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Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford to strike down criminal law provisions related to the regulation of sex work, the government passed Bill C-36, ultimately reaffirming the project of criminalizing prostitution. Also known as the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA), Bill C-36 is part of a global trend that shifts the state’s attention away from regulating sex work as a societal nuisance, and instead, puts forth a carceral agenda which situates sex workers as victims of an inherently exploitative and coercive sex trade – pivoting the punitive elements of criminal law onto clients and mythologized profiteers of the sex trade. Focusing on the testimonies of neo-abolitionists leading up to the implementation of Bill C-36, this article critically explores the ways sex work is constituted as a problem of ‘trafficking’ and how attachments to victimhood allow for renewed criminalization within this new regulatory framework.

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence. While rape culture is not simple, institutional responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause–effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

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The recent changes in Canadian sex work legislation have brought significant attention to the issues of decriminalization. With the implementation of Bill C-36 (Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act) the legislative response to the Bedford decision, the government has re-criminalized sex work. Shifting the attention of the criminal justice system away from those who sell sex to those who purchase sex creates a dynamic that reconstitutes sex workers as vulnerable subjects. How then do sex work advocates and abolitionists play on this notion of vulnerability and its relationship to criminality and risk? Using data collected from the Bedford decision and Bill C-36 House of Commons and Senate hearings, I explore the ways risk and affect serve to reorient our understanding of the risky sex worker subject from that of a societal nuisance to a vulnerable victim or legitimate worker-positions which ultimately reify the grievability of sex workers' lives.