Thank you so much for having me here today. It's lovely to see you and lovely to have London North Centre MP Peter Fragiskatos with us at the table today.
The London Abused Women's Shelter provides advocacy, support, and counselling to women and girls over the age of 12 who experience male violence in their intimate relationships, by their pimps and/or sex purchasers, and in the workplace.
We are a very small organization with 11 staff and a mandate to ensure that all women have immediate access to service. Last year, our small office served 6,045 women and girls. During the last three years, our prostitution and trafficking-specific programs have been attended by 1,664 trafficked, prostituted, sexually exploited, and at-risk women and girls. That is probably more than anywhere else in the country. Our programs are very popular, and we are grateful that we can provide them.
We also support families from across the country. Last year, we supported 140 family members, who sometimes just flew in from other provinces, or sometimes even from the territories, looking for their daughters who have gone missing into this horrible world of trafficking.
Two-thirds of all trafficking in Canada originates in the province of Ontario. Girls are recruited into trafficking for the purpose of prostitution and pornography. They're recruited at bars, at universities, in high schools, and in their workplaces.
London, as Peter will attest, is a hub of trafficking activity. Girls and women are recruited both from and to London. The lead with our London Police Service human trafficking unit recently said that trafficking is an epidemic in society.
The trafficking unit provided service to many girls between the ages of 11 and 17. These girls and women are trafficked by their boyfriends, family members, and organized crime. By organized crime, we often think of bikers or the Mafia, but I'm talking about small gangs that exist in communities across the country.
We need to recognize that there is a relationship between organized crime, male violence against women in intimate relationships, and trafficking. As has been stated already, trafficking of women and girls is highly profitable, unlike trafficking of weapons or drugs, where the trafficker has to continue to spend more money to get more supplies. Traffickers can make money off of the same woman over and over again.
Many women we work with have been forced by their pimps to bring home every day between $1,500 and $2,000. This means that they are providing sexual services and fulfilling the porn-fuelled fantasies of anywhere between 15 and 20 men per day.
We ask that you please try to understand and acknowledge that there is a relationship between prostitution and trafficking and that prostitution is inherently harmful, violent, and dehumanizing. Prostitution fuels trafficking.
Our current legislation in Canada criminalizes pimps, brothel owners, and sex purchasers and has been identified by many police services across this country as a valuable tool to help them in their fight against trafficking. On a side note, a recent Ipsos poll on Canada's prostitution legislation found that 58% of those living in Ontario support the current legislation.
I know how difficult it is for people to hear about repeated torture that is experienced by prostituted, trafficked, and sexually exploited women and girls, but to understand the significance of the issues, it's important that you hear about it.
Most trafficked girls have no idea what their trafficker has negotiated with the sex purchaser. When men appear to fulfill a rape fantasy, as an example, the woman has no idea. The man is given a card to get into her room, comes in, and literally rapes her as his fantasy. That experience for her leaves her feeling as if she was just raped, and she's left deeply traumatized.
We know some of the experiences women and girls share with us, particularly when they're trafficked into pornography. They are waterboarded. They are strung from the ceilings by their feet while being whipped, beaten, and electroshocked on their labia and in their vaginas. Their feet are repeatedly beaten until they are swollen and bleeding, and their nipples are nailed to wooden boards to stop them from moving.
This is torture. It can be called nothing but torture. It's torture in the private sphere, and it does require legislation to acknowledge it as non-state torture, so that women's experiences are validated.
We know that Liberal MP Peter Fragiskatos tabled a bill in the House of Commons to amend the Criminal Code regarding the inflicting of torture. It was known as Bill C-242. We felt that it was minimized when it came to this committee and minimized at the House of Commons in Parliament. Only two experts in non-state torture were called, no victims, and it was then sent back to Parliament, where on November 29, 2016, its status became known as dead. It's appropriate to call it dead. “Dead” is the exact word used when tortured women and girls are asked how they feel, and of course it's the word we all use when women are killed as a result of torture—“She's dead.”
Pornography today is extremely violent and has resulted in the murder of women on film. Men who watch pornography learn that women are nothing more than disposable objects who exist solely to satisfy male fetishes. The average child will watch pornography at age 11. When I go into school grounds and I see a group of kids huddled, I go over—it takes only one kid with a phone—and they're all watching pornography. These are kids in grades 2, 3, and 4.
In pornography, women are pulled by their hair to a bathroom where their heads are shoved into the toilet while it is repeatedly flushed. Women are shown in the videos fighting to live and gasping to breathe while inhaling water and choking, yet the more they fight, the longer their heads remain in the toilets.
Men in pornography, like many men in society, want women and girls to know they have both the power to kill them and the power to bring them back to life. Women and girls are forced to endure multiple men ejaculating on their faces, and unprotected anal-to-oral sex is the norm. These women and girls suffer from trauma and significant health issues like syphilis, gonorrhea of the eye, and prolapsed anus.
M-47 was a motion introduced by Conservative member Arnold Viersen. It was referred to the Standing Committee on Health to examine the public health impacts of pornography. The committee provided a response that failed to address the systemic public health issues in pornography. Instead, the committee addressed it as an issue of sexual health to be resolved by education. That's not appropriate.
I'm getting to the recommendations. Are you about to tell me I'm at 10 minutes? I say I'm at eight.