As I mentioned when I was speaking, I just had conversations with Build Canada Homes, and several years ago I had a conversation with CMHC. Of course, there are always these things you have to have “in addition to”.
First of all, when it comes to some of these things, we need to take those caveats away. If we're really serious about doing this work, we need to make sure that it isn't that difficult to do it. I've actually been doing this for more than six years, but it has been six years with the group of people I just spoke to you about.
Second, we need to educate, and we need to do a really good job of educating. One group of people who need to be educated, if you're worried about the law and how it's applied, are judges, because you can be sure.... Imagine being raped, as a woman or a man, and they find who raped you, they go into court and you have to testify as the victim. You can imagine that you are clearly the victim in that setting, usually, when they finally press charges. However, in the instance of a sex-trafficking survivor, or a wife or an intimate partner—Jacqueline would be better able to speak to this—they use language in front of the judge such as “daddy”, “boyfriend” or whatever. To the judge, that sounds like, “Hey, you actually wanted to have that relationship”, when in fact, no, it was coercion. There were different things going on there.
Then, in regard to children.... When someone first came to me with this issue, victims services said, “We need to build safe houses.” I said, “Well, we can build safe houses till the cows come home, but if we are not educating our children...” They need to know. I'm really old. When I went to school, there was Elmer the Safety Elephant. You knew never to get into a car with anybody. We didn't couch that in...the proper way to speak to somebody in intimate—
