Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2016

On the road again: My writing goes wandering

Delighted to have my writing appearing on other sites every now and then, the most recent examples being in the online B.C. newspaper  The Tyee and as a guest blogger on the web site Naked Truth  run by self-described "anarchist stripper mom" Annie Temple. Hope you'll check them out! The piece I wrote for The Tyee grew out of some conversations I had this week about my own experiences with the people who these days reveal themselves as nasty internet trolls, like the kind who have shouted down actor Leslie Jones with the worst racist, misogynist, super-ugly stuff. And the piece at Naked Truth builds on an earlier blog post I did about the deliberate campaign to silence adult sex workers by building a myth of trafficking and exploitation around them. As you'll see in my piece - and I've included all my sources at the bottom of the piece to encourage readers to see a little more clearly - trafficking is being manipulated into a far bigger issue than it actu...

When good words go bad: The usurping of trafficking as a weapon against sex workers

Were I a cartoon character, I expect I'd have big red flags and maybe some small explosions coming out of my head these days after reading the Ontario government's news release  this week about its big new anti-trafficking initiative. I'm all for ending trafficking, of course. But the issue is increasingly emerging as some kind of stealth instrument for attacking people working in the sex industry, so I've learned to read every announcement of new anti-trafficking measures in a state of acute hyper-vigilance for what's really being said. The Ontario news release offers some worthy examples of what I'm talking about. Scroll down to the "Quick Facts" in the release and you'll see this one: "In many cases of trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, trafficked persons may develop 'trauma bonds' with their traffickers, and may not view themselves as victims. As such, human trafficking is believed to be a vastly underreport...