In an online sex forum, users exchange tips on their pursuit of Indigenous women on the streets of Canadian and American cities. “Picked up a nice looking tall native girl . . . Was pretty drunk . . .” reads one post. Other posts encourage avoiding white women, as they could be associated with law enforcement, and to target Indigenous women instead.
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The forum is part of a broader ecosystem that includes online sex advertisements, a disproportionate number of which often feature Indigenous women, according to new research published by content and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters last month. Tracking the locations of those online ads, the report’s authors write, could help law enforcement determine whether the women in the ads are being trafficked and could help identify and find missing Indigenous women.
The authors also point to the need for law enforcement to place more focus on identifying buyers: “If sex ads are the marketing, we must ask: Who is the target for this marketing?” (While the report highlighted posts that have appeared in an online sex forum in the past year, in response to follow-ups from The Walrus, it did not provide dates for individual posts or the name of the forum, citing concerns about publicizing it.)
In Canada, people are immunized from prosecution for selling and advertising their own sexual services, but they are barred from advertising for others, and it is illegal to buy sex. But Janine Benedet, a law professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in legal responses to sexual violence against women and girls and who was not involved in the report, says enforcement of laws against buying sex is patchwork across the country. Police often take little action against buyers and pimps, some of whom are traffickers, until “the worst” occurs, she said. “We put the onus on victims to come forward or unless they’re dead and we can’t look the other way.”
The likely buyers—mostly men, according to Statistics Canada—are not being targeted nearly enough by law enforcement across the country, said Benedet. “When you have demand, you need supply to meet it, and traffickers procure women to meet that supply,” she said. “And of course, they move them around because it destabilizes them.” The constant displacement can also make it harder to locate women and gather evidence that they are being trafficked, said Benedet.
While they make up 5 percent of Canada’s population, Indigenous women and girls each account for roughly 50 percent of sex-trafficking victims, according to a frequently cited 2014 National Task Force on Sex Trafficking of Women and Girls report.
“There is a deep overrepresentation of Indigenous women in sex trafficking as well as victims of violence in Canada,” the Thomson Reuters report states. “The underlying factors behind these statistics can be traced to systemic vulnerabilities, which have roots in colonization and forced displacement.”
Nearly 3,500 sex ads featuring Indigenous women and girls from 2016 to July 2025 were collected by Thomson Reuters in research first published in 2025. The 2026 report published updated data, including 313 additional ads from the past year, on the trafficking of Indigenous people across Canada. Some of the Canadian ads were also posted in the United States. The report focused on ads that stated explicitly that the person featured was Indigenous or Native American. (The report’s authors concede it’s possible some ads were missed or miscategorized if the identification was incorrect or omitted.)
The Thomson Reuters report concludes that disappearances often occurred in the Prairie provinces and other urban centres, with most ads posted in the Greater Toronto Area. The authors acknowledge that not all the women are necessarily being trafficked and that not every case of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women ends in sex trafficking. Yet at least some disappearances, they note, could be solved by cross-referencing individuals’ photos with those appearing in online ads.
The report draws on data from the online ads to infer common paths of travel for likely traffickers. If an ad was posted in Toronto, and the same ad was posted in Edmonton days later, the report’s authors surmised the victim and the trafficker had moved cities. The report identifies Toronto to Vancouver as a movement corridor likely used by traffickers. Other notable corridors include Edmonton to Fort McMurray, Calgary to Edmonton, and Belleville, Ontario, to Edmonton.
To better target traffickers, said Benedet, the legal system needs to change. It is difficult to gather evidence to lay charges against traffickers and to secure convictions. The Crown must prove that the victim reasonably feared for their safety, which can also be challenging. Conviction rates are low compared to other violent crimes: according to Statistics Canada, only 10 percent of 1,281 cases with at least one trafficking charge between 2013 and 2024 received a guilty verdict.
At the end of July, a couple of days after the Thomson Reuters report was published, the federal government announced $3.35 million in funding for nine non-governmental organizations to support victims and survivors of human trafficking, which Benedet described as a step in the right direction. (A spokesperson from the Department of Justice told The Walrus the announcement was not connected to the report.)
Yet the government is also investing in large-scale projects that could further endanger Indigenous women. The Thomson Reuters report authors highlight concerns that an acceleration of the resource extraction industry in Canada through nation-building projects should be monitored for potential human trafficking activity. They point to a December 2025 review commissioned by Winnipeg group EmpowerMen that found extraction projects have been linked to higher rates of sexual assault and trafficking. According to the review, risk to Indigenous women increases where these projects are built due to an influx of a transient and predominantly male population, social isolation, and workplace environments that tend to normalize harassment.
Indigenous advocates have long raised concerns about sexual and physical violence against women at such project sites. The 2019 report of the National Inquiry into MMIWG found “substantial evidence of a serious problem” of increased violence toward Indigenous women related to resource extraction projects, where housing facilities for workers are often known as “man camps.”
