Courting Victims: Exploring the Legal Framing of Exploitation in Human Trafficking Cases

Abstract This article examines how exploitation informs judicial interpretations of human trafficking in Canadian criminal cases. While socio-legal and popular notions of trafficking often suggest that forced movement into a decidedly exploitative labour context is required, our analysis of key appellate cases and constitutional challenges reveals that actual exploitation is not a necessary element of the offence. Instead, the trafficking in persons provision criminalizes the intent to exploit, while requiring the court to adopt an “objective” assessment of whether a reasonable person in the complainant’s circumstances could potentially fear for their safety in the context of providing (sexual) labour. We argue that this objective standard contributes to a gendered hierarchy of legal knowledge and ultimately privileges the perceived masculinized rationality of the courts and legal actors while rendering the subjective experiences of complainants as less central to the prosecution of human trafficking.