Background

The Department of Justice Canada has contracted community-based research to better understand the lives of individuals involved in the sex trade. The former 2014 legislation, Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, also known as the “Nordic” model or approach, targets purchasers of sexual services and third parties who profit from others’ sexual services. Under this legislation, providers of sexual services are not criminalized, but are instead viewed as requiring support and not punishment (Department of Justice Canada 2014). With this important distinction at the forefront of this approach, the Measures Addressing Prostitution Initiative (MAPI) was created to aid sexual service providers to exit the sex trade. This program received multi-year funding from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021.

A major aspect of this initiative was to provide funding to organizations within the not-for-profit sector to support individuals within the sex trade with wrap-around services, such as housing, healthcare, therapy, addictions treatment, family reunification, and life skills programs. The 2022 publication of A Review of the Measures to Address Prostitution Initiative (MAPI) (Badets and Wichmann 2022) was based on data collected by the thirteen (13) organizations that provided support services. The data collected included basic demographics, services used, and some outcomes. While the report provides some information on people seeking support from these organizations, there remains a lack of qualitative data about the lives of sexual service providers.

Voice Found was one of the thirteen (13) organizations that received funding from MAPI; and this charity has a mandate to provide services to those who are at risk of, who have been, or who are being trafficked. This includes both sex and labour trafficking, but for the scope of this research, only survivors of sex trafficking were included.

The data collected by Voice Found provides many insights into the lives of their clients at the time of first being trafficked, during trafficking, their experiences as they exited, and what has helped or may have helped them through this time. The intention of this project was to provide a more complete picture of the why and how of both entering and exiting sex trafficking.

What is human trafficking?

While there may be similarities between consensual sex work and sex trafficking, there is a clear distinction between the two. Human trafficking has three aspects: the act, the means, and the purpose (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime n.d.).

A trafficker must engage in the act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring, concealing, or receiving a person using one or more of the following means for the purposes of exploitation (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime n.d., Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness 2019):

There are many different types of human trafficking, but for the scope of this research, the focus will be on trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation (heretofore referred to as trafficking).