First of all, just to be clear, I want to reiterate that the loss I spoke about was the daughter of one of our survivors.
We also are getting tired of the silos—trust me. The frontline workers are screaming at the top of their lungs. After this many years, we shouldn't have to anymore. We need to recognize what....
You know, play it out. A young girl is extracted by the police. They bring her to the police station at three o'clock in the morning. Now what? There are fewer than 20 beds between the GTA and here in Ottawa for specifically human trafficking survivors. As Tiffany mentioned, human trafficking survivors are unique in that they have suffered trauma that is unlike anything else. You can't put them in a typical shelter. It's dangerous to the shelter workers, it's dangerous to the other women and children who may be at that shelter, and it's dangerous for the survivor to be placed there. It's a failure every time. It's unconscionable that we have fewer than 20 beds from southern Ontario for human trafficking survivors. That's critical.
As I mentioned in my speech, typically it takes about seven attempts to exit. If they have nowhere to go, we give them a couple of nights in a hotel, a Tim Hortons card and a cellphone. Three or four nights down the road, they're back out on the street with survival sex. I guarantee you that within a week they're going to be trafficked again. It just becomes a never-ending cycle.
I hear from survivors all the time that they expect us to fail them, and we're doing a pretty good job of failing them. They're not really good at platitudes and shrugged shoulders; they want results. It's our responsibility to provide them with that.