Madam Chair and honourable committee members, thank you for providing us the opportunity to present here today on the issue of human trafficking.
I’m here representing Angels of Hope Against Human Trafficking. We’re a grassroots community-based organization located in Sudbury, Ontario. Since 2015, Angels of Hope has provided trauma-informed long-term support to over 300 human trafficking survivors and their families. Angels of Hope is the only organization in northern Ontario dedicated exclusively to supporting human trafficking survivors.
Sex trafficking survivors require specialized trauma-informed care to successfully exit from being exploited, reclaim their agency and rebuild their life. The process of escaping and recovering from sex trafficking is complex, highly nuanced and never linear. Once removed from being exploited, it can take an average of seven attempts to successfully exit the sex industry due to ongoing vulnerabilities, trauma bonds and lack of safe and secure shelter.
In addition to broken promises and lack of resources, far too often a survivor’s restorative journey is sabotaged by someone’s lack of awareness and understanding of the survivor’s mindset and trauma that they’ve endured.
Trauma-informed care is much more than making a survivor feel good or treating them with kindness. It’s not a catchphrase, a check mark on a website or a certificate on the wall.
The anti-human trafficking movement is being inundated with self-appointed experts who view human trafficking as fertile ground for grants and funding opportunities. These organizations hang out their open-for-business sign with absolutely no human trafficking experience, and particularly not in working with survivors of trafficking.
Many of these organizations consider the needs of sex trafficking survivors secondary to their fundraising efforts, their career aspirations, notoriety and social or political status. This destroys lives and puts survivors' lives at risk. Funding must be prioritized to go directly to support survivors.
Survivors communicate through their behaviours, yet despite all of the investment in education and awareness training, the majority of our survivors tell us of their experience with ignorance; apathy; social and racial stigmatization; and incompetence, corruption and exploitation among law enforcement, the justice system, doctors, nurses and social services workers. In addition to ongoing education and awareness training, the necessary paradigm shift to change this is only possible through educating those entering these professions.
Angels of Hope is excited to provide human trafficking workshops to the next generation of legal professionals, including university law studies, with the objective of building survivor confidence in the criminal justice system and inspiring legal professionals to understand the survivors' mindset and empower them to seek justice.
Survivors are very clear about why they don’t trust or report to the police and are unwilling to testify against their trafficker. The following is a quote from an indigenous survivor whose daughter was trafficked and ultimately murdered. This excerpt can be found in our report entitled “Increasing Access to Justice for Survivors of Human Trafficking”.
When my daughter passed away, the justice system was so awful. I remember calling the police to verify if it was my daughter that they found, and the police officer right off the hop says, “Well, did you know that your daughter was a prostitute, she was on drugs and she jumped out of a window?”
At that time, I was able to put in a police report about her ongoing exploitation and abuse. The trafficker just got a slap on the wrist and had to take cultural sensitivity training.
I think that is a major expression of how Indigenous women are treated in the justice system.
Survivors believe it’s unsafe to report to the police because of known cases of corruption and fear of being victim-blamed and shamed. It’s estimated that about 80% of human trafficking cases go unreported to the police.
Some survivors also expressed a deep concern about police being unable to get them out of trafficking situations because of the movement across multiple jurisdictions, internal bias or judgment when seeking help, and the safety risk to themselves and their loved ones.
Most people underestimate the significant dangers to those being trafficked, their families and other girls associated with the victim. Abuse and torture such as burns, cuts, breast and genital mutilation and anal and vaginal penetration with foreign objects are just some of the unspeakable horrors that these survivors experience.
It’s time to get serious about tearing down territorial silos and work collaboratively to build comprehensive human trafficking crime data to develop polices, protocols and generously funded programs that allow us to directly serve the long-term healing journey, recovery and basic needs of human trafficking survivors.
We’re making progress, but there’s a lot of heavy lifting yet to be done.