Over the past several years, public attention toward human trafficking in Canada has gained an increasing and much deserved intensity. Efforts from activist organizations, service providers, scholars, and experiencers has brought to light long-standing social problems relating to sexual and labour exploitation in Canada and in other parts of the world.

The need to effectively support experiencers and eradicate the root causes of this exploitation has likewise provoked challenging discussions about the historical legacies and social structures that shape the practice of human trafficking, as well as the frameworks through which the issue itself is commonly understood.

This Brief highlights an aspect of human trafficking that is tacitly acknowledged but typically overlooked in contemporary public discourse: the intersection of sexual violence with systemic racial and colonial violence. Although no single framework can provide definitive insight into such a complex issue, this Brief demonstrates how racism and colonialism are recurring factors in sexual exploitation of women in Canada, including what is referred to as human trafficking. Critical awareness of these interconnections is therefore essential to addressing the broader issue.

This Brief seeks to highlight and contribute to that discussion in the following respects:

• Examining how human trafficking connects with broader systems of structural oppression, such as racism, colonialism, and sexism, and how these intersecting forms of oppression affect the lived experiences of Black and Indigenous women and women of colour in Canada.
• Summarizing current advocacy and scholarship explaining how society’s values, ideas, and power relations have come to normalize the sexual violence experienced by Black and Indigenous women, and women of colour, in human trafficking.
• Situating human trafficking and intersecting oppressions within a broader historical and sociological context—and drawing upon these factors to critically assess various strategies for anti-trafficking advocacy and policy.

It is our hope that any gaps or shortcomings in this work (due either to constraints in scope or limitations in our own perspectives) will provoke further analysis into, and expansion upon, the complex intersectional nature of this social issue. We also encourage readers to learn about other forms of human trafficking that are not addressed here (e.g. forced labour), how these phenomena operate both domestically and globally, and how they too intersect with systems of racial, colonial, class, and sexual oppression.