Thank you.
We are nurses from Nova Scotia. We have 21 years of grassroots experience. We're human rights defenders. We're also members of the Canadian Federation of University Women, which is an NGO of approximately 8,000 women across Canada, and they support us in what we're speaking about today.
We'd like to say that Bill C-36 is historic/“herstoric”. It's transformative in that it's socially, legally, and relationally a new way of looking at prostituted persons in that they are persons, not a nuisance, and that the demand is criminalized.
Our goal here today is to expose a population of women we have been working with and supporting for 21 years who are invisible to this country. They are women who have endured grave brutality. They are involved in forced prostitution, which means no choice. They were forced into human trafficking. And what we're focusing mainly on today is the non-state torture that they endured.
Non-state torture is an Amnesty International term. The UN definition of non-state torture is severe pain and suffering; it's purposeful, it's discriminatory—in this case, gender discrimination—and it's intentional. The intentionality, indeed, shatters the relationship with the self of the prostituted and tortured woman.
Who are the torturers, in our work? We found them to be parents, family, guardians, spouses, pimps, traffickers, and johns.
Where is this torture occurring? It's primarily in-house. It's definitely organized crime.
You're wondering about the type of torture. What we're going to do, as a way of explaining it, is read the story of a tortured woman. Her story was published in the work we do in the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture.
Her name is Lynn. She is now dead. She said:
I was called bitch, slut, whore and ‘piece of meat’. Stripped naked and raped—‘broken in’—by three goons who, along with my husband, held me captive in a windowless room handcuffed to a radiator. Their laughter humiliated me as they tied me down spreadeagled for the men they sold my body to. Raped and tortured, their penises and semen suffocated me; I was choked or almost drowned when they held me underwater, threatening to electrocute me in the tub. Pliers were used to twist my nipples, I was whipped with the looped wires of clothes hangers, ropes, and electric cords; I was drugged, pulled around by my hair and forced to cut myself with razor blades for men’s sadistic pleasure. Guns threatened my life as they played Russian roulette with me. Starved, beaten with a baseball bat, kicked, and left cold and dirty, I suffered five pregnancies and violent beatings-forced abortions. They beat the soles of my feet and when I tried to rub the pain away they beat me more. My husband enjoyed sodomizing me with a Hermit 827 wine bottle, causing me to hemorrhage, and I saw my blood everywhere when I was ganged raped with a knife. Every time his torturing created terror in my eyes, he’d say, ‘Look at me bitch; I like to see the terror in your eyes’. I never stopped fearing I was going to die. I escaped or maybe they let me escape, thinking I’d die a Jane Doe on that cold November night.
That was Lynn's story.
In Bill C-36, there's an expansion of weapons in what can be used as restraint. Lynn's example shows that handcuffs could be used as a restraint in her case.
The other way we can expand on what torture is, what the ordeals are of the women we have worked with, is in our brief as well. It's a questionnaire that we developed and that we send to women who are interested in filling it out. Bridget Perrier was one of these, and she was willing to have me disclose that today.
This is another woman in Canada. We have identified 48 different forms of torture: forced impregnation; smeared with urine, feces, or blood; placed in a freezer.... All these are listed. This one Canadian woman endured 47 of the 48 that we have listed.
She summed up her statement by saying that she was sold to hundreds of perpetrators for sex and stating that “the goal of torture is to control and or break the human spirit through any heinous means possible.”
I would like to say to you that from what you've heard and in my opinion, I cannot call torture “work”.