Attachments to Victimhood: Anti-Trafficking Narratives and the Criminalization of the Sex Trade
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919897970 |
| Author | Marcus A Sibley |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(5) 699–717
Attachments to Victimhood:
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Anti-Trafficking Narratives
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919897970
and the Criminalization of
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the Sex Trade
Marcus A Sibley
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford to strike
down criminal law provisions related to the regulation of sex work, the government
passed Bill C-36, ultimately reaffirming the project of criminalizing prostitution. Also
known as the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA), Bill C-36 is part
of a global trend that shifts the state’s attention away from regulating sex work as a
societal nuisance, and instead, puts forth a carceral agenda which situates sex workers as
victims of an inherently exploitative and coercive sex trade – pivoting the punitive ele-
ments of criminal law onto clients and mythologized profiteers of the sex trade. Focusing
on the testimonies of neo-abolitionists leading up to the implementation of Bill C-36, this
article critically explores the ways sex work is constituted as a problem of ‘trafficking’
and how attachments to victimhood allow for renewed criminalization within this new
regulatory framework.
Keywords
Affect, Bill C-36, PCEPA, risk, sex work, testimony, trafficking, vulnerability
Introduction
In the last decade, there has been a significant international effort to regulate and
criminalize prostitution as part of the global strategy to combat sex trafficking. Many
Corresponding author:
Marcus A Sibley, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa,
ON K1S 5B6, Canada.
Email: marcus.sibley@carleton.ca
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Social & Legal Studies 29(5)
anti-trafficking organizations have partnered with lawmakers and police agencies to
mobilize the use of anti-prostitution laws to end the ‘crisis’ of sex trafficking and abolish
what they call ‘modern-day slavery’. Regulating prostitution plays an important role in
the panic over sex trafficking. In fact, many neo-abolitionists see the two as inseparable.
Many abolitionists argue that the sex trade must be understood through complex systems
of gendered-based domination that place women in a position where all sexual transac-
tions are expressed through idioms of coercion and exploitation. According to this
paradigm, the possibility of consensual sexual exchange can never be realized within
systems of patriarchal capitalism.
Under these conditions, the Nordic model has gained significant popularity among
abolitionists. First implemented in Sweden in 1999, the regulatory framework moves
away from criminalizing the sellers of sexual services and focuses instead on crim-
inalizing those who purchase sex, and more broadly, those who facilitate the exploita-
tion and coercion of those involved in sexual labour. Many countries including Canada
and the United Kingdom (UK) have adopted similar approaches inspired by the Nordic
model. In 2013, the Canadian landmark decision of Canada (Attorney General) v.
Bedford1 struck down Criminal Code provisions which had previously criminalized
sex workers’ abilities to actively engage in harm reduction via screening clients,
working indoors and hiring personnel (e.g. drivers, bodyguards, etc.). Like the UK’s
Policing and Crime Act (2009), Canada’s approach has been to move away from
governing prostitution as a social nuisance, and instead, focuses on recognizing sex
workers as victims in need of state protection. In 2014, and in response to the Supreme
Court’s ruling in Bedford, the Canadian government introduced and passed Bill C-36,
adopting and implementing many of the legal and ideological pillars of the Nordic
model. Titled the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, its legislative
mandate seeks to address the ‘exploitative nature’ of prostitution while simultaneously
protecting communities from those who lure women and girls into its grasp.
These legislative shifts offer a site of analysis that allows us to expose and challenge
what Butler (2009: 11) refers to as the ‘orchestrating designs’ of political and legal
interventions. Here, the methodological underpinning rests on how ‘[t]he frame’s jour-
ney exposes its cons’ (Carline, 2012: 210). In this case, the move from regulating sex
work as a nuisance to the creation of legislation which, on its face, suddenly recognizes
sex workers as vulnerable and ‘worthy’ victims, points to the need to explore how
prostitution is framed under these new legislative conditions. How does this discursive
reframing happen and what kinds of identity politics form the scaffolding for such
legislative changes?
In exploring these questions, this article examines the regulatory and discursive
framework surrounding Canada’s shift towards governing prostitution as a problem of
human and sex trafficking. I contextualize the global trends towards adopting the Nordic
model and how these regulatory systems mobilize a specific iteration of the trafficked
subject – one that is constituted through a language of vulnerability and victimhood.
Focusing on the Canadian context, I consider how the landmark ruling in Bedford allows
the state to reinvent its regulatory framework from one focused on governing nuisance to
a reimagining of sex workers as ‘worthy’ victims in need of saving. This created the
political and legal opportunity to orient the continued criminalization of the sex trade
Sibley
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around the exploitative users and profiteers of the sex trade (e.g. purchasers, pimps and
traffickers) while re-characterizing the ontological nature of sex work from that of a
societal nuisance to an institution designed to violently exploit women.
Inspired by Carline’s (2011, 2012) treatment of Butler’s (2009) Frames of War and
the tracing of vulnerability and victimhood in official state discourses related to similar
trends in UK prostitution laws, I consider the political potential of framing sex workers
as ‘prostituted’ and ‘trafficked’ victims in the Canadian context. Carline asks us to
consider how the subject position of the sex worker – or in the case of the abolitionist
narrative, the ‘prostituted’ girl – moves from one political context or frame to the next.
The cleavage between legislative frameworks allows for a critical unpacking of the many
articulations of both prostitution and the prostitute. In both contexts, the legislation
specifically focuses on the restructuring of legislation away from targeting prostitution
as a social nuisance, to one that is invested in curbing the exploitative practices of ‘johns’
and pimps. Unsurprisingly, Bill C-36’s response to Bedford was less interested in recog-
nizing and acknowledging sex workers as risk-taking subjects – a view the Supreme
Court of Canada held as an important part of the sex trade. Instead, the government
reframed the issues and debates regarding prostitution as a problem inextricably and
indistinguishably linked to saving victims of trafficking.
Drawing on the proposal of Bill C-362 and the testimony of witnesses called
before the House of Commons’ Committee on Justice and Human Rights in 2014,
this article focuses on the testimonies of policing representatives and neo-
abolitionist organizations in their accounts of the sex industry and how their testi-
monies inform understandings of prostitution’s relationship to sexual violence,
human trafficking and effective policy-driven responses.3 I unpack the ways police
organizations use anti-prostitution offences to intervene in and simultaneously con-
struct the problem of trafficking. Next, I explore how neo-abolitionists draw on
personal experiences of violence to conflate all women participating in the sex trade
as trafficked, exploited or coerced. Focusing specifically on testimony offered dur-
ing these committee hearings, I offer a picture of anti-trafficking narratives that
serve to draw us closer to scenes of violence and exploitation while simultaneously
distancing us from the possibilities that sex workers can engage in mechanisms of
risk prevention and harm reduction. Finally, I argue that the affective relationalities
between the sex trade and tropes of human suffering constitute the sex trade as
inherently dangerous and as a space where the utility of criminal law is privileged
over other kinds of interventions. Such visceral and immediate imagery moves the
discussions around sex work away from risk-management and instead frames sex
workers as incapable of choice.
The Influence of Nordic-Inspired Governance
The global trend to end the criminalization of women selling sex, and instead, focus the
prohibition on the sex trade by attempting to end the demand for sexual labour was first
introduced by Sweden in 1999. Legislators in Sweden sought to construct the sex trade as
a site where the sale of sex was emblematic of an exploitative culture of violence
perpetrated by men against women (Justitiedepartementet, 2010). Over the next 20 years,
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Social & Legal Studies 29(5)
Finland, Norway and Iceland passed similar legal mechanisms aimed at punishing those
who procure sexual services (Skilbrei and Holmstro¨m, 2011). In 2009, the UK and Wales
passed similar legislative directives in section 14 of the Policing and Crimes Act, enact-
ing a similar approach by criminalizing clients of sex workers while simultaneously
‘educating’ and ‘rescuing’ sex workers from the exploitative nature of prostitution. This
approach offers a...
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