Thank you, Madam Chair. It's nice to see everybody. I'm sorry I couldn't join you in person today.
Girls, women and gender-diverse people with disabilities are vulnerable targets of human trafficking.
I'll remind the committee that we submitted a brief that I hope has been circulated by now. If not, I'm sure it will be soon. Please make sure you do take the time to review that and the recommendations. Of course, we can speak to them today.
Disability is the centre of the cycle of violence, trauma and revictimization that many trafficking survivors experience. Women and girls with disabilities are more likely to experience childhood sexual violence. Childhood sexual violence is linked to revictimization through the course of life and has negative impacts, including mental health conditions, addictions, social exclusion and poverty. In turn, these factors have been identified by Public Safety Canada as risk factors for human trafficking.
One thing I decided I would talk about today, instead of what I originally had in my speaking notes, is an important case that DAWN was consulted on by an Ontario Crown attorney last year. The reason we were consulted by the Crown attorney was that they had five people for whom they needed to prepare sentencing. They asked us to prepare something that's called a “community impact statement”, which is very similar to a victim impact statement but focuses on an entire community that is likely to be victim to a specific type of crime.
I thought I would just share the facts. In this instance, a father began sexually assaulting his daughter at the age of four. As she grew, he began trafficking her to other men. By the time she was an adolescent, her father and four men were trafficking her, and trafficking her to other men. By the time this stopped, this woman was 30 and had been sexually assaulted, in all likelihood, thousands of times. This is the form of trafficking that I think is the most egregious, and it is something that I think is very important for the committee to consider.
Notwithstanding that, of course there are all kinds of other forms of trafficking that take place, including some you've heard about from other witnesses, including those here today. Of course, sexual trafficking is a huge and important problem. It is a fact that 24% of all women in Canada live with a disability, and if we add the lens of race in terms of indigenous and Black women, we're above 30%, so we know that a huge number of women who live with disabilities are at other intersections.
In terms of what we put in the community impact statement, I'll quickly share a few things that I think are important.
The victimization of women, girls and gender-diverse people with disabilities is indicative of the systemic factors. The sexual violence we experience occurs repetitively and frequently precisely because of the fact that a woman is disabled.
As stated in the community impact statement, “The sexual violence we experience involves multiple perpetrators, often individuals who are in positions of trust; starts when we are young children and is compounded into adulthood; is a spectrum of verbal and physical abuse to severe sexual attacks; is coercive and exploitative and this is viewed as socially permissible because of our disabilities; is often dismissed simply because we, the victims, live with disability and our inherent dignity is discounted; and is rarely subject to serious denunciatory findings because we are treated as less credible.”
A later section reads, “Disability scholars point out that women with mental disabilities are often taken advantage of when they are most vulnerable—by people in positions of trust and authority and in places such as shelters or institutions. Often, sexual favours are traded for money, cigarettes, or some other form of reward. Much of this abuse is often chronic and often goes unreported (one in 30, according to one study). This is often due to their reliance on others, including those that may be exploiting them.
A later paragraph reads, “Women with intellectual disabilities and cognitive disabilities, including women with brain injuries—frequently acquired as a result of violence—experience staggering rates of sexual assault and are seen as easy targets. As recognized in the Supreme Court case R. v. D.A.I., perpetrators believe that disabled women are powerless to complain or will not be believed even if they do complain. Because of their precarious status and limited reach within their social networks, women and girls with disabilities are easily marginalized and their concerns delegitimized simply because of their disability and ingrained images of disability as lacking capacity. Women and girls with disabilities are at a high risk of violence due to social stereotypes that often serve to reduce their agency by infantilizing, dehumanizing and isolating them.”
Further, “It is no surprise then that since women with disabilities rely on caregivers to have their basic needs met, they are particularly susceptible to being trafficked by those caregivers. Girls with disabilities are seen as ready and accessible prey, easily targeted, exploited and manipulated by predators.”
Before I—