Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Jasmine De Fina. I'm the executive director of SafeHope Home, one of Canada's few survivor-led recovery programs for survivors of human trafficking. I also work within the victim services sector, supporting survivors navigating violence, housing insecurity, trauma and exploitation. I also speak from lived experience.
Housing insecurity and gender-based violence are deeply connected. Many women stay in abusive situations because they cannot afford to leave. They have nowhere to go. They cannot support themselves independently and fear losing their children. Like many women I have worked with, I personally remained in abusive situations and later entered into other unhealthy relationships in part because of financial insecurity and housing instability.
We often ask women why they stay, but we don't ask whether Canada has created the conditions to make leaving realistically possible. One of the biggest gaps I want this committee to understand is that survivors of human trafficking cannot access appropriate shelter and housing spaces at all.
Human trafficking and violence against women are connected, but they're not identical issues. Trafficking survivors often have very different safety risks, trauma responses, clinical needs and recovery needs. Most violence-against-women shelters are not designed for the complexity of trafficking cases, and trafficking survivors rarely gain access to specialized beds because Canada has so few across the country.
At the same time, mainstream shelter environments can sometimes increase safety risks for trafficking survivors due to recruitment concerns, gang involvement, organized crime connections, trauma triggers, addictions and the high level of clinical support that is required. Canada needs specialized, trafficking-specific stabilization and recovery spaces.
Within trafficking-specific programming, we also cannot treat all survivors the same. Women without children and mothers often require separate living environments and program structures. Women with children need recovery spaces designed specifically for mothers and children together, while other trafficking survivors often require highly specialized, adult-focused recovery environments. Right now, there are simply not enough spaces.
At SafeHope Home, we consistently maintain a wait-list. Organizations across the country are full. Nationally, there is only a very small number of specialized human trafficking recovery programs. There are fewer than 10 dedicated long-term programs across the country.
Many of these programs are also not funded through ministries responsible for housing or long-term residential recovery, despite housing being one of the central needs survivors face. Instead, organizations are often forced to piece together unstable funding from multiple short-term resources while trying to provide highly specialized, intensive care.
Trauma recovery also does not happen in 30, 60 or even 90 days. For many survivors of trafficking and severe violence, healing takes years.
What Canada needs is a staged continuum of care for survivors of violence and trafficking. We need specialized emergency stabilization spaces for women fleeing violence and exploitation. We need long-term, women-only addictions and mental health treatment that is trauma-informed and specifically designed for survivors of violence. We need long-term, live-in recovery programs where women can heal the trauma, attachment wounds, survival coping mechanisms and vulnerabilities that keep them at risk of re-exploitation and returning to abusive situations.
We then need supportive transitional housing and independent living options where women can slowly rebuild stability while continuing to receive wraparound support. Finally, we need long-term affordable and subsidized housing so that women are not pushed back into dangerous situations simply because they cannot afford to survive.
These services also cannot continue to rely on temporary pilot projects and unstable year-to-year funding. Gender-based violence, trafficking and housing insecurity are not temporary problems. They have existed for generations and continue every day across this country. The funding response should reflect that reality.
Across Canada, shelters and transition house programs are overwhelmed. Women are turned away due to lack of beds, and they return to abusive partners and end up homeless and vulnerable to further exploitation. Young girls are being recruited into trafficking directly from homelessness, child welfare involvement, couch surfing and unsafe housing situations.
We also need to acknowledge that the response varies drastically by province. Trafficking survivors are highly transient, yet the quality of care changes drastically depending on where they are in Canada. Ontario's anti-human trafficking strategy has created stronger coordination and specialized responses, but we need national consistency. The federal government should establish minimum standards of care and coordinated anti-trafficking responses across every province and territory so that survivors receive consistent, quality support wherever they go in this country.
We must also realize that labour trafficking remains severely under-identified and under-serviced in Canada. We need specialized live-in recovery and stabilization programs for labour trafficking survivors as well, including migrant workers and newcomers experiencing exploitation, coercion and debt bondage.
I also want to emphasize that investing in long-term recovery systems is fiscally responsible. When women receive stable housing, trauma recovery, addictions care and long-term support, governments see reduced emergency room visits, reduced psychiatric admissions, reduced justice system involvement, reduced incarceration, reduced homelessness and reduced child welfare involvement.
Most importantly, we begin breaking intergenerational cycles of violence, exploitation, addiction and poverty within families and communities.
This is not simply social spending. It is long-term prevention and cost reduction across multiple public systems.
