Hello! Ashley here, I’m Programs Coordinator here at The Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking and I wanted to detail a 10-day cross-border, anti-human trafficking experience that I undertook just last month. I was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to take part in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) to learn best practises, solutions and anti-human trafficking efforts. Seven Canadians were chosen for the knowledge exchange including provincial, municipal and federal law enforcement personnel, two crown prosecutors and myself.
We often hear that the U.S. is around 10 years ahead of Canada in addressing the epidemic human trafficking. Some of what I saw on my exchange confirmed that notion, but I also saw examples of iniatiaves that are like those underway here in Canada. At the State and the municipal level, there are inter-agency task forces, service provider collaboratives and sexual assault coalitions working together to ensure they collaborate to service victims of trafficking, support survivors and their families and identify gap areas.
To learn about the anti-human trafficking work the U.S. Federal Government is currently undertaking, our IVLP group met with representatives from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees who behind the successful Blue Campaign. ICE has partnered with the Association for Convenience Store and Fuel Retailing, shopping malls, concert venues, local DMVs, gaming committees, and hotel associations nation-wide to more broadly disseminate their HT awareness materials. They have trained over 100,000 airline employees on the signs of human trafficking and have also trained over 500,00 law enforcement officials. This ‘outside the box’ thinking on partnerships in the anti-trafficking field is no-doubt something that could be easily replicated here in Canada.
The Department of Health and Human Services compiles the annual Trafficking in Person (TIP) Report, which objectively evaluates 187 countries on the ways in which they are addressing (or failing to address) trafficking. The U.S. government spends $265 million on 945 anti-trafficking initiatives worldwide. The U.S. government is also working to standardize training for front line workers, has developed national screening tools for runaway children and toolkits for Indigenous youth. The Department of Health and Human Services is addressing the challenges around centralized data collection. Through their partnership and support of Polaris’s National Human Trafficking Hotline, the government is using federal and NGO data sources to develop integrated and informed approaches to existing systems with a special focus on target populations. Canada has fragmented, outdated and non-standardized data collection on human trafficking incidence, victims, arrests, convictions and typologies. Some of these deficiencies will be addressed through the Centre’s proposed Canadian human trafficking hotline statistics.
The Federal Department of Labour (DOL) has 900 investigators spread out across the U.S. who investigate complaints about labour trafficking, child labour and labour exploitation and, regardless of immigration status, work to provide restitution of lost wages. Interestingly, tips about illegal behavior on the part of the employers often comes from business competitors or family members of exploited workers. Additionally, DOL investigators do outreach to employers working in lower-skilled industries, such as manufacturing and agriculture, to inform them of their responsibility to adhere to federal/state employment standards. The Department of Labour has partnerships with some foreign embassies who typically see large numbers of their citizens travel to the U.S. for work. Some of these labourers are illiterate and pamphlets that are traditionally handed out at visa offices are virtually useless. The DOL partnerships work to ensure that seasonal and low skilled workers are aware of their rights before they enter the U.S., and, before they become potential victims of forced labour. To read more about the DOL’s work on human trafficking, click here.
Victims of trafficking with no immigration status in the U.S. can apply for a T-visa which gives them (and their family) temporary immigration relief and the legal ability to work as they interact with the justice system. There are 5,000 T-visa available per year, but less than 1/3 of that number are granted. The burden to prove the seriousness of the trafficking situation is on the victim and they must also cooperate with law enforcement investigations. These two requirements of the T-visa program can be very challenging for individuals. The T-visa is valid for up to four years, whereas the Temporary Resident Permit (TPR), issued to victims of crime in Canada, is valid for only 180-days and requires more frequent renewal. For more info on T-visas, click here. To learn about TRP’s in Canada, you can click here.
The Boston Family Justice Center (Boston, Massachusetts) is my favourite example of a best practice that can be replicated here in Canada. Survivors, victims of human trafficking and their families can access the emergency and long-term services they need all in one location. Having the service providers co-located makes navigating the system easier for clients and allows more collaboration between the service agencies. The Family Justice Centre offers peering mentoring by Survivors of trafficking and support services for trafficked youth. There is an opioid specialist on site, forensic interview rooms, child advocates and a youth drop-in centre. For more info on The Boston Family Justice Centre, click here.
As we visited police and service providers in both Boston and then in Portland, Maine, we repeatedly heard how interlinked trafficking was to the opioid epidemic in those states. In Boston, traffickers are recruiting women and girls outside methadone clinics. Many of those engaged in commercial sex work in New England have drug dependencies. In Washington, we learned about the links between large transnational gangs and sex trafficking. We heard that commercial sexual exploitation was often inter-generational, meaning traffickers have parents who were traffickers or sex industry workers themselves. Police, working on this issue, also clearly understand that certain life events and systemic oppression make woman and girls vulnerable to sex trafficking. Police are realizing that exploited women are victims and that in all my years of writing reports and arresting her that never helped her.” While individual police officers understand that vulnerable women and girls are often victims, not criminals, I’m unsure if state or federal legislation will change to sufficiently reflect this thinking, like it has in Canada.
U.S. and Canadian Police have confronted many of the same human trafficking enforcement challenges such as victim identification, victim support and turning charges into convictions. Many police services have indicated that John sweeps should be done with more frequency to address the demand for commercial sex and child sexual abuse. Boston Police assert that there are approximately 9,000 searches for the purchase of commercial sex in the Boston-area on any given day. We also heard about the desire to develop a statewide human trafficking data-base with a point system for HT indicators, convictions and case notes which would help the various levels of law enforcement officers collaborate and identify child victims more efficiently.
The Canadian IVLP delegation met with film maker and former Olympian Mary Mazzio of 50 Eggs Productions. Mary premiered her film, I Am Jane Doe in 2017. This poignant documentary highlights the legal suit brought by three children who were sold for sex on Backpage.com. Backpage, is the largest, global brothel in existence, and there is evidence that management and staff knowingly facilitated the commercial exploitation and sale of children for sex on their website. The owners of Backpage have chosen to shield themselves from legal wrongdoing by using the U.S. Federal Communications Decency Act to protect their right to free speech online. Mary’s most recent film, I am Little Red was developed in collaboration with child sex trafficking survivors as a human trafficking awareness tool for kids. Mary is a dedicated advocate who continues to champion the voices of Survivors in the fight against the Backpage in the U.S. Senate. I am Jane Doe is currently streaming on Netflix, you can find out more by clicking here.
One of The Centre’s main objectives is to promote the replication of best practises and reduce duplication of efforts. As you may know, The Centre is working to design, develop and launch a national human trafficking hotline for Canada. With technical assistance from the Washington based Polaris, our expected launch is Fall 2018. On the IVLP exchange, our group had a chance to visit with Polaris and see their hotline operations in action. Polaris is a leader in the anti-trafficking field and world expert on global hotlines. Polaris receives approximately 270 calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline per day and have identified over 31,000 human trafficking cases to date. Polaris has revealed that they have already had over 500 suspected human trafficking calls from Canadian sources in the last 5 years. Polaris has many best practises and successful disruption initiatives that The Centre hopes to implement here in Canada. To learn more about the work that Polaris does you can click here. To learn more about future Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline click here.
I also had the opportunity to see the incredible work National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is doing to locate the over 400,000 kids that are reported missing per year. NCMEC focusses on 1) Finding Kids 2) Reducing Exploitation and 3) Prevention. They are one of only 2 non-law enforcement agencies that can access the National Crime Info Centre, they provide forensic age progression imaging services, family reunification and track failed abduction attempts. NCMEC has a dedicated cyber sex trafficking team because there is often a direct connection between sex trafficking and missing child reports. NCMEC believes that 1 in 6 missing kids reported are likely sex trafficking victims, 85% of those child victims of trafficking were runaways from foster care homes and 95.6% of the child sex trafficking victims were female. NCMEC works with various field partners to provide robust tips and detailed case information to law enforcement which assists with the recovery of missing children.
The United States is more advanced than Canada in addressing human trafficking in many respects and it is evident that Canada’s anti-human trafficking strategy needs to be better coordinated, more integrated and robustly funded. It would immensely valuable to replicate a similar version of this IVLP tour at the federal and provincial level within Canada. This would allow actors in the field to see what each department is doing, what programs they are funding, the grants that are available and how each level of government can work together to reduce human trafficking and meet the needs of victims. The connections I made with both the Canadian IVLP members and American field partners are extremely valuable particularly as The Centre moves forward with our work on the Canadian human trafficking hotline. I am excited to take the interesting and innovative projects and partnership ideas that I learned forward, and of course, to continue to advocate for systems change, which will assist in ending this human rights abuse here in Canada.
written by: Ashley Franssen-Tingley, Programs Coordinator, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking