Attachments to Victimhood: Anti-Trafficking Narratives and the Criminalization of the Sex Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford to strike down criminal law provisions related to the regulation of sex work, the government passed Bill C-36, ultimately reaffirming the project of criminalizing prostitution. Also known as the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA), Bill C-36 is part of a global trend that shifts the state’s attention away from regulating sex work as a societal nuisance, and instead, puts forth a carceral agenda which situates sex workers as victims of an inherently exploitative and coercive sex trade – pivoting the punitive elements of criminal law onto clients and mythologized profiteers of the sex trade. Focusing on the testimonies of neo-abolitionists leading up to the implementation of Bill C-36, this article critically explores the ways sex work is constituted as a problem of ‘trafficking’ and how attachments to victimhood allow for renewed criminalization within this new regulatory framework.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".