It's not only medical professionals who are not being properly informed. It's legal professionals, judges, police officers, etc. We have to do a major awareness-raising campaign.
As you heard me read, trafficking victims are subject to physical abuse. AIDS has become rampant because women who are trafficked aren't given a choice of whether they can use a condom or not. Men will pay more for a trafficked woman if they're allowed not to use a condom. After the women have AIDS, they're discarded. Women can become impregnated, so there's a medical issue related to unwanted children. There are other medical issues, as in a case I heard of recently, where a woman was impregnated 15 times and the embryos were sold on the black market in eastern Europe to a cosmetics industry. There's a myriad of medical issues that a health care professional would not recognize.
It is our obligation to report abuse of women and abuse of children. At the bare minimum, medical professionals should be made aware that a woman could be trafficked. We now have a card where they can phone the immigration division of the RCMP and have their questions answered. The two health care professionals I work with have lectured on the issue. They've written papers to the Canadian Medical Association Journal. We do have the personnel in this country to begin this education.
We did make contact with the interdepartmental working group on trafficking, and I'm sorry to say, it was, “Don't call us, we'll call you.”