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.