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Victims of Trafficking in Persons: Perspectives from the Canadian Community Sector
3. Findings (cont’d)
3.2 Services, Gaps and Barriers
Once they had identified the most urgent needs of trafficking victims, frontline workers were invited to describe the services provided by their agencies and the gaps in and barriers to access services. Agencies are focused on areas such as poverty, needs of immigrants, refugees and women victims of different types of abuse and violence. They get referrals from settlement services, prison advocates, women themselves, third world solidarity groups, women’s organizations and Aboriginal leaders. Within these mandates and their daily service provision, they address the most salient needs of victims of trafficking.
Varied levels of services exist for most of the needs identified. Respondents also noted gaps and barriers to the provision of services to address the particular problems of trafficking victims.
3.2.1 Outreach, Intervention and Protection
Outreach
Outreach was reported as an important activity undertaken to educate and help trafficking victims reach safety. Workers seek to reach potential victims on the streets or in massage parlours, bars or strip clubs, within ethnic communities or in churches.
- No One is Illegal, an organization for clients in undocumented situations;
- Dollard-Cormier, a drug treatment centre for youth;
- Cactus, a street-level organization working with injection drug users;
- and the Montréal Department of Public Health.
In Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal, some activists, as well as small community groups, were at times involved in "rescue" operations, in which they would physically intervene to help a woman caught up in a trafficking situation (for example, an LCP or other domestic worker) to leave the site of the exploitation:
We provide the so-called "rescue operations" at the centre. They call us up and say, "I really want to leave." They need to immediately leave the employer because they can no longer stand the abuse. We immediately support them and go get them. Without any questions, we just go pick them up.
Work has also been done in detention facilities or prisons where women are held, both around Vancouver itself, in the interior of British Columbia and on Vancouver Island. In this context, agencies do outreach and advocacy work related to immigration, settlement services, problems with prison and criminal justice authorities, or they take in women upon their release from jail.
It was noted that workers were overloaded and under-resourced and that there wasn’t enough support for outreach activities. It was also suggested that peers should be hired to do outreach work in some ethnic communities such as the Chinese, Thai, and East-European communities, where trafficking sometimes occurs within the community.
Several of the respondents interviewed identified public education and advocacy against gender, race and ethnic discrimination as one of the most important activities of their organizations. Several groups reported that their adherence to feminist principles or to the tenets of First Nations’ culture was a key element in their ability to reach out, to engage and to maintain contact with trafficking victims in vulnerable situations. Respondents felt that these alternative practice frameworks were under-valued by government officials and funding bodies, thereby limiting their ability to provide the services they see as both necessary and in demand.
Respondents also felt that the public lacks understanding of both what trafficking is and of its extent in their communities. Media coverage was considered incomplete, difficult to understand and presented from a conservative point of view. Public education campaigns addressing the links between systemic gender and racial prejudices and trafficking in persons were suggested as viable responses. It was argued that survivors or "experiential workers" should be hired to run campaigns available in a diversity of languages.
As part of this educational strategy, the public should be given tools to help victims. Programs such as Cybertip.ca, an online system to report actual or potential sexual exploitation of children on the internet, should be publicized.
Intervention
There were several examples of police operations uncovering trafficking activities. The evaluations of these operations were mixed. For a time in Toronto, Metro Police and a sex workers’ organization collaborated in a series of investigations and busts of local strip clubs suspected of trafficking. Each city also had examples of isolated police raids that uncovered suspected trafficking victims.
The results of police investigations and interventions in cases of trafficking, especially where organized crime was involved, have highlighted gaps within the system and pointed to a need for education for law enforcement personnel. For example, there have been instances during these kinds of operations in which trafficking victims were charged with prostitution-related offences. Respondents viewed this kind of outcome as problematic and highlighted the need to build better relationships between victims’ organizations and the police. In other cases, it was reported that undocumented women were directly turned over to the Canada Border Service Agency and subsequently deported.
Respondents also pointed to insufficient or inappropriate law enforcement activities as a barrier. Respondents questioned the implementation of the Immigrant and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA, 2001) and the lack of enforcement related to the existing tools such as the Canadian Labour Code and the Criminal Code.
- they are often jailed;
- their children are taken away from them;
- and they are denied other rights.
prisons are not in the business of helping women; they are in the business of managing people."
Criminalization of sex workers was also considered as interfering with prevention efforts. Given that the police use parlour activities as proof of prostitution and collect evidence to support accusations of prostitution against workers, agency workers’ efforts to leave preventative material such as condoms and lubricants on site is inhibited. Criminalization also makes it difficult for agencies to identify, reach out to and gain the trust of sex workers. Their fear of arrest or deportation can lead them to avoid accessing necessary services, a scenario captured well in the following quotation:
The first question is that you must understand the culture of the gangs, of the sex trade work. They don’t have status; they even don’t know if the Canadian law will protect them. They just came here. They didn’t intend to stay here forever. They just come here to get money and they eventually need to leave the country. They don’t know if the government is willing to help these kinds of victims.
Lack of implementation in the regulation of sex clubs, as well as lack of trafficking-related training and education of government officials are seen as gaps in the area of law enforcement.
Protection Services
There were a few examples of respondents providing temporary protection services to women by offering them a place to stay. These respondents reported feeling uneasy about having to take on that role. They felt ill-equipped to do so but felt it was necessary since the woman had no alternative. In most situations in which women felt endangered, the women were referred to domestic violence shelters. In some cases, refugee shelters actually sent their clients to another city in Canada or even to the US in order to ensure their safety:
So one day, we really started to fear for her safety when one of our volunteer was raking leaves outside in front of the house when a man, middle aged, white Canadian man, stopped and asked for this person. Fortunately, it was just a volunteer so she didn’t know and she went to tell me somebody is looking for this person. So I went to answer the person and to see how he looks and asked why he was looking for her but he left. She wasn’t secure anymore. So we arranged for her to go to another city and to be welcomed by another organization.
Respondents viewed the lack of protection policies and programs for trafficking victims as a primary barrier to effective service provision for trafficking victims. Service providers, themselves, also wanted protection in specific situations. In Calgary and Montréal, for example, some service providers had received threats related to their work on trafficking in persons. Workers feared exposing victims and themselves or colleagues to retaliation by traffickers.
We, too, have had threats. The women, too, have threats. All kind of threats, like on your own person. That’s why I hope you will respect the confidentiality, and why we can’t mention the names of the people, of the victims nor the groups either. We want to make it good but we don’t want to have a string of bad things happening to those who helped out with their heart.
- a pro-active immigration policy that includes violence against women;
- the full application of the UN Trafficking Protocol;
- and providing immigration status to trafficking victims.
Most of the agencies which meet with international trafficking victims have immigrant or refugee settlement services as their primary mandate. As such, they are used to helping individuals deal with immigration procedures. Many of the non-immigrant-serving groups interviewed rely on referrals to specialised organizations or on pro bono collaboration with lawyers to complete applications. Given the implications of an unfavourable immigration decision, most groups prefer to rely on specialists.
The most common procedures are refugee claims, humanitarian and compassionate applications for permanent residence, permanent residency applications for those in the LCP, or other temporary visas. If deportation is imminent, groups will sometimes offer emergency assistance through legal intervention, political lobbying, media work and activism.
There was recently a woman who was deported … She was one of the women in our group. … The government’s whole mentality, their bosses told them what to do and they do it, that’s it. They don’t care about us. There was an amazing demonstration. … They didn’t want it. She was deported.
Access to legal representation, including legal aid, was lacking for the groups aiming to help victims to negotiate with the immigration system. Some form of residency status for internationally-trafficked persons was frequently identified as a gap.
