Invisible and precarious: A scoping review of gender-based violence in agricultural streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program

Temporary Foreign Agricultural Workers (TFAWs) are critical sources of labour for Canada’s agricultural sector. However, TFAWs experience complex vulnerabilities as a result of structural inequalities and discrimination within agricultural streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The multiple, diverse, and intersecting social identities of TFAWs (e.g., gender, age, race, nationality, sex, language, and socio-economic status) may compound to exacerbate or lessen vulnerabilities, including gender-based violence (GBV) and discrimination. Through a scoping review of academic and grey literature, this research contributes to conceptual and practical knowledge regarding GBV in Canada’s agricultural TFWP in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia. Our search strategy returned 1,273 grey and academic articles, 128 of which were selected for full-text review. Of those, 62 sources met our criteria for data extraction and were reviewed using a Gender-Transformative Approach and a Systems Thinking framework to examine how structures and institutions (formal and informal) create and exacerbate inequalities between TFAWs while influencing the formation of systems’ structures which either promote or negate GBV.