Authors: Benjamin Perrin
Vancouver Rape Relief's Lee Lakeman describes the vulnerability of Aboriginal girls at truck stops: “[Often they are] very young girls who were forced into hitchhiking for lack of transportation and once they're on those hitchhiking routes, they are lured by men with small amounts of cash, small amounts of drugs, small amounts of gifts.” Or by other more violent means, as in the case involving Judge David Ramsay, detailed in
Chapter 13.
At least five hundred First Nations girls and women have gone missing in Canada over the last thirty years. No one knows at this point how many of these disappearances are linked to the flesh market and, perhaps, domestic sex trafficking, but some believe that the two likely are related.
“Aboriginal girls are being hunted down and prostituted, and the perpetrators go uncharged with child sexual assault and child rape,” reports the Vancouver-based Aboriginal Women's Action Network. “These predators, pervasive in our society, roam with impunity in our streets and take advantage of those Aboriginal children with the least protection.”
“Men see Aboriginal women not as women but as things to use and dispose of,” adds Redsky. She believes the problem is largely being ignored because of racism and sexism.
The Little Sisters safe house run by Ma Mawi is, for some, a last stop. One fourteen-year-old girl had been in sixty-seven placements in foster care and a succession of group homes before arriving there.
Yet Little Sisters, whose work is important and in many cases life-saving, has just six beds. Due to a lack of funding and facilities, they've had to turn away more than one hundred teenage girls in the last six years. In need of help and protection, the girls were failed by the system and left to take their chances on the street.
What's behind the high incidence of sexual exploitation of Aboriginal girls in this country? Are the causes economic? Social? Geographic? Historical?
A landmark study in 2007 found that they are all of these and more. The root causes named in the study are myriad and complex, and are linked to other persistent social challenges facing Aboriginal communities; these include the legacy of colonization and residential schools, domestic violence and crime, poverty, substance abuse, lack of awareness and acknowledgement of the problem, isolation of Aboriginal youth, racism, and inadequate services and laws to combat the problem.
Drugs and death
While drugs often play a role in
attracting and controlling young women within the commercial sex industry, their use is not universal. In some instances, traffickers may even forbid their victims to use hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin because once addicted, the girls may become too volatile and hard to control.
Staff at the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre have found that many victims controlled by their addiction are especially vulnerable to their drug dealer's becoming their de facto trafficker. Once addicted to methamphetamine (“meth”), crack cocaine, or heroin, victims may sell their bodies for sex acts to pay their drug dealer for the next hit, used both to satisfy their intense addiction and numb their physical and mental suffering. While under the effects of these narcotics, victims experience severely impaired judgment and a relaxing of inhibitions.
The stories of Aboriginal young women falling prey to drug dealers and sexual exploitation are almost too numerous to tell, and far too many of them end in tragedy. Such was the short life of Fonessa Bruyere (her real name), an Aboriginal girl in Manitoba who first was sexually exploited when she was only eleven years old. As well, Fonessa and her older sister soon became addicted to crack cocaine and meth. When Fonessa was just twelve, she sought help at a residential youth shelter in Winnipeg, but because all the beds were full, she was turned away. Her substance abuse and the lack of support contributed to her being sold for sex acts.
Fonessa returned to life on the street with her sister, managing to survive for five years. She was last seen alive getting into a car on a Winnipeg street corner near Selkirk Avenue on August 9, 2007. A few days later, she was found dead, her body dumped on a roadside at the city's outskirts. She was seventeen years old, and her murder has never been solved.
“Police were notified but we were greeted with indignance and disrespect to the extent that her grandmother was refused an incident number after reporting her missing,” says Carla Bruyere, Fonessa's
aunt. “We also made attempts to contact the press to get her picture out there as a missing child, but there was no interest at the time.”
Tragically, two of Fonessa's friends, also young Aboriginal girls, were last seen alive in the same area, went missing, and were later found dead. A group of men reportedly were using them for sex acts, plying them with crack cocaine, and giving them food and clothing. Fonessa's friends were Hilary Wilson, eighteen, and Cherisse Houle, seventeen.
9
FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS
O
ften when the justice
system fails victims of crime, it is said that they have been victimized twiceâfirst by the perpetrators who harmed them and later by a system that failed to redress that harm. Even if human trafficking victims are finally freed from their exploiters, they face formidable obstacles in trying to rebuild their lives.
Unfortunately, Canada cannot claim an enviable record in its treatment of trafficking victims. In too many cases, they receive treatment of the kind that should be meted out to their traffickers. While some important progress has been made, the majority of provinces in Canada do not have a system in place to coordinate services required for trafficking victims, and vulnerable women and children pay the price. Canada also lacks a national plan to ensure that victims of human trafficking are given the protection and assistance they need to recover and rehabilitate. Combine this with a bureaucratic attitude to dealing with circumstances that are not clearly delineated in policy books and injustice is sure to follow, as it did in the case of eleven-year-old Natalie.
Free from traffickers but confined by the state
Natalie arrived in Montreal from overseas in the summer of 2008. Border guards with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) believed that the little girl was a victim of human trafficking because
of the mysterious circumstances of her arrival. Authorities placed Natalie in the immigration detention centre just outside of Montreal, a prison-like complex surrounded by barbed wire. Her confinement was allegedly for her own safety.
During a routine weekly visit to the detention centre, representatives of Action Réfugiés Montréal noticed Natalie and were alarmed that such a young child was in the facility. The following week they found out that the terrified eleven-year-old was still there, now segregated from the adult population. The isolation may have enhanced Natalie's physical safety but contributed to her feeling frightened and alone. And although she'd met with a psychologist and had a social worker designated as her representative, she remained in detention.
“We were concerned among other things about the impact of her isolation from contact with others, the presence of uniformed guards, and her lengthy stay in a secure facility,” said the Action Réfugiés Montréal report. In an effort to get this child trafficking victim into a safe and appropriate shelter, Action Réfugiés Montréal told the English-language child protection agency in Quebec about Natalie's case. A reputed agreement between the CBSA and the French-language child protection agency, however, prevented the English-language agency from intervening. And for its part, the French-language child protection agency refused to help Natalie because they claimed that no facility in the province could effectively protect her from associates of her trafficker. Quebec's language politics and an ice-cold bureaucratic response stood in the way of quick action. After an entire month in detention, the young girl was finally released into the care of a local community organization.
Action Réfugiés Montréal called the incident “a breakdown of the child protection system, which failed to respond to the needs of a child at risk, as well as a breakdown of the immigration system, in which, by law, children should only be detained as a last resort.”
Natalie's is not an isolated case. In November 2007, a child called Tasha was found among a group of adults (whom she did not know) as they were trying to enter Canada illegally from the United States.
Officials were able to determine that Tasha had neither friends nor family in this country and suspected her to be a trafficked child. She was detained, again allegedly for her safety, and moved from Ottawa to the CBSA's immigration detention centre in Montreal, where she was held in prison-like detention for at least two weeks. Due to federal privacy laws, officials will not provide any information as to Tasha's whereabouts. We can only hope that she was placed among people whose care will help her overcome whatever trauma she suffered in custody.
The cost of provincial inaction paid by victims
The Province of Quebec isn't alone in its inadequate response to the needs of victims of human trafficking. Ontario is home to the majority of foreign trafficking victims recognized by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). It's also the province where the most human trafficking prosecutions in Canada have occurred, yet for years Ontario has failed to develop a comprehensive system to assist victims.
Is it a problem of perception, of priorities, or of political will perhaps? No one knows. Or at least no one in a position to know will talk about it. When I interviewed Joan Andrew, the deputy minister of immigration for the Province of Ontario, not only did she have nothing to say about how her department was addressing the issue, she also demonstrated alarmingly little understanding of human trafficking in Ontario.
“I don't think anything has been done,” says Detective Sergeant Mike Hamel of the Toronto Police Service, commenting on the treatment of victims of human trafficking in the province. While the “gangs and guns” issue has received funding in Ontario, Hamel is concerned about an apparent lack of attention to sex trafficking, a crime connected to several gangs operating in the province.
Another member of the Toronto Police Service shares Sergeant Hamel's concern. “We have very little infrastructure in place that would make it easy or give that victim the confidence to call the police,” she points out. “We just don't seem to have the resources.”
Constable Kristine Arnold of the Peel Regional Police, Vice Unit, confirms that this harsh reality affects Canadian victims as well as those from abroad. “We need money for clothes,” she points out, “and they need money for food. We had one girl from Alberta that our unit paid for out of petty cash, because our battered women's shelters were full.”
So bad is the situation that Timea Nagy, a survivor of human trafficking, had to start her own organization to educate police and pull together resources to help victims. The result, Walk with Me, inspires hope, as do other NGOs that are beginning to make limited progress. However, for years both CIC and the CBSA have declined to meet with NGOs in Ontario to improve the response to human trafficking in the province.
In November 2009, the issue of human trafficking finally made its way to Queen's Park when an Opposition member asked the government to explain why, unlike several other provinces, Ontario lacked a program tailored to the needs of trafficking victims. Rick Bartolucci, Ontario's minister of community safety and correctional services, dodged the question, bizarrely accusing the Opposition of failing to support provincial and municipal police. Later the minister reportedly told the media that human trafficking raises a lot of complex “federal issues,” adding, “They're immigration.”
This is an aloof bureaucratic response to a very human situationâone that grows more serious and daunting year by year. That Ontario is home to the largest number of foreign human trafficking victims identified by government records, as well as to the most prosecutions of domestic sex traffickers, should inspire a less cavalier response. Bartolucci's attitude also ignores the responsibility of the province to ensure that victims obtain the assistance and protection required to recover. At a meeting with Premier Dalton McGuinty in February 2010, after having set out this serious problem, I called on him to do the right thing and implement a system in Ontario to help victims of human trafficking. As this book goes to print, the provincial government has made no announcement.
The NGO representatives in Ontario who were interviewed for this book had no idea whom to contact within the provincial bureaucracy to assist victims in accessing services essential to recovery. Tragically, those who pay the price for this inaction are the victims in greatest need. It's a mark of shame for Canada that many know us only as a place of misery, suffering, and exploitation. This is indeed the memory of Canada for two Eastern European women who managed to escape traffickers in Toronto who were selling them for sex acts through escort agencies and strip clubs.
In the spring of 2008, Svetlana and Dina managed to overcome their fears of their trafficker and made their way to Toronto's Pearson International Airport with the intention of going home. Officials believed that the women were victims of human trafficking. However, Svetlana and Dina were locked up in the CBSA's secure immigration detention centre because “they had nowhere else to go” while they waited for their trip home to be organized.
Canada should have provided appropriate emergency shelter for these victims and worked with their home countries to facilitate their voluntary repatriation. Other countries have passed laws to ensure that if, as a last resort, victims need to be detained for their own safety, the facilities must be appropriate to their status as victims. Immigration detention and remand centres are not suitable and amount to imprisonment for these victims.
Another concern is the failure to properly and promptly identify victims when they come into contact with authorities. Even when traffickers use overt methods of control, some front-line officials remain unable to accurately identify the victim as a trafficked person. For example, local police may respond to complaints of domestic assault and fail to identify the incident as one of human trafficking. Here's an example: