Legal Possibilities and Criminalised Population Groups: A Personal Experience of an Indigenous Woman in the Sex Trade

Abstract

This chapter is an analysis of the tort of invasion of privacy (intrusion upon seclusion) in the Canadian context with a comparative analysis in other jurisdictions, namely the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The chapter will explore the different approaches to this tort and will outline the legal possibilities it provides and alternatively, prohibits, especially in the lives of vulnerable and marginalised population groups. The chapter will adopt an autoethnographic approach to challenging legal responses to the right to privacy among sex trade workers especially those who use a myriad of technology to facilitate transactions today. While many organisations make assumptions about those in the sex trade, I ask the reader to challenge their own biases and assumptions to see how the law can be used to facilitate digital and social justice for those often erased and forgotten in discussions about technology-facilitated violence and harassment online.

I recognize that the term sex work is often used in advocacy circles to destigmatize ideas about selling and trading sexual services; however, for Indigenous women, often times, sex work is not work for them. As such, I use the term sex trade to acknowledge these nuanced experiences. Sometimes I may refer to sex work but that is only applicable to my experiences as opposed to more broadly, experiences of Indigenous women, where I will use and refer to the experiences in the sex trade, more broadly.