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.