are nice guys. These pimps and sex buyers are the problem. They're the ones who abuse and in some cases kill.
I supported my daughter throughout the missing women inquiry, and the outcome was this: Our mothers, sisters, and daughters are not born to be used and sold for men's sexual needs. We are not commodities.
Also, we want to talk about linguistics. There's nothing in the native language, in indigenous languages, that describes selling sex, so if it's not in our language, it's not for our women.
I applaud former minister MacKay for the creation of Bill C‑36, because he recognized the inherent dangers and abuses for those who are prostituted. That bill was a victory for survivors and those who are stuck in a vicious cycle of indignity and pain.
We need to look at the numbers, which show that 52% of human trafficking victims are native and that the average age of exploitation for a native girl is 12 years of age. Ninety-eight per cent of the women that Sextrade101 has worked with have said that they have wanted out at some point.
As a sex trade survivor, I thank you so much for giving me the honour of speaking on behalf of the survivors in Sextrade101 and all the Anishinabe survivors across Canada, whether they are still in or have exited.
What we're seeing now is the increase of girls using social media as a tool for their exploitation, only as sugar babies, as Trisha pointed out, there is now a niche for native girls. When I was in the game, we never said we were native, because we knew if we said we were native, we would be in trouble. We would be in trouble by being assaulted or whatever, so we hid our identities.
Just last week I had a young woman from northern Ontario sleeping on my couch because the treatment centre that we paid $20,000 for to get private drug and alcohol treatment took one look at her and said she wasn't fit for their program. We had nowhere to send her, and at that moment, after 15 years of injecting drugs, she just wanted.... She was done. We had to think outside the box and figure out something radically fast.
I've seen a lot of money going into this, and not a lot of action. We don't have a safe house for indigenous women here in Ontario. We have a lot of religious-run safe houses, and I'm sorry, it's not a fit for my girls, my indigenous girls. I always get emails. Every week I get this “Hi, Bridget, we feel that this survivor fits your criteria.” Why? It's because she's indigenous and she's opened her mouth and said what she feels is best for her.
I don't know where to put them. I don't know where to put them, and I'm putting my children at risk by having them in my home, but I can't send them anywhere else, so we have this girl right now who has had 15 hard-core years on the street. She survived an attempted murder. I can tell her story and sit here and say, “Holy cow, she's doing good.” We have her in a bush camp and she's off drugs, and that's a big accomplishment. I told her that in 35 days your brain will retrain itself.
We're in crisis. I was in Thunder Bay, and they're buying women left, right and centre. The Thunder Bay police don't want to be burdened with the issue of exploitation, and they don't even want to admit that there's human trafficking going on. The pretty native girls are being farmed to southern Ontario and trafficked along the Golden Horseshoe.
What I'm seeing now, and Trisha is saying this, is that we're burying our daughters. I'm seeing girls that I was out there in the trenches with, and now it's daughters. It's intergenerational. If we don't help them figure out their potential, we're creating room for the new generation. It's happening. I'm now seeing grandma, mom and grandchild. Let's add fuel with a pandemic and now an opioid crisis, and we have the perfect brewing pot for exploitation.
When a prostituted indigenous woman is murdered, we see what happens. It's the Cindy Gladues and everything.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that we're in crisis here, and especially in northern Ontario. I'm only in northern Ontario for one week out of the month. I go to Thunder Bay. That's my job. Nobody knows where to go, and the people who are providing frontline help are putting themselves in harm's way to help women exit. If we just had a place to send them, like a one-stop shop, it would be so much easier.
What we're trying to do at Sextrade101 is mentor them. We don't have core funding like that. We have to get funding through another organization, but to this day, our recidivism rate back into prostitution is only at 4%. Obviously we're doing something right.
With that, I'll say meegwetch, and I'm up for questions.
Thank you.
Janet Gobert
View Janet Gobert Profile
Janet Gobert
2021-06-22 11:57
My name is Janet Gobert, and I am of Ojibwa descent from the Peepeekasis first nation in Saskatchewan.
I currently serve as the community initiatives coordinator with the Bonnyville Canadian Native Friendship Centre located in Bonnyville, Alberta, which I acknowledge is Treaty 6 territory and is a traditional gathering place for many indigenous people.
The Bonnyville Canadian Native Friendship Centre is dedicated to bridging the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people culturally, socially, economically and recreationally by promoting communication and delivering effective programming within our community.
In 2020, I acknowledged a gap in service provision that could be addressed by a project called Iskwew Iskowtew, or “where women heal by fire”. It implements promising prevention and intervention practices that advance knowledge and enhance empowerment supports for at-risk populations and survivors of human trafficking in the Bonnyville and Lakeland region.
The objective of this program is to reduce violence against women and human trafficking through evidence-based programming, which includes, but is not limited to, providing a safe haven where clients will have access to relevant programming and support services. Utilizing a wraparound approach, our holistic crisis support mentor, peer support worker, indigenous wellness worker and critical incident stress management coordinator deliver consistent programming with traditional knowledge keepers who share their understanding on site in addition to providing access to land-based activities and cultural ceremonies.
During the development of this program, I acknowledged that assisting indigenous women and girls transitioning out of sex work would require the support of numerous organizations within the community to address issues such as education, housing, employment, mental health and substance abuse issues. Hence, a board indicative of the aforementioned was established.
It was noted within our meetings that there are three essential components that are necessary to the creation of social and political change within the sex trade. These are social services, law enforcement and community education. I would like to address the latter.
With regard to our service area, it was identified that our program needed to concentrate on community education. Within our community and surrounding area, human trafficking is not acknowledged, and this is a barrier that we need to overcome. It was duly noted that opening this Pandora's box within the community would need to be navigated with accurate information, education and promotional tools in order to be effective. This component of our program will be executed no later than September of 2021, with continued ways of change in its wake.
The debate that surrounds laws and regulations placed upon prostitution-related offences is rooted within a framework that distinguishes prostitution as either sex work or sex trafficking. As the former represents a choice in regard to prostitution, the latter represents forcible containment within the sex trade. As legal responses to prostitution-related activities vary depending on a community's social, political and economic commitments, criminalizing sex trafficking victims renders their experiences of violence and labour exploitation less visible, thus producing a tendency to discount the human rights of women involved in sex trafficking.
As sex trafficking in Canada is inherently harmful and dangerous, specifically towards indigenous girls and women, a public policy change must be enacted in order to address such issues. The issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is a sociological phenomenon in Canada that is entrenched within Canadian policies, laws and institutions. In Canada, indigenous women and girls form only 2% of the total population, yet they constitute 16% of the total population of women who are murdered or go missing.
Traffickers choose vulnerable, exploited women because they are perceived as expendable, thus reducing them to the status of a mere sex object rather than an actual human being. Often we have victim-blamed these women for their own murders due to their high-risk lifestyle, such as working in the sex trade, whether by force or by choice.
By creating a program in the Lakeland region that addresses issues such as education, employment, housing, mental health and treatment services, we make it much simpler to create an exit strategy for women within the sex trade. As indigenous women and girls in Canada face these socio-economic issues, this project could help to reduce the rate at which these women are involved in human trafficking, go missing or are murdered.
Finally, the lack of knowledge surrounding sex trafficking and the laws that pertain to its origin are why it is so difficult to detect the sex trade as well as to exit from it. It is integral to understand that these women live their lives in the community as grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters and friends.
I would like to thank each one of you for this opportunity to share our new program initiative with you.
Thank you.
Cherry Smiley
View Cherry Smiley Profile
Cherry Smiley
2021-06-17 11:17
Thank you for inviting me to speak on this topic and thank you for studying this very difficult issue.
My name is Cherry Smiley. I'm from the Nlaka'pamux Nation in B.C. and the Navajo Nation in the southwestern United States. I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University, where my research works to help end male violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada, including prostitution. I'm the founder of Women's Studies Online, a decolonizing educational platform for research, education and action.
As part of my doctoral project, I did field work in Canada and New Zealand on prostitution. Before beginning the Ph.D. program, I worked at a rape crisis centre and transition house for battered women and their children.
There is, of course, a lot to say. I know that my friends here today, and the others who've spoken before this committee, have given a solid overview of the dire circumstances of indigenous women and girls in Canada related to sexual exploitation.
I will address two topics today. First, I'm going to talk about the difference between sex trafficking, prostitution and sex work. Secondly, I'm going to talk about issues when it comes to doing research on sex trafficking. I'll conclude by making some recommendations.
Language matters. This issue is a controversial and political one. The term “sex work” implies that some women are obligated to provide “sexual services” to men for money. This is not a term I use and I hope most others don't use this term here either.
Janine Benedet has described the difference between prostitution and sex trafficking as follows: Sex trafficking always involves a third party—a trafficker, a pimp or a brothel owner—while prostitution can, but doesn't necessarily involve a third party.
Prostitution and sex trafficking are more similar than they are different. The impacts on women bought and sold are the same. The men who purchase sex acts from these women and girls are the same. The men don't care how she got there.
Secondly, sex work researchers try to make a distinction between chosen sex work and forced sex trafficking. This isn't a realistic or helpful way to look at the issue. What it ends up doing, actually, is harming victims.
Sex work researchers have adopted a very anti-woman and anti-feminist theory of sex trafficking that narrowly constructs a false perfect victim. It is a woman who, for example, may not speak English or who is kept locked to a bed in chains. There is absolutely no doubt that women are sexually exploited in this way. I've met women who have been exploited in that way. In the same way that patriarchy has constructed a false narrative of the perfect rape victim who fights off her rapist in just the right way, or the perfect battered woman who, of course, never goes back to her battering husband, few women, if any, would fit the definition of the perfect sex trafficking victim.
Does this mean that women haven't been sex trafficked? No, it doesn't. This means, actually, that there's a profound and, I would argue, deliberate lack of understanding about male violence against women and a lack of feminist research being conducted on this issue today.
We've already seen what's happened in New Zealand. A lack of understanding about male violence against women has resulted in the decriminalization of men who pimp and buy women. In turn, this means that women who don't very obviously and distinctly label themselves as trafficking victims and accept whatever help comes their way aren't trafficking victims.
Trafficking doesn't exist in New Zealand, according to the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective. This is an outright lie. Sex trafficking absolutely does exist in New Zealand, only the police have less ability to investigate potential cases of trafficking. Cases of sex trafficking are reclassified as family violence, for example, to bolster false claims that decriminalizing men who pimp and purchase sex acts helps women in prostitution. Women and girls who are in prostitution and who have been sex trafficked have no support services available to them. There are no exiting services in New Zealand. Services for women who have been assaulted by men in New Zealand aren't equipped to work with women who have been sex trafficked or prostituted, because they don't understand prostitution as a form of male violence. It's simply a job like any other.
I'll conclude by saying that sex trafficking and prostitution are linked. One of my recommendations, like that of Diane Redsky, is that we keep and improve on the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act.
Buying sex must remain illegal, and women must not be punished for their prostitution. If PCEPA is repealed, we as a country say that it's okay to purchase that group of women in prostitution over there but not this group of trafficked women over here, and that's just completely unacceptable.
We also need a guaranteed livable income. We saw how quickly the government recognized the economic impact of the pandemic on Canadians and acted accordingly. A guaranteed livable income recognizes the economic impacts of patriarchy on women in Canada and acts accordingly. Women must have more economic options that don't include sucking dicks for 10 bucks.
The third recommendation I'll make is that, while culturally relevant services are essential, what's more essential is that non-indigenous organizations and indigenous organizations have a feminist understanding of the impacts of colonization on indigenous women and girls. There's a whole body of knowledge out there that feminists have created on male violence against women, and this is where we need to start.
Feminism is the only theory, practice and social-political movement that always prioritizes women and girls, and we need to learn about this and put into practice a feminist understanding of sex trafficking and prostitution. Without this understanding, it's too easy to blame and shame women and girls for their prostitution and too easy to let men off the hook for their unacceptable behaviour.
Without this feminist foundation, even culturally relevant services won't be of much service to sex-trafficked women and girls. As my friend Fay Blaney mentioned the other day, we need core funding for autonomous indigenous women's organizations so that we can do this work and do it more easily than we do now—on shoestring budgets or, in my case and in the case of many other women, with no budget at all.
Last, patriarchy and what Adrienne Rich and Carole Pateman call the “male sex right” are the sources of harm in sex trafficking and in prostitution. In addition to preventative programs aimed at girls and women, we need preventative programs aimed at boys and men to stop them from sexualizing women and girls, feeling entitled to do so and exploiting them in the first place.
Sex trafficking and prostitution are issues of sex-based inequality. Men are overwhelmingly the buyers, and women and girls are overwhelmingly the sellers of sex acts, so we need to approach this issue using feminist theory.
My final recommendations are to stop watching porn and perhaps, for example, to propose that MPs and others in government pledge not to pay for sex acts from any women or girl, trafficked or not. Treating all women with respect is a reasonable requirement of leadership in Canada.
Thank you.
View Arnold Viersen Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you, witnesses, for being here today. I really appreciate your testimony.
Ms. Smiley, perhaps we could just dig into the situation in New Zealand a little bit more. That's really interesting. The situation in New Zealand is similar to Canada's in terms of having a similar kind of basis in law. I'm just wondering how changes in law in New Zealand have affected their first nations communities.
I know that Maori indigenous people account for a percentage of New Zealand's population that is about the same as the percentage within Canada's population of first nations, Inuit and Métis. The correlation is fairly similar, other than the fact that New Zealand is an island nation and not right next to the United States.
I'm just wondering if you can outline a little bit how laws have changed there and what the effect on the indigenous population has been.
Cherry Smiley
View Cherry Smiley Profile
Cherry Smiley
2021-06-17 11:26
Sure.
I spent almost four months in New Zealand researching prostitution and the changes in the law they had there. They fully decriminalized. They decriminalized women in prostitution, but they also decriminalized the pimps, the men who sell women and the sex buyers.
The thing I noticed most in what I learned in New Zealand was that sex work does work if you're a man who wants to exploit women. It really doesn't work for women. I met with women who had tried five, six, seven times to leave prostitution and they couldn't, because there were no services that recognized the trauma of being in that circumstance day after day after day. You're being penetrated by however many men every day. That's your job. You do it, whether you feel like it or not.
Definitely Maori women have not benefited at all from the decriminalization laws there. There's ample evidence that you're seeing more Maori children or Maori girls entering into street prostitution at a younger age.
I know that there's a challenge coming. A Maori woman and an ally of hers are challenging the prostitution legislation, claiming that the prostitution legislation didn't consult with indigenous women before it was implemented—which they didn't.
In New Zealand, there's this cover.... There are so many people there who are afraid to say anything. They were afraid to speak with me. They were afraid that people were going to find out that they were critical of prostitution, or they had questions or doubts. It was incredibly difficult. You have the government. You have non-profit organizations. You have women's organizations. Everybody has kind of come together and decided that sex work is work, so there are consequences for women who have doubts about that.
What we hear coming out of New Zealand is overwhelmingly positive, but the reality is not that at all.
View Arnold Viersen Profile
CPC (AB)
I know that the average trafficking victim raises or is worth about $320,000 a year. There's a lot of money in the sex trafficking world. How do we get that money out of the system? How do we end that demand? That's the big question.
Do you have any comments around that?
Cherry Smiley
View Cherry Smiley Profile
Cherry Smiley
2021-06-17 12:26
It is a big question. I think there are a lot of moving parts, but we absolutely cannot legalize and sanction that industry. It will not get the money out of the industry if we decide, okay, we'll just make it legal and fully decriminalize it, with brothels everywhere, as they do in New Zealand. Organized crime is very tied up in that, and it's a little bit easier for them now. They can function legally. They're businessmen. They're not pimps anymore. They're brothel owners. They have business associations like other businesses do. It has become that much easier for them to function and to move that money around.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you, Chair.
Ms. Skye, I'm really struggling with understanding this divide that I've been hearing through testimony for the past several witnesses and days. We've heard testimony that there is a difference between sex work and human trafficking.
Adding the layer of the colonial history of Canada and its impacts on indigenous people, how do we balance a response? We're hearing two sides. How do they come together, or how do you work on these two approaches simultaneously?
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 12:37
I think that's really important. It's a huge struggle all right, because there are different people who have different experiences and different advocates and organizations that view how to best support women.
I think it's important to recognize, because there is an emerging dichotomy between the types of services people are willing to access. There's an increasing stigma around certain women's organizations and certain support networks that aren't necessarily accessible to women who are engaging in sex work and who are looking for oversight and regulation.
If we're looking at what kinds of policy approaches and regulation might exist around different types of places or industries where there's a suspicion that there is trafficking or exploitation existing within them—whether they be massage parlours, strip clubs or the like that are legal and operate under municipal regulations across Canada—we look towards strong regulation, we look towards sex workers as workers and ensure that they have workers' rights and stigma-free access to employment standards and employment supports that are accessible for workers. There should be ways that they connect and have barrier-free services and, if we do have a genuine interest in supporting women who have this experience, again, it comes back to the other supports and services that are necessary and that exist outside of making it less safe for other women to engage in sex work.
We're looking at things like basic income, accessible services and an increase in the number of shelter services across the country. Right now there are over 600 first nations in Canada that don't have access to a women's shelter and don't have women's shelters in their communities. Those are the kinds of solutions that need to be balanced with the kind of moral judgment that comes with discussing this topic.
Results: 1 - 10 of 10

Export As: XML CSV RSS

For more data options, please see Open Data