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Chanelle Gallant is an author, strategist and consultant who has been an organizer in movements for racial justice and sex workers rights for over two decades. Elene Lam is an activist, artist, community organizer, educator, and human rights defender. She is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the cofounder of Migrant Sex Workers Project.

In issue #124 we feature an excerpt from their book Not Your Rescue Project (Haymarket Books, 2024). In this excerpt, they explain how Toronto’s anti-trafficking regulations claim to protect women—but instead, they weaponize city licensing laws to harass, fine, and endanger racialized migrant sex workers.

The danger that police pose to racialized migrant sex workers is well known, but there is less awareness about just how discriminatory and dangerous city-level licensing regulations (and their enforcement) are to racialized migrant sex workers. In this section, we use Toronto as a case study to illustrate how municipal anti-trafficking regulations governing massage businesses led to an increase in harassment, abuse, and physical and sexual violence against migrant sex workers, from the state and from individuals, after Toronto introduced its first citylevel plan to combat human trafficking.

Municipal regulations and enforcement vary between cities and regions and between the US and Canada. No single case study can tell us everything. However, this case study has the advantage of our access to records, data, and accounts from workers who describe their experiences before and after the introduction of the city’s anti-trafficking plan. From this we have learned a great deal about how city licensing and enforcement regimes harm migrant sex workers, the strategies of this system of power (including how it cloaks itself), and how to recognize and support worker resistance.

In 2013, the city of Toronto’s Municipal Licensing and Standards Office issued a report with a plan for “strengthening the protection of vulnerable women, children and all persons from human traffickers.” The singling out of women and children communicated that the policy would focus not on labor exploitation and abuse, which occurs in a range of unprotected labor sectors, but instead on surveilling the industry that has been repeatedly associated with “violence against women and children”—the sex industry. And not just any part of the sex industry: the sex industry is vast and diverse, but Toronto’s city council passed a motion calling specifically for increased human trafficking investigations into the city’s massage businesses, which were staffed largely by Asian migrant women. One of us (Chanelle) was part of a sex work organization that objected to the new plan, on the basis that it was founded on misinformation and would lead to increased law enforcement abuse, especially of those most strongly linked to sex trafficking in the public imagination. Multiple sex work advocates and organizations submitted recommendations that the city not adopt the proposal and instead use evidence-based approaches to combating exploitation, coercion, and abuse in a range of labor sectors, including the sex industry. But the recommendations went ignored by the city council members, who instead followed the guidance of a number of anti– sex work / anti-trafficking nonprofits that had met with the city and helped to inform and develop its plan. The following section is based on Butterfly’s research about the plan’s impact on migrant sex workers.

Targeted Investigations, Excessive Charges

After the introduction of the city’s anti-trafficking plan, licensing enforcement began to descend on the racialized massage sector, conducting constant and lengthy investigations on massage businesses that resulted in a dramatic spike in fines and prosecutions.11 Between 2013 and 2017, law enforcement investigations of four hundred massage businesses in Toronto skyrocketed from just over three thousand per year to over twenty thousand investigations in a single year.

Not only were the police saturating the massage sector with constant investigations, they seemed intent on making life difficult for the workers. Workers reported that licensing enforcement officers were spending one to two hours in the spas and seemed determined to find an offense. They began to issue citations for trivial infractions (such as having a scratch mark on a massage table or not having a city-issued license number on a business card). Another worker who had put a thimbleful of liquor on a small prayer altar for deities was charged with violating the laws against open liquor. Other workers reported being investigated over twenty times in a single month and enduring investigations that involved as many as seven officers at a time.

In interviews with Butterfly, workers described these inspections as frightening, abusive, and disruptive. Here is one example: “They [law enforcement] searched for an hour and could not find anything. Finally, they found a minor issue that they believed warranted giving me a ticket. They refuse to leave until they can find a reason to give you a ticket.” During investigations, police would burst into the workers’ closed treatment rooms, shower areas, and private changing areas where women were changing or undressed. Some workers were terrified, thinking that a robbery was under way. Some officers forced workers to stand or not to move for the full length of the questioning. Each officer enforced the regulations differently, and they frequently would not explain the charges and fines they were issuing or would present the information in English only. Consequently, some workers could not understand what they were being charged with.

Licensing officers also began to more frequently enforce regulations that put workers in danger. For instance, workers in Toronto massage businesses are prohibited from locking the doors to their treatment rooms and installing their own closed-circuit cameras, and they must post their license with their full legal name and home address somewhere that is visible to customers. These discriminatory regulations put workers’ personal safety at risk, especially for women working alone at night in isolated areas. Some predators know that massage businesses are likely to have cash on hand and are legally forced to keep their doors unlocked, without any cameras in place. Workers are safer if their clients do not have their personal information. Before 2013, most city-licensing officers did not enforce these rules—something that workers appreciated.

This changed, however, after the introduction of the city’s anti-trafficking plan, with licensing officers increasingly motivated to prosecute any infraction they could find, including the rules that endangered workers’ safety. Massage workers were forced to make a choice—leave their doors open and risk a robbery or a serious assault, or lock the doors and risk getting charges and fines. A business that racked up a certain number of these charges and fines could lose its license, meaning all the workers in that establishment could lose their jobs. The city’s human trafficking policies and enforcement thus forcibly made racialized migrant sex workers vulnerable to workplace violence.

Police also began to issue fines that were up to five times higher than what other businesses faced for similar infractions. Some workers tried to fight back against the excessive investigations and false charges by contesting the charges in court. But when they did, the police would retaliate, increasing the number of investigations and the size of the fines. In one case in which a worker tried to fight her fine, the police punished her by levying seven fines in short succession.

Excerpted with permission from Not Your Rescue Project:Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam, published by Haymarket Books (2024).

The Internationalist Archive