For Indigenous girls, the sex talk is a matter of safety: Dawn Lavell-Harvard

For Dawn Lavell-Harvard, the conversation about sex with her young daughters ended up being closely intertwined with her work at the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC).

The discussion came up while Dawn was in the car with her three daughters, travelling down the highway in Eastern Canada. Because of her role as head of NWAC, Dawn had to interrupt the road trip to take calls from the media, to comment on the inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Within the confines of the car, she found herself talking about the sex trade in front of her children.

That's when Dawn realized: The average age of girls recruited into the sex trade is 13. At that point, she still hasn't had the sex talk even with the oldest daughter, who was 17. For Dawn, it was the internal struggle between the desire to protect her daughters' innocence and the desire to protect them from the harsh realities of the world.

"If you are from a marginalized population in a country like Canada, it seems that you can't have the sex talk without talking about human rights, without talking about the larger society that we live in, that determines our choices," Dawn told Out in the Open host Piya Chattopadhyay.

"I have to have that sex talk with [my daughter], so she has to learn some of the ugly truths of life, so she can protect herself when I'm not always there."