Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue 12 - Evidence - October 19, 2009 - Afternoon
OTTAWA, Monday, October 19, 2009
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 2:05 p.m. to examine the issue of sexual exploitation of children in Canada, with a particular emphasis on understanding the scope and prevalence of the problem of the sexual exploitation of children across the country and in particularly affected communities.
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, I see a quorum. This is the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights. We are here to examine the issue of sexual exploitation of children in Canada, with a particular emphasis on understanding the scope and prevalence of the problem of sexual exploitation of children across the country and in particularly affected communities.
Our first and only witness in this slot is the Honourable Landon Pearson, who is at the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children's Rights. Ms. Pearson was a vice chair of this committee when we studied the Convention on the Rights of the Child and is no stranger to the committee, to the Senate and the work of children. In particular, part of our study under the Convention on the Rights of the Child was to look at exploitation. She has followed this topic not only specifically within the Senate context, but also within her own studies and, in particular, at her centre.
Welcome back. It is good to have you here. We thank you for coming to share your experience and your wisdom. You are no stranger to our processes, so I do not have to outline them to you. The floor is yours.
The Honourable Landon Pearson, Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children's Rights: Thank you so much, senators. As a former colleague, I am not entirely sure how to address you, but I think "colleagues in a common cause'' will do.
The question we have before us is not whether the sexual exploitation of children and young adolescents can ever be justified, but how can government, through legislation and policy formation, diminish if not eliminate it in practice.
Ever since my days as the co-chair of the Special Joint Parliamentary Committee on Child Custody and Access, I have carried around a quotation from Samuel Johnson: "How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!'' I think that is always a reminder of what we are able to do and what we cannot do. But, however small it is that we must address, it is to that small part that we must address ourselves.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to appear before you today and provide you with some of the history of Canadian government involvement in the issue of the commercial sexual exploitation of children by recounting my own experience with it over the years.
I think the Badgley committee report of 1984 on the sexual abuse of children was the wake-up call for all of us concerned with vulnerable children. The statistics revealing the extent of the prevalence were alarming; yet, I remember sitting with friends on the porch of our cottage on the Gatineau River and my skeptical husband's asking us how many of us had had unwanted sexual advances in childhood. In a discussion of unexpected frankness, it turned out that we fitted the statistics exactly — one in three girls and one in four boys.
While none of our experiences were prolonged or particularly harmful, each one of us could remember them in excruciating detail. From that moment on, I became fully conscious of the enormous potential for soul-destroying damage that these experiences can have on children, and I have paid close attention to the issue ever since.
So has the federal government. After Badgley and the subsequent Fraser committee report on pornography, Rick Rogers was appointed special adviser to the Minister of Health and Welfare on the sexual abuse of children and charged with the task of developing strategies. Justice began the long process of crafting protective legislation through amendments to the Criminal Code.
My first encounter with the Senate was when, as president of the Canadian Council for Children and Youth, in 1986 or 1987, I brought a distinguished American developmental psychologist named James Garbarino to speak to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, chaired, as I recollect, by Joan Neiman. The question was about the truthfulness of small children as witnesses in sexual abuse cases.
He testified then that you can trust a child's answer as long as the question he or she is asked has no more words than the child's age. Then he urged the committee to pay special attention to adolescent defenders in sexual abuse cases, because he said — looking directly at the male senators at the time — it is much easier to change sexual behaviour in youth than once it is firmly established in adulthood.
Even today, that comment speaks directly to the need for more focus on the promotion of healthy sexuality in high school education programs as a form of protection, as well as awareness raising through special presentations and the visible modeling by responsible adult males. That has been taken up by young people again and again, that perhaps some of the sports people could come out and take an active role in saying that this is not right. We know that Senator Dallaire has stood up as a model against this particular abuse of children.
In 1989, when the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, article34 addressed the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children for the first time clearly in an international human rights document. I will not read a lot, but I will read that one because it is quite short. For the rest, I will be giving other references and I will probably hand them over to the researcher so that we do not have to hear them all.
Article34 of the convention says that:
States Parties undertake to protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For these purposes, States Parties shall in particular take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent:
(a) The inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity;
(b) The exploitative use of children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices;
(c) The exploitative use of children in pornographic performances and materials.
For me the importance of the Badgley report was that the issue of sexual abuse had been underground. Obviously, it happened. It has occurred since the beginning of time. However, it really was not until the Badgley committee report in 1984 that the issue came out into the open and the rest of us became aware that this was a widespread practice that had such a damning, difficult impact on children.
Then, of course, the same issue was subsequently addressed in the world declaration and plan of action from the World Submit for Children in 1990. This summit, which was held at the United Nations under the auspices of UNICEF, was brilliantly co-chaired — I was there to observe — by Brian Mulroney, who had managed to persuade even George Bush, Sr., to attend.
That Mr. Mulroney really cared about issues related to children and youth was confirmed when, subsequent to the World Submit, he designated Benoît Bouchard, who was Minister of Health and Welfare, as Minister Responsible for Children. Minister Bouchard, in turn, established a children's bureau within the health and welfare department and charged it with developing a national plan of action, entitled Brighter Futures, which laid the ground work for many of the excellent programs for children in Canada that are still in place today. Some of those were cited by Kelly Stone two weeks ago as preventive measures.
By the time Brighter Futures appeared, Canada had ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. With government support, in my role as the chair of the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children, I brought two youths from each province and territory to witness Mr. Mulroney's signature on the instrument of ratification in the great hall of Parliament, surrounded by the twinkling lights of all the Christmas trees. It was a great event.
With this act, the slow process of raising consciousness about children's rights really began to take hold.
When I was appointed to the Senate in 1994, it was made clear to me that, in addition to representing Ontario — which we considered already well represented in Parliament at the time — I was to speak up for all those who cannot vote — that is, every Canadian under the age of 18. Therefore, for 11 years I did. Senator Andreychuk will remember the days when we first tackled reforms to the Young Offenders Act in the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. On the whole, I think we agreed in principle with respect to children's rights, but as a former youth court judge, she knew better how things work out in practice.
I will return to the commercial sexual exploitation of children. In September1995, I, along with Senator Cohen from New Brunswick, represented the Senate on the parliamentary delegation to the fourth World Congress in Beijing. It was there, sitting beside the widow of Olof Palme, at a day that had been organized by UNICEF devoted to issues related to girls, that I first heard about Sweden's proposal to host the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, along with UNICEF, ECPAT — End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes — and the nongovernmental Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Finally, the world was beginning to pay attention to an issue that has such devastating consequences for young girls and, as we are beginning to learn, for young boys, as well.
I was determined to go to that conference and, fortunately, by this time, Lloyd Axworthy, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, had appointed me his special adviser on children's rights. We had an excellent delegation made up of officials as well as nongovernmental representatives. Gordon Phaneuf, who has appeared before you, was on it, as well as someone from Justice. Julian Fantino, then the chief of police in London, Ontario, was on it, as was Paddy Torsney, the MP from Burlington. It was mostly led by Hedy Fry, who was the Minister of State for the Status of Women, but Mr. Axworthy joined us for the final few days, along with three other foreign ministers. That was the level at which the issue was being taken and paid attention to at that time.
Stockholm was the kind of world conference that literally changes the way the world looks at and understands an issue, and it will forever remain in my mind as one of the most effective conferences I have ever attended. There was only one thing missing: experiential youth. UNICEF had brought a young Canadian to the conference named Cherry Kingsley, who had had more experience in the sex trade than any of us would care to imagine and who could speak to all the horrible life events that made her and so many others vulnerable to exploitation.
I had met her a couple of years earlier at a conference and knew her to be extraordinarily eloquent. She joined our delegation. There were other young people in Stockholm, but she was the only one, in a conference focused on the sexual exploitation of children, prepared to speak about it.
She sat on a panel with the representatives from all the religious groups — I think about nine different ones — and when they finally came down to her, she sort of looked up. They had all talked about how much they value children and how important children are. She finally looked up and said, "I do not know what you are talking about. You say you value them and you cherish them, but will you come with me to visit my friend who is dying of AIDS because he has been exploited in the sex trade?'' As Senator Dallaire would know, her very presence electrified the audience.
The rapporteur for Stockholm, who was from Thailand, was an able synthesizer. At the end of the whole session, he summed up what had been said by all the participants and transformed their comments and recommendations into a workable strategy to address the issue. Its seven components fully encompass what governments can do in conjunction with civil society.
I think the strategic directions outlined in the Stockholm agenda for action hold up very well, and I would urge you to study them carefully as you prepare your recommendations. I will just quickly run through them.
First is child participation. That was not his first, but it is my first; I put it that way. The second is prevention; the third, protection; the fourth, recovery and reintegration; the fifth, information collection and dissemination; the sixth, international cooperation; and the seventh is follow-up.
As categories, they work really well for all the activities that need to be undertaken in order to bring some kind of amelioration to this challenging, difficult and painful problem.
When we returned to Canada, I offered to orchestrate a Canadian follow-up, as Hedy Fry had many other things on her plate. Therefore, with the support of Lloyd Axworthy and with the help of Senate staff, particularly Yolande Arsenault, who, as many people know, worked with me all the years I was here, I established an interdepartmental, intersectoral committee expanding from our original delegation to Stockholm. We met here in this room four times a year for nine years, making connections, sharing information and moving the agenda along.
We did not keep minutes, but every so often Ms. Arsenault would contact everyone on the committee and write up a progress report. I have all these progress reports here from all those years of what the different departments were doing. We organized it according to the strategic direction, so it is a good historical archive of what has been done in the past. This material is all public information. Everything in here has been done. It is all public. There is nothing secret about it. It needed to be collated, organized and shared.
I was speaking today with some people in the government. One of the biggest challenges is knowing what is happening. Many things are happening that we do not know about. One of my final points is this question of information sharing, information collating and knowledge transfer. One of my last tasks as a senator was to write premiers and relevant ministers in every province and territory to ask what was happening with respect to the commercial sexual exploitation of children in their jurisdictions. Everyone answered with some good descriptions. This included Quebec, and it was often a challenge to get information from them. This material will be available to your researcher, and some of the items could be followed up.
You said you were doing this in 2005. What are you doing now?
When I retired, I was able to persuade Senator Dallaire to take over the committee. While it has changed somewhat in nature, it keeps the issue alive. Here we are today, in the standing committee, examining what more needs to be done.
Let me turn to what has happened post-Stockholm. While in Stockholm, we decided that the voices of experiential youth needed to be heard. We formulated an idea to hold a summit of experiential youth from the Americas. As I look back, I do not know how we managed it.
We were able to bring 54 young people from the Americas — South America, Central America, the United States and Canada. We lost one from Haiti, who took off when she came through Montreal. Various departments with members on the committee came to the plate. Ms. Arsenault was always phoning people to see who would do what — Health Canada will do this, the Solicitor General should do this and so forth. We managed to get enough money to have focus groups across the country prior to the meeting. Young people were identified by Ms. Kingsley and a friend who were able to go out at three o'clock in the morning, find them and bring them in to get their comments. We have a lot of material from that conference of what the children told us.
We were also able to get UNICEF and Foreign Affairs to support it. CIDA funded some focus groups in the Americas beforehand. UNICEF in New York paid travel costs for the young people from the Americas, which was a huge cost.
We had the conference in Victoria. The Child Welfare League of America located youth from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration was very helpful with special visas. You can imagine bringing in young people with their various backgrounds from these different countries. We managed to get them all into Canada without difficulty. Status of Women Canada contributed to Ms. Kingsley's salary as a coordinator. It was an astonishing collaborative effort that paid off. Ms. Kingsley and I co-chaired the conference. I am relatively good in the morning and she is hopeless. She was good at night and I am hopeless. We largely had 24-hour coverage of the event.
The young people were provided with many different venues for expression — writing, art, theatre and music. There were 54participants, all of whom had been or still were in the sex trade. On the next-to-last evening, they performed for the City of Victoria in city hall and the place was jammed. On the last afternoon, we brought officials and politicians to hear the young people's declaration and to make commitments. No one who took part in that event would ever see these young people in the same way again.
The language changed forever. These were not "juvenile prostitutes,'' but "young people exploited in the sex trade.'' That has gone into the international terminology now. You rarely hear people refer to young people being exploited as juvenile prostitutes.
As we got to know them, we saw that these were young people who had been abused and neglected in childhood. They had grown up, some in terrible poverty, with nothing but their bodies to sell. Each of them — boys and girls alike — was a person of human value who, given the right circumstances, had no trouble earning our respect. They were really quite astonishing.
It was this experience that taught me you cannot develop any workable solutions to the problem you are studying here today unless you hear from young people themselves.
The young people who came together in Victoria were only the tip of the iceberg. Some of these young people have done well since. I was in Thunder Bay on Saturday with one of the young boys who is not so young anymore that had been involved. It was a transforming event for him. Alas, as Senator Dallaire and I know, some of them have not done as well. Most of them continue to be haunted by demons and witches and they always will be. However, it meant much to them to be heard.
Your challenge is how to hear from them in a way that will be authentic for them. I understand you are working on something that sounds like a very good way to approach it.
The next World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children took place in Yokohama, Japan in 2000. Many young people, including some our own experiential youth, were present. This event took into account evolving technology and the growing problem of trafficking. I went to Japan, but was unable to go to Rio de Janeiro where the third world congress took place. Young people were there in force and produced their own declaration. I have this material and I am sure some of you have it as well.
Senator Andreychuk led the delegation to Rio and we were still represented. She could speak to her experience if you want to have a dialogue on that. The results were mixed.
While I was not at the congress in Rio, I was able to take part in the thematic conference held in Winnipeg before the Rio conference to hear from the private sector. I hope you are planning to hear from private sector representatives, Internet service providers or ISPs and others. It was encouraging to hear some of the very interesting ways technologically that they are going after the Internet and the challenges presented by people using new electronic media to exploit children. They deserve recognition for what they are doing.
In addition to the congresses specific to the issue, our government has made other important commitments to address this problem. Canada ratified the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography to the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2005. It has made its first report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Canada was among the first to adopt the International Labour Organization Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour, which included in its definition children exploited in the sex trade.
Canada helped to negotiate A World Fit for Children with its eight substantive paragraphs on child sexual exploitation. I think it would be very useful for you to have a look at this document. I was privileged to have the opportunity to lead the development of A Canada Fit for Children. It was the document that Canada produced in response to the UN Special Session on Children. It also has several paragraphs on how to address this issue in a Canadian context.
Honourable senators, it is not the words or ideas that are lacking with respect to addressing the commercial sexual exploitation. It is action. I would urge you to focus your attention on actions that bring words to life and no how government could support those actions.
One organization I failed to move, for example, was the Canadian Tourism Commission. Unlike most developed and indeed developing countries, we have very few tourism-related organizations that have signed up to the World Tourism Organization in Madrid, which has a secretariat on the sexual exploitation of children — they have come up with a protocol for developing it; you sign up and so on. Only two Canadian organizations apparently have signed on to that. They sounded willing when we talked, but no one ever took it forward. That is one example.
I was on my way to Peru a couple of weeks ago when I went to the XX Pan American Child Congress. The landing card has a section at the bottom that says, "Buying sex from children is a crime.'' It is right there in your face.
Air France and many other airlines have made a special effort to address the issue of sex tourism in a concrete way. We just have not gone nearly as far as we could go on that. That is one thing I would like to see.
I would also like to see you recommend a designated group in government. Senator Andreychuk and I have been over this ground before, and we now know that there is the Inter-Ministerial Standing Committee on Child Rights. It exists, but some years ago there used to be a quite effective inter-ministerial working group on children that was very helpful at the time of the Victoria summit of sexually exploited youth. I had a matching group within government that helped to ensure we got the funding and support we needed. That does not exist anymore, but it did exist and now you have another. Since the optional protocol on sexual exploitation is part of their mandate, they could be urged to do more.
A lot of work needs to be done within government to bring policy and principles into harmony. There are many programs, some of which are promising, but they do not contain the language necessary to address the issues from a child rights perspective. There is a task there that needs to be done.
Naturally, I would think that if we had a commissioner for children, someone within that office or group could be given the responsibility for focusing on it.
There are all these ideas, proposals and recommendations. One project that came out of the work of the summit was Sacred Lives, a study by Cherry Kingsley and Melanie Mark, who worked across the country with Aboriginal children. Both of these young women had been in the sex trade and were therefore quite authentic and able to talk with many people the rest of us could not talk with at three o'clock in the morning without getting into serious trouble, particularly the men. Their report contains specific recommendations that, as far as I know, have never been implemented.
There is so much that can, I think, be done if there is a focus for it. At the moment this committee is the focus for it, but you must take responsibility by saying in your report what the government could be doing. As you will all agree, nothing in this issue is justifiable.
Sérgio Pinheiro, the United Nations special representative who wrote the report on violence against children, said that no violence against children is acceptable and all violence is preventable.
No sexual exploitation of children is permissible or acceptable. I would like to say that all of it can be prevented, but I am too old and experienced to think that all of it can be prevented. Yet, we can do a lot more than we are currently doing to ensure that we have given prevention the best shot.
That is my brief summary of the history, and I would be happy to engage in conversation.
The Chair: Thank you. You certainly have given us a broad overview of the events that have occurred, which you pointed out are important milestones in the development of protocols, agreements and conventions with respect to children who have been exploited as well as a broader area. I thank you very much for that. I also thank you for putting forward how complex this issue is and how it is important to find the issues that we can deal with. You have cited some that are very helpful.
From your experience — and one hesitates around this table to say "the many years'' because that puts an age category on it, and I will be into another violation of human rights — we hear an awful lot about new ways that children are being sexually exploited now through the Internet. You pointed that out with the tourism, and so many of the new negative linkages that are available to very young children. Do you think these are just new tools and the issues are the same, or do you think some of our society today is driving children into being exploited?
Ms. Pearson: I do not think they are new tools — obviously they are new ways in which children can be exploited — but it is self-feeding. If it did not exist, I think the problem would be somewhat less than it is now.
I have been struck over the years by the implications of the sexualization of young children in advertising and in toys and books and so on. Young children well below the age of puberty are being exposed to things that were totally unknown to me.
In this case can I talk about age. I was 20 before I heard some of the language I now hear outside my window from students as they are walking up and down Nelson Street.
The sexualization of children is having an increasing impact in normalizing behaviour that was not normalized during the time that I was growing up. Also, it has had some biological impact. We are discovering that the exposure to sexually explicit material that comes the way of quite young children — and it is very difficult to prevent that — has not only impacts on self-image, which we know from children who suffer from eating disorders and so on, it also has an impact on setting the endocrine system in motion earlier. Therefore, some of the possible causes of menstruation starting in girls two years younger than it did at the beginning of the last century may well have to do with the interaction with sexually explicit material, which begins to have sort of an arousal effect on young children. It is not something one would normally think about, but one must be responsible, because there does seem to be some sort of interaction.
There is no question that the way girls see themselves is very different from the time when I was growing up. When I was dressing up, as all little girls dress up, I would put on my mother's clothes. I can tell you the shawls, necklaces and lipstick were hardly sexually provocative. Little girls dressing up now tend to dress like adults in a very sexually provocative way, because that is what they see. It is a natural process for little girls to pretend to be older, but the ways in which they are being driven by the advertising industry, by commercial interest, by television and so on is different from what it was.
How this impacts on boys is perhaps more in the range of acceptable behaviours that are shown on television and in videos, which I do not have much access to myself but which I hear about.
There was a comment on the radio today that some research now shows that the use of the iPod and of sexually explicit and violent music has an impact on children. Many teenagers in particular apparently listen to this type of music continually for up to two, three or four hours a day. I do not know whether you could find someone to speak to that issue. Certainly Media Awareness Network can speak to it. Whether someone else can speak to it in defence, I do not know.
There is no question that society's attitudes about what is permissive and what is not permissive in terms of sexual behaviour have changed radically in the last couple of generations, and this has increased the idea in certain people's minds that sexual exploitation or having sex with a young child is a permissible or normalized activity. One of the greatest challenges out there is culture.
There is the mindset that children under the age of 16 do not have sex and, therefore, you should not teach them sex education because that might increase their interest in the issue. Nothing will increase their interest in the issue more than what they are already being exposed to. We need a counterbalancing force as a counterweight with healthy sexual education and healthy sexuality.
In Finland, for example, they have a very good sexual education program that starts almost at zero, where children start to learn and differentiate between male and female. That has been in place now for about 15 years, and they have been able to lower the rates of unwanted pregnancy and HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. I do not know whether they have increased the rate of happy marriages. That is another issue.
There is an area there that the social culture is responsible for. In Health Canada, we used to have quite a good program developing templates for healthy sexual education, and that does not seem to exist anymore. That is another recommendation one could make, that the government use its capacity to do pilot projects or to lead through knowledge transfer to develop those types of programs.
Senator Dallaire: Welcome, Ms. Pearson. Also, thank you enormously for the amount of work that you have done in this realm and in making us aware of how much work is left to be done.
You indicate there are enough instruments out there to grasp the problem of sexual exploitation of children, be they mainstream children or Aboriginal children. However, there seems to be a lack of focus on how to make it work, where some seem to fall between the cracks or they are helped for a period of time but not others. That leads me to wonder whether, to bring all this together at the provincial level or the federal level, we need a legislative instrument to oversee this dimension of the abuse of children through sexual exploitation. Is there a need for a national legislative instrument that can bring all these entities together and attack this problem more specifically than can the different spectrum of stuff out there now?
Ms. Pearson: I think our legislation is quite good. I do not think the problem is the legislation, but it is always a focal point; you always need someone who will lead on the issue. You need that within an institutionalized context where there are enough resources and clout to make things happen. I think that is missing.
The evolution of the legislation in the last 15 years is quite remarkable. The implementation of that legislation can often be very disappointing; as we know, we have had only about three charges on sex tourism since 1996, so something is wrong. Does it mean that one of the things we should be promoting is more education for law enforcement, more education for judges, those kinds of things? You will need to have that come out of a focal point; otherwise, you will not have the follow-through.
This is where I go back to the idea you have all supported of a children's commissioner, where someone within that office would have the capacity to look at this issue specifically.
Senator Dallaire: Manitoba has a study starting up on the disappearance of Aboriginal women. Because there is such a high proportion of Aboriginal children caught up in the sex trade or sexual exploitation, I am wondering whether the fact that we are not necessarily responding to Aboriginal adults is perhaps giving them a sense of despair or the perception that they will not necessarily be supported in regards to preventing them from having to fall into this scenario.
Ms. Pearson: As you know, it is a complicated and complex issue, and depending on whether you are looking at a situation on reserve or a situation with a larger group of Aboriginal children, the reluctance to discuss these issues remains quite high. I am not sure at all what the federal government can do, although the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility.
It is an issue that must be built from the ground up with the gaining of trust. It is better to work with health care professionals and others who are trusted within the community and who provide support to them. You can do that; it could be one of the recommendations the federal government offers, that those who are hired and paid for by First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, FNIHB, build a child rights perspective into their training. We know those exist because they have developed something called CRIP, Child Rights in Practice. There are quite a lot of programs for use by health professionals.
That is my suggestion of where you might make a recommendation of this sort. Otherwise, getting people to talk about the issue is very difficult. You are right that kids would not feel defended by reporting this to someone, so you need to build a whole structure in which this is done.
Senator Jaffer: I really appreciate your taking the time to give us your background knowledge. It will certainly be useful to us.
I wanted to ask you a few questions. First, you know our study talks about affected communities, and of course we know the terrible situation that exists for many Aboriginal children. With the vast experience you have, what other communities, aside from Aboriginal children, would you consider to be affected communities that we need to look at?
Ms. Pearson: I think the communities that will be particularly vulnerable will be communities where poverty is an issue, communities where this may be the only way to get money, or where there is a lot of family or domestic violence. It is hard to say how you describe that as a community, because that cuts across bonds. Generally speaking, among street children are children who have run away from home, and you will have a vulnerable population in particular.
It is an issue that cuts across class and other categories, but it would be interesting to speak to someone representing the immigrant population to see whether this is an issue with them, because then you also have some clashing ideas about sexuality. I imagine that would be another population it would be useful to pursue.
There are certainly groups who represent street children. Health Canada has had a good survey over many years on street children and their vulnerability to sexually transmitted diseases, and you can begin to extrapolate from that. It is a surveillance program. It would be worth hearing from them.
Senator Jaffer: In your work, what have you observed regarding domestic human trafficking being used to facilitate the sexual exploitation of children? Since I have become a senator, once in a while I walk in Vancouver at night, and I see that more and more younger children from the reserves are ending up on the streets. I have no data on this, but there seems to be a real increase of children coming to our city.
What are your observations are on domestic human trafficking? Do you believe that it exists?
Ms. Pearson: When we brought these young people together in Victoria, the young Canadians were not all Aboriginal by any means, but several of them had been trafficked; they had been picked up. Poverty is the big issue. That is the vulnerability. A combination of poverty and sexual abuse or other kinds of abuse within the family means that the kids have left the family, for whatever reason. This is a particular area of vulnerability. They have often been picked up by someone from Newfoundland and trafficked to Toronto, and so on. It is not by any means only the Aboriginal children who are being trafficked. The old question is always this: How many are we talking about? Of course, most of us would answer that one is too many, but part of your mandate is to try to find some shape to the problem. Hopefully, some of the people you bring in will give you that. Domestic trafficking is definitely an issue. As long as there is a demand, there will be people prepared to supply it. There will be a number of pimps and others who are prepared to go out and find kids, if they cannot find them. A lot of them are picked up at the bus station, for example, kids who run away, and immediately they get there they are picked up, whether or not that is trafficking. Definitely there are people who are trafficked. One of the kids at our event said she had been trafficked three times, literally taken. Cherry herself had been taken from Alberta to Vancouver.
Senator Jaffer: Do you observe a pattern of children coming from a certain part of the country to another part of the country, or is that not necessarily the case?
Ms. Pearson: The pattern is taking them to larger centres. Rural children are often quite vulnerable because they are seeking to get away for one reason or another. Other than that, I could not really speak of patterns.
Senator Jaffer: After the Victoria conference and your other work, did you also come across children who were brought from outside of Canada into our country or children who were trafficked into our country?
Ms. Pearson: We were told about them. We did not have any actually present there, but we were told that many Asian children had been brought into Vancouver, for example. The person who was telling us this had met them and spent time with them. They build community among themselves. They had been in the back of some store on a mattress and raped regularly — five, six, seven, ten times in the course of a day. A friend of mine had been with one of these young women, girls, in hospital, and this girl was telling her the story. There is a practice in that, too, and we have very little handle on that.
Senator Mitchell: We really miss you. Listening to you, I am reminded how much we miss you.
Part of the problem with all of this is that many of the services that would support children to keep them off the streets are provincial, yet a lot of the responsibility is federal. In Alberta, we have just had a massive, abrupt cutting of these services. In fact, I will pick on one agency that I know that provides housing and accommodation for children who are, in one way or another, abandoned and without a home. They were cut 80percent with two weeks' notice.
Will you comment on this dichotomy of federal initiative, federal responsibility to some extent, and the level of support of services at the provincial level?
Ms. Pearson: I observe, like you do, that there has been a cutback in many of the services available. You think of transition houses for women and so on. Many things that were funded by Status of Women Canada are not being funded now. For me the issue is what is the priority. There used to be — and this has nothing to do with which party is in power because this covers a much longer period than that — a federal-provincial-territorial working group on youth involved in prostitution. It made several interesting reports. The police, particularly the RCMP, which is a national organization as opposed to a federal one, is another area where help could be brought.
Unfortunately, it is always a question of priorities. Is it a priority to protect and save these children? I think it should be; I am sure all of you do, too, in the sense that the costs of not doing so, quite aside from human costs, are huge. The cost of a child who has been devastated by this experience can be lifelong in terms of mental health issues and so on, but it is always that issue. You need a champion, whether it is a commissioner or someone else. Benoît Bouchard was the minister responsible for children. We do not have a minister responsible for children now. Those are the kinds of things that have changed. In Alberta, you do, so I am not quite sure why others do not. That is a different issue; I will not go there.
Senator Mitchell: It is interesting: when you raise the impact that this has on the child's life and future criminal activity and so on, you wonder whether increased mandatory minimums would actually ever do anything to fix that. I do not think so.
Recently, the government made a grant to a group that counsels young women. The project that they funded "aims to promote non-violent behaviour in the romantic relationships of adolescents by targeting the hyper-sexualization of girls as a root cause of dating violence.''
I guess that is not exactly exploitation.
Ms. Pearson: I think it is. I have already spoken about the fact that the commercial advertising aimed at children is hyper-sexualizing. I am glad to hear about that grant.
Senator Mitchell: My concern is that when we start talking about — and it depends on how we put it — the "hyper- sexualization of girls'' could infer that it is their fault. There must be some care in that. The male has responsibility, too, no matter what the woman or young woman is doing.
Ms. Pearson: I agree.
Senator Mitchell: I wanted to make that point.
Ms. Pearson: That point is always worth making. Boys and girls are both implied in this.
Senator Demers: This is the first time I have heard you speak. Thank you for your presentation. I have just been named a senator and I want to get deeply involved in lifting some of the stuff that happened in the past.
What message is sent when Roman Polanski is arrested and high-profile people from Hollywood defend him saying that we are treating him unfairly? That must be very frustrating for you, as it is for us all. It does not matter whether the incident happened 30 years ago. The girl was 13 years old. He gave her $500,000. The young woman says she forgives him and that it is okay, but it happened. What do you think about that?
Ms. Pearson: I distinguish between the exploitation of children and other things. I agree with you. This goes back to having male models who say this is unacceptable. It is a crime to buy sex from children and to exploit children for sex. It does not matter whether they think they are 17 or 30. We need people to speak out and say this is unacceptable behaviour. I agree with you. That is the obverse of the model that we should have. Someone like you can say that this is unacceptable. Why could Wayne Gretzky, for example, not say this is unacceptable? Such statements might offset the statements of others.
Unfortunately, we have very little control over the media.
Senator Brazeau: Thank you for your presentation. My question deals with Aboriginal peoples. I think everyone around this table will agree that the most vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Canada are Aboriginal women and, in many cases, children.
It is also a fact that many Aboriginal leaders and advocates across the country are increasingly calling for issues such as this to be looked at through a First Nations-specific lens. They are asking different levels of government for financial resources to conduct their own research, to educate and empower their own citizens and to come up with plans and priorities that they deem important.
I am not saying that is a good thing. There is much existing current research. Aboriginal people have been researched to death in this country, and we are looking for action. I think we agree on that.
Do you think that advocating for our own pots of resources and looking at this through a specific lens might be slowing down the process of educating Aboriginal peoples on this issue? Is it not reinventing the wheel or duplicating services that already exist?
Ms. Pearson: I think we need a multi-pronged approach. There is a fiduciary duty to Aboriginal peoples on reserve, and therefore something can be done via that route. I do not disagree at all with pots of money being available for some work by those organizations with their own people. At the same time, there should be pots of money available for other groups that are working with their people.
I feel strongly that this issue must be dealt with from the inside out. The best we can do is to support those who set certain priorities and help them to work through those priorities. It is not an either/or issue; it is both/and.
Aboriginal girls and boys are both vulnerable, as are other children. Some of the solutions are within smaller groups — that is, families and communities — and some of the solutions will emerge from legislation and policy. Some of the solutions will be broader, even international, such as the kind of thing I presented to you with all the international language that has been developed.
You need capacity. You need a focal point with an open mindset that is able to think strategically and broadly.
In the work I do with Aboriginal children I see them working themselves to get some answers. They are the ones who will be able to bring about change, so I would like to see more support for youth groups and for young participants who will be able to empower themselves to bring results.
The Chair: Senator Pearson, thank you for sharing your experiences with us and bringing a very balanced and practical approach to our work. You have given us some very good leads, which we will follow up. The recommendations you made are certainly worthy of consideration.
Ms. Pearson: Thank you.
The Chair: Honourable senators, the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights will now hear from a new panel. We are examining the issue of sexual exploitation of children in Canada, with a particular emphasis on understanding the scope and prevalence of the problem of the sexual exploitation of children across the country and in particularly affected communities.
We have before us in this panel Ms. Jackie Anderson and Ms. Debbie Cumby from the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre. The National Association of Friendship Centres is represented by its Executive Director, Mr. Peter Dinsdale.
I understand, Ms. Anderson, you will be sharing your time with Ms. Cumby and you will go first, followed by Mr. Dinsdale. We are a little late, so please be efficient with the time you have for presentation and then we will go to questions.
Welcome and thank you for appearing. It will be helpful in our study.
Jackie Anderson, Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre: Thank you and good afternoon, senators and guests of the committee.
I am from Winnipeg, Manitoba, working for an Aboriginal agency called the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre. In the Ojibwa language this means we all work together to help one other.
I am extremely honoured to have been invited here to share with you all my knowledge and make recommendations to increase awareness and find realistic solutions to protect our most vulnerable children, who are being victimized daily on our streets and behind closed doors throughout Canada. I am very passionate when it comes to discussing this topic and my passion comes from supporting the voice of those who have been affected.
My personal experience of working with children and youth goes back 21 years; in particular, the last nine years have been spent directly supporting and advocating for sexually exploited youth. I am by no means a lawyer or a professor, but I am a strong Aboriginal woman who is working on the front line, and I have come here today to share the voice of our youth.
My presentation will be presented in a manner of passion, heart and sadness of what front-line workers feel every day: powerless to do what really needs to be done to stop the exploitation. Now I say "stop the exploitation.'' Is that realistic? I truly believe that if we work together at all levels and follow through with what needs to be done, and if we continue to listen to our young people and include them in discussion, then we will move one step forward in making this a reality.
There are two aspects relating to the sexual exploitation of children and youth, and they are the vulnerable victims and those who abuse them. It is so much easier to focus on what is needed for the kids but not always so easy to speak about what needs to happen with the demand. Again, I have to say I am not an expert on the law and legislation, but I do consider myself an expert on the realities of exploitation and the types of luring and victimization that these kids are enduring on an everyday basis. I am witness to a caregiver to the men and women who continuously prey upon our kids and are getting away with it due to the current legal aspect of the onus being put on the kids to testify.
With this, I will share with you the voice of our little sisters, the same children who are out on our streets every day, not by choice but by fear that if they leave they will be hurt or their family will be hurt, the same kids who are afraid that if they testify or give a statement to the police they will be taken from the streets or their families and never be seen again.
My first statement is often asked of me by colleagues in community: What is sexual exploitation? After educating people on it, I am often asked: Why do we refer to it in these terms? It is so much easier to refer to them as prostitutes or hookers, and after all it is considered the oldest profession in the world. My response to this is that if we continue to refer to children and women in these terms, it continues to normalize the behaviour for the perpetrators. They will not see this child as a child. They will not see what they are doing when they are preying on children as child abuse. They do not see the face of a child who has been hurt in so many ways. Instead, all they see is that what they are doing is contributing financially to their needs.
In order to stop this perception, we need to work collectively and nationally to create awareness. We need to show the realities of sexual exploitation in our schools and have mandatory curriculum to prevent children from being lured and to prevent children from becoming abusers. This needs to happen in all schools, not just those where poverty lies within.
Unfortunately, in Manitoba a high number of youth are vulnerable to exploitation. Many of these kids who are involved have a long history of being in the care of Child and Family Services. Many of these kids on our streets are of Aboriginal descent.
A few years ago I had the honour to open our safe home, called Honouring the Spirit of Our Little Sisters, to a young Aboriginal girl who was 14 years of age. Sadly, prior to coming to us, she was already in over 60 placements. Even more sadly, this past summer her life was taken by the hand of a perpetrator.
I believe a review needs to be done to examine the quality of care that is being given to at-risk kids. Culturally relevant specialized care is what will be successful in stabilizing these children. Working from a traditional value-based model rather than a rulebook is what will make a difference for these kids. Loving these kids like your own will make the utmost difference in guiding them on their healing journey.
As mentioned previously, it is so much easier to discuss and implement resources for kids. There is often advocacy for more homes, locking up kids, and treatment options, but there is very little discussion on what needs to happen with the demand aspect. If we tackle the demand first and foremost successfully, we would not have to have the expansion of beds. We want not have to have intense meetings and discussion on expanding the resources for youth but just maybe do things a little differently.
I will be honest here. It is very difficult for me to have any type of empathy or understanding when it comes to the demand aspect. I cannot make excuses or minimize the harm that is being done to our children and cannot understand why these perpetrators are not sitting in jail for sexually abusing children.
Perpetrators going after women can be charged due to undercover police officers witnessing a transaction, but nothing is or can be done when the police pull an underage child out of a john's car unless the child is willing to give testimony. This is an exploitive relationship, because with this in place there is the increased need for perpetrators to prey upon our children. With this I ask you: Are the perpetrators sexually addicted? Is this something that perpetrators feel they have no control of? Do they know the risk but get their high from doing it anyway?
I would personally have to answer yes. They have no fear when they are out strolling in our streets. They get a sense of relief in doing it and not getting caught. These symptoms are no different from someone with an alcohol, drug or gambling addiction. For these types of addictions, if caught doing something illegal, you can be ordered by a court into a 30-day residential treatment.
Locking kids up for their own safety is often a debated topic. Why lock the kids up? As the victims, they are being made to feel like the criminals. Why not lock — and I emphasize the word "lock'' — the perpetrators up for a court- ordered 30-day sexual offender treatment instead? This would definitely have an impact on those who are out attempting to prey.
I would like to thank you for this opportunity and I would like to thank the members of the Senate for addressing this issue as a priority. We cannot lose any more of our children to the streets or to the spirit world before their time. Our job is to protect these children as caregivers, but we need the tools and the legislation to back up the work we do.
I ask you respectfully to please do what is necessary to honour and protect our most vulnerable youth. They need us to be their voice until they can get to a place in their life to stand up and speak. With this, I would like to introduce to you my partner, Debbie Cumby.
Debbie Cumby, Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre: Good afternoon senators. I am extremely honoured to be here today. I would like to thank the chair of this committee for allowing me to participate with my friend and colleague Jackie Anderson.
I work for an Aboriginal agency in Winnipeg called Ndinawe Youth Resource, as a street outreach worker. I am also a strong experiential woman who spent 14 years sexually exploited on the streets of Canada. That is why I feel so passionate about the work I am currently doing.
I also was honoured to participate in developing a safe home in Winnipeg seven years ago, called Honouring the Spirit of Our Little Sisters, and I am currently assisting with the development of a rural traditional healing lodge in Winnipeg, called Home Hands of Mother Earth.
My job consists of walking in the most at-risk areas of the streets, meeting the girls and women, and giving them resources and harm reduction tools to keep themselves safer. I also do surveillance in the stroll areas. I record and identify information on johns and pimps who are infesting these neighbourhoods.
This is not an easy job for me to do. I leave every night to go home and my heart hurts for the young girls who are being taken advantage of, and I feel a lot of anger towards those who are out there strolling with no fear.
I have been off the streets for many years now. With great sadness, I am still seeing former johns and exploiters out there preying upon our children.
Our Canadian laws need to change immensely when it comes to perpetrators preying on and abusing our children. If I was a child that was being abused in a home, systems would step in and remove the abuser rather than myself, the victim. The offender would be charged, listed as a sexual offender and possibly lose their job. I would feel that I have been heard and protected and that these people care about my victimization.
These kids that are out there do not want to be, but because they are not heard or because they have to testify in court that they are being victimized, they will not do so. When a child is being recruited into the sex trade, the perpetrator is part of the recruiting phase; they will get to know everything there is to know about that young person and will use that as a tactic to keep them entrenched.
I consider myself a lucky one. Many times, my life could have been taken from me, but I survived it. Lately, though, this sense of survival is not a reality for our young children and our kids out there. Too many are going missing or have been found murdered. These are our children, and it is our job to protect them and do whatever it takes to ensure their safety.
I would again like to thank you for having me here today. I speak from experience and with knowledge of what needs to change today, what would have helped me to get out rather than being victimized for over 14 years when I was a child.
I thank the Creator every day for giving me the strength to get out when I did. I only hope that more kids will not have to experience that horrendous life. Together we can make a difference.
Peter Dinsdale, Executive Director, National Association of Friendship Centres: I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today and provide some perspectives from the National Association of Friendship Centres. I congratulate my fellow witnesses on their excellent presentations and speaking from passion, that place of heart.
Friendship centres are local community Aboriginal service delivery organizations. The National Association of Friendship Centres, NAFC, is the national organization that represents them. There are currently 120 community agencies across Canada and seven provincial and territorial associations.
In 2006-07, the last year for which we have full statistics, there were 1.3 million client services provided through that network. If I went 10 times to a food bank, I would count as 10; that is our data problem, but that is how many client services we provided in that year. We provide a wide range of programs to the full complement of Canada's urban Aboriginal people — First Nation, Metis and Inuit.
In the interests of time I will not go over a lot of the background, but you should be aware that 54percent of all of Canada's Aboriginal people live in cities and towns. The corresponding policy and financial authority does not represent that in this country, but that is the service delivery demand that we have in our facilities every day. There are some areas of explosive growth: 1 in 10 in Winnipeg; 5percent growth in Edmonton; 51percent increase in population of the 2001 census in Halifax and others.
A very important demographic is that 48percent of the population is under the age of 25. We have a very young, very urban population. It is a challenge that we face every day.
In 2006, our membership at our annual general meeting passed a resolution asking the NAFC to be engaged in this issue. It recognized the recent studies in Manitoba, which highlighted the severe instances of child and youth sexual exploitation, the dependence on illicit drugs, and gang activities and the rising use of guns in that activity, and asked us to develop a national working group to research and develop a national action plan to address these issues in our communities.
We spent well over a year working together with partners across this country to try to facilitate a national action plan. However, there was no federal agency or department willing to work with us on it.
I take a little bit of issue with testimony we have heard saying we know the extent of the issue. I think the reality is that we do not. We spent a year trying to understand. I cannot tell you what percentage of the urban Aboriginal population across Canada is affected by child sexual exploitation. If I am wrong and that study exists, we would appreciate having it, because we have been trying to get this information for quite some time.
In 2006, the Manitoba Association of Friendship Centres conducted a regional study to try to find out what was happening in their province. It was based on 147 surveys that were issued province-wide. It found that in each region throughout the province there was strong evidence of child and youth sexual exploitation.
Predominantly, it was happening to children and youth, mainly females of Aboriginal descent between the ages of 12 and 17. The most vulnerable were those who were Aboriginal who had run away from home and were living on the streets. The perpetrators were varied, but predominantly it was older males.
The most important factor in dealing with youth at risk and child sexual exploitation was gaining trust and making those youth feel safe. They were doing that successfully and exploiting them. To help them, we need more resources to intervene in the communities — programs like theirs and others — to make sure that these children are safe and there are places to go when there are challenges.
The study found a number of challenges in the methodology of people who come in to research our communities. They come from external places, not from where we live. They fly in, do their research and fly out, leaving behind open wounds of previous victimization and other challenges. We need researchers that are grounded in our communities and are coming to speak to us directly. I wonder if you are getting the full information when they do come in that way.
Prior to my employment here, I worked at a place called Native Child and Family Services in Toronto. I was working with homeless youth. Many of the youth who ended up at our drop-in were on the streets in the evening for a variety of reasons. These youth would not talk to researchers who came from outside our communities. They would clam up and not discuss it. I think we have a real challenge in understanding fully what is happening with this issue across the country.
We want to acknowledge the research that was conducted by Sue McIntyre from the Hindsight Group. She presented to this committee on September28. She commented that 61percent of the 157 young men they have data on who were involved in this issue were of Aboriginal descent; 85percent of those in their study from Saskatchewan were Aboriginal. Coupling this study that you had before you and the one that occurred in 2006, we think it is safe to conclude that urban Aboriginal youth are at a very high risk of child sexual exploitation, which I think you have acknowledged. The real challenge is that we do not know how at risk — we do not know how they get in or get out.
We were proposing national research to look at the instance of child sexual exploitation in our communities with our youth groups, with our own people. However, we have yet to find uptake within the federal family to do this work.
There simply is not any consistent or sustained federal government funding interested in improving the quality of life of urban Aboriginal peoples in this area. There is a multitude of data and statistics around the life of First Nations people living on-reserve, but there is not the same for urban Aboriginal people, where the majority of our people live.
The sad reality has come to the fore this year when we talk about an area like H1N1. It is the very same type of issue. We have a federal pandemic plan that focuses on reserve. We have provincial pandemic plans that are allegedly to serve all the people in their communities. The reality is that urban Aboriginal people are falling through the cracks. The H1N1 issue demonstrates that tremendously, and we believe that holds true in this issue here today.
We are prepared and we have offered numerous times to assist the federal government in addressing issues such as child sexual exploitation. I think what is missing is a willing federal partner to look in urban areas where people are living. We think this committee can go a long way to make recommendations around that.
Senator Dallaire: Do you believe that AMBER Alerts and reporting of Aboriginal children going missing or being injured significantly — raped and killed — is being reported in the same way as mainstream children across the country?
Ms. Anderson: This is commenting again on Manitoba. Recently, we are finding that the minute children are going missing from their home or group care or children-in-care placement, they are immediately putting them on TV and they are being found a lot quicker. This has just recently changed and is being acted upon.
Again, our children are the most at risk. Yes, we know they are well-known with the missing persons unit of the Winnipeg police, but until recently we had a 24-hour clause before we could report a child missing. That too has recently changed. Again, that was because these kids were being viewed as chronic runners. To me, being a chronic runner, you are a lot more at risk of victimization on the street or from being hurt outside of that.
Senator Dallaire: Do you feel that was specifically identifying Aboriginal children?
Ms. Anderson: Yes, both I think, absolutely. Unfortunately, in Manitoba a lot of Aboriginal children are going missing and being hurt. Therefore I am happy they are doing a lot more of the awareness piece, and our kids are being found a lot quicker.
Mr. Dinsdale: At the recent Sisters in Spirit vigil on the Hill a couple weeks ago, the family of the two missing ladies from Kitigan Zibi were pretty clear that they were told by police to call back in 72 hours before they would issue a missing persons alert. It may be working well in certain jurisdictions in Manitoba, but I do not think that is the case, certainly not for those two young ladies in Maniwaki or Kitigan Zibi, and certainly not the case across the country.
Senator Dallaire: Can you now confirm that when we speak of Aboriginal peoples in urban areas, the provincial social programs do discriminate between Aboriginal peoples and mainstream Canadians in the services, because of this federal-provincial backdrop?
Mr. Dinsdale: I think it is pretty clear that it does. You can look at education, housing or any number of policy areas where provincial authorities are reluctant to be part of it in a meaningful way. There are always certain pockets of jurisdiction where they come in and touch these areas, but I mean enter the situation in a meaningful way. In the same way the federal government refuses to enter the situation in a meaningful area for fear of acknowledging their jurisdiction around that area.
One of our great hopes and expectations for the Kelowna process, when we had provincial, territorial and federal officials at the table together, was to have a frank conversation about who is responsible for what level of services. Prior to Kelowna, the last first ministers' meeting that was not constitution-related, on Aboriginal issues, was to do with whether the federal government pays for any health care services for status Indians. That was resolved, then, in the 1960s as bigger policy areas not yet fully defined. We think it is a great gap we have in the federation preventing meaningful programs that address the issues that are being addressed here today.
Senator Dallaire: I have a last question, if I may. Ms. Cumby, having knowledge of other women or girls who are caught up in the trade, were you threatened by weapons to stay caught, as you say, "entrenched,'' in the areas where you were involved in having to be abused? Were physical threats to your life, including use of weapons, part of that?
Ms. Cumby: Not weapons as in guns or knives, but fists, yes. With my case it, I was always isolated and always taken away from my family back to another province, where you are totally dependent on that one person who brought you there. Therefore you will listen, because you want a roof over your head, you want to eat and you want to have clothes. This is the only person that you know.
I came from Edmonton to Vancouver. That is a big, big city, and I also felt indebted to this person for bringing me there. There was a lot of physical abuse but not with weapons, just actual physical abuse.
Senator Jaffer: I want to thank all three of you. I learned a lot from your presentations.
I want to ask you a question, Ms. Cumby. First, it is obvious that all three of you care, but it takes a lot of guts for you to share your story publicly. Thank you very much. It brings us a face to what we do. We will remember what you said. I appreciate that.
You finished by saying that things need to be done, and I am asking you almost for a list. What exactly do you think we should be recommending to our government, and what do you think would have made a difference for you not to end up on the street?
Ms. Cumby: The perpetrators who are using us for their services need to own up to what they are doing. They need to be charged. There needs to be a way that the youth do not have to show up in court to testify, because I think 98percent of them will not come. It is a very intimidating experience even for an adult to go through, let alone a child.
Ms. Anderson: I have some other recommendations, if you do not mind. There are certainly different dynamics of how kids and how women are being exploited, as well as men. However, I put some stars beside some things. In particular, currently business licences are being granted for adult entertainment, massage parlours and that kind of thing. We are actually pulling kids under the age of 18 out of some of these establishments. I truly believe that if a city is granting a business licence, it needs to be doing some follow-up and some private investigative work by going in, because they will see it is not just adult women who are working in these environments.
Another thing that is very hard for us is that we, as caregivers, know who the perpetrators are. We are not just enacting or reporting because we see a vehicle once. We do some of our own investigative work in regards to the make of the vehicle and the description of the male. Our kids will actually take us for a ride and they will point out the johns, the perpetrators, the crack houses; they are giving us that information because, as adults and caregivers, they are expecting us to do something about it.
There is only so much that we can do by reporting it or by sending it to the Safer Communities branch in Winnipeg, which will do a surveillance of the property. However, the kids are giving us that information because they want it to stop.
As Ms. Cumby said, yes, absolutely, these kids are threatened. Their lives are threatened. I can refer to an adult lady whom I did a lot of work with when I developed our safe home. She was brought in and recruited into the sex trade at age 13. At age 15 she tried to leave by getting herself caught in Toronto by the police, thinking she would be sent home to her family. That is absolutely what happened, but within seven days of her return home, her parents' home was lit on fire.
There are certainly tactics that the recruiters are using to keep the kids entrenched and even more so the threats of them not testifying. I have heard of all different techniques of screens and videos testimony, that kind of thing, but it is still terrifying for a child who has been so thoroughly threatened and whose brother, little sister or parents are being threatened, as well.
Another thing that has a lot to do with the victimization is the media. After ten o'clock — and sometimes it happens during the day — provocative commercials come on television that ask men and women to call in if they want to have a chat. These commercials are very sexualized. The men and women who are watching will not make the phone call because it shows up on their phone bill. Their spouse will see that. If anything, those commercials are luring them then to the streets where they are victimizing the children who are visible, who they think are not worth anything.
Those are just a few things. Again, there is a huge dynamic of kids that are moving from rural to urban, and that has a lot to do with many of our First Nations communities. They only go up to Grade 9. At Grade 9 you are 14 or 15 years old. If you want to further your education, you need to move to the city or to a town closer to the city.
These kids are seeing the highlights of Winnipeg, of Portage Place and the malls. They are seeing name-brand clothing. When they come to Winnipeg, they are extremely vulnerable and the recruiters and perpetrators know how to identify a child who has just come from a reserve into Winnipeg. That definitely needs to be looked at.
Senator Jaffer: I have a question for you, Mr. Dinsdale. I am very interested in the Manitoba study you were talking about. Maybe our researchers have that study, but I am not sure they do. We would appreciate your giving us a copy of it so that we can see what the study sets out.
You have asked that we recommend a national study, and I am not asking for the whole recommendation, but, roughly, what was the study about and what were the findings?
Mr. Dinsdale: The study was done regionally in Manitoba. It reviewed a number of other studies that existed. It was more a literature review as much as a front-line review. It was trying to get a sense of what is out there, because we have this notion that we have all this data available in our hands, we know the issue and it is time to move on from it.
I think it found a lot of anecdotal evidence that our people are overrepresented in these various areas. It is problematic for us in that it is not done by our communities, in our communities. Therefore, it under-represents the impact it is having.
We suggested that we need to get a better grip on what is happening in communities. There are a variety of ways to do that. It does not need to be only us. A number of players have to be at the table and work must be done generally.
In addition, there is this concept that child luring is happening on the Internet. We need to be cognizant about that in our communities. I am not sure it is the biggest issue. We have been challenging that notion among our own service providers in terms of access across the country, particularly in rural areas. It is not as prevalent as elsewhere.
Senator Jaffer: I am sorry, what is not as prevalent?
Mr. Dinsdale: Internet luring. We think it mostly has to do with poverty, as the earlier witness discussed. Strategies to address it in our communities are more related to that than elsewhere. Much of this is anecdotal. We need to do better work as a country to identify that systemically. The report I referred to is widely available on the Internet. We have an electronic copy and would be happy to send it to the clerk.
Senator Jaffer: Please do send it if it is available.
I come from British Columbia where we will have the Olympics. The biggest issue at the beginning was worry that women and children would be trafficked into our country. I believe our government has done a good job trying to prevent that from happening. It has set up resources to help women and children who are trafficked.
I think we are letting women and children down. When you walk the streets of my city — Vancouver — you see more and more children from reserves. I do not know whether they are being trafficked for the Olympic Games. I have no way of knowing. Have you any knowledge of children being trafficked into Vancouver at this time?
Ms. Anderson: At this time, I know that children have gone missing. Certainly, a number of children in our province are missing. We do not know where they are. Maybe that was part of their victimization.
I am definitely concerned. I know some study was done a couple of years ago. I cannot remember the name of the document. I did some research last year. They are looking at preventing trafficking, but I am concerned about the children that will be forced underground.
Our children are aware of the Olympics and the possibility of a way to make some quick money. I think adult women are more knowledgeable about the situation.
Mr. Dinsdale: Large cities are a focus, but it is not only large cities. I was in Prince George two years ago doing work with the friendship centre on the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. Our friendship centre was an intake place for that work. It was remarked to the vice-chair of the commission and the RCMP's detachment commander about how many young Aboriginal women were on the streets working at three o'clock in the afternoon outside my hotel. We stayed in a downtown hotel. It was remarkable. There were big white pickup trucks from the logging industry stopping, women jumping in and leaving. It went on all night.
It is not only in big cities; it is anywhere close to the communities. Poverty is the disenfranchisement we were referencing. It goes on all across the country. A lot of attention is focused on it because it is so prevalent, but it is all across country and needs more focus.
Senator Jaffer: I struggle with how to find a way to give a child resources or to take them away when they are brought into Vancouver. The government has two options: when a child arrives they may, sadly, be victimised; or we find a way to help the child get away from this. What things should we have for the child — for want of a better word — to be rescued or to find another way in order not to be exploited? Maybe the option is to be returned to their family, but that may not be an option.
Ms. Anderson: We encountered the problem of jurisdiction between provinces when we opened our safe home in 2003. There will be situations where a child's safety is at risk in the extreme. It should be possible to access resources in other provinces. We encountered barriers with that in 2003-04 where a child needed to go out of province to be safe.
Resources absolutely are lacking. Manitoba currently has 55specialized beds for prevention. Those are children at risk for exploitation as well as kids currently entrenched in the sex trade. We opened a six-bed safe home in 2003 for kids involved in the sex trade. It was the first of its kind. Seven years later, we have been able to support about 43 or 44 young people during that time. However, over 130 referrals of children have been made. Many were self referrals that we were not in a position to support.
Specialized resources are needed in the knowledge of a traditional value-based model with the cultural component. We also need to have experiential women working with these children, whether that is experience of being on the streets, abuse or addiction. Those are extremely important dynamics when working with this population of children.
Mr. Dinsdale: No silver bullet or magic program exists anywhere. If the child is over 16 years old and out of reach of the child welfare authorities, you are at their will to want to access your program. You have to make sure there are properly funded agencies to do outreach to ensure they are safe and have a way out. Broader community dysfunction has to be addressed.
Senator Brazeau: My first question is for Ms. Anderson and Ms. Cumby. Ms. Cumby should be commended for the courage and strength she has to overcome the odds and to do what she does. It is important work for the Aboriginal community.
I am not sure whether you are aware of the private member's bill that was passed in the House of Commons, BillC- 268, with respect to human trafficking. You talked about perpetrators and said that often the system is lax on them. With respect to human trafficking, this bill goes a long way, in my view, to protect women and children from exploitation in that fashion. It imposes minimum sentences on those convicted of human trafficking of five years as opposed to letting judges decide what they should get. Court decisions for perpetrators of human trafficking are receiving sentences between six months and two years. This bill would imposes five-year minimum sentences, which is getting tougher on crime.
My colleague mentioned that perhaps imposing minimum sentences goes too far. A renowned Quebec judge, Andrée Ruffo, says this piece of legislation will go a long way to getting tougher on crime and getting at the perpetrators so they do not get into that business.
If you are aware of that bill, I would like your thoughts on it.
Ms. Anderson: I will be perfectly honest. I do not know much about the bill; I have heard about minor pieces of it. I am on the front-line work. I am consistently in crisis mode working with our children. A colleague, Jane Runner, will be presenting later. She may be able to offer some feedback.
Is there a difference between human trafficking and the johns and perpetrators exploiting our kids on the street? That is often a topic of debate at our table when we meet in Winnipeg. There is no difference to me whether you are being trafficked from one province to another or one town to another. These children are being trafficked right on our streets from one neighbourhood to another. We cannot have any differences where that is concerned.
Senator Brazeau: If you have the time, I certainly invite you to look at the bill. The individual who championed this particular piece of legislation is a Conservative MP from Manitoba, Joy Smith.
Mr. Dinsdale, I do not think I have to preach to the converted regarding the challenges of advocating for the needs and aspirations of our Aboriginal peoples who live off-reserve. I certainly understand some of the challenges and barriers around securing federal funding to do some specific research projects. However, with respect to what the National Association of Friendship Centres wanted to do with a national study, can you tell us whether outreach has been done provincially to try to secure resources to do the same thing?
Mr. Dinsdale: I think Manitoba is the best example. At the outset it was 2006 and it took us about a year, so in about July of 2007 we finished as a national working group. We were defining the parameters of the work we would be interested in becoming engaged in.
Essentially it was looking at making sure we had a large enough representative sample across the country to make some methodologically defensible conclusions by interviewing youth in our youth agencies and all across the country to get a sense of whether child sexual exploitation is occurring amongst their peers, where they go if it occurs and what supports they require. Those are the kinds of questions we do not know the answers to. That work was being done at a national level, and some regional bodies such as Manitoba have taken a leadership role. I do not have any results for how that has happened since that has occurred, no.
Senator Brazeau: What about your level of collaboration with service providers in terms of sexual exploitation? Do you have a working collaboration with those who work on the front lines?
Mr. Dinsdale: It varies. Some of our friendship centres, particularly in British Columbia, are leading on the front lines, in part because of the transfer of responsibility for the child welfare regime in that province. In other jurisdictions there are a multitude of service providers, depending on the size of the community. As you know, Winnipeg has many service providers, while Thompson, Manitoba, has fewer, so if anything happens, it will come out of that friendship centre.
There has been some collaboration, though not enough. We do not like to talk about this stuff in Aboriginal communities. You are not supposed to ask questions about it and you are not supposed to talk about it. We are trying to heal from those issues, but that has led to the silence we see broadly, which is tragic. A lot of that work has been artificially stunted as a result.
Senator Brazeau: The reason I ask about collaboration is that in my experience, successful attempts have happened when a consortium of interested stakeholders works collaboratively to get a research project under way. Looking at what has succeeded across the country, I think when you can get the federal government, provincial governments, and service-delivery organizations — Aboriginal service-delivery organizations in this case — to work together to get this done, usually it is successful.
You are aware as much as I am that if the National Association of Friendship Centres gets funding to do a study on a particular topic, then the requests will flood in from other organizations that do similar work. The reality is that there is just not enough money to go around for everyone. However, in terms of free advice, I guess, if a real consortium of interested people could come together and present such a research topic, it would be difficult for any level of government to reject.
Mr. Dinsdale: If this government or any government is interested in funding this research, we will work with any and all parties to make sure it gets done. What is critical is that it gets done, not necessarily that we do it.
Senator Mitchell: I would like to thank you all very much. As we all are, I too am very grateful for this.
I would like to begin by asking Ms. Cumby a question. Clearly prevention is what we have to focus on, but there are so many people involved — young people who cannot get out and others. I would be interested in knowing how you got out. What was it that allowed you, or where did you find the courage and the strength to do it? What changed?
Ms. Cumby: I became pregnant with my daughter, who is now 12 years old. I just wanted a better life for her. I was terrified of her ever becoming involved in any sort of thing like that. What was a huge eye-opener was when my daughter was a year and a half and one of my regulars asked how much for her.
Even though it was a horrible and negative thing, a positive came out of it because it opened my eyes more that if I did not stop what I was doing, no matter what I did and how much I protected her she would become involved in that lifestyle in some way. We all want more for our children than what we had as children ourselves. I get my strength from my daughter every day. She is the best thing.
Also, resources that were just perfect for me helped me get out. Actually, Jane Runner of New Directions in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was one of the ladies who helped me quite a bit in my transition during my first couple of years.
It takes a woman and a child at least 10 attempts to get out before they actually succeed. We always have our little slips; we have a lot of stuff going on in our heads and we already have a lot of negative things going on up there, and all we need is more to bring us down to the level where we will go use drugs again or drink again or harm ourselves in some way.
We need more than a one-year program for people, because a year is not long enough. A year is enough to just start scraping some of that crap off of you so you can find out who you are again. We wear this huge label that all we are is only sex trade workers, when we are so much more than that.
Senator Mitchell: Thank you. I think the research question has been pretty much explored, but, Mr. Dinsdale, I am interested for you to clarify. You said much of the research has been done by researchers to whom Aboriginal youth will not speak. Are you saying that it would require Aboriginal researchers or a different approach, or what would you recommend? How would you make that work?
Mr. Dinsdale: We recommend working with the communities directly, talking to organizations such as theirs and our local centres to talk about whether it is an issue in their communities. They are more engaged than many of our centres are. How did you work your way out? Who can you talk to when there are issues? Those are the kinds of questions that someone coming from outside of our community will not get answers to. You cannot parachute a travelling road show and circus to come in and talk and then leave for the next town the next day and expect people to be open, disclose and work long term. You have to build that trust to work with them.
The Manitoba study showed that this kind of thing is not occurring, and that is the problem. If you want full disclosure of what is happening in these communities, you have to let the agencies that are there every day lead it and partner with them to provide the resources that allow you to be there for 10interactions, as Ms. Cumby mentioned. If they come and then leave, who will be there for those 10 interactions until that woman and her family are out of that circumstance?
It is that kind of long-term, systemic investment that will pay off in the long term.
It exists here in Ottawa too. There was an article in the Ottawa Sun two weeks ago about how in Vanier there is women's organization partnering and developing with Minwaashin Lodge. The Aboriginal workers going to Vanier to work were being solicited by people in this town. The non-Aboriginal young ladies working there were not solicited on the way in. It is pandemic in this society, in people's mindsets, that our young women are out there to be preyed upon. You do not have to go far to get this front-line research. You need to work with people in those communities to get to the bottom of it.
Senator Mitchell: When you talk about research, it seems the emphasis, at least in this discussion, has been on plumbing the depths of the problem and doing an inventory on how bad it is. I have no reason to argue with your suggestion that it is probably considerably worse than the data would indicate at this point. You can comment on that too.
On the other side there is this question of programs — some, not enough by any means. What sort of study has been done on the programs that exist to look at which ones work and best practices and that kind of thing, to elicit or conclude ideas like it takes 10 attempts, so a year does not work?
Mr. Dinsdale: There was some reference in the Sacred Lives report that was tabled here earlier. I do not pretend to be an expert on that. That is exactly the kind of thing we want to understand. Some will be counterintuitive: I do not think there will be strictly programs targeted to street-involved youth; I think there could also be recreation programs, cultural programs and others that will be seen as being required, but I will defer to the experts on the panel as to what is working well in their communities.
Ms. Anderson: I can quickly add to that. Referring to my earlier presentation, the kids that we are seeing — and I am speaking about kids that are in the care of child and family services — are in multiple placements when it comes to foster care, group care, as well as the justice system. Definitely there needs to be a review of that. Many kids are being placed in homes or programs where they are not understood or respected. The minute they break a rule they are given up on. That is absolutely an impact when it comes to stabilizing kids and kids believing in actual programs that are out there to help them.
I wanted to quickly comment on the research aspect. If researchers will be going into our communities, there must be follow-up resources afterwards. You will be going in and opening up huge boxes that have been shut, and there must be a lot of healing done afterwards. I wanted to make that comment.
Senator Mitchell: With respect to my last question — Mr. Dinsdale has referred to this — you are looking for a partner, any partner at the federal level, who can help and work on this program.
As an aside, part of the genius of Kelowna was that it negotiated with all of the provinces and territories and set up a regime where federal funding supported provincially delivered services rather than having the federal government reproduce it. There may be something in that model. It would be a huge problem to do that.
I am wondering, you said any federal partner, but if you had your druthers, which one would you choose, knowing what you know?
Mr. Dinsdale: If I had my druthers, I do not think that department exists yet. We have a colonial mind set perhaps in this Indian and Northern Affairs program administering the Indian Act, whose primary focus seems to be limiting the amount of spending it has on education, health benefits and land claim benefits each year. It would be more progressive to have a department of Aboriginal affairs look at these things more systemically and that may be able to work out more comprehensive relationships with the provinces and, in some cases, municipalities around the delivery and funding of services directed at the populations of people and where they live.
If I am in a central agency deciding on what programs should be set up, I think that is where I would begin. At the end of the day, it will take tremendous political will. The genius of Kelowna was that there was a multitude of partners at the table. The flaw was that only one partner was funding those programs. When all jurisdictions have a penny to put into the pot, all of a sudden they are much more concerned about the outcomes. Kelowna too is something we would encourage them to look at.
The Chair: We have run out of time, but I wanted to go back to one question. Obviously, we have talked about preventive services, and the change is much more systemic than just the street difficulties; it goes back to changing society and some of the living conditions.
We struggled with this during my days in the court. How do we get at perpetrators? If we wanted to name them, if we wanted to get at them, it has usually been through a criminal process. The obtaining of evidence must come from the witness, the child. We struggled and struggled to find some perfect answers in order not to victimize the child further. The problem is, we have only come up with screens, protection agencies or moving families. I recall moving a family right out of the area and trying to provide support services because of the victimization and the threats coming in.
How do we get at the perpetrators if we do not use the criminal system? With the criminal system, because of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms we cannot apprehend based on hearsay; it must be based on evidence, and the only evidence is from the child. How do we get out of that conundrum? You have pointed out how difficult it is.
Ms. Anderson: I was hoping to get the answer from you on that one.
The Chair: I have not been able to come up with an answer on that.
Ms. Anderson: It is definitely a challenge and a barrier. Going back to the value of how resources and programs are delivered to the kids, we have been successful because of the relationships we have built with the kids and because we are not working in isolation from the resources. We invite the police into our homes; we have a relationship with the outside systems. It is about building trust between the kids, and through the police and through the courts.
We have certainly been successful in encouraging kids or helping guide that process, but it is definitely a tough one for kids, depending on who they are being recruited by and how they are being threatened and coerced. It is definitely a hard thing to do, but as caregivers, we know who these perpetrators are.
As Ms. Cumby mentioned, there are still johns and pimps out there who were out 15 years ago exploiting her. That in itself goes to show something is not working. They are still out there, and they are preying on our kids. The kids on our street are looking younger because that is what the demand wants. There are not that many adult women out visibly on our street; it is mostly children.
I was asked when I came out here "What do you hope to get out of this?'' I hope I can go in there with a magic wand and have some great outcomes, but there are all the other parameters that go with that. At the end of the day, it is about these kids. I had a horrendous summer of having to bury two children that I fell in love with over the last four years. As a front-line caregiver, it is devastating to know that something needs to be done.
The Chair: We talk about johns, etcetera. We have not heard it from you, but we have heard it through anecdotal evidence and other witnesses that there is gang activity. It is no longer just an individual john; it is now a criminal system and a criminal element with a drug-related aspect. You have not highlighted that. Is that because it is still the john on the street, the individual? Or is it a more commercialized or deadly form of drugs and gang activity?
Ms. Anderson: Certainly some kids are being controlled by a pimp. Often the child becomes addicted, and their drug of choice becomes their pimp or their dealer becomes their pimp.
You can absolutely say that the gangs are out there controlling or you can say it is your peers, but we also see a lot of young girls that are pimping out their friends and that kind of thing. The johns are out there visibly strolling. That is evident. Things are definitely organized through different groups.
I will quickly talk about newcomers coming into Winnipeg, where they are being exploited or are becoming the exploiters. There needs to be something done with educating the newcomers in order to prevent them from being harmed.
The Chair: Thank you. We have run over our time. We thank you for the evidence you have provided us today and for the work that you do daily, which I think is important.
As you say, there are no magic answers. We have to look at coming up with solutions that get us closer to a better answer than we have today. If you come up with anything — not the magic bullet, I understand — we would very much appreciate hearing from you. Watch our hearings, add to it. You have our contacts. Thank you for appearing today.
Honourable senators, we are here to examine the issue of sexual exploitation of children in Canada with a particular emphasis on understanding the scope and prevalence of the problem of the sexual exploitation of children across the country and in particularly affected communities. We have had several witnesses who are exploring this issue with us. We have touched on issues of research, community-based needs and resources.
We have before us on this panel, from the Canadian National Coalition of Experiential Women, Ms. Jane Runner; and from the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, Kim Pate, Executive Director. Neither is new to this committee or Senate committees, so we welcome you back again. You know our routine. We want to hear from you on what you can give us as guidance on this study and then we will go to questions.
Jane Runner, Canadian National Coalition of Experiential Women: Thank you so much for the invitation to come back. I have been in this position many times. As I was thinking about coming here I became frustrated, because 25 years ago I was here talking about this issue, probably saying the same things that I might say today. When we look at how we changed our Criminal Code legislation in 1985 and how we had to review that several years after, a lot of voices were heard at that time, a lot of recommendations made, and nothing happened. I also sat on a federal- provincial-territorial group for a while many years ago and made many recommendations, and nothing has happened. Canada did a legislative review a little while ago in 2006 and there were many recommendations, and nothing has happened at the national level.
It is very frustrating for me to be around that long and not to see the kind of movement that we really need to see. We do not see the priority that we need to give our children here in Canada. I hear about billions of dollars being spent for the war, for many other things. I do not see that type of funding go to our children.
I do not think people really realize the extent of the exploitation in Canada. It is in all communities, in all very different forms; it is there. It has been there a long time and will continue to be there, unfortunately, because we are not prioritizing and not making a concerted commitment to the kids of our country.
I have heard many recommendations here today, and I certainly support what everyone is saying. We need to look at prevention. We need to let Canada know what is going on here with our children. We need to get that message out. We need to set up a strategy, an action plan. We need to look at the demand; we need to look at the offenders who are getting away with abuse every day, and we cannot charge them.
We need to look at all our communities, all our urban and rural communities and all those children within our reserves who are being exploited, who are not getting educated. There was something in the paper about kids having to go to school in a tent. We do have many problems. Again, we are not prioritizing our children.
We have lots of research on this issue and have read many papers. I think it is there. I do not think we need to do tonnes more research; we have that.
We have talked about language. Certainly that has changed over the years, and I really appreciate the fact that now we are finally using "child abuse.'' We are talking about exploitation. We need to stop calling the offenders "johns'' when we are talking about children. They are child abusers; they are predators; they are offenders. We must change our language.
Somewhere along the line we will have to step it up, I think, in Canada and just finally do it because we have not done it so far.
What I do see from the provincial level is actually quite a bit of action, certainly with Manitoba being my home province. We have a provincial strategy to respond to this issue, and many initiatives have come out of that. Public education awareness campaigns and "stop sex with kids'' is what we were talking about in Manitoba.
You question what we can do with offenders, because we cannot do anything with Criminal Code. The police are very frustrated that they cannot do anything with the current legislation, because of course the children have to come forward and press charges. That is just the scariest experience that a young person should have to go through.
In Manitoba we are looking at our child welfare legislation — and there is similar legislation in all provinces — to see how we could use that tool to tackle the offenders, because it does not require the same burden of having the child come forward. As adults we can take responsibility and use that act.
Different sections in there refer to harbouring children, or interfering with children in care. We are now getting cases before our provincial court system to see how we can use that as a way to tackle the offenders.
I will turn it over. I think what I am saying is very clear. I hope I did not offend anyone, but after being around for such a long time I have to say again that I am quite frustrated. It is time we do something a little more serious about this issue in Canada.
Kim Pate, Executive Director, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies: Thank you for the invitation. It is always a privilege and a pleasure but also a huge responsibility, in much the same vein as my co-witness here has spoken.
I want to start by acknowledging the Algonquin territory in which we are, because every time I think of this issue, I think of the inextricable links, as you heard from the witnesses before us, to some of the issues around the ability we seem to have to commodify children in particular but also women, and especially those who are most marginalized and victimized amongst Aboriginal women and children.
I want to honour the work done by some of our sisters, such as the Native Women's Association of Canada; the work Senator Pearson has done — I was happy to see her here; the work you have done yourself, Madam Chair; the work that Senator Dallaire has picked up; and the work that all of you are doing with issues around child sexual exploitation but also issues of women and issues of Aboriginal people that others of you have been involved with. I want to thank you for that.
Similarly, we have been working on this issue for a long time, and sometimes it gets tiring. I am at the stage where maybe I am getting a bit too long in the tooth. At least it is still on the table. So many things seem to be sliding off the table recently that it makes us happy you are putting this back on the table.
We want to ensure that we link this to the end result of the young people and women and men who then get ignored once they pass being marginalized and being victimized and end up in a situation where they may themselves be criminalized largely because of their attempts to deal with their sexual exploitation. I am thinking of many of the women and girls we work with who end up in the criminal justice system because they have no supports. They often start by ending up in the child welfare system, then into the juvenile system, then the youth justice system, then into the adult system for all kinds of reasons: because they have experienced violence, because they have experienced abuse and because they then try sometimes to deal with those in the ways they have learned to cope, which may be by anaesthetizing themselves with drugs or alcohol. It may be by commodifying themselves in a way they have already been commodified, whether in their homes or communities by others, or start trading their bodies for accommodation, food and for other means of supporting themselves.
We need to look at the broader context in which that occurs and not just focus on those young people who are exploited and the end results, but also on an environment and a community of support for the increased sexualizing of young people in particular. We heard one of the previous witnesses talk about someone approaching her about her daughter; we know that happens all the time. How many women do I know who are living in areas that they would rather not live because it is a poor area, an area we have tended to shuffle off others who are marginalized, so that is where they get preyed upon even more?
Yes, it is more likely to be the racialized young people, the poor young people or those who for all kinds of reasons are trying to manage their lives half on the street and do not have safe places to be protected from that exploitation. It is not a surprise what we end up seeing at the level where we end up intervening, and I am happy that the team of regional advocates we have going into our prisons across the country happens to have been meeting for the last few days. Half of them have already had to head home. Before that, they came up and you could see the strength of the volunteer community. They all do this work off the sides of their desks in addition to their employment. They are doing this as volunteers, so it is very important they are the ones seeing people on a regular basis. I go a couple of times a year to each of the prisons with the volunteers. They are in on a monthly basis and on a regular basis seeing the 82percent of women who are in prison who have histories of physical and/or sexual abuse as children and as adults. If we are talking about Aboriginal, First Nation, Metis and Inuit women alone, the statistic is 91percent. They are dealing with the impact of that not only on those women but also on their children and the generations that come.
Therefore, we are very concerned that the entire context in which this occurs be examined in much the way that many reports have done before, as Ms. Runner has mentioned. We want to see a context in which we stop blaming the victim and stop making responsible the individuals who have not been able to pull themselves out. Very few can, not because they are not capable, but because there are very few opportunities.
I am privileged to know some of the women who have been able to pull themselves out. You have met them as well, but there are many more women who do not have those same opportunities for all kinds of reasons and have not been able to exit the situations they are in.
We must ensure that we stop the notion that at a certain age they become blameworthy for the situation they are in, that somehow they are responsible for being on the margins, being racialized, being criminalized, being institutionalized or whatever the results are. We must also ensure that we no longer accept that it is all right not only to vilify the victims in those contexts but to attack them when they are in court.
The question you were asking the previous witness, Senator Andreychuk, I would like to pick up on, because if we talked about the criminalization of the behaviour, the criminalization of the notion of that level of misogyny and sexual violence, we would be talking about different standards of proof and different ways of showing cases, not necessarily requiring an individual victim to be the witness to that.
I think we can look at some other options, and some options have been looked at in other parts of the world. We can look at some of the work that has been done here. We can stop saying it is okay when a child or an adult woman brings forth a situation of her own victimization and then becomes the person who is discredited. Many people have said there are all these false accusations. I know many women who have withdrawn charges and it has been labelled a false accusation or a recanting, but I can tell you most of them are asking the Crown to withdraw those charges — clearly it is the Crown's decision in the end — largely because they see what happens when you pursue. The attack that comes is the only place where you will see witnesses, victims, being systematically decimated for the evidence they are trying to produce. If my house is broken into, I am not likely to be berated by the defence counsel about whether in fact I ever left my door open, whether I bought a big television, whether I put the box on the street, whether I allowed my windows to be open and the curtains not closed so people could see what I had in my home, whether I bought a car and flashed it around and let people see. You understand the train of thought. We have allowed that to continue without challenging it.
I also think we need to question when examining these issues why we do not look further when it comes to those who have been criminalized. I will use one example, and I will then invite questions because I would like this to be useful. You know what you want to do with this review. We have some suggestions, obviously, but we would very much like to be as helpful as we can.
I recently saw a friend of mine who worked on the Mount Cashel inquiry. We were talking about how no one seems to be asking questions about what happened to the sisters of the boys who were at Mount Cashel. Many of the men had to be brought out of prison or had records already for being sexual predators themselves by the time the inquiry happened. There was an expectation or a belief that they would tell the truth. I would suggest some of that is based on some homophobic views about why men would not make up having been sexually abused. Some of it is about the manner in which we treat young women and girls once they reach a certain level, but nobody seemed to question all the young women who had been sisters of those boys who had ended up in similar situations, and many of them had gone on to be sexually exploited in other relationships. Many of them had also been criminalized, though not as many had been criminalized, interestingly enough, as their brothers, but we do not know the stories of those women, and we do not seem interested in knowing the stories of those women once they get beyond a certain age.
I credit the group that Ms. Runner is involved with, the work of Senator Pearson and the work many of you have done with keeping those stories alive and trying to ensure that we focus on them. However, we need to think about the suppositions and the underlying discriminatory attitudes that help shape our looking only at certain segments of this population and this issue without really examining it.
I have reluctantly talked in what I think of as a more abstract way. Those who know me know that I often tell stories about people I know. You have heard some of those horror stories; I do not need to tell you any more of them. However, if you want stories, I can give you lots of examples of just how these issues evolved.
There are some ideas we can look at, and there are some ideas that you have considered previously — collectively and individually — to look at drilling down on some of these issues and changing attitudes about who we are talking about. If you are interested in some of those, whether it is about how to continue to pull back on the criminalization of young people, whether it is about how to impact generations, you have already heard many recommendations that we would certainly support, and we would certainly be interested in further discussions.
Thank you very much again for having us here.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Pate, for reminding me that you have testified before. Much of that testimony is with us and we will be reviewing it. It is not a one-off in your case.
Before I turn to the growing list of questioners, Ms. Runner, you have suggested that using the child welfare system is a better system than the criminal system, and you have lauded some provincial initiatives on that, whereas I hear Ms. Pate saying that we could probably change the criminal system by emphasis and definitions and much within.
I was in the child welfare system for a long, long time, and I found that that could be even more victimizing than going to court. It leads right to the recent report from Saskatchewan where there is a shortage of foster homes and care opportunities are needed. Once children are trapped in the child welfare system it is very difficult to get out of it, and many of the problems that our criminal system creates and deals with are the same in the child welfare system.
What gives you the feeling now that that is the way to go, when a lot of our history has pointed out that putting children in welfare is not the panacea for their problems?
Ms. Runner: As Ms. Anderson said earlier, most of the children we deal with are already in the child welfare system. Therefore, the point is to look at the tools within that act to find other ways of getting at the offenders. As I said before, the Criminal Code is not working for us, so we do need to find other avenues that we could possibly try. Within Manitoba, 70percent to 90percent of our children have experienced child welfare, have had that many placements, but we have those provisions in there so we should try to use them. They have not been used. People rarely use the various sections of those acts to get at the bad guys, but we have it there so let us use it. Let us try it.
In Manitoba, we increased the fines for this to $50,000 and two years in jail. We have several cases that are pending right now that we certainly hope will go through and set precedent so that we can continue to use this act and hopefully get at some of the offenders this way.
Ms. Pate: In addition to that, some of us were just talking about a particular woman who is trying to raise her grandchildren now. She is an Aboriginal woman who has herself been through the system and is trying to prevent her grandchildren now from experiencing the life she experienced, the life her children experienced when she was jailed for trying to defend them, and then now the life that may befall her grandchildren if she is unable to keep them. The inadequacy of kinship care arrangements, the predisposition against women who may have been criminalized at one point, which we would argue in this case should probably never have happened but it did, and the presumption then that such women are not good people to continue on and parent grandchildren or others in the family — all of these are a problem.
That kind of reform in a child welfare context would be extremely valuable, particularly in communities where many families want to take on the children but do not have the resources. There is huge hypocrisy in the notion that you can take children out of family and community and place them in another community where they may receive many more resources, instead of shoring up that family with the provision of support services and resources. I am talking about financial resources, but also non-financial resources that people need to be able to support themselves and provide opportunities for their children they might not otherwise have.
Senator Dallaire: It seems quite obvious that we have not broken the code on this one in regards to attenuating even the impact of the abuse of children or sexual exploitation, and with growing populations, particularly on the Aboriginal side, this curve will continue to grow.
In attempting to find solutions, has there been or should there be a completely new way to think of the social, criminal atmosphere or environment that are part of the solutions now to the cases of these children and their turning into adulthood involved in this sexual exploitation? What I mean is why not get rid of the federal government from this thing and have provincial-municipal capabilities? Why not have the Aboriginal communities create their capabilities and be funded to do that? Why not take one level out of this completely and bring in a new methodology from the provincial level down, with funding of course? Would that help? The impression is that people keep handing over the problem, and there are all kinds of cracks that people are falling into.
Ms. Pate: There is always merit in resourcing at the community level. We have seen a retrenchment of that position at the federal level, quite frankly, since the abandonment of the Canada Assistance Plan and some elimination of standards that used to be in place that were not adequate, in our organization's and our personal opinion. A shoring up of those standards at the federal level is vital so that tax dollars are not just going to however a province or territory may choose to spend them. There must be clear standards around the levels of intervention, whether it is support, care, or education.
I think of Louise Arbour's comments a couple of years ago when she talked about the fact that we need to look at human rights in this country in the way we once did, which is that human rights meant a freedom from want. You would be hard pressed to find most people who are marginalized in this country who think that human rights mean you have a right to freedom from want, a right to be housed, a right to be fed, a right to be clothed, and a right to be educated. Yet there was a time when many people thought that is what Canada stood for. Having national standards around those and then the resources in the community are what is needed, absolutely. However, I believe there is a role for the federal government, just like there is a very important role that — maybe this is not the time to say, but I will say it — this Senate now is exercising in the oversight function, the house of sober second thought, which the Senate needs to be at a time when we are starting to eviscerate more and more the very real resources that need to be in the community. Rather than go farther in that direction and the further abandonment of a federal responsibility, I would like to see those standards there and the resources at the local level.
Senator Dallaire: The established standards, but it is operated locally with local people attempting to solve locally without displacing them out of their cultural milieu and the like as a solution.
Ms. Pate: As we were just talking in our meetings in the last couple of days, I may be able to pontificate about what we need to do around law reform, but if there are no relationships at the local level between the women who are going into the prisons or working in the communities, that is one thing. Our organization provides early intervention work in communities right through to reintegration work and working with children, working with pregnant teens, working right through. If those relationships exist but there is no ability to resource and provide the services that are needed, then that is a very real issue, and I would agree with you.
Senator Dallaire: What about the world of NGOs versus the government structures? What about making them far more capable of meeting the requirements in regards to on-the-ground, in-your-face solutions through non- governmental organizations, who would be directly supported financially or resource-wise? Instead of going to government structures, even municipal structures, there could be non-governmental structures created from scratch locally.
Ms. Pate: I would agree with that in principle. The fear I would have is of off-loading responsibility that is a government responsibility.
For example, normally there are two people in my office; we are a two-woman office. I am currently working only with a part-time person, partly because we are using some of those resources to help fund challenges to policy and legislation that need to be happening on individual cases as well as some collective actions. We are doing that because we are increasingly being asked to by the very people who end up, at least figuratively, on the other side of the debate because they do not feel they can act anymore within their own posts.
Senior bureaucrats — individuals who, in theory, have the authority and power to change something — are increasingly coming to us and saying: "As an NGO, you can speak out. We no longer can, even in Status of Women, which is funded to be able to advocate, but we need you to say this. Can you do this?'' Even very senior people within Corrections say, "Why do you not take us to court on this? Look what is happening to these individuals in segregation, these individuals with mental health issues, these individuals we are trying to place in the community.''
Increasingly, there is an expectation that the community will pick up that ball. We try to; but unless there are some expectations that things will be operating very differently, some standards of how those rules of engagement will occur, then it means it is really an off-loading of responsibility without the requisite resources to ensure that you can put into action what needs to be in place.
Senator Dallaire: That is excellent. That is exactly what I was hoping. You need that influencing of the policy.
Concerning terminology, why is it that sexually abusing youth under the age of 18 is not simply called "rape''? If you are creating an atmosphere, which is what you were saying, create that atmosphere that makes this intolerable within a society. Why not push the limit of the ugliness of the whole scenario?
Ms. Runner: Does the term "child abuse'' in itself not kind of say that?
Senator Dallaire: It does not, because if it did, we would be doing something. You have just told us that for 25 years we have been doing nothing; so why not change the rules of the terminology?
The Chair: I do not think it was called "child abuse'' 25 years ago.
Ms. Runner: No.
The Chair: That is the problem.
Ms. Runner: Yes.
Senator Dallaire: No, but we have moved to child abuse —
Ms. Runner: Many people do not know that it is child abuse. We have not made the greatest attempts at educating all Canadians that this is a form of child abuse. We are still at the beginning stages of doing that.
Every time people try to change some of the language, it concerns me that we are just trying to pussyfoot around the issue. Take the word "trafficking''; we have always had trafficking. The legislation around trafficking is not much different than the current legislation we have around procuring and living off the avails. It just added a few extra things, but the bottom line is that it is still the children or victims who have to come forward to press charges.
We do not yet have many charges around this new legislation, and I do not think we will have; it has not worked with previous ones, so why would it work now? We need to call it what it is. I think trafficking is a kind of child abuse.
Senator Dallaire: I have experiences in the field in developing countries, where countries are in conflict. When we come upon rape situations and the victims are 11, 12 and 13 years old, there is no doubt in my military mind that that is what it is. Therefore, why is it we do not use that terminology when it is within our society? Why are we not doing exactly what you are saying, which is manipulating either terminology or methodology, to go out and bring this to a radical conclusion? I mean, legislation, fine, but it is nowhere near what I think is required to achieve the aim. Is that not correct?
Ms. Runner: Again, I think so much of this goes back to education. People need to know what child abuse is and what it all entails in this country — that it is sexual exploitation and that all this stuff is going on. To try to come up with another word now I do not think is the way to go. We just need to educate people on what this word means in this context, and we have not done much of that.
Senator Mitchell: Just to pursue that a bit, I understand as well as I can what you are saying and what you mean by that, but I do not think "child rape'' is pussyfooting. I do not know enough about the whole evolution of the term "child abuse'' and what impact it is having. However, in defence of what Senator Dallaire is saying, the fact is there are many forms of child abuse.
One of the very worst ones would be child sexual abuse. If you called it "rape,'' it would certainly bring it home to me. It has a different impact. All child abuse is horrible, but you could see that the term "rape'' certainly has an impact. Anyway, I just mention it.
I am interested in all of what you have been saying, but you made a point, Ms. Pate, that led to this escalation, if you will. The fact is a child grows up in poverty or a very difficult situation, is abused one way or another at home, ends up on the streets and then becomes sexually exploited. All of these experiences are somehow impressed upon them and that becomes their behaviour. It becomes criminal behaviour as they get older and they end up committing other crimes.
Then they go to jail; and now it is being said that we need tougher sentences and mandatory minimum sentences for these kinds of criminals. Does this do anything other than just distract us from the real issues, programs and support that these people need?
Ms. Pate: No, it does not. In fact, it does distract us from addressing the very real issues. We would argue that prisons are becoming one of our biggest social problems; they are sucking resources out of communities in much the way we have seen south of the border, where we have seen education and health services suffer. Literally, the resources that could be spent on preventive work — education, all of those things — are being depleted because there is so much focus on criminalization and incarceration.
When there are more and more people in the system, whatever programs were there that might have been beneficial become depleted. You have more people with fewer opportunities for them to have any kind of treatment or support.
It was a shock even to me when the Senate was doing the review on mental health a few years back with Senator Kirby. We were looking at this issue and realized that the majority of psychologists and psychiatrists in this country were on contract with Corrections — not to do treatment, but to do assessments. Even then, the assessments were more to determine risk when the person was not even getting access to treatment programs or services to meet the needs to diminish the risk in the first place.
When you realize that is the sort of situation we face increasingly, you realize that by putting more resources into longer prison sentences, more harsh prison sentences — because that is what longer sentences will mean with fewer resources there — you are actually sucking resources out of the community; and I do not think we can maintain the social, human and fiscal costs.
If those costs could be maintained, we probably would not see the retrenchment in the United States now, or the situation in California where the court has ordered the release of 45,000 or 48,000 prisoners because they cannot manage any more in the system. It is depleting the state coffers.
I would go back to the education component. From our perspective, education is not just about what child rape or child sexual abuse is in isolation. It is also about the context that we provide an opportunity for some young people to be identified as disposable. When we have a hierarchy of who is entitled to rights, who is entitled to protections, we create an increasingly more disposable group of people — whether young people, women or racialized individuals.
Unfortunately, that is the state we are in. I think we need to pull back and say it is not okay to say that some people are not deserving of protection — whether they are children or women or girls or men or boys. We should not accept the idea that there are some who are not deserving of protection.
Senator Mitchell: Absolutely. If you really wanted to get tough on crime, to follow up the earlier point, you would get tough on poverty, mental health issues and child sexual abuse; you would get tough on all of those things. What will happen with mandatory minimums, I am absolutely convinced, is that they will distract us from getting tough on those things. You see it every day, and we will see it more and more as a society. It will be children — who are victimized in the first place — who will become victimized again, and we will not help them.
Ms. Pate: The countries that have the highest rate of education, post-secondary education in particular, and highest literacy rates, social services and health services are also the countries and areas where you see lower crime and lower incarceration rates. It is not accidental.
The Chair: Are there any further questions?
Senator Mitchell: Yes. I have just one more.
I share your frustration. I am sure most of us do. You said something that really struck me, Ms. Runner: It is time we got serious about this thing. I feel that about a whole range of issues, such as climate change, for example. However, these are issues that we need to get serious about, and I feel that pressure. If we just started to do what we know can work, things would be moving.
If you were the prime minister and you had the chance to sit down today and say what the top three or five things are that you would do to work on this issue, what would they be? Maybe you want to think about that and get back to us, but I would be very interested in knowing, from both of you if you could respond, even with bullets. I know it is not that easy.
Ms. Runner: Sure. First, I must apologize for my frustration. It is probably coming out a little off.
Senator Mitchell: Not at all.
Ms. Runner: Certainly education for all people would be on my list. I talked earlier about hearing about kids on- reserve. They did not have schools and were taking classes in a tent. That really concerns me. We need to do lots more in educating our kids and looking at prevention from that point, so they know what might be ahead of them.
We need to educate Canada. We need to educate all the people as to what is really happening. Many people do not even think about it really, unless it has happened to someone in their family. People need to know, and people need to get their hearts into it and understand that we do have young girls who are standing on street corners or who are in houses who must have sex to get by, who have to give up their bodies to get some money to eat.
This is Canada, right? It is just a hard thing for such a country that we have little girls having to do that, and young boys, too.
We need to get serious with the men — the offenders — and that goes for those who live off the avails, to those involved with the drugs, to the guys who are out there trolling the streets.
The kind of hesitation I have seen about that is difficult. I am sure if all the people came forward and shared the names of all the men they know who have paid for sex, whether with adults or young children, you would know a lot of those people, right? That is concerning. Therefore, when there are people in positions of power who have exhibited that behaviour, we will not see much movement until those people are challenged for their behaviour.
Senator Poy: I do understand your frustration. You have been talking about it for 25 years and, from what have I have heard, the root cause is lack of education, because it is poverty that is causing many of these problems.
You mentioned that in some Aboriginal communities children have to attend school in tents. Why is that happening? Maybe it is just my lack of understanding, but education is under provincial jurisdiction. Is it the same in Aboriginal communities?
Ms. Runner: Not for on-reserve. It is a federal jurisdiction.
Senator Poy: That would be federal. Obviously, there is not enough money in educating the on-reserve children. Is that what the problem is?
Ms. Runner: It seems to be. It is also an issue, too, within child welfare. Recently, too, it has come out that the transfer payments are not up to par with provincial standards of what provinces are contributing to the costs of child welfare. Again, that is another issue.
Senator Poy: Much of it has to do with the transfer payment from the federal government?
Ms. Pate: I think it also has to do with who has the ability, because they have resources, mostly, and authority and power to express their views. To answer your question, I am not aware of anybody wanting to make me prime minister, but I would be happy to sing.
Senator Poy: I bet you are a better singer.
Ms. Pate: I do not know about that. However, in all seriousness, regarding that song, "With a Little Help From My Friends,'' if you are a child in a tent, who are your friends? Who has the authority to change that decision, to take you out of that tent and put you in a properly funded school?
As a single mom with children, I have watched one child who went through a fairly affluent neighbourhood in this city. I see parents all the time. The minute something is not available in that school, it is provided. Why? We have many parents who have a lot of resources and a lot of influence in this city, municipally, provincially and federally, to ensure there are adequate resources for all of those children. Therefore, my daughter benefits from that as well.
My son also benefited, but he was in a different school at a different time at a different state of resources. That is just my children, and my children are not by any stretch the children who are in the tents on reserves.
Regarding those children on reserves, I would say that if the communities do not have authority — which we know they often do not — if they are not supported, if there are not resources, if there is not a political will and a will from those who have the authority to make those decisions, then they will not have a better education system. They will not have better housing. They will not have plumbing even in some of those communities. They will not have sanitary conditions or adequate food, or all of those things we know.
We do have to examine some of those structures. That is why I said we have allowed that kind of stratification to occur in this country, so we know the majority of people on northern and rural reserves are living in conditions that the United Nations considers lower than those of most developing countries. We should be ashamed about that. Yet it is not accidental. It is not something that we cannot rectify. We could rectify it. We do not have the will to do it, I would suggest, and I think that is something we do need to continue to push for. Why do we not? Because those are not the people who have the influence in voting, or who are in positions of power.
Senator Poy: Why would they not have the influence in voting?
Ms. Pate: The demographics show that many of the young people experiencing these conditions are Aboriginal people under the age of 18. That demographic is growing, but it does not mean necessarily that they feel any engagement or any ability to change what is happening, nor do they have the resources to change what is happening themselves.
I think it would be beneficial to encourage that engagement. I do not know whether we should have mandatory enfranchisement, like they do in other countries. It helped some changes in Australia recently. Maybe we could.
Senator Poy: I just want to pursue this a little further. Really the important thing at the federal level that the federal government can do is fund — not only schools on the reserves but also the social agencies that help victimized and abused children. Would that solve the problem?
Aside from that, the federal government should not have a hand in dealing with the actual problems because the only way the problem can be solved would be through the community. Am I correct?
Ms. Pate: I think it can be resolved in the community, but not without resources and some standards.
Senator Poy: No, you need resources.
Ms. Pate: The response from the United Nations when Canada has been looked at for civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights has been that it is not an excuse any longer for the Canadian government to hide behind the excuse that it is not in control of the provinces.
When the government eliminated the Canada Assistance Plan, it knew it was providing an opportunity for provinces and territories to stop doing lots of things — social services, health services, education services — that they do have jurisdiction over. We really need to look at those standards. If I were having less of a mental pause at the moment, I would be able to remember them, but I cannot. If you are interested in those recommendations, I would be happy to help find them.
Senator Poy: Maybe you could send those to us.
Ms. Runner, are you from Manitoba?
Ms. Runner: Yes.
Senator Poy: You were saying that the provincial government is doing more now for victimized children in the community. Aside from Manitoba, are other provinces doing equally well, or would Manitoba be the leader in dealing with the problem?
Ms. Runner: Other provinces have strategies or something else. B.C. has been quite active. Alberta has taken a different twist. They started years ago by locking up children, but they have progressed from there.
Manitoba has been doing this a long time. We have lots of experiences in what works and what does not work. In 2002, our government adapted the strategy with many recommendations and has implemented many of those recommendations.
Ms. Anderson indicated that theirs was one of the first safe homes from the strategy. In specialized training, we have created a training program to work with all front-line workers to raise awareness of the issue, but skill application remains. How do you work with exploited children? We are looking at mentoring and buddy support programs. When students arrive from off-reserve or rural areas, a group can support them in the big city. It tries to keep them from losing their way. We also have our PR campaign, Stop Sex with Kids. Child Find has been quite active and there have been several phases.
The second phase of our strategy was based on the unfortunate death of a young girl who was sexually exploited for a long time and had many placements in her life. She committed suicide. The inquest that followed produced more recommendations.
With immigrants coming into the province, we look at ways of educating them in their languages on child abuse, what it looks like here and the dos and don'ts.
Ms. Anderson talked earlier about the creation of a police street reach team. It is based on what vice officers have done in Dallas. It prioritizes and looks at high-risk children who are always running, which makes them more vulnerable. Police are working with missing persons staff, outreach and child abuse investigators to intervene and track these kids immediately.
In the last few months, as soon as a young one goes missing, his or her picture is in the paper and on the news. We are telling the public these are kids who are vulnerable; these are kids who are at risk; and these are kids who could be exploited. It gives a different message.
There are many initiatives. I can share tons of information just on what Manitoba is doing.
Senator Poy: Is this being partially or fully funded by the Manitoba government?
Ms. Runner: It is fully funded by the Manitoba government.
Senator Poy: In that sense, they do not need anything from the federal government or, at least, have not had anything.
Ms. Runner: No, it still goes back to transfer payments for reserve communities.
Senator Brazeau: As a First Nations person, I have to agree, Ms. Runner, with your statement that sometimes it takes a long time for things to happen to get results. However, I must respectfully disagree that nothing or very little has been done. Let me outline efforts and see if I am successful in trying to ease your frustration, especially with regard to what has been done on the protection of Aboriginal women and their children from sexual exploitation.
In June2008, Parliament passed BillC-21. For the first time in 30 years, it grants human rights for First Nations people living on- and off-reserve. For example, many Aboriginal women I know regained their status through BillC- 31 in 1985. They have made requests for housing on-reserve. Chiefs in council have discretionary power to make those decisions. Often times — not in every case, but in many cases — these individuals get denied and Aboriginal women and their children have no place to go. The likely place they will end up is in an urban centre, in many cases, where they are more susceptible to sexual exploitation.
We talked earlier about BillC-268 with respect to human trafficking. I cited the judge in Quebec who said this would go a long way to discourage perpetrators from trafficking Aboriginal peoples and, in particular, children.
I would dare suggest that locking up a perpetrator for five years, in terms of the human costs, is a lot better than the current system where this perpetrator could be in jail for six months or a year. At that point, they are back out on the street and continue the practice of trafficking our Aboriginal children. I guess, ideologically, that is debatable. I strongly believe this legislation is a good piece of legislation.
Ms. Runner: Has that been passed?
Senator Brazeau: No, we will be receiving it in the Senate shortly. It has been passed by most NDP, Liberal and Conservative members in the other place.
This government is also currently working on matrimonial real property rights. In case of a separation or divorce, the current system will have the male individual allocated the family house on-reserve and the property that the couple has. In many situations, Aboriginal women and their children are forced to relocate and end up in urban centres.
These are three concrete steps that this government has undertaken in the last three years. Obviously, it does not fix the whole problem. However, we need to acknowledge them so that we know where we are at and to give us a better picture of where we need to go in the future to fix overlapping problems.
I also heard both of you talk about government responsibility to tackle this issue. Although resources are sometimes an important component of addressing these issues, before the imposition of the Indian Act, we did not need resources to deal with individuals who conducted themselves in a criminal manner or to rectify the issue. We came together as a community and did what we had to do to bring some resolution to this problem.
As an Aboriginal person, far too often I hear that Aboriginal peoples need money to deal with a problem. There is a shortage of money if we compare it to the provincial system. That may be the case. However, what are your views on the responsibilities and obligations of individuals, parents, community and expert service delivery organizations that deal with these issues? An argument can be made that there is a government responsibility, but what about the responsibility of individuals, families and parents?
Ms. Pate: It is important to look at those issues. Certainly, there are attempts to make progress that have good intentions behind everyone's efforts.
You raised the issue of who gets jailed. I would urge you to look at how many perpetrators are jailed, because of the discriminatory attitudes we talked about. I know many people — police officers, chiefs of police, wardens of institutions, heads of corrections, ministers of religion and political ministers — who have acknowledged privately that there are discriminatory attitudes on these issues. This means certain people will get reported, certain people will be pursued and certain people will not.
Publicly, that is where we need those individuals to speak out — not just privately, but publicly — and it is rare that people will. Why? I go back to your issue of individual responsibility. I think we all have individual responsibilities, but to actually suggest that we all have the ability to exercise that responsibility equally is not accurate.
If you are a child on a reserve who has been sexually abused, it may be your parents — that may be one issue; it may not be — and, if you are held responsible, it is more difficult. We talk about "hyper-responsibilization'' increasingly of women and girls who have been victimized, particularly Aboriginal women and girls, to actually try and respond to this themselves and, if they do not, they are held accountable for not doing it. When there are inadequate resources — and I do not mean only financial resources, but also authority, power and the privilege that those things provide — then it becomes much more difficult.
As you would no doubt know very directly, having worked with communities and in the work have you done prior to coming to this chamber, there is a very real difference between who has the opportunity and the capacity to act in those ways and who does not.
In a context where increasingly we are using those bootstraps-type arguments and people do not even have boots, we need to be challenging ourselves. We have come a bit beyond that. We need to pull back and say why is it that we are now returning to a place where we are happy to "responsibilize'' the community, the individuals and those with the least ability to actually achieve the change we are talking about, instead of saying let us ensure there are standards and resources there.
Yes, it must be done in an accountable and responsible way, but not to pretend it can just be done. I think pre- contact was a different time, when we did not have some of the influences that have occurred since then. I am always conscious of the work that we do. The first jails for Aboriginal people were reserves, as you undoubtedly know. The first way many Aboriginal people were criminalized was if they left the reserve without the authority of the Indian Act. That was one of the first ways we started on this track of taking the responsibility and resources out of the community and taking the people out of their resources, as well.
I think that is a very important message and I would encourage all of you to think well beyond just individual responsibility, because that is the easiest way to divest ourselves of responsibility as a community, as a country and as a nation.
Senator Brazeau: I have a very short question. With respect to human trafficking, what are your thoughts about BillC-268? Specifically, if the bill is passed by this Parliament, do you think imposing five-year minimums for convicted perpetrators would increase the chances of victims of human trafficking being more open and forthright, knowing that the perpetrators would at least receive a firm five-year minimum sentence as opposed to the lax discretion that judges currently have?
Ms. Pate: No. I say that because the ones who are caught, prosecuted and jailed are generally the easiest to catch. I will give you an example. We had a very progressive move by one police force in this country. After we had Sacred Lives, after we had discussion about the sexual exploitation in particular of Aboriginal youth, there was a decision that no longer would they prosecute those young women, young Aboriginal women in particular, for communicating for the purpose of prostitution. We started to see bawdy house charges and procuring charges, charges that were framed as an attempt to assist those young people. I am not suggesting these people had malicious intent by any stretch. They saw young girls on the street and they were trying to intervene. They had five or six girls, in one instance, and they said it was her turn to work because we have to pay rent or get food. Therefore, they charged the rest of them with procuring because that young woman had gone out. I think, in the end, it was living off the avails.
We tried to shame them into withdrawing that. In trafficking, my worry would be the other young women who they may be living with who are trying to survive on the street who may also be facing those trafficking charges. Heaven forbid we see many more of the young women we are seeing. Women are the fastest-growing prison population, particularly Aboriginal women.
My fear would be that we would see that demographic showing that the young women, who might be doing survival sex, would end up being the ones charged with some of those trafficking offences. My experience, and it is a bit removed — you are far closer to it than I am, Ms. Runner — is that the ones who are actually the profiteers often have a great deal of privilege and power, and they are very rarely the ones prosecuted. If they are prosecuted, they have counsel and other resources that mean they certainly do not see jail time.
The Chair: Ms. Pate and Ms. Runner, thank you for coming today. I think some of us have been here before, as you said. We have seen governments come and go, many of them at both the provincial and the federal level. I hope we do not lose the optimism to find the answers to our society.
I do not believe that in all the time I have been in many various levels, provincially and federally, we have come close to a solution. I think we continue to work at it, and as someone pointed out this afternoon, we play an oversight role: to remind government not to give us the fine words but to start implementing and putting into action some of these things.
I still see Senator Pearson, who I think made that point resoundingly, having lived through many governments. We hope we will be part of the action-oriented part of this and in some small measure help some child, whether that child is being abused in a home or on the streets. I hope on an optimistic note that we can continue to struggle with the issue and have some resolution on some of the issues that are within our control.
We thank you for coming and generating the dialogue.
Senators, thank you for your patience. It has been an extremely long day. We have an extremely long day the following Monday. We will continue with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security in the morning and return to the sexual exploitation study in the afternoon.
The good news is there will be no hearing Monday, November16. That should have been conveyed to your offices. Therefore, if you will bear with us on a very long day next week, there will be a break and a pause down the line.
(The committee adjourned.)