Don't equate sex work with human trafficking
An article in your Aug. 21 edition, “Centre providing support to victims,” states that Nova Scotia has the highest rate of human trafficking in Canada.
On the one hand, this is a shocking claim, and all people concerned about the welfare of women and girls should be concerned. On the other hand, unfortunately, the article is very misleading.
It is one thing to rightly critique the forced or fraudulent trafficking of women and girls into sexual slavery. It is quite another thing to conflate actual human trafficking with consensual sex work.
The reporter uses the terms “sex trade” and “human trafficking” interchangeably without a definition of what is meant by trafficking and what is being reported as human trafficking.
At one point, the author points to factors that lead people to involvement in the sex trade — i.e., lack of housing, poverty and impacts of colonization — and then quotes an advocate clearly trying to humanize people who make this choice by alluding to their own selfdeception: “If you're feeling loved and you're not shamed, regardless of the profession, you're going to stay in that situation as someone who is vulnerable and then you're coming out of that facing the shame of what you've been doing, that's hard.”
A lot needs to be unpacked in this statement. Clearly, the advocate knows that at least some of the people she is referring to choose to work in the sex trade, perhaps even feeling loved and not ashamed by what they're doing.
It's when they leave sex work, for reasons that are not clear in the article, that they then feel ashamed of what they had done.
Why might that be? Could it be the shame emanating from the “rescuers”? Is it because someone convinced them they should be ashamed? Did they buy into the slut-shaming of society at large?
Certainly, for the advocate quoted, sex work is something to be ashamed of, even if sex workers themselves aren't, until coming into contact with their helpers.
I'm sure this is done with all good intentions. But saying to someone, “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” would in fact indicate that you do have something to be ashamed of.
The article states that desperation causes women to enter the sex trade and shame keeps them stuck in it.
First of all, no one should be doing sex work who doesn't want to do it, or out of desperation, and that requires a whole slew of programs and supports to help people who want to get out of sex work get out.
Research indicates that about 10 to 20 per cent of people in the sex trade enter it out of desperation, not choice. Sex work is a lucrative way to make money, so the question then becomes how to replace that income.
The second issue about shame is almost equally difficult to address. We live in a society that still shames women for their sexual activity outside of specific norms, so sex workers face that issue on a daily basis from both the right and left wings of the spectrum. Anti-sex-work feminists might think they are helping women, but continuing to stigmatize sex work stigmatizes the women most of all.
It is a double-edged sword. They believe that sex work is inherently exploitative, but at the same time demonstrate through their words and actions that they believe sex work is something to be ashamed of.
How could this not be communicated to the young women the advocate above is dealing with: How could I do that to myself? How could I let someone do that to me? What issues do I have with self-esteem that would allow this to happen?
These questions all assume that there is something deviant about what she is doing and then that gets replicated by the rescuers and by society at large. Only someone with no self-esteem could do something that low, thereby reinforcing the stigma itself.
Only by challenging the idea that sex work is only done in desperation can we challenge the stigma of sex work. Someone who does not want to do sex work should not be doing sex work, full stop. But those people who do want to do sex work for money, like people working at fast food restaurants, should have legal and labour protections, and we should be at least trying to destigmatize their work, not reinforcing the stigma.