I recently spoke with Michelle Abel and Armando de Miranda on the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Inside Policy Talks about human trafficking, prostitution (not to be called ‘sex work’), online exploitation, pornography, and the direction of Canadian law in these areas.

The conversation was grounded in the latest Statistics Canada data which show increases in rates of human trafficking.

Here are a few key takeaways:

Human trafficking

– Police-reported trafficking has increased since 2014. This could reflect a mix of expanded offences, improved detection, and reporting, or a greater prevalence of prostitution – the result of a culture with ever more permissive sexual norms.

– What is consistent is that most victims are young women, most cases occur in urban centres, and sexual exploitation remains the dominant form of trafficking.

Online exploitation is now central

-Sexual exploitation increasingly occurs online — through grooming, coercion, image abuse, and platforms that profit from scale and anonymity.

-Canada criminalizes much of this conduct, but enforcement lags far behind the speed of digital harm and lacks the frameworks emerging in peer jurisdictions.

-Michelle was involved in the passage of the US’ Take it Down Act, which requires swift action to remove images and matches the letter of the law with enforcement capacity.

Pornography and enforcement

-Under existing Canadian law, much mainstream pornography could fail the obscenity test if it were interpreted without the mainstream elite’s libertine cultural misunderstanding of freedom as licence, and enforced consistently.

Bills S-209 and C-16

These bills raise address legitimate concerns but there are issues with how they’re crafted at present:

• S-209 aims to limit youth access to pornography, but its effectiveness will depend on enforcement design and capability.

• C-16 seeks to address coercive control, but risks overbreadth if not narrowly and carefully drafted.

Good law must protect victims without sacrificing clarity, due process, or proportionality.

Intimate partner violence and relationship type

StatsCan data and other studies show higher rates of sexual and partner violence among:

• cohabiting and unmarried couples

• LGBTQ+ populations

The core lessons from this conversation are that we don’t need more symbolic laws that are unenforceable because of lack of enforcement or prosecution capacity, or poor legislative drafting. And we need a big shift away from the libertine culture that has characterized our own since the 60s.

Episode description:

Every year, thousands of women and children in Canada and the United States are drawn into human trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, and online abuses. These victims are often hidden in plain sight, but the harms they endure ripple out across families and communities.

It’s a gut-wrenching issue, but there’s some signs of hope. Our culture is becoming more aware of how vulnerable people are targeted, and how all of society is affected by factors like the omnipresence of pornography. In that context, there’s growing talk about the need for laws, policies, and enforcement tools to adapt in response.

But at the same time, less attention is given to how the broader liberalization of sexual norms has rapidly destigmatized behaviours that once carried moral and social boundaries. It’s a trend that coincides with – and perhaps contributes to – greater prevalence of social ills.

To discuss the work they are doing to combat these challenges, Michelle Abel and Armando de Miranda join Inside Policy Talks. Abel is a survivor of family-based human trafficking who has spent the past 15 years working directly with victims, survivors, and their families in Canada and the U.S. She is the founder of the non-profit organization Bridge2Future where she leads research, advocacy, and policy work. De Miranda is a former UN peacekeeper who now works closely with Abel as the legislative strategist at Bridge2Future.

On the podcast, Abel tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that adverse childhood experiences – known as “ACES” – like the ones that she experienced growing up, lay the groundwork for further abuse.

“Traffickers don’t need to create this conditioning. They just need to exploit it,” says Abel.

In that context, she pushes back against the idea that terms like “sex work” should be used to refer to activities like prostitution – which is often tied to trafficking.

“I absolutely reject the term sex work, because it obscures the reality of exploitation,” says Abel, noting that around four out of every five women who enter prostitution before the age of 18 have experienced childhood sexual abuse.

“They’re minors, so they’re not making informed employment choices,” says Abel. “The term sex work makes it look like it is a legitimate job or a career, and it’s absolutely anything but that. Exploitation is never a form of a profession.”