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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 (cont’d)
3.2.2 Housing and Income
Housing Services
Respondents viewed housing services as closely related to protection services. When encountering trafficking victims in crisis situations and in need of immediate shelter, service providers turn to a number of resources. Domestic violence or refugee shelters are the most common resources used, but in cases where victims do not seem to fit into either of these two categories, frontline workers reported seeking spaces in homeless shelters. In Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal, activist organizations sometimes arrange for victims to stay in their members’ homes.
The limitations of domestic violence, refugee and homeless shelters are related to their specific mandates, which are geared to specific populations and which inhibit the provision of services to meet the needs of trafficking victims, such as protection, immigration accompaniment or specialised counselling and health services. Another issue reported in Winnipeg and Vancouver was the unwillingness of shelters to accept people under the influence of drugs and alcohol. This represents a barrier to helping a person who may disappear into the city if he or she is turned down for help:
I had a woman come into my office. She was obviously very high, obviously hadn’t slept for a few days. She was falling asleep while sitting up. She was very young. She was hardly dressed. I was trying to find shelter for her but nobody wanted to take her as long as she was inebriated. The best I could offer her was, there was a church called First United Church down here. They’ll let you sleep on one of the pews. They’re pretty supportive. But that was about all I could offer her. She got frustrated fairly quick because most of these women haven’t really had any support, don’t trust any of these systems in place. And so she took off before I could actually finish. I gave her clothes, gave her food. She grabbed all that she could before she left. She ran out in a huff.
Women-only facilities were deemed necessary as protection against traffickers. When they are available, there are not enough places, especially when trafficking victims are not part of the shelters’ specific priorities.
For the most part, residential facilities available for trafficking victims are for detoxification, and even these are reported to have waiting lists that are so long that many individuals have lost the impetus to get treatment by the time their name comes up. Also, these facilities are rarely available on short notice. This lack of detoxification beds was reported as especially severe in Vancouver and Winnipeg for Aboriginal women, whom are considered as being internally trafficked. Several organizations working with women in the sex trade highlighted the need for residential facilities for transitioning out of forced prostitution.
You need that residential facility, somewhere when you are starting off and where you can get ESL. I’m looking up with other agencies possibilities, whoever it is, and each person is an individual so you can never treat everybody in generally. They can be in that house, having free courses and meals in the day, and then start looking for refugee status, and lawyer procedures. Because if you don’t feel safe somewhere, you can’t move forward.
There is apparently a project in the planning stages in Toronto, but to date this kind of service has been lacking.
Income
Frontline workers shared their experiences in trying to secure welfare payments for trafficking victims. Obtaining welfare is possible for those who have made a refugee claim or who have permanent status in Canada. Those who are undocumented or on temporary visas cannot generally access provincial welfare.[14] Also, for Canadian victims of trafficking, jurisdictional issues and lack of identification may block access to welfare.
- charitable donations,
- and referring victims to churches,
- other religious organizations,
- and food and clothing banks.
We make a point to go where current policies are and we push those to the limit and then we go to charity services that we know. The third option is to raise money from our own pockets.
Several labour rights-oriented organizations were willing to accompany victims working legally in the country through the complex complaint process at the Labour Board. However, these organizations lack necessary resources to meet all the demands for accompaniment services.
3.2.3 Health
- (1) collaboration between a sex worker’s association and the Peel Board of Health in order to gain access to strip clubs and massage parlours; and
- (2) the use of peer educators to gain access to sex trade workplaces.
While many organizations referred trafficked women to community health clinics that were reportedly more open to patients without health cards, service providers were unsure about the extent to which it worked. One Montréal organization had arranged its own weekly health clinic in collaboration with Médecins du Monde, offering free frontline medical services regardless of immigration status. Another group found doctors within ethnic communities willing to volunteer their services as the need arose. Several organizations in each city, especially the sexual assault centres, reported accompanying victims to health appointments in order to defend their rights and to explain procedures.
Service gaps related to health included an insufficient number of workers for health outreach and education, a lack of residential services for recovery, a lack of detox beds, and difficulty in accessing public services for victims without immigration status or proper identification.
Counselling services were offered by many of the organizations interviewed, often around specific issues such as sexual assault, refugee experiences, domestic work experiences, or addictions. It was often because trafficking victims sought help related to one of these issues that the trafficking itself was discovered by frontline workers.
The counsellors interviewed reported not being able to meet the demand for their services. Knowledge and skills were required to develop trust with the women and to bring them out of their isolation. The need for training related to the specific dynamics and implications of trafficking in persons was raised by several participants:
Yes. The difficulty with the specific area of trafficking is that there isn’t a specific training course on how to help victims of trafficking. I think it would be useful because there are so many programs in BC that are working specifically on violence against women. It would go quite well. It is a unique area of provision of services and response.
3.2.4 Physical, Psychological and Social Barriers
Respondents noted that marginalization and isolation, both of which are inherent to trafficking in persons, are serious barriers to helping victims. The secret nature of trafficking prevents women from disclosing information. Restriction of victim movement and communication with outside parties also prevents many women from accessing services. Overcoming this kind of sequestration and isolation requires, in addition to police intervention in appropriate circumstances, a long-term investment in intervention.
Frontline workers noted that closely circumscribed living and working conditions, as well as constant accompaniment by the trafficker, were formidable barriers:
Once the trafficked people arrive in their destination, the most important thing for traffickers is that victims be isolated from their own community and even from each other. Most of the time, what happens is that their papers are confiscated and then they are usually herded and placed in dormitory-type arrangements where they are not free to come and go, except to do their work. So, let’s say, if it is to work in a club, they are lap dancing, etc, they will be herded to their place of rest after they are through working. They will not necessarily be allowed to leave the premises on their own and then they’re herded back to do their work.
Respondents noted that psychological and emotional manipulation of victims was a powerful means of control exerted by traffickers, regardless of the type of trafficking. Among the psychological barriers mentioned were lack of trust, low self-worth and deception. Fear of violence, arrest, and for victims of international trafficking, deportation, prevented victims from coming forward and obtaining the services that they required. The climate of fear established by the traffickers can be quite extreme, as revealed in this interview excerpt:
They are very afraid to come forward. … They are afraid of being killed. Also these people who have brought them to this country, they will go see their family in their home country. There are all kinds of blackmailing. Everything is used to keep these people into this operation, this situation. They are afraid of being traced; those people who brought them can trace them if it is done through that. … And this is for both genders, both girls and boys, children, juveniles and adults also.
It was reported that in some cases, there have been years of programming and brainwashing, whereby women are convinced never to trust the police or any outsiders.
Language was mentioned as a barrier that greatly affected international trafficking victims’ ability to take advantage of services and other forms of help. Groups were sometimes able to register victims in government language courses but, more often than not, they would turn to language courses offered by other community groups or by religious associations, given that trafficking victims are likely to have difficult schedules or not to have papers. The inability to secure spots in language courses, especially for those with less flexible schedules, and a lack of identification, immigration papers, or income, was reported by respondents as problematic.
In each of the sites studied, community organizations were able to provide services in languages other than English or French (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Tagalong, Romanian, Thai and Hindi). No single organization can represent all the languages of the victims who seek help; however, several of them cooperate with other groups, volunteers or public services for access to translators. Translation of their services for outreach or educational material is seen as an important but difficult task.
Along with attempts to translate their own services, several groups reported trying to provide translation services for victims’ court appearances, legal and health appointments or contacts with various government agencies. Finding translators in crisis situations has proven difficult. Several groups suggested the necessity of an on-call, 24–hour, government-funded bank of interpreters:
There are some victim services provided by the provincial and federal agencies in BC. But because people who need services arrive anytime of the day or night, because the CIC may shut a house anytime of the day or night, they might not understand what’s going on because they might not have bodies to interpret, because they might be deported any time… You really need workers who can understand that this is not a 9 to 5 kind of situation.
Significant cultural barriers to service provision, including difficulty on the part of some women to tell authorities or service providers what has happened to them and what sort of help they require, was raised as a major issue.
For respondents from several community based organizations, greater support is needed for those working on an equality-seeking model, (eg., anti-racism, women’s liberation, and anti-poverty). Furthermore, respondents indicated that within governmental agencies and NGOs alike, anti-racism and anti-oppression models need to be developed and the gender lens need to be applied to the policies.
3.2.5 Service Providers
Many of the groups interviewed were aware of recent federal efforts to address trafficking, including the Interdepartmental Working Group on Trafficking in Persons (IWGTIP) [15]. Some had participated in roundtable discussions on trafficking issues organized by the federal government as well as by the British Columbia government. It was expressed by many of these groups that more regular communication with the Working Group would be useful.
In addition, most of the groups interviewed were engaged in some way in the policy-making or the legislative process, be it directly or through their membership in coalitions or federations. They participated in the parliamentary commissions on migration issues and consultations with specific government departments on policy. They provided feedback, research reports and policy briefs, often directly related to trafficking, but also on the related issues of violence against Aboriginal women, the LCP, exotic dancer visas, the refugee determination process, and the overall immigration program. Although this work was time-consuming and usually unpaid, groups saw it as important to address the structural elements behind the specific cases they encountered at the grassroots level.
Respondents expressed a need to share more information across government and non-government and federal and provincial agencies and to develop collaborative partnerships among all the agencies involved, including child welfare services with regard to the protection of child victims.
Respondents noted that the biggest obstacle to service provision at the level of community and grassroots agencies is financial. Agencies have too few resources to offer a broad range of services. There are no funds for service development, hiring regular staff and "experiential workers", and offering staff development programs. Funding to deal with a sudden influx of victims is non-existent. Moreover, there is a lack of office space, problems related to hours of operation, and lack of adequate interpreting and translation services.
Beyond the community level, respondents believed that there is a lack of national standards on health, welfare, training and credentials. This absence creates important barriers to developing well-coordinated, effective services, regardless of immigration status. It was indicated that the 1996 repeal of the Canada Assistance Program only served to fragment the delivery of social welfare across the country.[16] They also believed that there are systemic problems which impede transition housing, and safe and secure long-term housing. Respondents are frustrated by the fact that provincial and federal governments seem to be disputing whose responsibility it should be to fund services to trafficking victims.
