The view from Western Canada is that we need to face up to the "discounting" of women and girls of colour--in this place, especially Aboriginal women and girls--as victims of crime. When Aboriginal women go missing, the disappearances aren't investigated thoroughly enough by police (see the Missing Women case in Vancouver, the "Highway of Tears" in Northern B.C. and a serial killer in Saskatoon, Sask. who was finally caught in 1996 after he deliberately CHOSE to specialize in killing Aboriginal women); when Aboriginal women (and even girls under the age of consent)are raped, they are viciously stereotyped as promiscuous, and if they should have happened to be abused in their families of origin before they were raped by white men, then the white men get the benefit of the doubt that their victims were "sexually aggressive", especially if the white men got the Aboriginal females drunk first. You may recall a stereotypical linking of Aboriginal women with booze...
I wish I were making this up! I wrote a comment for an important alternative policy voice here, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in Jan. 2005 on a rape case where three white men poured liquor into a 12-year-old, and then each took turns trying to have intercourse (they were too drunk themselves to penetrate her); the result was two acquittals and a suspended sentence with no jail time for the one who actually confessed. The reason? The girl had semen from her father on her clothing, so the defense were allowed to make her out to be "sexually aggressive" because of the abuse. You see, in white families, this is isolated abuse due to individual moral failings; but in Aboriginal families, a lot of white people in Saskatchewan were apparently ready to see it as "culture".
So, victimization of women of colour and what my favourite Canadian feminist legal theorist of colour Sharene Razack called "culturalized racism". Underlying both, poverty and the construction of prostitution in particular places as a "woman of colour's profession".
This is certainly what happens around here.
I really wish I could be there with you at your conference! I just got my LL.M. and would love to work in this area.--Norma Buydens