Trafficking Harms: Critical Politics, Perspectives, Experiences is an edited collection that brings together contributions from academics, community organizers, sex-worker rights and migrant-justice advocates, defence lawyers, and individuals with lived experience of navigating (and being targeted by) the expanding carceral net of anti-trafficking efforts in Canada. The book emerges amid intense national attention on domestic (sex) trafficking and the growth of an expansive policing enterprise generously funded by all levels of government. Yet, as the anthology demonstrates, anti-trafficking enforcement efforts persist despite empirical research demonstrating persistently low prosecution rates (Chapter 5) and the documented harms of raid-and-rescue operations, particularly on migrant sex workers (Chapters 7). Extending this critique, experiences of migrant labour exploitation within Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program remain marginal to dominant anti-trafficking approaches, with the final chapters revealing troubling tensions between anti-trafficking regimes and immigration policies governing temporary migrant labour. Against this backdrop, Trafficking Harms brings critical anti-trafficking debates into dialogue and demonstrates how historical and contemporary anti-trafficking discourses promote and sustain colonial authority. Indeed, the book situates anti-trafficking enforcement practices as inextricably linked to Canada’s ongoing colonial project.

Trafficking Harms, which mobilizes an anti-carceral, decolonial and abolitionist perspective, is organized into four sections. The first explores the ideological foundation of anti-trafficking enforcement in Canada, specifically described as “constituted by antiblack logics and narratives” (Beutin 2024, 35), as well as informed by anti-sex work and anti-migrant sentiments. Having established the discursive context, the chapters in the second section critically examine the “highly gendered, racialized, and sensationalized” nature of anti-trafficking efforts (O’Doherty and Millar 2024, 89) through the implementation and enforcement of various regulatory approaches (e.g., the Anti-Human Trafficking Strategy Act) and criminal justice policies such as the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) and Trafficking in Persons offences. In addition to empirical research showing that human-trafficking charges have had limited success in the courts (Chapter 5), the chapters in this section reveal how the discursive construction of “pimps/traffickers” and “victims” effectively determines the central targets of anti-trafficking efforts. Elene Lam, a scholar, activist and executive director of Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network, and Mash Frouhar, a practicing defence lawyer in Ottawa, demonstrate the harms of such racialized policing, including heightened vulnerability to exploitation and violence, increased economic precarity and the risk of deportation.

While narratives about anti-trafficking efforts often focus on (migrant) sex workers who are targeted, the perspectives of those accused of human trafficking are rarely heard. Accordingly, the second section concludes with a firsthand account that forcefully demonstrates how quickly and powerfully the trafficking label is imposed (and, in this case, long before any evidence is gathered). Notably, the young man whom readers encounter bears little resemblance to the archetypal “pimp” or predatory offender that dominant narratives have sketched. He describes a mutually beneficial relationship in which both parties sought income, with his share of earnings supporting his postsecondary education. There is a clear departure from the sensationalized “pimp” figure that Stacey Hannem and Chris Bruckert describe in Chapter 2. While this is not explicitly stated in the book, stories such as his demonstrate the importance of an abolitionist perspective even when the legal system appears to operate as promised (namely by punishing individuals who meet legal classifications of a “human trafficker”). His story, when understood in the context of the preceding chapters, highlights the disjuncture between formal legal outcomes and the complex realities of those caught in the expanding net of anti-trafficking enforcement.

The third section of the anthology focuses on the expansion of police powers and surveillance practices that disproportionately target racialized and marginalized communities and the organizations that support them (Chapter 11). This section, drawing on both scholarly analyses and personal accounts from community organizers, powerfully illustrates the broader settler-colonial logics underpinning anti-trafficking policing. The fourth section expands this analysis, suggesting that the structure of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada constitutes state-sanctioned exploitation, bolstered by legal and regulatory frameworks that legitimize exclusionary logics and heighten migrant workers’ vulnerability. The final section of the anthology fleshes out how anti-trafficking enforcement and policing practices, through immigration enforcement and border securitization efforts, are part of an expansive colonial enterprise that frames surveillance, carceral solutions, and strict immigration policies as protection against “dangerous criminals.” As such, these chapters trace the colonial logics that divide victims deemed “worthy” of rescue from those whose victimhood is dismissed and recast as deceptive, fraudulent, and a threat to Canada’s border security.

A notable strength of the collection is that, despite the diversity of writers, its abolitionist and decolonial perspective is sustained throughout. This makes Trafficking Harms a compelling and necessary read not only for academics, legal scholars, activists, and community organizers, but also for those newly engaging with the topic. It meaningfully contributes to ongoing debates on the harms of anti-trafficking enforcement and frames abolitionism as a political imperative. In every respect, Trafficking Harms is a powerful and thought-provoking collection that will inspire future research and continued dialogue between movements, carrying its anti-carceral perspective forward.