Attachments to Victimhood: Anti-Trafficking Narratives and the Criminalization of the Sex Trade

Abstract

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.

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

“…Between 2006 and 2018, 1,096 persons were charged in relation to 1,416 trafficking offences, with 82% of those charges being issued after PCEPA was implemented in 2014 (Millar and O’Doherty 2020a, 21). This is likely attributed to several factors, including a more robust conflation between trafficking and sex work, the drastic increase in public funding for anti-trafficking policing and non-governmental organization efforts, the creation of new anti-trafficking units within municipal police forces, and a reframing of sex work regulation away from a nuisance-management strategy and towards a more direct counter-exploitation movement (Sibley 2020).…”

“…Instead, PCEPA relies primarily on framing sex work as exploitative, and thus justifies ongoing criminalization by rendering most sex workers as victims of exploitation (Durisin, van der Meulen, and Bruckert 2018; Sibley 2018, 2020). This poses an inherent challenge for many reasons.…”

Sexarbeit in Deutschland: Zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen

“…Im konservativer werdenden politischen Klima erlebt die neo-abolitionistische Anti-Prostitutions-Bewegung, die alle Prostituierten als Gewaltopfer und "Sklavinnen" ansieht und "retten" will, seit Jahren Aufschwung (Sibley 2020;Weitzer 2020). Hier hat sich weltweit eine regelrechte Rettungsindustrie (rescue industry) entwickelt, die Sexarbeiter:innen jegliche Selbstbestimmung und Handlungsmacht abspricht und sich dafür selbst als allwissend und unverzichtbar inszeniert in ihren Anti-Sexarbeits-Aktionen (Agustín 2017; Ahmed und Seshu 2012).…”

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

“…Instead, PCEPA relies primarily on framing sex work as exploitative, and thus justifies ongoing criminalization by rendering most sex workers as victims of exploitation (Durisin, van der Meulen, and Bruckert 2018;Sibley 2018Sibley , 2020. This poses an inherent challenge for many reasons.…”