Justice Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2009

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

That's part of it. I think we're also talking about having a balanced approach. You need policing and you need good legislation, but you also need to be working on the other fronts.

In terms of The Godfather and the illegal needs, I think that in a lot of communities there is a real sense that the organized crime supports the community. The community supports the gangs because they provide a philanthropic service. They give them money when they need things. They provide them with some legitimate jobs as well. There's an interesting amount of work that has been done on what they call the organized armed violence, where you have endemic organized gang violence in places like Cape Flats in South Africa, in Northern Ireland, in Guatemala, in Nigeria. These are areas where there are generations of families who have belonged to gangs and been involved in organized violence at the local level.

The gangs in a sense provide the social services, the welfare services, even the security for those areas, because there has been no legitimate policing. I think you're absolutely right that if you can begin to work to provide alternatives for people living in those communities, it means that they don't have to get into the gangs.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I want to play devil's advocate for a minute. I think that makes a lot of sense and is quite supportable by the facts in less-developed countries, but in the western democracies, including Canada, is it really applicable? In terms of organized crime groups, I don't see many organized crime groups in our society as being philanthropic.

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

There is a certain amount of money that is given out, which can be useful to people. I agree. I don't think it's applicable in quite the same way, but I think it's at a level of the same kind of approach for those people who are involved in organized crime and who are part of the family--they're supported in some way and protected by it.

The arguments around this are that you can use.... I think South Africa has produced its own version of RICO to deal with organized crime and gangs in places like Cape Flats. Many people within South Africa have argued that this is never going to deal with the roots of these problems because there will be many more young people, young men, growing up to take the place of the ones you imprison, and you'll just have to build more prisons all the time. So you really have to begin to work on those other places too.

I think the same issues apply here. We've had, as we've talked about, some very good successes in Canada. I remember there were a lot of issues with gangs in the 1970s in B.C. This wasn't organized crime so much, but it might have touched it at one end. And very successful initiatives by the B.C. government really reduced those problems by working at the community level providing alternatives for young people, trying to re-educate them, change their attitudes towards high-risk violence.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

Mr. Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our witness for joining us today.

I want you to elaborate on a couple of things you mentioned that I certainly agree with.

You had mentioned focusing on the few that are the problem. That was something we heard in testimony on other bills that we've had before the House, from experts, community leaders, and the police, that oftentimes it may be a widespread problem, but those that are committing these crimes are a small group. Even in areas where there's a much higher than average crime rate, it's still being perpetrated by relatively few citizens, and when people have focused on them with appropriate programs, treatment, and in many cases, including taking people off the street, they've seen a marked decrease in the crime in that community. So I'd like you to comment a bit on that, whether our focus has to be those who are most at risk and those who are causing the greatest deal of the problem, with a very sharp focus on those people.

As well, you mentioned the acceptance in some communities of those who are involved in organized crime. I want you to comment on this, if you think it's true. There's the sense that in many of our communities there may be an acceptance, just because it hasn't an impact on a person personally or isn't on their conscience. While police are very aware of the problem in the community, the public is not engaged until there's a sensational case, until there's something that either has an impact on them or on someone they care about, whether they know the person or not. Then there's a public sense of vulnerability or outrage, or a combination of those things, and the public starts to engage on the issue.

How important do you feel it is that we maintain a focus on these groups even when that public outrage perhaps dies down? How important do you think the public engagement is on coming to a solution? It's obviously not something we can just do by ourselves.

Could you comment on those couple of things?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

Yes. I think you're right that, clearly, much of the success in well-developed projects, many of them in the States—such as Boston's Operation Ceasefire, Chicago's CeaseFire project, and others in other U.S. cities—has had this combination of really targeting the worst offenders, telling them there's going to be no letup, telling them you're watching them, really supervising them. It's a quite small core group, and that begins to give them messages. But it is also working with other people at the same time.

When I'm talking about the high-risk focus, it's about areas as well as individuals, because quite often they coincide. They are concentrating their work, living and working within one area. So I think it's very important to try to target the areas where the problems are worse and to try to keep relations with the community going.

You're absolutely right that if something happens, this is sometimes the catalyst. It can be, unfortunately, tremendously beneficial for really catalyzing a community to come together to do something. That's quite clear, and that has happened here in Canada and in many other countries. That should be used as an opportunity to really work with a community.

But I think you can also see projects in high-risk areas where people are maintaining ties. The project I mentioned in Bradford is about working with leaders among the Muslim community, especially the mullahs and others, so that when there are issues of race and terrorism happening in the city of Bradford, they already have a network that is relatively active, is alerted to the need to know how to talk to their communities. So it's maintaining something else, apart from just concentrating on the very high-risk individuals. I think you have to try to do both.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move to Ms. Jennings.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you.

When you talk about a balanced approach and not just targeting high-risk individuals but also high-risk areas, are there studies that permit us to identify the factors that would allow the designation of a high-risk area? I think I know, but it would be helpful for all members if we have it on record.

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I can't recall immediately the kinds of studies, basically, but it's more likely to be in areas of high deprivation, areas where the housing is the poor, the environmental facilities are poor, there is not very good transport, and there are public health issues such as high levels of infant mortality or other kinds of issues. There may be a large number of young teenage mothers. It may be areas where there is a lot of public housing that is turning over very quickly, so there is a lack of any sense of its being a community and of the capital within the community to go and talk to someone about problems. There may be a high number of young people in some areas.

In Britain there is an organization, a government department called the neighbourhood renewal unit, that identified the 88 high-need areas across the country. They put in services and they work to join services up in those 88 communities, quite successfully targeting the reduction of poverty, the increase in employment, improvement in health, reduction of crime, improvement in community safety, and some other indices with a series of approaches.

Yesterday I heard about a similar approach in Sydney, Australia, that targets the worst areas. There are quite a lot of indications of the kinds of areas we are looking at. They will be much worse in some areas and in formal settlements in developing countries, but the kinds of issues will be similar in European and North American cities.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Go ahead, Mr. Ménard.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

I'm quite familiar with your centre because I believed in it as minister of public security. I subsidized it as much as I could. At one time, we talked about what one dollar invested in prevention was worth. How much was it?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

You're asking me for the numbers. It's approximately that if you invest a dollar in prevention, you'll save six, seven, ten, or eleven dollars in terms of prevention. There are some very good cost-benefit studies that demonstrate the economic benefits of prevention.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

From what I understand, that was measured in a number of ways, in various regions of the world, and we came to a roughly equivalent result.

Is that correct?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

Yes.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

From what we've been told here, once people join a criminal organization, they don't leave it.

Does that correspond to what you've observed?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

No.

When somebody has entered a criminal organization, they do get out, or they can get out, but they may need to be helped. There are a large number of projects now to help young men get out of gangs, with a lot of them providing tattoo removal--tattoos can obviously be a signifier of gang membership--and also giving them skills other than how to use a gun and case a territory. They would be giving them employment skills, job experience, and an alternative life vision for what they want to do with their lives. There are a lot of these projects around the world.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

You also touched on the question of human trafficking.

In the UN report of February 1983, it was noted that the majority of people charged with having taken part in human trafficking in the world were women. In many cases, those women had themselves been victims of trafficking.

Can you explain to us how women manage to switch from victim status to participant status?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I think it was a very interesting report on human trafficking that came out earlier, and it does make this point that there were a lot of women involved. The numbers are quite small, and internationally it's extremely difficult to measure human trafficking, the precise numbers, in any country. But there's a lot of work, as you're well aware, in all countries to improve our ability to measure human trafficking.

I think it's clear that women who have themselves been trafficked will know a great deal about how to do it. If they have spent their lives working illegally in prostitution or in work-related trafficking, then it is a way for them to continue to earn money. I think it's a human nature response. I would assume that it is a minority of the women who are trafficked.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

In the organizations there are people at the top who take the majority of the profits. Where do women stand? Do they control the organizations or are they generally controlled by men who amass all the profits? Do they play a subordinate role?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

It's a good question. I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer it, since I haven't spent any time recently looking at research on this. I would imagine that women do not play a very high role. They will be somewhere in the middle.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

In fact, all these organizations are based on violence and the threat of violence.

It's also said that some young girls attracted by this environment are under 18 years of age and that eventually, at the age of 19 or 20, they athouse other young girls who are brought to them.

Is that in fact how things work in the those organizations?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I assume so. Again, I've really not spent much time looking at this in detail, at the research on the actual organization of trafficking in humans.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

That's the problem we currently have to solve. The goal is to determine whether people who house these persons deserve the same sentence as the individuals who are at the top of the organization.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.