Status of Women Committee on Oct. 26th, 2006

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

I'd like to call this meeting to order. We're a little late starting this morning because the other committee was a little late leaving the room. So we'll get started right away.

I would like you to take a look at your documents in front of you. You should have several documents. One is the statement of Vivita Rozenbergs' hearing before the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Another piece of information you should have in front of you is prepared for the House of Commons standing committee on trafficking in persons from the Parliamentary Information and Research Service.

Another document you should have, from the Parliamentary Information and Research Service, is a discussion document, “Defining the Parameters for a Study on Trafficking of Persons”.

Also, you should have, again from the Parliamentary Information and Research Service, witnesses who have appeared or who have been invited to appear as of October 23, 2006. That should be in your package as well.

Also in your package should be the additional witness suggestions, and also the notice of motion of Ms. Minna. The last thing would be your schedule of meetings.

Those should all be in your package in front of you this morning.

Ms. Sgro, the chairperson, will be late because she had another commitment, but she will be arriving in a timely manner, so we'll go through the first part, which is the witnesses' presentations on human trafficking.

Perhaps we could begin, because we're about fifteen minutes late and we don't want to miss any of our witnesses.

I would like to welcome you here today. It is indeed a pleasure to have you present on this very important issue to the status of women. We have in front of us the International Organization for Migration. Vivita Rozenbergs is the head of the Counter Trafficking Unit. Welcome, Vivita.

I don't know if I'll pronounce this right. I'm going to try. Niurka?

[Niurka Piñeiro, Regional Coordinator, Media and External Relations, International Organization for Migration]

Niurka.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Niurka--what a beautiful name--Pineiro. That's almost musical. Beautiful.

Niurka is the regional coordinator, and we're very, very pleased to welcome her here.

We also have the International Labour Organization. Armand Pereira, welcome. I'm so glad you could make it. Armand is the director of the Washington office, so we feel very privileged to have him here this morning, and we are very interested in hearing what he has to say.

We also have Jean Bellefeuille. Did I pronounce that right, Jean?

[Jean Bellefeuille, Member, Comité d'action contre le trafic humain interne et international]

Bellefeuille.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Okay, thank you. He is the member of the...how do you say this?

[The Clerk of the Committee]

The Comité d'action contre le trafic humain interne et international.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

She says it more beautifully than I would. Welcome.

And also Aurélie Lebrun--is that right?--member and researcher.

We welcome you all to a discussion of this very, very important issue.

Ms. Vivita Rozenbergs, perhaps you would like to begin with your presentation.

[Vivita Rozenbergs, Head, Counter Trafficking Unit, International Organization for Migration]

Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair, for this opportunity to appear before the committee today.

I'm privileged to speak to you about the International Organization for Migration's concerns about human trafficking.

Trafficking is a coercive and exploitative process related not only to migration but also to gender, labour, human rights, and security issues.

Today, I'd like to highlight some of IOM's programmatic responses to human trafficking and share with you some of what we've learned through providing direct assistance to victims and how we can improve on meeting victims' needs worldwide.

Within our work as an intergovernmental international organization, the IOM promotes orderly and humane migration for the benefit of all migrants, working closely with governmental, intergovernmental, and NGO partners to respond to diverse needs of migrant populations worldwide.

IOM has a membership of 118 states, including Canada. Our organizational structure is highly decentralized and service oriented, with 280 field locations around the world. IOM's extensive geographical presence, along with the directive to assist governments in migration management and to ensure the safety and well-being of migrants, puts us in a unique position to also advise on policy and provide assistance to victims of human trafficking through the IOM network worldwide.

For over a decade, IOM has collaborated with partners to develop a comprehensive victim-centred response. We aim to strengthen the tools and resources available to organizations providing direct services to victims and to law enforcement in the conviction of traffickers.

It's estimated that at least one million men, women, and children are trafficked across international borders and forced into involuntary servitude. Many more people are trafficked within their own countries, in and out of local communities, generating huge profits for criminals operating in many parts of the world in relative impunity.

It's against this backdrop that the IOM is currently carrying out more than 150 counter-trafficking projects in some 70 countries of origin, transit, and destination. To date, IOM has provided direct assistance to over 100,000 persons. IOM is able to carry out counter-trafficking activities only through the financial support we receive from governments and other donors. Currently, the highest portion of funding for IOM's global counter-trafficking activities comes from U.S. government agencies, followed by Sweden, the EU, and Australia. In the past five years, IOM has received approximately $488,000 from the Canadian government. That has allowed IOM to carry out counter-trafficking activities with local partners in 11 countries and regions.

As a reflection of Canada’s own response to the growing challenges of addressing human trafficking within its borders, law enforcement training activities have been conducted with IOM participation involving Canadian immigration officers, border officials, police, prosecutors, and policy advisers within government agencies to build capacity and techniques for investigating and prosecuting trafficking cases.

Last year, an IOM representative from Costa Rica presented some of the successful community-level practices to combat human trafficking at an event hosted by the Canadian Red Cross and the Canadian Council for Refugees, together with other concerned individuals and organizations in British Columbia, to shed more light on the problem.

These are examples of federal, provincial, and local efforts to mobilize civil society to work together to gain a common understanding and to better define each actor's role in a coordinated response.

In IOM's experience, such collaboration is necessary if the problem is going to be addressed comprehensively.

The capacity of individuals and institutions is crucial in developing a response and long-term strategy that will address human trafficking in a sustainable manner. Ongoing training and information exchange is necessary.

Despite good efforts to bring attention to the issue, human trafficking remains one of the most serious challenges to migration policy makers and practitioners worldwide.

When a person falls prey to a trafficker, the consequences for the individual are extremely serious. Victims often do not know where to go for assistance and may be too scared to seek help. Sometimes victims who do escape traffickers are re-victimized by authorities who deport them due to their irregular migratory status, rather than granting victims the protection they deserve.

Staff of IOM and local partnering agencies know firsthand the heartbreak and suffering inflicted on victims of trafficking, individuals whose hopes for a good job or for safety from persecution or violence have been shattered. It's heart-wrenching to think about the people enslaved who we have not reached. Globally, the needs of trafficking victims greatly outnumber the resources available to help. This provides even greater reason for organizations to share experiences, as human trafficking remains an ever-changing phenomenon.

In recent years, IOM has made efforts to document and share its experience on the ground working in real-life settings. For example, through the financial support of the U. S. Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, IOM has developed counter-trafficking training modules to provide an introduction to essential components of counter-trafficking activities, including information campaigns, cooperation and networking, return and reintegration, and capacity building. The next three topics under development are direct assistance, children, and victim identification and interviewing techniques. This interrelated series of educational materials has been designed to be easily modified to allow for different contexts; thus, government, non-governmental organizations, and donors have quick and cost-effective access to training on activities related to counter-trafficking through IOM.

Another example is IOM's internal “Direct Assistance Handbook”, which will soon be available in an adapted version for external partners, and our counter-trafficking module database, the only global database with information from primary sources. It's widely used by governments, law enforcement agencies, NGOs, and others as an important source of data.

Certainly, other actors in the fight against human trafficking may have equally effective strategies and approaches. What’s important is sharing what we have learned from common experiences. The IOM finds that a well-established process for the return and reintegration of victims of trafficking lies at the heart of building a comprehensive counter-trafficking response. This process inherently involves constant contact with a victim; therefore, it's critical that service delivery organizations are identified and their capacity strengthened to ensure the safety and protection of the victim while maintaining a humane approach to care.

Based on our experience, we encourage institutions to adopt basic principles that guide direct assistance, including a respect for human rights of all assisted victims; a victim's informed consent; the right to privacy; and self-determination and voluntary participation, especially in regard to returning victims to their origin country or community.

Providing services in an environment that safeguards dignity and fosters both a sense of well-being and trust between the victim and the service provider can also facilitate information exchange that might lead to the apprehension and punishment of traffickers and others who are complicit in the trafficking situation. Most importantly, proper handling of victims of trafficking in the return and reintegration process leads to successful recovery of the victims and reintegration into society. It also greatly diminishes the chance of re-trafficking.

As an example, the IOM office in Washington, D.C., runs a unique program that assists foreign national victims of trafficking who are identified in the United States. The IOM's return, reintegration, and family reunification program facilitates voluntary return and reintegration of victims of trafficking, enabling their safe return home. The program also reunites victims who have been granted T visas and permission to remain in the U.S. with their immediate family members.

The victims have been men, women, and children forced to work as domestic servants, prostitutes, skilled labourers, and in the agriculture and restaurant sectors. To date, 48 persons from 15 countries have been returned home or reunited with family members. Many of those who have been returned to their family members are children who have not seen their parent in years. We are currently assisting an additional 50 individuals.

Regardless of the level of socio-economic development, many states are continually striving to enhance their capacity to effectively manage population movements, including finding acceptable counter-trafficking mechanisms.

IOM believes that this political commitment, together with support from agencies such as IOM and others, is the most effective way to combat trafficking and put an end to the exploitation of its victims.

Madam Chair, thank you for having me appear before you today.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

I want to thank you very much for your very insightful presentation this morning.

Now I would like to ask the International Labour Organization to present as well.

[Armand Pereira, Director, Washington Office, International Labor Organization]

Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.

My short presentation today can only highlight some of the major points that you can find in the paper I produced for this meeting. The paper provides a quick overview of major trends and new developments and some of the gaps and some priorities, including those that have to do with the ILO instruments and experience.

ILO is a tripartite organization. It's the oldest organization of the UN system, and it has been in place since 1919. We have a particular dimension of combining representatives of governments and employers' and workers' organizations, and that puts us sometimes in a very special position to try to negotiate consensual interventions and agreements for taking action. We have a number of instruments, including treaties--two of them on forced labour--that include trafficking. They have special importance in the context of fighting sexual exploitation and other forms of forced labour, although, through our experience, we also know that, depending on national legislation, these may not be enough, because we're dealing here with questions of crimes and therefore not just with questions of labour law.

In any case, this is just a very brief introduction.

At the outset, I'd like to say yes, together we can go about cracking down on sexual exploitation and related trafficking, which, specifically in the case of sexual exploitation, targets particularly women and girls. When I say “together”, I mean that parliamentarians, policy makers, journalists, researchers, officials of international and national agencies, as well as the donor community, consumers, and employers' and workers' organizations can all play a role in this.

In recent years, we have all been very outraged and disgusted by the sorts of films and news about how gangs can exploit women and girls, and, of course, as a result, we have been developing a number of initiatives concerning that exploitation.

Yes, let's put the scavengers in jail. Let's put them behind bars. But the question is why there aren't many scavengers engaged in this business behind bars. That, obviously, is where we start. We have few people behind bars. We have to be more effective in closing the circle and the gaps and legal loopholes. To do that, we must know exactly what we are fighting against to be able to close down the circle.

On the global dimensions of this problem, we don't have very good figures for anywhere in the world. Last year the ILO, with the global report on forced labour, presented the first attempt internationally to come up with some estimates. We're not proud of these estimates, but they show some very key things, which are very important to put this whole business that we are discussing into perspective.

When we're talking about an estimate of 12.3 million victims of modern forced labour, including 2.5 million victims of human trafficking, that means that trafficking is about one-fifth of the total of our estimates. We're talking about very moderate numbers. We also know that almost 10 million of these victims are in Asian-Pacific countries. There are about 1.3 million in Latin America.

What we are really concerned with is trying to understand what this all means in terms of characteristics. Although victims of forced labour are not always victims of trafficking, the trafficking victims almost always end up in some form of forced labour. Among the victims of trafficking, most end up in labour for commercial sexual exploitation. Some 95% of them are women and girls. At least one-third are also trafficked for other forms of economic exploitation, and the numbers of these are underestimated. For forced economic exploitation specifically, other than sexual exploitation, we estimate that about 56% of the victims are women and girls. About 40% of the overall victims of forced labour are under 18 years old.

The interesting thing is that over the years there's been a change in the question of who's the exploiter. In the past, most of the exploiters of forced labour were the states, because of prison labour, and today we find that four out of five cases are really private. So this is a big change. We see more sexual exploitation on the radar now, whereas in the past we didn't see as much of that, maybe because of the lack of information.

Based on these estimates, we have to make an appeal to address the plight of women victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation, not as a stand-alone issue, but rather as a subset of a much wider problem of forced labour and trafficking practices.

The more we reflect on our experience in the ILO, the more we recognize that trafficking for forced sexual exploitation is part of broader problems that are related to forced labour and trafficking. These practices are tightly connected with deficiencies in labour markets and migration and related laws and policies.

Why is this so? Where is the connection? Indeed, the significant part of the trafficking for sexual exploitation is a result of false promises and illusions about jobs, better jobs. The typical stories get repeated over and over. It's the girl, the young woman, who gets offered or attracted to a specific job, and then she travels, and when she gets there she realizes she's trapped.

It is an interesting phenomenon that doesn't just apply to women; it also applies to men.The women who get trapped are not just getting trapped into forced sexual exploitation; they can also get trapped into other things. In some cases they may be the victims of trafficking, but in some cases they may not be the victims of trafficking. There may be a case of an illegal migrant who is already in situ and who then gets trapped. So for us this means what? It means that we should stop putting the focus just on trafficking alone and put the focus on the much wider perspective of issues that go beyond trafficking. There are a number of people who fall prey to these practices who are not necessarily trafficked.

We're not saying implicitly that these things are related only to labour markets. They may be related to labour markets and to migration, but what we have here is that the problem of both false promises and illusions are really rooted in the growth of a labour market informality, including illegal labour practices. Why? Because if that girl or woman was not promised a better job elsewhere and she didn't have the illusion of going there, she wouldn't fall into this situation. The reason they fall into this situation is when they get there, chances are they will find an illegal job, and they know that, because their cousins and friends have found illegal jobs without any legal papers. So we get into a vicious circle; it is a real problem. We have the illusions and the promises that are rooted in the informality, the growth of informality, in illegal labour practices, and this is partly related to the excessive deregulation of the labour markets.

In turn, as a result, we have a promotion of illegal migration, and as a result, we have a promotion of trafficking, because without illegal migration, you don't have a place for trafficking. So we have to close the circle by looking at these issues together. This is why it is important to focus on trafficking from the perspective of labour markets, migration, and immigration laws, legal and illegal--legal immigration laws and illegal migration practices.

We need, in this process, first of all, a better mapping of the roots, of the patterns, of the trafficking, both for sexual exploitation and for other forms of forced labour. Much like drugs and arms trafficking, trafficking in persons for sexual or other forms of exploitation has both a supply side and a demand side. The major gap here is that most of us in the last few years have tended to focus excessively on the supply side and not enough on the demand side. As a result, we don't get the picture together and we end up going around in circles. Sometimes the innovative initiatives don't really add up to close the gaps, and--

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

I'll have to interrupt you for a moment. Time is up, but you might like to finish your sentence.

[Armand Pereira]

What I want to say, having given you these basics, is that we all have comparative advantages. International organizations each have particular advantages. With international banks, for example, we're getting more and more the situation where they can play a major role by conditionality in lending to prevent situations where they're promoting these directly or indirectly, and so on. But the real lesson is that we need to close off the circle and work together, rather than just focusing on bits of the process.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you so much, Mr. Pereira. I must say that your presentation was submitted only in English, so we haven't received it at this point in time. All committee members will receive this presentation as soon as it is through translation. Thank you very much for your presentation, with your very insightful comments.

Now I would like to hear from the CACTHII organization.

[Jean Bellefeuille]

Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen members, we thank you for inviting us to testify before this committee as part of the research being conducted into the trafficking issue.

First, allow me to tell you briefly what the CATHII group is. It's an action committee against the domestic and international trafficking in human beings. Here we're talking about an association of religious communities represented at the United Nations, academic researchers—such as Ms. Aurélie Lebrun, who is with me today—representatives of NGOs such as the Canadian Religious Conference, the Montreal police department, the Association des religieuses pour la promotion des femmes, the Service Intercommunautaire d'Animation Franciscaine, the Centre justice et foi, in short groups whose goal it is to join forces to fight domestic and international trafficking in human beings.

Our objective, among other things, is to coordinate awareness initiatives. For example, our sessions have reached hundreds of people across Canada over the past two years. As regards information, we are in contact with a number of networks across the country. Lastly, in the area of mobilization, we have conducted a lobbying effort. Some of you have received petitions or letters from members of CATHII or religious communities with ties to us.

In addition, our partners are very important. Among others, they include the RCMP Human Trafficking National Coordination Centre, the Association du personnel domestique and the Centre d'aide et de lutte contre les agressions à caractère sexuel.

It's important to tell you that CATHII has adopted the neo-abolitionist approach, the one used in Sweden, in particular. It consists in decriminalizing prostitutes, while criminalizing prostitution and clients, after first putting in place prevention, awareness and support programs, particularly for clients. It's clear in our minds that legalizing prostitution would open the door to considerable growth in trafficking in women. It's also clear that prostitution is sexual exploitation and that, although prostitution is a job for at most five percent of prostituted persons, for 95 percent, it is an activity that destroys them, that they feel forced to engage in and that they want to abandon.

CATHII is currently focusing on all matters pertaining to the protection of victims, such as enforcement of the Palermo Protocol, temporary visas, emergency shelters and client demand. Ms. Aurélie Lebrun will tell you about the client aspect, the new priority we want to focus on. I will discuss three other issues.

In May 2002, as you know, Canada ratified the Palermo Protocol, which urges signatory countries to adopt measures designed to protect victims. However, until quite recently, few concrete measures had been taken, except as regards offering temporary living permits to alleged victims of trafficking. We understand that it is important to prosecute traffickers in order to eliminate the problem at its source, but we believe it is also important to implement actual protection measures, without which victims will never agree to cooperate with police and testify. As much out of respect for the victims' humanitarian rights as for reasons of legal efficiency, it is important to protect the victims.

As regards the granting of temporary resident permits, we admit that this is a step in the right direction. However, we believe that it entails some weaknesses, in particular the fact that victims are not clearly told that they will not be required to testify if they do not yet feel able to do so. No provision is made either for work permits. In addition, it is provided that if police officers deem that the person is a victim of trafficking, they must direct that person to her embassy. In our view, this is a troubling aspect of the directive. We know of one case in which the victim of trafficking was in fact exploited by her embassy.

As for the term of the permit, we think that a 120-day permit would scarcely enable the victim to really recover from physical or mental trauma. We think that completely new statutory provisions enabling victims to obtain a visa would solve these problems in addition to granting legal status to persons who do not have it.

Lastly, we see that granting a temporary resident permit does not provide housing for trafficking victims. In fact, it provides for no services, except health services that the permit would financially enable the provinces to provide.

It was the Vancouver division of the RCMP that first asked the people at CATHII if they could provide emergency shelter, since their services had no budget for this purpose, or for supervision, interpretation or rehabilitation. The religious communities of Canada can provide these victims with temporary housing. Some NGOs are also prepared to take in this type of clientele.

However, who will fund the related services required? That's the main problem we have to resolve. Since Canada signed the Palermo Protocol, we think it must also agree to approve the budgets that will make it possible to meet its commitments toward victims.

I now turn the floor over to Ms. Lebrun.

[Aurélie Lebrun, Member and Researcher, Comité d'action contre le trafic humain interne et international]

Thank you.

One of CATHII's priorities is to examine demand. It must be understood that prostitution and trafficking are organized, developed and directed on the basis of demand by clients, who are increasingly called prostituting clients. I am starting a research project at the University of Ottawa as part of a post-doctoral fellowship funded by CATHII. It's a project on prostitution clients in Quebec.

Many researchers agree that prostituting clients are the driver of the sex industry. Without that demand, the increasing entry of women and young girls into prostitution would not be necessary. It's from this standpoint that trafficking in human beings for purposes of prostitution must be understood.

The express demand by Canadian men for so-called exotic women and young girls, particularly Asians and Russians, who work in massage parlours and escort agencies of the major Canadian cities, explains the organized importing, not only internationally but locally as well, of women and young girls into the Canadian sex industry.

I said local organization because the demand for what is called exotic women is also one of the reasons why Quebeckers go to strip bars in Ontario. This is what's called domestic or internal trafficking. The lack of visibility of prostituting clients in the debate on trafficking in human beings for purposes of prostitution and prostitution is surprising. They represent at least 90% of the prostitution world.

This silence and lack of visibility, however, are relative. In the many forums conducted on Canadian Web sites promoting prostitution, prostituting clients exchange advice and experience about their purchases: breast size, firmness of buttocks, skin colour, diligence on the job, techniques used, eagerness to please. All the women's “qualities” are discussed, then carefully given a dollar value. In these e-mail exchanges, racial stereotypes are legion: Thai masseuses are the best, Asians are the gentlest but can also be cheapskates, and the Russians love it. The arrival of new products, that is new women, is always good news that prostituting clients are quick to spread through these forums.

The presence of women and young girls recruited and transported from outside Canada to meet Canadian demand is one aspect of the sex industry. In our view, it is incorrect to believe that decriminalizing prostitution would put a stop to trafficking in human beings, quite the contrary. In all countries where the sex industry has been given the green light, trafficking in women has increased. The more you trivialize the buying of women, the more normal the merchandising of women becomes; the more the sex industry advertises in the newspaper classifieds, on the Internet or in the yellow pages, the more Canadian society in general, and men in particular, learn to think that paying for a woman to submit to their desires is normal, indeed even desirable.

The act of prostitution cannot in any case be considered an exchange between two consenting adults. In Web exchanges between prostituting clients, women are rarely mentioned as full-fledged individuals, but rather as body parts or an ability to please. What clients are buying is the opportunity and the right to subject a woman to their own desires. They're paying for someone to tell them yes. However, women's right to say no has been and still is a major demand of the feminist movement.

It therefore seems false to draw a distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution, the latter being trafficking in human beings and the prostitution of minors. Women victims of trafficking for purposes of prostitution find themselves in the sex industry in Canada. They're in contact with Canadian women. Whether they come from Montreal, a native reserve or China, these women all wind up together in the sex industry to meet the demand of Canadian men. It's pointless to claim that these are two separate realities. Some international experts whose work concerns trafficking in human beings for purposes of prostitution sometimes go so far as to say that trafficking victims are treated better than the women of the destination country. On this point, we recently learned that Quebec women, for example, could be chained in rooms, living in situations similar to slavery. And yet here we're talking about Quebec women.

Drawing a distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution is tantamount to focusing all the analysis and understanding of prostitution on women, without every questioning what clients want, express and do when they base their sexual desires on submission and violence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Excuse me, Ms. Lebrun. Could you just come to a close quickly, please?

[Aurélie Lebrun]

Consequently, if Canada wants to stop trafficking in human beings and to protect trafficking victims, it seems urgent that we examine those who motivate it: Canadian prostituting clients. It also seems important to understand and to analyze prostitution and trafficking as related phenomena and forms of violence against women.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thanks to all of you for your important information. It's a difficult subject, so it's hard to keep things short, but let's try. The committee has a lot of questions that I'm sure they want to get answers to.

Ms. Minna

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

To the ILO and Madam Rozenbergs, could you tell me how many people are actually trafficked into Canada? Do we know the exact numbers and where they're going when they get here? Do we have a handle on what's coming into the country on a yearly basis?

[Armand Pereira]

I have no clue.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Ms. Rozenbergs, do you know?

[Vivita Rozenbergs]

I don't have that information. But I understand the RCMP has come up with some estimates. I believe it's 600 to 800 a year.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I wanted to see if there was a handle on the international scene, because I understand some of the programs.

Ms. Rozenbergs, you said that your organization is funded primarily by the U.S., but you're based in Canada. Did you mean your head office, or something else? Where are you based?

[Vivita Rozenbergs]

The International Organization for Migration has its headquarters in Geneva.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

But you, yourself, are based in Canada?