Status of Women Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2016

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I call the meeting to order.

We'll start off with a notice of motion that was received and sent out on Monday, from Ms. Harder.

Over to you, Ms. Harder.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Awesome. Thank you very much.

There was a notice of motion given on Monday, to do with Yazidi women being relocated to Canada. As you all know, the government has agreed to bring over a certain number of Yazidi women and girls. In order to prepare for that, I do believe it would be in the best interest of those women and girls but also our country as a whole to prepare for them well.

The motion is as follows:

That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and given the government committed to resettling Yazidi survivors in Canada, (i) that the Committee study the potential actions the government can undertake to treat trauma for Yazidi women and girls who survived sexual enslavement; (ii) that this study examine the German program for Yazidi women and girls to determine best practices when dealing with their trauma; (iii) that this study be comprised of no less than two (2) meetings prior to the end of the 120 day deadline; and that the Committee report its findings to the House.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Mr. Fraser.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

I know that we did set an agenda very recently. I also believe that the immigration committee is studying something very similar to this.

With respect to our witnesses and wanting to get on with the meeting, I move that the question now be put.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

If there's no further discussion, we'll put the question.

All in favour?

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

On a point of order, there is a speaking list.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We'll go to to the speaking list, and then we'll call the question.

Ms. Malcolmson.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

This is a motion that I supported in the House, but I don't see that this committee has expertise to study it. I understand that immigration is studying it. If anything, the subcommittee on human rights could study it.

Having had the committee vote down my motion to study funding for violence against women's shelters, I would much rather prioritize that than take on this work for which we do not have expertise and other more suitable groups do.

Notwithstanding that, I absolutely support bringing Yazidi women, but I don't think we're the ones to weigh in on it, with respect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Vecchio.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the comments that have been made. Just to set the record straight about the citizenship and immigration committee, it is not their priority to study this. I think for us, dealing with the sexual assault that we're dealing with even today, it's very important that we recognize this. I know when I looked at making this motion originally, looking at it as immigration as a whole, I brought it forward, and it was denied with the forethought that citizenship and immigration was doing so. I did review that and I spoke to members of the citizenship and immigration committee, where it is not being studied. I think for us to think that other people are doing the work is inaccurate.

It's dealing with exactly the issue we are dealing with today, which is sexual assault. We have to recognize that these victims are coming over from another country. They have already been victims, worse than we can even imagine. This should be a priority of ours. By taking a day or two to study this, I think it would be really worth the wait and really worth the effort.

Plus, we're bringing them over here, and yet we're not going to be providing the necessary items for them. I believe we need to make sure that every single thing the government can do is in place so that we can properly assess them and get them the help they need.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

The motion is before us. We're calling the question.

All in favour?

(Motion negatived)

We move now to our witnesses today.

It's my pleasure to welcome, from Covenant House in Toronto, Julie Neubauer, and from the DisAbled Women's Network Canada, Bonnie Brayton.

Ladies, you'll each have ten minutes to bring your comments. Then we'll begin our round of questioning.

We'll start with you, Julie.

[Julie Neubauer, Manager of Human Trafficking Services, Covenant House Toronto]

Thank you very much. I'm honoured to be here this afternoon and to have this opportunity to address the Standing Committee on the Status of Women on behalf of Covenant House Toronto. My name is Julie Neubauer, and I am the manager of human trafficking services with the agency.

Covenant House is Canada's largest homeless youth-serving agency. It changes lives by providing the widest range of services and support under one roof. It's a national leader. We educate and advocate for change to help at-risk, homeless, and trafficked youth by influencing public policy and delivering prevention and awareness programs. More than just a place to stay, Covenant House provides as many as 250 young people daily with 24/7 crisis shelter, transitional housing, and comprehensive services, which include education, counselling, health care, employment assistance, job training, and aftercare.

The youth who turn to us are between the ages of 16 and 24, and come from a wide variety of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Most have fled or have been forced out of their homes due to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or neglect.

Many of the young women we are supporting have suffered sexual violence at home or on the street. Increasingly we are seeing young women who have been victims of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. While homeless youth are at a higher risk of being trafficked, unsuspecting women and girls are being lured from malls, schoolyards, and even online.

As many of you may be aware, sex trafficking is the most common type of human trafficking in Canada, and it's largely a domestic crime. Research in Ontario has shown that 90% of victims are female and most are Canadian girls as young as 13 and on average 17 years of age. The road back from their nightmare of violence and degradation for these young women is a long and challenging journey.

At Covenant House, we will often hear a young girl in our care recount how she was convinced or coerced by her boyfriend to sell herself for sex. Soon he trades the romance for violence, and she is terrified to leave. Traffickers follow a very similar pattern of psychological manipulation and control that includes luring, seducing, grooming, and then terrorizing their victims.

A recent study found that over a third of victims were recruited by men who they considered to be their boyfriends. Another 25% were lured through friends, most often victims themselves.

Over the past four years, Covenant House has enhanced its services for these victims and taken on a stronger advocacy role to combat this terrible crime. In 2015 we launched a comprehensive anti-trafficking plan that we call our “urban response model” to respond to the issue of sexual trafficking. It consists of three different pillars: prevention and early intervention, direct services to the survivors, and learning and transfer of knowledge.

Our prevention and early intervention pillar is focused on delivering programs directly to the at-risk girls and to organizations and businesses who may come in contact with them, such as the hotel and taxi industries. This is a wide-ranging plan and includes community training, education, and a multimedia awareness program that is supported by online resources and tool kits.

Our urban response model also includes comprehensive trauma-informed programming and services for victims of sex trafficking, focusing on the stages of recovery—from crisis intervention to stabilization to transition to independent living.

Within our crisis shelter we have opened two designated beds for female victims of sex trafficking with our municipal funding, a first in Toronto. Further, in September, we were very proud to open the city's first transitional housing program for female survivors of sex trafficking. It's called the Rogers Home. It is an innovative program that will provide seven residents with stable housing for up to two years. We provide life skills training, community-based trauma counselling, and other wraparound services to support these young women on their road to recovery.

Despite being a pressing social concern for some time, human trafficking, and particularly sex trafficking, has only recently drawn increased attention from the public, government, and research communities. To date very little research has been done to determine promising practices for working with the young survivors. That is why “learning and knowledge transfer” is the third pillar of our model. Covenant House will be embarking on a five-year evaluation and research and assessment initiatives that will determine what's working and what's not, what partnerships are necessary to provide a coordinated set of services, and whether our model is actually even making a difference. We will also be building an online centre of excellence so that we can share our findings very broadly.

Collaboration is a key success factor in combatting sex trafficking and providing high-quality services and supports to the victims. That is why Covenant House has developed strong partnerships with the Toronto police services, mental health and addictions service providers, victims' services, the City of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, and the indigenous community in the delivery of our urban response model.

Covenant House commends this standing committee for studying the pressing concern of violence against young women and girls. In doing so, we encourage you to also consider the issue of sex trafficking in your deliberations and to identify measures that can be implemented across the country to combat this crime. It is important that the response to sex trafficking be comprehensive in nature and include initiatives to prevent girls and young women from even being lured in the first place, services and supports for the survivors and victims, training and education for community partners, and strengthened tools for law enforcement and the justice system to combat these crimes.

Once again, I thank you very much for this opportunity to share the work that Covenant House is doing to put an end to sex trafficking and to provide enhanced supports and services for the victims. We're committed to working closely with the Government of Canada in addressing needs and in providing support to at-risk, homeless, and trafficked youth.

I look forward to hearing your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Now we'll go to Bonnie Brayton, the national executive director for DisAbled Women's Network Canada.

You have 10 minutes.

[Bonnie Brayton, National Executive Director, DisAbled Women's Network Canada]

Good afternoon, everyone.

I would like to begin today by recognizing that we are in a time of truth and reconciliation here in Canada with our indigenous sisters and brothers and acknowledge that we are gathered today on the territory of the Algonquin Nation.

I would also like to thank the committee for bringing us here today and for undertaking this important study on violence against women and girls. DAWN Canada is a pan-Canadian feminist disability organization and continues to be the only organization, for more than 30 years now, that is focused on addressing their experiences of violence.

It is so important to acknowledge that despite all our wishes to the contrary, it is girls who are the most at risk of violence—yes, girls, and sometimes young girls. If I may remind the committee, the most at risk among young women and girls are those who live with a disability or are deaf, up to three times more at risk, something DAWN Canada and this committee must find unacceptable and must address with the same urgency with which we have finally begun to address the deplorable situation faced by indigenous women.

As always, DAWN Canada comes to this committee from an intersectional perspective that encompasses all disabilities, both visible and invisible, but with a clear understanding that while all young women and girls are at risk, there are some factors that greatly increase risk, including type of disability, being indigenous, being black—being differently abled.

Although our data collection on these issues will soon be improved and is being addressed by Minister Hajdu under her national strategy, we have to work with very limited data—for example, about our cohort and about indigenous women and girls. We know that the rates of disability are the highest with indigenous women and sit somewhere between 25% and 35% at a minimum.

We wish to express our deep disappointment and concern that there has been no meaningful effort to include indigenous women and girls with disabilities in the inquiry, despite the fact that, again, a minimum of one third of these women would have been living with a disability, whether acknowledged, diagnosed, or not. We urge the committee to address this in your recommendations.

Ableism is, in and of itself, a form of violence against women, as is racism. Systemic ableism abounds, as does systemic racism. It is not deliberate, it is not intended, but it is highly pervasive, and our organization is working very hard to address this.

Sarah Stott died just a few months ago. We do not know for certain what her cause of death was, but we can assume that an ableist society that places less value on those who are differently abled almost certainly had something to do with why and how this young woman died after surviving being hit by a train, being nearly frozen, and then being supported by a loving family and community who helped raise funds for her to have her own adapted apartment and her own car. We can only surmise that, despite all this, Sarah simply did not feel valued. Despite all that love and support from her community, the world beyond was not ready for her, the same world that so many young women with disabilities aspire to be part of.

Our newest project, funded by Status of Women Canada, is called “Legislation, Policy and Service Responses to Violence Against Women with Disabilities and Deaf Women”. It is the result of three years of community consultations with women with disabilities in 13 communities across Canada. They are tired of sharing their stories and repeating over and over that they are not getting the support they need.

We have undertaken this project in Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia and have already begun to see strong evidence that affirms the enormous gaps in policies and program delivery for women and girls with disabilities. Policies tend to be reactive, if they exist at all; legislation specific to disability—we have 10 years with the AODA in Ontario—is not applied from a gendered perspective; and any policies that appear to have merit are generally just that: well-written policies with no champions, no funding, and therefore no programs, no services, or none specifically for our needs, and no results.

In today's high-tech and social media world, the most at risk of being bullied or of being exploited online are girls with disabilities. Despite the incredible opportunities technology represents in supporting women and girls with disabilities, again there is no legislation or policy in place to protect our young women in this rapidly changing environment that dominates youth culture today.

Coming back to my opening remarks, the rates of sexual violence, physical violence, verbal violence, and systemic violence are at least three times higher for young women and girls with disabilities. If we had the courage as a country to really look at childhood sexual abuse and to gather that data, we would again be looking at the alarmingly high rates of sexual abuse among girl children with disabilities.

Last year CBC broke a story that got very little national attention: a young woman with an intellectual disability sexually assaulted on a public bus in Winnipeg while her support worker sat two seats ahead of her listening to music on her iPod. Our work with young women with intellectual disabilities has a strong correlation with this. What they have told us repeatedly is that they need to receive appropriate information about their sexual and reproductive rights and the supports they require to protect themselves and those rights.

From a recent study of women in prisons in Ontario, there are two important pieces of data to share with you today. What two things did all these women have in common? Again, 40% of all women incarcerated in prisons in Ontario have a history of childhood sexual abuse and a traumatic brain injury.

What are we doing at DAWN Canada? I'm very proud to share with all of you today a recent and exciting partnership that we have with the Girls Action Foundation, funded by a grant from the Canadian Women's Foundation, for the next four years. Focused on their nine- to thirteen-year-old girls programming, Girls Action Foundation and DAWN Canada will begin collaborating for the next four years to see the inclusion of girls with disabilities and deaf girls in these mainstream girls' programs. This is the most exciting “pay it forward” and positive project we will have done yet, and it means so much, because it is about our future, about girls with disabilities as confident leaders.

This kind of uptake of leadership, of accepting responsibility for all girls, is sadly lacking elsewhere. As I stand before you today, there is but a handful—and I really do mean a handful—of peer support groups for women with disabilities, and nothing for girls or young women with disabilities, nothing for those who are experiencing violence at the highest rates. How can this be?

All of us gathered here today and all of us in Canada must do better. This is about the collective responsibility each of us has. This is not DAWN Canada's job, my friend; it belongs to all of us.

I stand before you today without a brief because my organization is already pushing itself well beyond its capacity day in and day out, for more than 30 years now. A brief and more facts should not be what is required to move you today. Every human rights instrument, including the CEDAW, the CESCR, and the CRPD, and every review of Canada's performance under its human rights treaties affirms that Canada is failing women and girls with disabilities. According to the World Health Organization, we are the largest minority group in the world. According to the most recent human rights commission report for 2015, nearly 60% of all complaints received were disability-related.

Minister Qualtrough has been charged with developing national accessibility legislation, together with all of you in the coming two years. She and I and the millions of young women and girls with disabilities in Canada need your support, need your commitment.

I could not be more proud of the fact that Canada has finally stood up and taken real and meaningful collective responsibility for the exclusion and harm done to our indigenous peoples. I stand before you today to urge FEWO and all of its members to do the same for young women and girls with disabilities.

Thank you. Merci.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to our questions section. We'll be hearing questions in both English and French, so if you need the translation devices, I'd invite you to put them on.

I'd like to welcome Mr. Arseneault, who is joining us today.

We'll begin with Ms. Nassif.

Ms. Nassif, you have seven minutes. Please go ahead.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will be addressing my questions in English this time. I know you did this for me, because I usually ask in French.

I would like to thank both our witnesses for sharing their work with us today, but my first question goes to Ms. Brayton.

You mentioned that it's estimated that 40% of women enter prison with a traumatic brain injury. Half of these women, apparently, sustained their TBI before committing their first crime.

[Bonnie Brayton]

That's right.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

I'll read a quick quote from the study, and I want to ask you two quick questions. Julie could add to this, if she wants.

I would ask, Chairman, if I have time left, to share it with Mr. Fraser.

Half of these women apparently sustained their TBI before committing their first crime. I will read the quote, and then I will ask my question. You said:

In our research we observed a striking gender difference. Female inmates with a TBI, compared to males, were much more likely to have suffered physical or sexual abuse as children....Right now we don't know very much about how brain injuries affect women in the correctional system. This study indicates a need for more research, and for programs that address TBI and mental health programs among people at risk of incarceration.

That was in 2014. I was hoping you might give us some comments to say what kinds of services are currently available to these individuals, if there are any; what kinds of services they should be getting; and how difficult it is for these women to return to society and not only function normally but not become repeat victims of abuse because of their histories, and now the possibility of disability.

[Bonnie Brayton]

I appreciate that you've taken the time to look carefully at that study. It's a very important piece of work, and I'm glad you've asked these questions.

To be really clear, we are criminalizing women with disabilities. We are doing this in terms of the homeless population. Again, the same researcher who did that study, Dr. Angela Colantonio, did an interesting study on the homeless population in Toronto. In terms of recent work done by Dr. Colantonio and her colleagues, I think it's important to share another statistic with you, because I think it plays into the same questions. Between 35% and 80% of women who are going into shelters and transition houses have a traumatic brain injury. That's right: between 35% and 80% of all women. It's not diagnosed and it's not screened. A lot of women are walking around with brain injuries without a diagnosis.

I think when we go right back to where the source is, it's to understand that the rates of violence against women speak to why this is so. Women are choked. They are slapped. They are beaten. They sustain injuries. Again, these are not injuries that they get screened for. They go to the hospital. Screening for a traumatic brain injury is expensive. It's not something they're going to do as a standard of practice unless the government and Parliament support the idea that we need to get much more proactive, not just around sports brain injuries but around the kinds of brain injuries that women are experiencing because of the high rates of violence against women in this country. It's an epidemic in terms of what we're talking about.

If I were to show you the data around brain injury versus every other disability.... Again, DAWN is cross-disability; I am not advocating more for brain injury. However, in the very context of what we're talking about here, specifically women in prisons, women who are homeless, and indeed women who are in the sex trade, we are often talking about women with an undiagnosed brain injury.

I see my colleague Julie nodding her head, because I know she sees this in the people who are coming through her wonderful resource.

In terms of what needs to happen, we need to get right at the core issue. We need to make sure that some of the funding that's now going to brain injury around sports and so on is redirected, or that additional funding is put forward. Again, the largest problem we have in this country is violence against women. Upwards of 50% of women going through transition houses and shelters are going through that system without the supports they need.

I am not pointing to the transition houses and shelters. I'm talking about a failed system at the very highest level. We have not understood how big this problem is. I would say further that one of the things we really begin to see—and this is something revealed through Dr. Colantonio's research—is that there are correlations between the high incidence of Alzheimer's in women and violence.

This is the kind of research that's going to require longitudinal studies that begin to follow women with brain injuries throughout their life course. I understand there's been research done in other countries. There's certainly other research that I can point to. I would be happy to provide the committee with additional research and formal recommendations, and with a panel of experts, who should be part of this discussion.

I thank you very much for raising this question. It's extremely important that we focus on where the systemic issues are and where the systemic solutions lie.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

You mentioned the high percentage, 35% to 80%, of women who suffer with TBI. I was about to ask you the question about whether there are any programs elsewhere in the world that have done well to integrate women with traumatic brain injury and provide them with adequate services. Would you have any information to share on that?

[Bonnie Brayton]

There aren't any that I'm aware of. There's certainly research going on, as I said. I think that's where Canadians and the Government of Canada have an opportunity to lead on this. We have been leading on the issue of addressing violence against women, and I think this is an important area that needs to be looked at much more closely. There needs to be more resources put into the research to take this from qualitative to quantitative data, to the point where we can assign the appropriate level of resources to it.

It's much bigger than has been understood. The research I'm sharing about transition houses and shelters is very recent. It's a further affirmation of the other evidence that we're not really addressing brain injury at the place where it begins, whether it's a car accident or it's through violence. I've encountered women with disabilities at my office, who have come through my door. One woman I know had a car accident. From there she lost her job, lost her relationship, and eventually ended up homeless and in a terrible situation. It was because there was no catching this woman at the first stage. And she had a diagnosis.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right. That's your time.

We'll go now to Ms. Vecchio for seven minutes.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'll start with Covenant House Toronto. Being from the city of London area, I know there's been a lot of work done there with Megan Walker and the London Abused Women's Centre and with a previous member of Parliament, Joy Smith, who did a lot of work on the issue of sex trafficking.

I think part of the issue is that we believe it's something that's overseas, although it does happen here in Canada. I'm wondering to what degree sex trafficking actually occurs in Canada and if you have some statistics on that. In terms of sex trafficking as a problem, to what scale is the sex trade in Canada? Perhaps we can look at that and compare it to other countries.

I'll let you continue on this roll, because both Marilyn Gladu, the chair, and I were with the U.S. ambassador at the U.S. embassy about two weeks ago looking at the sex trafficking studies that were being done by Homeland Security.

Just go ahead and speak openly on those topics, if you don't mind.

[Julie Neubauer]

First, I'll address the fact that it is a misunderstood myth that it is an overseas issue that happens in Thailand and places of that sort. Certainly that doesn't negate the fact that it does occur in those places, but I believe 90% of the cases that we see at Covenant House Toronto are domestic. They are young people from London, for example. Megan and I share a lot of the same views and do a lot of the same work. They're young people coming from Sault Ste. Marie. They're coming from Nova Scotia.

Anecdotally, I can give you a number of stories. Out of our 86 different cases that we're working with right now, there may be only four people who were not born in Canada, and those tend to be women who have arrived from abroad and are involved in forced-marriage circumstances or honour-based violence.

The young women who we see are moved throughout Canada. As I said, they may begin their trafficking experience in Barrie, and be moved around to St. Catharines, to Windsor, through the various strip clubs to the hotels and to the condominiums across Ontario. We have found an increase in young women coming from Quebec, from Nova Scotia, and there is an increasing involvement in gang-related activity in both of those provinces, as well as in Ontario.

Again, I think Laurie Scott and a lot of the programs and campaigns that are identifying this are using the terminology of “right under our noses” and “just like a girl next door”, and those are absolutely accurate. At Covenant House, because we are an agency that has been serving the at-risk, vulnerable sector for 34 years, most of our experience up until the past six years has been predominantly with that population of young women who were coming to us from atypical, non-intact families. We are finding increasing numbers of women and their parents who are calling us for either consultation or seeking shelter. They are coming from situations where there are two parents with a modest earning in the home; the young women are enrolled in university, in high school. To stun even further, these young women are connected to their communities. They are involved in dance. I'm trying to protect the confidentiality, but there was one case where she was a professional dancer and had gone abroad on a scholarship.

Again, there's a vulnerability that crosses over all the young women who are involved, but there is a larger systemic issue around gender equality in Canada and across the world. For these types of young women who are living at home, they look to forms of income, and they don't want to work at a lower-income, minimum-wage job.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I just wanted to add, if we could talk about this, that a lot of times when we look at the perpetrators we look at them as male, especially when we're talking about sexual assault. But in this situation, are there females involved as well as part of the perpetrators who are getting the young women involved? Just recently in the House of Commons, we've been talking about mandatory minimum sentences, things of that sort. I think it's important that we look at the entire issue.

In a situation like this, of course, the majority are men, but are there women also involved in getting people hooked into this trafficking?