For migrant women in the sex industry, Canada’s anti-human-trafficking strategies are a pipeline to harm

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Elene Lam is the executive director of Butterfly, a support network for Asian and migrant sex workers, and a sessional assistant professor at York University. Chanelle Gallant is an organizer and co-author, with Ms. Lam, of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice.

The Canadian federal government’s five-year strategy to combat human trafficking expires this year, and Ontario’s strategy will expire in 2025. Both the federal Liberals and Ontario Conservatives claim that their governments have made progress in addressing human trafficking. But we are advocates who have worked with migrants in the sex industry for two decades, and the stories they continue to tell us are not of being rescued from human traffickers by the police. Instead, they recount the terror of being targeted by anti-trafficking “rescue raids” – being surveilled, interrogated and strip-searched; having their wages, phones and passports seized by the police; and being placed in jail cells or immigration detention centres before being deported.

Stories about human trafficking are everywhere, but what do we actually know about human trafficking and how to prevent it? Having worked with people who have experienced violence and exploitative working conditions in the sex industry, what we find from the stories they tell us is that they share many of the same experiences as migrant workers who have faced sexual assault and wage theft from unscrupulous bosses across other industries in Canada. The challenges facing migrant sex workers are the direct result of them being racialized migrants with no rights or resources. They operate underground, isolated and without adequate protections, not because they are controlled by traffickers, but because they are hiding from the police.

In our book Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, we uncover the extensive harms of anti-trafficking measures and how they are designed to target migrants in the sex industry, as well as Asian massage parlours, regardless of whether the massage workers provide sexual services. Massage and sex workers are routinely criminalized, and can be deported via anti-trafficking laws, immigration policies and municipal bylaws, which makes them vulnerable to everything from wage theft to domestic violence, and prevents them from accessing any health and safety protections at work. They can’t report unsafe workplaces, or organize for better treatment, and they have no legal right to challenge a boss who is breaking employment laws. Workers whom we interviewed in the process of writing our book have described how they have been taken advantage of by managers, who would remind them that they had precarious immigration status. Some told us that they avoided even placing a call to a domestic-violence hotline for fear of being reported to police as suspected trafficking victims, and getting investigated for sex work and immigration offences as a result.

Scholars and human-rights organizations around the world have documented the ways in which anti-trafficking campaigns and policies have actually put sex workers in danger, and have increased their vulnerability to abuse and exploitation. And it’s clear why sex workers are far less likely to seek help in reporting unsafe working conditions when we consider what anti-trafficking efforts typically look like. For example, police investigators rarely find human trafficking in the massage sector, but this doesn’t stop raids from happening at parlours, and it doesn’t prevent women who may already be victims of their managers or clients from having sex-work and immigration-related charges laid against them. One woman described to us how she was arrested, detained in leg and wrist chains, and had $10,000 in savings seized before being refused bail by a judge who claimed that keeping her locked up would protect her from her traffickers. In the name of “protection,” these women often lose their jobs and, without a way to earn money, become even more vulnerable. Some even describe being sexually abused by police and immigration officers. The federal and Ontario governments’ talk of “tackling human trafficking” and protecting victims hides the reality: that anti-trafficking policing criminalizes migrants in the sex industry and violates their human rights and dignity. They are harmed, not protected.

In spite of this, we have watched as more and more sectors of society feel obligated to be involved in combatting human trafficking, including corporations, non-profits and governments. Governments are a major player: They allocate the funding and pass policies and laws that criminalize sex workers in the name of combatting the trafficking problem.

We have worked with agencies in Canada that genuinely care about human-trafficking victims and don’t realize that trafficking laws criminalize sex workers. But there are also anti-trafficking agencies that want to prohibit the sex industry at any cost, even if it endangers the rights and safety of sex workers. Other anti-trafficking agencies want to discourage migrants from entering the sex industry so that they will take the jobs that other Canadians don’t want, such as positions in long-term care homes. And whether it is intended or not, human-trafficking prevention results in more funding for police and border control, making less funding available for social programs such as education, housing and health care. Anti-trafficking laws also result in more police power, such as Bill 251, Ontario’s Combating Human Trafficking Act, which in 2021 authorized broad new investigative powers for police inspectors.

In 2021, more than 300 migrant massage and sex workers showed up to Toronto’s City Hall to insist that they are not helpless trafficking victims, but instead are workers demanding rights, not rescue. So when the federal and Ontario government anti-trafficking strategies expire, we hope they will not renew them and instead listen to migrant sex workers’ voices and support sex workers’ rights, as well as migrant workers’ rights.