I am from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, the Canadian branch, which is an arm of a global secretariat that has been at work on issues of trafficking in women for about 16 years. In Canada, we started in about 1996.
Our work has almost exclusively been associated with transnational migration. I want to preface my comments by saying that although we are aware of trafficking within Canada, that's not the group of women I'm specifically working with or commenting on.
I have had the opportunity of working with several aboriginal women, and I really appreciate your comments, Dominic. I have heard similar stories.
I want to contextualize trafficking in my comments today in the context of global migration. I think one of the barriers to our taking action is that we feel overwhelmed by the threat of huge numbers of people who are migrating, which continues to be seen as a threat. If we can try to normalize that, then we can engage in some community-based, solution-based innovations, rather than this sort of binary response we have around either prosecution or victimization.
According to the IOM, there are about 190 million migrants crossing borders in the world today. These include rural-to-urban migrations within countries and those from the global south to the global north. Women migrate for a number of reasons, including global economic disparities, displacement and dispossession of marginalized populations, increased access to travel, armed conflict, disasters, the awareness or hope of better options elsewhere, and of course the very basic human desire to explore the world.
In this particular historical moment, in which states are responding to the challenges of increased global migration and other associated pressures with tightening of immigration controls, increased border security, and increased use of detention and deportation, it helps us to understand global migration as an ongoing historical reality to see migration as an always present aspect of human evolution and history.
Although the discussion around trafficking in women, especially as the conversation attempts to address sexual exploitation, often becomes panic-laden or morally outraged, in seeking to respond in sustainable and substantive ways to the needs of migrant and trafficked women, it's been helpful in our work to consider a women's equality framework that acknowledges the trafficked woman as the expert in the issues affecting her migration and the exploitation she has experienced. It has been helpful to us to create communities of advocacy in the context of service provision—to have those two things linked—so that as a trafficked woman comes to identify her experience, she can access legal, social, and economic supports that are meaningful to her.
It's been important to reflect on the paradigms of victimization that so often inform law enforcement responses so as to accompany women as partners in action for empowerment and to dissolve, in ways that are possible, the rendering of the trafficked woman as “other”.
Sexual exploitation, we know, exists in so many areas in our world. It happens in workplaces, it happens at universities, it happens everywhere we go. We need to be careful about using the trafficked woman as an emblem of sexual exploitation, instead of acknowledging it as the pervasive problem that it is.
We have found that regardless of whether a woman is able to remain in Canada or returns to her former country of residence, to a community experience within which her irregular migration is understood in the context of huge numbers in migration, the exploitation and abuse that may also have been part of that migration can be transformed somewhat.
Obviously we have root causes for these things. Our globalized economy is inextricably linked with irregular migration and trafficking. Global patterns of economics and trade have increased demands for low-wage labour, as well as the demand of poor countries for remittances from out-migration labourers in the global north that assist economies in the global south.
In fact, remittances have exceeded direct foreign investment for the first time, reaching almost $80 billion in 2002. Remedies for this are very few. In areas of market management, international migration, or labour laws, these remain inadequate to protect migrant women and ensure respect for their mobility rights and other human rights.
All those states, including Canada, are responding to human trafficking with an array of new laws and policies. These are rooted in an enforcement framework that privileges border and national securities, conservative sexual morality, and prosecution of the trafficker.
Although discussions in Canada have included notions of protection for the victims of human trafficking--and we're really happy to see that--very few protections are in place. I think the notion of protecting victims is also somewhat problematic. The question of protection of trafficked persons is certainly welcomed, but at the moment, deep consideration must be given to other associated questions. What does protection entail? Who decides what constitutes protection? Will the enforcement community decide? Will NGOs decide? Will trafficked persons themselves decide? How much space is there for trafficked persons' voices in setting the agenda and determining what protection means for them and their futures? Why is it that protection and the prosecution of the trafficker are so often coupled? Is it possible to delink protection from prosecution in the name of truly humanizing this experience?
To date, laws to address human trafficking in Canada remain largely unresponsive to the protection of the human rights of trafficked persons. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act contains within it measures for more vigilant border surveillance, penalties for punishing smugglers and traffickers, and enhanced powers of detention and deportation. Within the act, in paragraph 245(f), for example, immigration officers are directed to detain those who may be involved with traffickers. This implicit contradiction between values of protection and what appears to be a direction toward protective detention reveals the privileging of prosecution over protection of trafficked persons.
In May 2006, without much consultation with NGOs, the government announced a new temporary resident permit for trafficked persons. The document itself is flawed by inconsistencies, and its terms and conditions are not responsive to the needs of a victim of trafficking. For example, although there are provisions for interim federal health and counselling, no other social supports are accessible. The 120-day reflection period is not linked to an access to work permit or any other form of social support, including provincial income assistance, which remains to be negotiated.
The TRP also involves an immediate consultation between enforcement communities, and although cooperation with the prosecution of the trafficker is not required under the new TRP, in practice we've seen that women who have made applications were scrutinized and interrogated for hours.
Since May, when the TRP was put in, we've had two applications that I'm aware of and four others that apparently have been abandoned, although I'm not sure why. There was one that was successful and one that was not successful. The experience of the woman whose application was not successful seemed to reflect a kind of need for increased training and awareness amongst the enforcement community, in the way Dominic was speaking to earlier. In particular, the Border Services Agency and Citizenship and Immigration Canada both had lengthy interviews with this woman, and there was interrogation of her culpability throughout. In other words she was asked, in the same way that victims of domestic violence used to be asked, “If you knew something was wrong, why did you not leave?”
So the trafficked person is at risk for being the site of statistical analysis, and in response, as Dominic mentioned, what social services are in place for her? Hardly anything. Most of what she receives is supplied by volunteer NGOs, and at this point she's still very much unable to access services from the state.
I think the TRP did include some nuanced language. That is important, and it is one step in understanding the complexities of the experience of migration. However, it doesn't go far enough.
In summary, our work continues in the form of ongoing advocacy and direct service provision for trafficked women, as well as ongoing dialogue and lobbying of government for full legislative protection of trafficked persons. We've also been doing lots of public education. We've found that to be a key element in trying to settle the long-term debates and discussions around what human trafficking is and what sexual exploitation is. Through that, we're trying to create communities of understanding, where the binary around what the needs are can be deepened, so there's a community response that actually honours human rights obligations and the human rights of that person and her participation as an agent in the solution-making.
Thank you.