Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking refers to the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person sexually for another’s gain. Although often conflated with sex work, trafficking is best understood as distinct, because people choose to engage in sex work for a wide range of reasons, and it is not inherently exploitative. There is no contradiction between supporting the rights of sex workers and opposing sex trafficking.

The vast majority (96%) of trafficking victims in cases that are reported to police are women and girls, and 70% of them are under age 25. In over 80% of cases, those accused of this exploitation were men. It is clear then that sex trafficking is a gendered issue, closely tied to other questions of gender-based violence.

Many of the factors that make young women and girls vulnerable to trafficking are amplified by homelessness. According to Covenant House Toronto, over 30% of women and girls who stay at their shelter have been involved in some kind of sex work, including sex for food. They point out that not all of these young women are victims of trafficking, but that this speaks to the desperation that accompanies homelessness for them.

Covenant House identifies several other factors that may make a young woman vulnerable to trafficking, including a tumultuous life, with struggles at school and unstable families top of the list. These are also risk factors for homelessness. Traumatic experiences are another source of vulnerability to trafficking, and homelessness is particularly traumatizing and unsafe for women and girls. According to the national Without a Home survey, 37.4% of young women experiencing homelessness were sexually assaulted in the previous 12 months (which rises to over 40% for trans people).

Accordingly, a report published by Polaris in 2018 based on American data found that 64% of sex trafficking survivors reported being homeless or experiencing unstable housing at the time they were first trafficked. It found that traffickers exploit young women’s fears of sleeping on the street by both offering safe housing and by threatening to make them homeless as means of control.

We can see then that homelessness and sex trafficking are closely linked. Homeless young women are at increased risk of being trafficked, in large part because of the gendered violence they face while homeless.