Good morning, and thank you for having us here.
My name is Mirjana Pobric, and I'm project coordinator for the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada.
My organization takes a broader view of human trafficking, given the experience and issues that our population of immigrant and visible minority women in Canada face, and the issues that we came up with in the twenty years of the existence of this organization. As you know, we are an equality-seeking organization of and for immigrant and visible minority women within officially bilingual and multicultural Canada. We have functioning networks in all immigrant-receiving provinces, and have been working on problems facing immigrant women for over two decades.
We have a broader view of human trafficking. Our particular focus is on fraudulent arranged marriages as a form of human trafficking. They very often finish with violence for women who have been sponsored and brought to Canada as sponsored spouses.
Our definition of human trafficking, as I said, is broader. We define it as any action that involves the process of using physical force, fraud, deception, or other forms of coercion or intimidation to obtain, recruit, harbour, and transport people for the purpose of profit. That's why we maintain that fraudulent marriages are a form of human trafficking.
My colleague, researcher Dr. Shandip Saha, will give more details on this point.