This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. This article examines how exploitation informs judicial interpretations of human trafficking in Canadian criminal cases. While socio-legal and popular notions of trafficking often suggest that forced movement into a decidedly exploitative labour context is required, our analysis of key appellate cases and constitutional challenges reveals that actual exploitation is not a necessary element of the offence.
Instead, the trafficking in persons provision criminalizes the intent to exploit, while requiring the court to adopt an "objective" assessment of whether a reasonable person in the complainant's circumstances could potentially fear for their safety in the context of providing sexual labour. We argue that this objective standard contributes to a gendered hierarchy of legal knowledge and ultimately privileges the perceived masculinized rationality of the courts and legal actors while rendering the subjective experiences of complainants as less central to the prosecution of human trafficking.
The seismic wave of anti-trafficking campaigns and organizations since the s has entrenched the narrative that human trafficking is a significant and growing problem that requires strong global partnerships between governments, nongovernment organizations, and private corporations Heynen and van der Meulen These coalitions between public and private entities, with varying mandates and orientations, continue to expand and often blur social, legal, and political definitions of trafficking De Shalit and van der Meulen ; Lobasz This lack of clarity has created a dynamic whereby various public safety institutions—including government and policing agencies—create their own definitions, understandings, and knowledges around trafficking.
As a result, anti-trafficking narratives and responses tend to merge with other criminal legal issues, including gendered colonial violence Kaye and anxieties around border control and migration Pickering and Ham While various courts in Canada have been tasked with adjudicating and clarifying the legal definition, the development of political and juridical narratives must be contextualized through the shifting regulatory frameworks related to trafficking, sex work, exploitation, and the conflation of these terms.
In , the United Nations established the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons , which served as an international call to combat the recruitment and movement of persons into forced labour. The protocol set an international enforcement standard for criminalizing human trafficking and called on nation states to adopt a comprehensive approach to protecting vulnerable persons from exploitation.
