This is the first in a special two-part series on human trafficking that takes a critical deep dive into trafficking discourse, state power, and their impact on migrant and sex workers. Avery Moore Kloss is joined by co-hosts Dr. Katrin Roots (Wilfrid Laurier University), Dr. Jessica Templeman (Memorial University), and Dr. Ann De Shalit (University of Windsor) to discuss human trafficking across policy, policing, and public narratives. Featuring interviews with legal scholar Vincent Wong and organizer/writer Chanelle Gallant, Part 1 traces how vague and flexible trafficking frameworks can expand carceral state power, amplify racialized and colonial logics of protection, and produce real-world harms through policing, surveillance, raids, detention, and deportation.
Vincent Wong joined the University of Windsor Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2022. He is also a PhD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, where his dissertation focuses on racial capitalism and the processes that produce and structure unfree status-excluded labour in Canada. He serves on the board of the Community Justice Collective (Tkaronto). Professor Wong holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto and a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School, where he was a Human Rights Fellow and James Kent Scholar. Professor Wong’s research focuses on law and political economy – specifically at the nexus between migration, race, markets, and the law. He is particularly interested in how a Canadian context-specific critical race theory (CRT) can better inform and be informed by the practice of anti-racist and intersectional movement lawyering. Professor Wong is also interested in what critical frameworks of law and political economy have to offer in the context of understanding the emerging hub of the 21st century global economic order: China.
Prior to academia, Professor Wong worked as a Staff Lawyer at the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and Secretary of the Chinese Canadian National Council - Toronto Chapter. He has also previously held positions at the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto and the African American Policy Forum.
Chanelle Gallant is an abolitionist feminist who has been fighting to free women’s sexuality from criminalization for over 25 years. She is a frontline organizer, writer, thinker, strategist, and the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. Chanelle has contributed to dozens of influential publications, including Pleasure Activism, and spoken everywhere from Princeton, Columbia, and the London School of Economics to the UN Special Rapporteur, and at thousands of organizing meetings and trainings. She is currently a visiting Activist-Scholar at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, Toronto. Chanelle cut her teeth fighting the cops as a core organizer in the historic fight against the Pussy Palace raid in 2000, and went on to found numerous sex work organizations and SURJ-Toronto. She now sits on the national board for multiple organizations in the US and Canada. Chanelle is a queer femme, a survivor, and the eldest daughter of a poor family that has been impacted by criminalization and incarceration. She works as a money coach and advisor, social movement strategy consultant, and trainer. Chanelle is a Lambda Literary Fellow and holds an M.A. in Sociology.
Dr. Katrin Roots is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University and has researched Canada’s anti-trafficking efforts for over 15 years. She is the author of Domesticating Human Trafficking: Law, Policing and Prosecution in Canada (2022) and co-editor of Trafficking Harms: Critical Politics, Perspectives and Experiences (2024).
Dr. Jessica Templeman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a member of the Collaborative for Racial Justice. Her research focuses on exclusionary migration law and policy in Canada, including deportation for criminality and human trafficking.
Dr. Ann De Shalit is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Work at the University of Windsor and teaches at Trent and York Universities. She has conducted critical trafficking research since 2009 and has supported grassroots migrant and labour justice activism for over a decade.
This episode was funded by a Knowledge Synthesis Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
CRSP Talk is a production of the Centre for Research on Security Practices (CRSP) at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Part 2 continues the series with organizer and scholar Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez, focusing on migrant workers, labour precarity, and resistance, where we discuss what changes when trafficking discourse is applied to labour sectors beyond sex work.
Misaligned Frameworks (Part I): Migrant Exploitation and Anti-trafficking Efforts
Centre for Research on Security Practices (CRSP)
Interviewers: Avery Moore Kloss, Katrin Roots, Jessica Templeman, & Ann De Shalit
Participants: Vincent Wong & Chanelle Gallant
Length of Interview: 00:55:08
[Introduction Music] 00:00:00
00:00:07 Avery Moore Kloss
Welcome to CRSP Talk. I'm Avery Moore Kloss. This is a podcast that tells the story of research being done by members of the Center for Research on Security Practices, or CRSP, at Wilfrid Laurier University. At CRSP, security can mean a number of things. Human security, surveillance, safety, justice, sometimes art. And while the definition of security is in flux in the face of emergent issues such as health pandemics, migration, war, homelessness, income disparity, and other forms of marginalization, CRSP believes it is nonetheless critical to understand security as a means to generate connections between practices and experiences of security and securitization. And so today we're launching a special two-part series, a critical deep dive into one of the most misunderstood and urgent security issues in Canada today, human trafficking. In this episode, a part one, we'll talk about trafficking discourse, state powers, and sex work. Then in part 2, we shift focus to migrant workers and labor precarity. You might remember a couple of years ago we published an episode on the same topic where CRSP member and Laurier professor Dr. Katrin Roots took us through a discussion of critical perspectives on human trafficking in this country. Today, Katrin joins us to co-host with her colleagues, Dr. Jessica Templeman from Memorial University and Dr. Ann De Shalit from University of Windsor. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for being here.
00:01:27 Jessica Templeman
Thanks for having us.
00:01:29 Avery Moore Kloss
Okay, so for all of you, I wonder if you could start with a quick introduction of yourselves and just tell us a little bit about the work you do in this area. And Katrin, since you've been on the podcast before, let's start with you.
00:01:41 Katrin Roots
Sure. I'm an assistant professor in the criminology department here at Wilfrid Laurier University, and I've been researching Canada's anti-trafficking initiatives and efforts for about 15 years now.
00:01:53 Jessica Templeman
Hi, everyone. I'm Jessica Templeman. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. My research focuses on exclusionary migration law and policy in Canada, specifically around the deportation of migrants for criminality, but I also do work on human trafficking.
00:02:12 Ann De Shalit
And I'm Ann De Shalit. I'm a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor, and I also teach at Trent and York Universities. And I've been doing critical research on trafficking or anti-trafficking for the past 16 years or so and have also been involved in some grassroots migrant and labor justice activism for about a decade.
00:02:36 Avery Moore Kloss
Well, thank you all for being here and honestly for the very thoughtful work you put into this, because I would not have been able to do these episodes without the three of you. And so I wonder if we start off, if you might just give us a primer on how this podcast series came to be but also why you wanted to build this platform for both the work you're doing and the work of the three guest experts who we interview in this series. So maybe you could take that one, Katrin.
00:03:00 Katrin Roots
Sure. Well, this podcast series emerged from our SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis project that examined definitional variations around human trafficking, labor exploitation, forced labor, and related terms across various academic and non-academic sources. Over the last two decades, human trafficking has been a much discussed issue in Canada, and it's become aggressively addressed through legislation, policy, funding, policing efforts, and these efforts are overwhelmingly focused on what's come to be defined as domestic sex trafficking. Importantly, what is being ignored in these efforts are the experiences of exploitation, abuse, force, coercion, and related conditions in labor sectors that are outside of sex work, including within temporary foreign worker program. So while problematic practices within the temporary foreign worker program have been well documented by now, they're not being defined as human trafficking, despite the fact that some of these experiences are meeting the international legal definitions of trafficking. So our project looked at how and why there's this differential labeling that takes place and how trafficking is defined across literatures. And we were particularly interested in understanding framings of migrant labor exploitation and whether and when these experiences are defined or rationalized as human trafficking. And what we found is that despite the heavy use of key terms like human trafficking, exploitation, forced labor, unfree labor, precarity, abuse, violence control, and so on, there are generally very few attempts across the literature to define these concepts and or to draw distinctions between them. So when definitional attempts are made, authors often rely on references to the other terms, secondary key terms that are also largely undefined.
00:05:04 Avery Moore Kloss
Okay, so in this podcast series, you explore some of those definitional challenges and variations, like you said, and you really dive into how this vagueness in definitions enables an often problematic application or lack thereof of human trafficking framework with kind of this underlying political motivations. And so I wonder, what are you hoping will come from this discussion?
00:05:27 Katrin Roots
So our aim of this discussion is not to suggest that the human trafficking framework should be applied to more circumstances because as our guests are going to point out, the framework has often resulted in more harm than good. But instead we want to uncover the politics that results in some situations being defined as trafficking and then targeted with the full force of the state and then other situations are ignored and silenced.
00:05:54 Avery Moore Kloss
So we mentioned that we interviewed 3 expert guests for this episode. Let's get right into getting to know the first one. Jess, I wonder, can you tell me a little bit about Vince Wong and why you reached out to him for this episode?
00:06:07 Jessica Templeman
So Vince Wong is a legal practitioner and a scholar studying in the area of immigration law. And Vince brought a legal perspective on human trafficking to our conversation, talking specifically about how this concept is deployed in legislation and practice.
00:06:25 Avery Moore Kloss
Okay, so here's a little bit of that interview we did with Vince.
00:06:29 Vince Wong
My name is Vincent Wang. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. I'm also a PhD candidate, hopefully finish my PhD soon at Osgoode Hall Law School on a topic entitled Xenoracial Capitalism and the Status Exclusion of Canada's Dreamers. So it's about sort of undocumented young people. And before that, I spent about five years working in law as a lawyer, specifically as a legal clinic lawyer at the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic in downtown Toronto. We did a lot of stuff, but among other things, I did quite a bit of immigration work and deportation defense for working class clients and families in our respective communities. And one case, it was pretty incredible. And for me, I didn't know that much. It was a steep learning curve. But when I started being a legal representative of some of these cases, it just kind of blew my mind. So with one client, it was in a sense a very typical and severe, you know, let's say traditional human trafficking victim, organized crime, a lot of control, very direct control. This was not indirect control when this client was in Hong Kong to provide sexual services. And eventually this client fled to fled to Canada and, you know, encountered a lot of difficulty in regularizing status, but also with, you know, kind of post traumatic stress disorder and a host of other things. Working on her case to regularize her status, CBSA required people to report periodically. And so she had never missed a reporting date. But one time she disclosed to the CBSA officer that she had attempted suicide. Of course, CBSA already knew all of her backstory, right? There's just like a very long kind of file and they cuffed her, they detained her, and they threw her into Vanier, a prison for women, just like a medium security prison in Milton, Ontario. And it was incredible, right? Because, of course, it was tremendous, like, traumatization. They stripped her of everything, very destructive for her mental health. And the reason that the CBSA officer gave was that we're doing it to for her for health purposes, right? Because suicide ideation, attempted suicide. And so we would have better healthcare for her in this jail because, you know, having nurses and whatever, right? So the legal side of it was you're a flight risk, the flight risk being you might kill yourself before you show up for deportation. So, you know, it kind of screwed me up a little bit to be the lawyer on this case. So as I moved from practice to academia, I kept thinking about some of these issues and became a little bit more involved in trying to historicize what kind of trafficking work looked like and becoming more involved in community-based research and advocacy.
00:09:49 Avery Moore Kloss
We mentioned earlier that it's definitely a challenge to try and find one definition of human trafficking. And so generally in this series, we're going to try and stay away from coming to kind of like any singular definition. Though, if you want to know more about the trouble with definitions in this space, you can head to the show notes and we'll link to that episode Katrin and I hosted specifically on that topic. In this episode, we actually did pitch something similar to this question to Vince about how definitional vagueness and ambiguity are expressed in legislation. And so Jess, I wonder if you could just tee that clip from Vince up for us.
00:10:25 Jessica Templeman
What we did is ask Vince to provide us with his understanding of this concept. He breaks down the elements of the definition of human trafficking as provided in international law. He also gives a more considered reflection on the historical origins of human trafficking law and policy in the Canadian context. So it's through this secondary discussion that Vince opens the door to an analysis connecting the issues of definitional clarity and the harmful effects of application of human trafficking law and policy specifically for Indigenous women and racialized migrants in Canada.
00:11:04 Vince Wong
The typical legal definitions of human trafficking or trafficking in persons that typically exist out there. Now, one of these definitions is the facilitation of both movement and movement restriction. Sometimes you might call this like mobilize to immobilize. It takes term out of some of the migration studies, right? So facilitation of both movement and movement restriction. That's one. Two, enacting some sort of control, direction, or influence, right? So you'll see this pop up in a lot of these definitions as well, often through discipline or punishment or the threat thereof, right? So that's number two, some sort of influence, discipline, control, right? And then number three is for the purpose of exploitation or facilitating exploitation. So I would call this the value extraction component or proposition, right? And these three components, okay, so facilitating movement and movement restriction, enacting control direction and influence, often through threats or threat of punishment. And then the third one, exploitation. If you just look at that, under this conceptualization of human trafficking, what becomes clear is that this conduct is exactly what immigration law does, right? It's what the Canadian state, but not only the Canadian state, right? Like this is, you know, typical of, you know, modern day immigration law in the 21st century and border enforcement engages in, right? And particularly in Canadian immigration law, the way that it manifests is through, you know, these two-tier immigration programs, you know, migrant immigration programs that contain certain populations into a state of conditional precarity of rights, structural disenfranchisement, contained through the threat of deportation, which is the threat of discipline or punishment. Indeed, I would argue that among other actors that are engaging in similar conduct given scale, scope, and severity, the Canadian state in Canada is unambiguously the biggest human trafficker, or you could say the human trafficker par excellence, right? And this is not a novel argument. Many people have said similar things, like legal commentators like Shane Martinez and Chris Ramsaroop that are in the migrant justice space have made similar arguments, particularly in the context of the seasonal agricultural worker program. But I would extend this argument to say that the Canadian state's production of other precarious status communities and workers like international student laborers, undocumented peoples, are part of that same human trafficking dynamic. If we were to understand human trafficking actually in its first principles of facilitating movements and movement restriction, enacting control, direction, and influence through punishment and discipline, and for the purpose of extracting value, in other words, exploitation.
00:14:08 Avery Moore Kloss
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about why it's important to locate bordering and immigration restrictions within the context of history.
00:14:16 Vince Wong
Yeah, I think it's important because for a variety of reasons, I'll give three quick ones, right? One is it really reveals, especially in a place like Canada, like the racial and colonial foundations of mobility control, right? So I'd say not just immigration, but movement control. Who can move for what reasons? And who has their movement restricted and for what reasons, right? So these are basic questions, but if you keep asking them in every single case, like I think you'll get a much better perspective of what the system sort of actually does. So for example, like anti-trafficking measures today often claim to be about protecting vulnerable people, right? Especially like women and migrants. But if you trace their roots, you see that the very same narratives were used to justify border controls that were very deeply racialized and gendered. And this is not just for the origins of immigration law as we understand it, right? This dichotomy between citizen and alien... Indigenous control, right? So the Indian pass system that existed from 1885 to 1940s in Canada West. What were they, right? They were basically like visas. It was a visa system, right? So if you were in an Indian reserve, right, your Indigenous First Nations person in a reserve, the only way that you could get out, right, was with the permission of the Canadian state, particularly the Department of Indian Affairs. And they would say, okay, you got two weeks to go hunting and then you got to go back. You got to go back to where you came from, which is the reserve. And so you have this sort of internal passport or visa system that actually was created, like the bureaucracy was created before we even had passports and visas that we associate with immigration law, right? And one of the main reasons that this was created or one of the justifications was also to control sex work. So in 1883, 1884, near Calgary, you had the Tsuutina First Nation that was close to Calgary at the time. There was sex work going on. So some of the teepees, some Indigenous women worked as sex workers with clients from sort of the big city Calgary, right? And so both settler society in Calgary, working with the chiefs from the First Nation said, oh, actually, okay, this is a horrible vice, right? We have to do something about this. And so what they instituted was a permit system to say, okay, do you have a permit? Do you have a proper permit to be using these teepees to be in here at this time? If we see that it has something to do with sex work, then you don't have the proper permit, so we're going to boot you, we're going to deport you back to the reserve. And a lot of these ideas were then later on translated to what we know as the Indian pass system starting in 1885, right, a much this broader kind of system of control. And so yes, there are some differences with the way in which these things worked back then and now. But if you break down a lot of the justifications and the answers to who ostensibly is being protected and for what reasons and using what solution, then you'll find that there is a lot of straight line between some of these historical ideas of control and to now, right? They're legitimizing this idea to the second point of using this idea of rescue, not to militate towards solutions of equality, but to support solutions of exclusion. People agree that abuse is going on, but the solution becomes, right, policing and exclusion and not rights and not equality and not building up and empowering people. And so, kind of the third thing is this historic sort of this issue is important in challenging the idea that trafficking is like this exceptional or new or isolated issue, right? Like trafficking has from the very beginning, this discourse has from the very beginning, not being separate from regimes of labor control, of immigration management, of settler governance.
00:18:40 Avery Moore Kloss
Okay, so I think there's a lot there to reflect on and I really appreciate Vince for his ability to be super clear about the law, but also weave in why the historical context is so important in that. And so I wonder for all three of you, how important are these three elements that Vince lays out here and how do they open the door to thinking differently about how sex work gets entangled in these laws? Jess, maybe you can start us off.
00:19:05 Jessica Templeman
Sure, yeah. So in providing the three examples, what Vince really does is confirm that the law is working as it's intended to in a way that is oppressive to marginalized people. It's part of the bigger story we want to tell about the harms of the human trafficking framework.
00:19:24 Ann De Shalit
And just to add to that, I think understanding the colonial logics and forming the ways we understand and regulate people's movement is really important. For one, it's not a new thing. Obviously, societies have been trying to regulate the movement of sex workers, and especially Indigenous and racialized and marginalized sex workers, importantly using protectionist narratives for a very long time.
00:19:48 Katrin Roots
I think from my perspective, what Vince importantly does here is to show that it's the Canadian state itself that's the trafficker. And he moves us away from this dominant narrative of the state as the rescuer and the individual sort of bad actor as the trafficker that the state then has to target.
00:20:08 Avery Moore Kloss
I think all this work that Vince does here also is really important in setting up our next expert guest. And Katrin, I wonder if you can tell us about Chanelle Gallant and why you invited her into this discussion.
00:20:21 Katrin Roots
Sure. So Chanelle Gallant is the author of the book Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. And Chanelle says it's an abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the anti-trafficking industry. It makes a powerful argument about who's really leading the way towards justice, that being migrant sex workers themselves. So Vince's breakdown of the three core elements of trafficking really help us see how ambiguous this concept of human trafficking really is. But what Chanelle shows us is that it isn't just theoretical, right? It has profound impacts on people's lives. And in this conversation we had with Chanelle, we really get into how those laws play out on the ground. So here's Chanelle.
00:21:07 Chanelle Gallant
Hey everyone, my name is Chanelle Gallant. I am a longtime community organizer, educator, activist, and movement writer in movements for sex workers' rights and racial justice for over 2 decades. I am the co-author with Elaine Lamb of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. And I'm pleased to be on the show with you today.
00:21:29 Katrin Roots
So, Vince showed us how vague definitions open the door for carceral expansion. And here Chanelle discusses how these efforts have focused overwhelmingly on sex work.
00:21:40 Chanelle Gallant
So the term human trafficking at this point sounds common sense to most people. They think they know what it means. It's a household term. If I say human trafficking, everyone thinks they know what it means. But then ask people what it means, and you'll actually get a lot of different answers. Then look at the law. Read any of the human trafficking laws or policies, and you'd be surprised to find what's in there. There's a laundry list of things that are defined as human trafficking, but adult sex work is always in those definitions. One thing that unites human trafficking laws, policies, measures, initiatives is that there's a conflation with sex work. Now, sex work law at the international level, sex work law at the local municipal level, all of those laws include some reference to sex work. And they do that because that is actually the function of the concept of human trafficking and human trafficking laws. Human trafficking laws have been sold to us as a way to stop forced labor. That's not what they do. They are both the wrong solution and they are the cause of forced labor and harm and violence and coercion. They criminalize sex workers, voluntary sex workers. They criminalize the movement of sex workers across borders. I have worked with sex workers for over 20 years. And throughout all of that time, every sex worker that I have known has been negatively impacted, harmed, or endangered by human trafficking laws. No sex worker is unscathed by human trafficking laws. They're all negatively harmed by them. Because human trafficking laws criminalize sex workers' ability to do everything that they would want to do to work together safely. So it's a human trafficking offense for sex workers. Basically, essentially all of sex workers' relationships with each other and mutual aid are all human trafficking offenses. Because once you define sex work as human trafficking, then anything related to it becomes a human trafficking offense as well. So if it's illegal, if it's, so for example, if it's considered human trafficking for two people to engage in sex work, together, then that's an organized crime offense. That's aiding and abetting, giving someone a ride to a place where they do sex work is transportation. Living with a sex worker is harboring a human trafficking victim. Sharing expenses in a household is living on the avails of human trafficking or in some ways materially benefiting from human trafficking. So, it's not that I have isolated experiences of sex workers who've been harmed by human trafficking laws, it's that I've never known a sex worker who is not harmed by human trafficking laws. All sex workers are forced to work underground, forced to hide their work, unable to work safely above ground with labor law protections, with their friends, in little cooperatives, report unsafe employers, et cetera, because of human trafficking laws.
00:25:09 Avery Moore Kloss
To add a layer to that, you talked about sex workers facing multiple oppressions. Can you just give me a sense of how that affects them even more? Like what's the actual reality of how if you are trans or you're a person of color or you're a migrant, how that gets magnified in those scenarios?
00:25:29 Chanelle Gallant
Yeah, well, if we look at immigration, for example, so someone who is a full-service sex worker working in the sex industry, say they're an escort in Toronto, working for themselves. Now, if you are an Asian migrant, you might be advertising in venues where clients can find that. You might say, for example, in your ads, or be working for a massage parlor where clients know that there are Asian workers. Police will racially profile workers. They will identify ads that mention workers are Asian, or they will specifically surveil and target and raid massage parlors where they the workers are majority Asian because they can lay criminal charges or it's actually hard to prove and very resource intensive to go through a criminal court case. What they know they can do is snatch up a bunch of immigrants in a worksite raid. And much more easy than going through a criminal court case, they can do a raid on a massage parlor, arrest say a dozen workers, seize all of their money and cash on site, because that's considered proceeds of crime, and then put all of those women into deportation proceedings. And the state has much more power to do that, much more easily than a white citizen sex worker, where they would have to find the evidence to prove prostitution charges, which is much more difficult, much more labor intensive, but the state can use the deportability of immigrants to attack sex workers much more easily than white citizen sex workers.
00:27:16 Avery Moore Kloss
It occurs when you're talking about that, obviously there's like anti-trafficking policies that are claiming to protect these workers. And of course, you're talking about how really it does the opposite in most cases. So I wonder if you can give me a sense about like what claims are made about this protection? And then on the flip side of that, what kinds of harms or the, obviously we're talking about going to deportation proceedings, but can you really get right down to brass tacks about what is the consequence for these workers who are in the end being targeted by what people tend to think is actually supposed to be helpful?
00:27:52 Chanelle Gallant
So I'll just lay out, for example, a human trafficking investigation. Say there's a massage parlor operating in your neighborhood. And what people see is that the women don't leave the massage parlor very often. They see food being delivered. There's mention in the reviews for the massage parlor that the women are offering sexual services. And someone thinks that sounds like there's human trafficking going on, right? That sounds like it must be human trafficking. The reason they think that is because we've all been trained to assume that racialized immigrant women who are selling sexual services don't have the power and agency to be making that decision themselves and are so naive and incapable or brainwashed and victimized that they must be forced into it. That's racism. These are adult women. The massage sector actually tends to be older women. The women in that massage parlor are likely in their 30s to 60s. And the reason they're not leaving the massage parlor very often is because there's two reasons. One, every time they leave work, they're at risk of somebody, a nosy neighbor reporting them for suspected sex trafficking. It puts them at risk to leave of you. It puts them at risk of civilians identifying them as suspected sex trafficking and then calling the police on them. Secondly, because when immigrants move to Canada, they're often working in very expensive labor markets. And like a lot of migrant workers, they want to live at work. It saves expenses. They don't have to rent an apartment. They can move around to different locations in different cities much more easily and save money that way. But that's misinterpreted as evidence of sex trafficking. So someone places a call and says, I think the massage spa in my neighborhood is a site of sex trafficking. Now, the police don't just come knock on the door and say hello. They conduct surveillance. They either, and all kinds of horrible things happen to workers during that time. Undercover officers book sessions with them. That means that sex worker is now in a situation where she doesn't know she's interacting with a cop who could arrest, deport her, and seize all of her money, shut down her business, at best make her homeless and out of work if they shut down the massage parlor. So they start conducting surveillance. Then maybe they conduct a raid. A raid is terror. A raid is terror. That means that they are potentially breaking into the massage parlor or they're all loading in at once. Armed men. Usually the workers think that they're undergoing a robbery. Many of them have experienced a robbery. So you've got these screaming armed men who rush into your workplace screaming at you in a language you don't understand in English, ordering them up against the wall, walking into their change rooms where they might not be dressed, into the bathrooms where they might be showering and forcing them to line up against a wall. They're strip searched, they're interrogated in a language they don't speak. They don't know what's going on. They don't know what the charges are. They're trying to understand, are we being robbed? Are we about to all be raped? Are we all being raided? They don't know. Then they are taken in for questioning at the local police station. They might be strip searched again. We have reports of them being strip searched in front of other officers who are on view. They might be brought up on charges. They might disclose violence that they've experienced and have that used as evidence of sex work. All the money that they have been working so hard for, they often can't use bank accounts because of anti-trafficking banking regulations. You're not allowed to work in the sex industry and keep your money in a bank. That is against anti-trafficking banking regulations. So they often have more cash on site. That site can be seized by police officers as proceeds of crime. And then they, if they're released, even if they're released without charge and the massage parlor gets shut down though for suspected sex work, they no longer have a job or a home. And that's the best case scenario. They had all their money taken and now they're homeless and jobless. And they're off and on, they might be on like a non-association condition where a judge says, you are not able to speak to anyone else who's been charged. So now they can't even get support from each other. It's an absolute disaster. It's incredibly scary, traumatizing, violent and harmful to the workers who go through it. And that is what people think is helpful when they make a call to report suspected sex trafficking in their neighborhood. That's what can happen to the women.
00:32:55 Avery Moore Kloss
Okay, so one thing I really understood when we were talking to Chanelle is both how deeply she cares about the sex worker she's advocating for, but also how frustrating it is for her that more people don't understand how what's framed as like rescue, like we talked about, is often harming the people that it should be protecting. And so Katrin, I wonder if you could share some of your reflections on that topic.
00:33:18 Katrin Roots
Yeah, you're right, Avery. I think that what we can hear from Chanelle is that anti-trafficking laws don't just fail to protect sex workers, but that they're actively harming them. And a big part of how this harm happens is through policing of sex work under this guise of fighting human trafficking.
00:33:37 Ann De Shalit
And just to jump on that, something that I find crucial that Chanelle points out is that the state violence is being framed as care, which can be quite dangerous. When we look at the actual impacts of anti-trafficking policing, like harassment, perpetual fear, physical injury, at times it can involve sexual harassment and assault, long-standing trauma, in some cases assets being taken away, some people have been deported, that framing of care should easily dissipate, but because the framing of care and rescue is so powerful, these realities are still often read as markers of success where they might not be read like that in other situations. And so we come to accept anti-trafficking efforts despite their harms because we can't imagine or we can't access any other forms of care. So it sort of turns into this cycle of abuse.
00:34:32 Jessica Templeman
Yeah, and I just want to note that the harms Chanelle's identifying are disproportionately experienced by racialized migrants, which was also said by Vince.
00:34:43 Avery Moore Kloss
Yeah. Jess, there's a great part of this interview with Chanelle where you actually jump in and ask some clarification questions. So I want to play that portion now and just get your reaction to Chanel's response.
00:34:55 Jessica Templeman
So you mentioned that there's surveillance by police, but I'm wondering if you can be more specific about what police we're talking about here. Is it traditional police, as in provincial, federal, municipal, or does that also include what we would understand as immigration police, so CBSA services agents?
00:35:15 Chanelle Gallant
Yes, in many cases, well, first of all, every level of law enforcement can have investigations into human trafficking. So from municipal zoning officers all the way to federal intelligence agencies. At every single level of governance, there are law enforcement bodies with some type of human trafficking mandate, some mandate to combat human trafficking. And that definitely, of course, includes CBSA. But often there are regulations that we are supposed to, we are all supposed to be protected by, where law enforcement and border control are not supposed to collaborate, right? So for example, in sanctuary cities, Toronto is a sanctuary city, right? Where law enforcement is not supposed to bring in CBSA on investigations. However, if you are highly marginalized and criminalized like migrant sex workers, you can't avail yourself of those rights necessarily. So what we'll see is law enforcement that are not supposed to involve border control, call them up to check someone's immigration status or just bring them into investigations or pass workers on to CBSA, or we'll see border patrol show up at the hearings for migrants who are in some type of criminal proceedings so that they can snatch them there. Right. So there's all there's so many different ways in which these law enforcement bodies can collaborate, whether it's legal or not, that put migrant sex workers at so many overlapping types of risk, both criminal and at an immigration level as well.
00:37:13 Jessica Templeman
So one thing that's coming through that you've spoken about is the issue of organized crime as well. And under immigration legislation, migrants can be inadmissible, deportable, as you say, on the basis of engagement in organized criminality. And it's a really scary area of law, just given the fact that there's significant discretion and very little oversight, and the standard of proof is quite low. So I'm wondering, have you seen sex workers be deported on the basis of...
00:37:45 Chanelle Gallant
Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
00:37:47 Jessica Templeman
Yes.
00:37:48 Chanelle Gallant
Well, we tell a story about that in our book. We have a first-hand account of that in our book. Yeah. So 2 women who knew each other or friends, work together sometime, end up at the same hotel room. But if I'm breaking a law and you're breaking a law and we break that law together, that can be organized crime, right? That's all it takes. Like you said, it's a very low standard of proof and there's a high level of discretion. And officers are very motivated to view two migrants in the sex industry as engaging in some type of criminality. And so we did see this, and Butterfly has seen many instances of this, where two migrant sex workers who for all kinds of very good reasons, want to work together. The safety, sharing costs, companionship while you're traveling. It just makes so much sense. It is so preferable not to work in the sex industry alone. No one would advise you to work in the sex industry alone. But when you work with someone else and you're under that type of surveillance, where they, and in that case, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, the officers in that a town engaged in racial profiling. They targeted these workers because they had advertised as Asian. And they were selected on that basis for investigation. And then because they had two Asian migrant sex workers conducting sex work together in the same place, I think they were sharing a hotel room or something like that, they were brought up on suspected organized crime. It gets worse, which is that the local nonprofit who they were working with, in this case, I believe it was the Elizabeth Fry Society, refused to continue working with these two women, refused to support them because they were now suspected of engaging in organized crime. It is incredibly serious to be targeted for this type of criminal investigation. They were left with no support other than Butterfly, Asian and Migrant Sex Worker Support Network, who offers peer-led, non-carceral, non-criminalizing, non-stigmatizing actual support by and for other Asian and migrant sex workers in their own languages. And it's why their work is so crucial. And it is so important that those services be provided by peers because they were the only ones who could help these women.
00:40:20 Jessica Templeman
So this piece of the conversation with Chanelle I found very fascinating. I, a little bit of background, worked in immigration law for about 15 years and the experiences that Chanelle is communicating are also my experiences. The CBSA really wields Section 37 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the inadmissibility for organized crime provisions to support migrant deportation. The implication in implying this legislation is that the migrant is a danger to the public given their involvement in quote unquote organized crime. But the standard of proof and the evidentiary requirements for determination of inadmissibility under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act are just so much lower than what's required by Canadian criminal law. And ultimately what this means is that migrants can be removed from Canada based on their involvement in quote unquote organized crime, but they've never actually been charged with a criminal offense or let alone convicted of a criminal offense. I was also so thankful that Chanelle communicated this experience because oftentimes in academics, Section 37 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is not something that I've seen widely discussed. There's obviously just so much work that needs to be done to reveal the multiple and varied ways that migrants are regulated through these violent state practices.
00:41:57 Avery Moore Kloss
Yeah, thanks, Jess. I think that's a really important note to make there. And in both of these interviews with Chanelle and with Vince, we asked them to offer their alternatives. So how they think this discussion of human trafficking and the harms that are implicit in it could be approached differently. And here's what they offered. So first we're going to go with Vince and then right after we'll play Chanel's alternative.
00:42:21 Vince Wong
Our first instinct should be equality. What do we need to do to give this person more resources, more rights? What is their status? How can we provide more supports instead of saying, okay, well, we need a bunch of police to go and kick down the door and see what's up. And then they'll figure out how to get justice by finding the bad guys and making the people who are victims write a bunch of witness statements to prosecute them. Right. And then we're all good. Equality and not exclusion. And this is specifically, especially tailored to people who are precarious status. But even outside of that, right, we think about victims of trafficking. The focus really should be first and foremost on how to provide more supports, more resources, how to provide organizations that are providing that support and are brutally underfunded relative to the police and prosecutors some of this money so that they can provide healthcare, that they can provide housing, they can provide social supports, whatever. So that's one, equality, not exclusion. Second is like rights, not rescue. I think this is a very kind of typical common slogan from sex work groups and sex work right groups is that folks are not necessarily looking for a rescue, a savior. It's very important to actually listen to people who are directly affected, what they need, what they prioritize, especially if calling the police carceral apparatuses are part of the options to really talk to them and try to understand, what are the benefits and what are the risks there, right? Because most often frontline service providers, especially after a lot of these anti-trafficking trainers are not doing that or they specifically skip that, which is very, very dangerous. So, and then related to that is the third point of nothing about us without us. So you see in the ways that trafficking law enforcement and regimes are working, it's very important to listen to and center the voices of those who are most directly impacted by those regimes, as opposed to having inserting your own idea of how this should work hypothetically. And I would just like to shout out in terms of, you know, the Hall of Shame, the Supreme Court of Canada for doing this in RV Kubikov, right? Expunged, right, so this was a case about the constitutionality of several of the sex work criminal provisions, and they kicked out from intervention every single group that is directly working with sex workers or is like a contingent of actual peer sex worker groups. How are you going to make a decision ostensibly based off of the protection of a particular group while expunging all of the direct voices about that group. And instead they, I don't know, like they allowed as interveners some evangelical Christian group. Right. Okay, cool. Great. This is fantastic. It's so basic. It's so basic. And the reason that it happens at such a high degree is because trafficking discourses tell us that these people are victims, agentless, voiceless. If they do have a voice, we don't have to take them seriously because they don't really know what they're talking about because they're traumatized, right? Like you can see the way that, you know, sort of this mental health vocabulary gets weaponized. And so nothing about us without us is always important, but it is especially important in contexts of carceral humanitarianism where sex work politics has evolved, where trafficking politics is evolved. Okay, and then the final thing I think is learn the lessons of history. So we talk about all this stuff about slavery. We talk about all this stuff about like anti-trafficking. And let's not be surprised when people use anti-slavery rhetoric when they repurpose them for purposes of trafficking, mobilize to immobilize a threat of a penalty, which is like the penal part of deportation and all that, and exploitation, value extraction. This is what's going on. And it's a challenge. It's a challenge to fight it.
00:46:45 Chanelle Gallant
You have to trust migrant sex workers. Trust them to develop their own solutions. They know what they need. Migrant sex workers aren't dumb. They're not brainwashed. They're not helpless. They know exactly what they need. And so first of all, follow their lead. Migrant sex workers are pushing for the full decriminalization of sex work and the decriminalization of migration for sex work. Remove the criminal penalties against sex work and remove the immigration restrictions against sex workers so that migrant sex workers can do what they need to do for themselves. Stop treating them like they're babies, their children, their helpless little wards of the state in some way, and let them be the grown-ass, capable, strong, powerful women they are who made the decision to migrate to another country boldly, bravely, who made the decision to enter the sex industry in order to avoid other kinds of more exploitative work like domestic work or farm work or restaurant work. Let them run their lives. Let them run their ****. Remove the boot of the state off the neck of migrant sex workers so they can make their own ******* decisions for themselves. They're fully capable.
00:48:00 Avery Moore Kloss
I just want to say a big thank you to Vince and to Chanelle for their participation in this episode. But I think there's a lot of key insights that they brought up in this episode that are really important to unpack before we look ahead to applying their thoughts to migrant workers in part two. So as we wrap up part one, I wonder if the three of you can each just share your reflections on what you've heard in this episode. Lets start with Katrin and then Ann, and then we'll end with Jess.
00:48:25 Katrin Roots
Sure. So for me, this conversation is really an important reminder that the anti-trafficking framework is a governance strategy. It's a flexible political tool that can be used to justify a wide range of punitive and restrictive laws across areas like immigration, sex work, migrant labor, and so on. And it's this flexibility that gives it the power that it has and that it makes it as harmful as it is. And what makes this especially troubling is that most people see anti-trafficking activities as unquestioned, common sense, good. And they're seemingly obvious and they're necessary and they're a response to terrible crimes and terrible people. And most people don't see how it also enables state violence, exclusion and surveillance of marginalized populations.
00:49:16 Ann De Shalit
Yeah, and also I think our guests remind us that we really do need to rethink our approach to exploitation and harm. For example, question who gets to decide harm, who gets to decide when exploitation or abuse are something that needs to be addressed and when they aren't. I think the anti-trafficking framework has taken that away from us. It tells us where harm is, where exploitation lies and where it doesn't. So the ability to think of other means of protection and safety that don't involve control, surveillance, policing, overall carcerality are really important. And the only way forward really is through solidarity with sex workers, with migrant workers, with other precarious workers.
00:50:06 Jessica Templeman
Yeah, and for me, the guests today really provide two key insights. So the first is on the connection between the human trafficking framework and the maintenance of the colonialist white supremacist state in Canada. As Ann just relayed, the work here tells us we need to look beyond the law and policy to support migrants and sex workers. And then second, these authors bring forward critical insights from practice that reveal the additional harms migrants are facing in the immigration system and through the operation of immigration law. And again, this reveals the limits of protectionist claims demonstrating how the system has been built to sustain the regulation and removal of people from this nation.
00:50:53 Avery Moore Kloss
Yeah, I think those are all really important points. And this was a really eye-opening episode for me at least. I just want to thank you all for being here, and I'm looking forward to continuing this discussion in part two. And I wonder, Ann, if you could just quickly tee up for us what listeners will hear in part two.
00:51:12 Ann De Shalit
So in the next episode, our conversation continues with organizer, longtime organizer and scholar, Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez, who talks us through the harms of the anti-trafficking framework for migrant workers in other areas, especially agricultural. Their experiences with exploitative and abusive and otherwise problematic labor conditions that often happens with consent from the Canadian state and then also importantly, their tactics of resistance.
00:51:43 Avery Moore Kloss
Yeah, great. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to the next episode and thank you all for your excellent co-hosting in this episode and we'll see you for part two.
[Music] 00:51:52
00:51:58 Avery Moore Kloss
Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk and a thank you to our guests for this episode. Dr. Vincent Wong is an assistant professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. He's a PhD candidate from Osgood Hod Law School, where his dissertation focuses on racial capitalism and the processes that produce and structure unfree status-excluded labor in Canada. He serves on the board of the Community Justice Collective, Tecoranto. Vince holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto and Master of Laws from Columbia Law School, where he was a human rights fellow and a James Kent scholar. His research focuses on law and political economy, specifically at the nexus between migration, race, markets, and the law. And Chanelle Gallant is an abolitionist feminist who's been fighting to free women's sexuality from criminalization for over 25 years. She's A frontline organizer, writer, thinker, strategist, and the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. Chanelle has contributed to dozens of influential publications, including Pleasure Activism and spoken everywhere from Princeton, Columbia, and the London School of Economics to the UN Special Rapporteur and at thousands of organizing meetings and trainings. She's currently a visiting activist scholar at the Center for Feminist Research at York University, Toronto. Also a big thank you to Katrin, Jess, and Ann for their help co-hosting this episode. Dr. Katrin Roots is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She's been researching Canada's anti-trafficking efforts for over 15 years and is the author of Domesticating Human Trafficking: Law, Policing, and Prosecution in Canada published by the University of Toronto Press, and is the co-editor of Trafficking Harms: Critical Politics, Perspectives, and Experiences, published by Fernwood Publications. Dr. Jessica Templeman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University in Newfoundland. Her research focuses on exclusionary migration law and policy in Canada, namely around deportation of migrants for criminality and human trafficking. And Dr. Ann De Shalit is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor. She also teaches at Trent and York Universities. She's been doing critical research on trafficking since 2009 and has been involved in grassroots migrant and labor justice activism for about a decade. Make sure to listen to part two as we pivot to talking about how discourse around human trafficking is the same or different when applied to migrant workers. You can find a link to any research mentioned in this episode in the show notes. This research was generously funded by a knowledge synthesis grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. CRSP Talk is a production from the Centre for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. For more research stories, listen to past episodes of this podcast. And for more information about the work we do at the Centre for Research on Security Practices, please visit our website at crsp.online.
00:54:55 Avery Moore Kloss
Thank you for listening to CRSP talk. We'll be back again soon with more research to uncover. I'm Avery Moore Kloss.
[Outro Music] 00:55:02