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This collection critically investigates anti-trafficking enforcement in Canada and its impact on marginalized groups.

April 23, 2026Open Access

Katrin Roots, Ann De Shalit and Emily van der Meulen, Trafficking Harms: Critical Politics, Perspectives, Experiences. Fernwood Publishing, 2024, 275 pp.

Key Points

This collection critically investigates anti-trafficking enforcement in Canada and its impact on marginalized groups.
Edited anthology featuring contributions from various stakeholders, including advocates and individuals with lived experience.
Analysis of contemporary anti-trafficking policies and their implications for migrant workers based on empirical research.
Demonstrates low prosecution rates despite extensive anti-trafficking efforts.
Highlights the negative impacts of raid-and-rescue operations on migrant sex workers.
Reveals tension between anti-trafficking regimes and immigration policies affecting migrant labour.

Abstract

Experiences is an edited collection that brings together contributions from academics, community organizers, sexworker rights and migrant-justice advocates, defence lawyers, and individuals with lived experience of navigating (and being targeted by) the expanding carceral net of anti-trafficking efforts in Canada.The book emerges amid intense national attention on domestic (sex) trafficking and the growth of an expansive policing enterprise generously funded by all levels of government.Yet, as the anthology demonstrates, anti-trafficking enforcement efforts persist despite empirical research demonstrating persistently low prosecution rates (Chapter 5) and the documented harms of raid-and-rescue operations, particularly on migrant sex workers (Chapters 7).Extending this critique, experiences of migrant labour exploitation within Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program remain marginal to dominant anti-trafficking approaches, with the final chapters revealing troubling tensions between anti-trafficking regimes and immigration policies governing temporary migrant labour.Against this backdrop, Trafficking Harms brings critical anti-trafficking debates into dialogue and demonstrates how historical and contemporary anti-trafficking discourses promote and sustain colonial authority.Indeed, the book situates anti-trafficking enforcement practices as inextricably linked to Canada's ongoing colonial project.Trafficking Harms, which mobilizes an anti-carceral, decolonial and abolitionist perspective, is organized into four sections.The first explores the ideological foundation of anti-trafficking enforcement in Canada, specifically described as "constituted by antiblack logics and narratives" (Beutin 2024, 35), as well as informed by anti-sex work and anti-migrant sentiments.Having established the discursive context, the chapters in the second section critically examine the "highly gendered, racialized, and sensationalized" nature of anti-trafficking

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