Anti-trafficking Efforts and Colonial Violence in Canada

Abstract

In Responding to Human Trafficking: Dispossession, Colonial Violence, and Resistance among Indigenous and Racialized Women, Julie Kaye offers a critical examination of how Canadian state and non-state actors understand human trafficking and implement anti-trafficking measures. Kaye examines Canada’s anti-trafficking policies and the efforts of non-government organisations (NGOs) through one-on-one interviews and focus group discussions. She demonstrates the way in which this politically charged issue has worked to conceal Canada’s violent colonial history and naturalise the inequalities and structural and material conditions in which trafficking and various forms of violence occur. Kaye argues that trafficking discourses position the colonial state as the saviour and therefore work to reinforce its power.

Psychologists as vital frame sponsors in news coverage of human trafficking.

“…Here, their contributions were not about traffickers' coercive tactics and the psychological impacts on victims but rather the peddling and uptake of conspiratorial beliefs that continue to interfere with legitimate antitrafficking efforts. Four years after "Pizzagate," a far-right conspiracy theory alleging (without evidence) that Democrats were operating a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington, DC, pizza parlor (Kline, 2017), social media claims that retailer Wayfair was engaged in a bizarre scheme to traffic children resulted in a glut of calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, compromising legitimate efforts to fight trafficking (Roose, 2020). The nongovernmental organization responsible for operation of the hotline urged the public to "learn more about what human trafficking really looks like in most situations, and about how you can help fight trafficking in your own community" (Polaris, 2020).…”