Taking back the power: The link between poverty and Canada’s sex industry

Despite the investment in sophisticated and well-funded counter-exploitation strategies in Canada, women and children continue to be trafficked and sexually exploited each day. Research has provided significant findings, demonstrating close correlations between poverty, homelessness, and deprivation of opportunities for education and employment, and lacking resilience to being targeted and oppressed in the sex industry (Chrismas, 2017). Cullen-DuPont (2009) has described how traffickers identify people who are desperate to escape poverty by luring them with lies, such as the promise of legitimate work. In some cases, parents sell their children in hopes of a better life. Tragically, however, the hope of legitimate work often turns into torture and servitude to the sex industry. Chrismas (2017) has characterized the sex industry in Canada as amounting to 21st century slavery, in which children and young women are, at first, lured and then captured in a fully entrenched culture of torture. Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or purchase of persons for the sole purpose of exploitation (Glowbal Act, 2018). It happens to men and women, but the base majority of exploited people in Manitoba are women, often introduced to the sex trade industry at an early age. This paper provides context around the impacts that poverty and homelessness have on those who are trafficked, along with recommendations for those looking to get out.