Human Trafficking in Canada as a Historical Continuation of the 1980s and 1990s Panics over Youth in Sex Trade

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) reconceptualization of human trafficking as a transnational organized crime of pressing urgency through the Trafficking Protocol (2000) provided an enormous boost to the urgency surrounding the issue of trafficking. In the domestic context, in Canada, however, the issue has become embedded with various pre-existing concerns, most notably child sexual exploitation and youth in the sex trade, which can be traced to the panics that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s around youth involvement in the sex trade, marked by the release of the Badgley Report in 1984. Since then, young people in the sex trade have been seen as victims to be protected rather than criminals to be punished (Bittle, From villain to victim: secure care and young women in prostitution. In: Balfour G, Comack E (eds) Criminalizing women: gender and (in)justice in neo-liberal times. Fernwood Publishings, Halifax, p 195, 2006). This chapter focuses on the ways in which anti-trafficking discourses and frontline practices of criminal justice actors in Canada borrow from concerns over sexual exploitation of children and particularly the 1980s and 1990s panics over youth in the sex trade. In historically precedented ways, these concerns are used to target the sex trade under the guise of “saving the children” from sexual abuse and maintain a targeted focus on young black men as “pimps” and exploiters. This adaptation of knowledge, tools, logics, and discourses of the 1980s and 1990s into the current anti-trafficking efforts has enabled the reconceptualization of previous procuring cases as human trafficking.