Citizenship status, racism, gender and violence: Aboriginal women in Canada, international sex trade – finding the links and associations

In the forward to Andrea Smith’s (2005) book Conquest. Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Winona LaDuke, writing about Native Women’s experience in Minnesota, writes that Native women in the state, which borders Manitoba, have a ten-times higher chance of dying a violent death than a white woman in the same region. She also notes that “the National Guard will not spend hours of manpower scouring for your missing body.” (LaDuke: xvii) She compares this to the expensive $150,000 search for a blond woman, who went missing at the Minnesota/North Dakota border, attesting the lack of similar resources under any circumstances expended in search of a missing Native woman. This is not only true of Minnesota, North Dakota or any other part of the U.S., but also the truth of experience of Native women across Canada. This paper will try to explain and evaluate, and place in a personal social-work context, why this would be true. As well it will compare the experience of Native women and violence, to the violence faced by immigrant women who work in the sex trade in Canada, or the role of Canada as a state of boundaries and policies of exclusion, within a climate of globalization and heightened spread of an international underground of sex trafficking that accompanies globalization

[...] (Jiwani: However, this is not even framed or noted as such, unless it is deconstructed and interrogated, due to its ‘natural’ air which equates with privilege (Razack, 1998) The way that citizenship laws are framed in Canada, as Jiwani (1999) notes, leads to exclusion of vulnerable and young women from being able to migrate to Canada. This becomes one of the ways that the liberal democratic state, inadvertently, aid the traffickers in girls and women in the international sex trade. [...]

[...] As a society this could include as Green suggests native women who end up seeming political inconsequential not only to the Canadian state which frames the laws of citizenship but also the band councils with the urgent need for self-determination, again, not taking into account the equality of women in the unfortunate interlinking of citizenship, status, patriarchy and for those at the margins, gender and race and poverty. (Green: 718) The need, as Fellows and Razack contend lies in the deep analysis that “class exploitation could not be accomplished without gender and racial hierarchies; imperialism could not function without class exploitation, sexism, heterosexism, and so (Fellows and Razack: 335) Their radical critique stems from their fear that if one oppression is left to stand, then they all remain; none are eradicated unless all are eradicated together, whether in theory or in praxis. [...]

[...] eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp 207-229 Brennan, D. (2002) “Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as a Stepping Stone to International Migration” in Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A. eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp 154-168 Fellows, M. and Razack, S. (1998) Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations Among Women” The Journal of Gender Race and Justice, No pp 335-352 Gill, S.(2002) Unspeakability of Racism: Mapping Law’s Complicity in Manitoba’s Racialized Spaces” in Razack, S. [...]