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View Carolyn Bennett Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thanks very much.
First, Tracy and Katharine, I would like to know a little more about the need for Inuit specific research and approaches. Could you describe to the committee the link between childhood sexual abuse and addiction, the link between childhood sexual abuse and leaving a community, leaving a family? I don't know whether you have any experience with that. What we've heard more recently, which I hadn't thought of, was about children fleeing abusive foster care. That seems to be under-reported.
I wonder if you would also tell us about your experience—maybe Tracy in B.C., as well—with there not being enough shelters and also the invisibility of the existing ones. In downtown Toronto, for example, the shelters are invisible. No one knows about them. There's no sign on the front. Nobody can find out where they are. I've been to the one in Apex in Iqaluit and everybody knows where the shelter is, and if someone wants to come after somebody who has been so bold as to leave the household and embarrass him, that person knows where to find her.
The solutions are different. Obviously, there are not enough shelters. But even ensuring safety in the shelters is more difficult in remote and rural communities.
I wondered what research you think still needs to be done. What would be your suggestions? I had many patients who ended up addicted because they were numbing themselves from being daddy's or uncle's little girl. That was the way they dealt with that, and then they ended up more likely to be addicted, a street worker, whatever. It was part of the numbing out that needed to happen for lack of treatment.
Can you tell me where you are in the research, and where you'd like to go?
Tracy O'Hearn
View Tracy O'Hearn Profile
Tracy O'Hearn
2013-06-06 18:51
If I may, I'd like to follow up more specifically on child sexual abuse.
Each of the four Arctic regions has now completed an Inuit health survey, which included household questions and also experiences of childhood sexual abuse.
In the one in Nunavik, we know that 44% of respondents identified that they have been the victim of unwanted sexual interference as a minor—44%—but I'm not aware of further, more specific research. Starting to get those numbers was a big step.
Then yesterday this new study was released, from McGill, I believe, trying to look more substantively at the links. As I said, 15% of the group they studied who had committed suicide had previously been sexually abused.
We also need to know a lot more about the experience of women when they come south, because they do flee the communities for safety, absolutely. They come here and it's a different culture: the language, the food, everything is different. They may or may not have contemporary survival skills in a completely different world. Twenty per cent of Inuit are living in the south now. We have to know more about the experiences of women, the barriers the face, if we are to come up with some solutions.
Kristin Kalla
View Kristin Kalla Profile
Kristin Kalla
2012-05-17 13:08
Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentleman, I would like to thank the subcommittee for this opportunity to address you on the issue of sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It is also a personal honour to appear here today, as my mother's family's roots were in Ottawa, going back to the early 1800s, when my ancestors here arrived from Wales and Ireland. It's very nice to be here.
My name is Kristin Kalla, and I am the deputy of the trust fund for victims and also the senior program officer at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. As an international public health anthropologist specializing in women‘s reproductive health, I have spent the majority of the last 25 years living and working in communities that have experienced serious and chronic violence, conflict, and human rights abuses in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, and central Asia. I have seen first-hand that the horrific human costs of war and violence devastate people, societies, and the structures that support them.
It has been 55 years since the United Nations first recognized the devastating effect of the most serious crimes on humanity, crimes such as genocide. Since then the Rome Statute has pushed the borders of international justice, for the first time giving a significant role to the victims themselves within an international instrument combining a tribunal, the International Criminal Court, with a reparatory mechanism, the trust fund for victims, responsible for providing court-ordered reparations and rehabilitation assistance to victims under the jurisdiction of the ICC.
In relation to its first role, the court may order money and other property collected through fines or forfeiture from a convicted person to be transferred to the trust fund for the implementation of reparations awards. However, the fund can also complement such awards through voluntary contributions from states and other donors. Our board of directors may determine the extent to which the trust fund will complement court-ordered reparations in accordance with regulation 56 of the regulations of the trust fund.
The trust fund's general assistance for victims is supported by voluntary contributions. It is implemented before the conclusion of the ICC trial, and is not limited to the victims participating in the proceedings before the court. Rehabilitation assistance may be initiated once the board of directors has notified the pretrial chamber of the necessity to provide assistance to victims and where this does not affect the fairness of the trial, as stipulated in regulation 50 of the regulations of the trust fund.
The assistance mandate serves as a very immediate response to the urgent needs of victim survivors and their families who have suffered from the worst crimes in international law. Through its extensive work in the situations where ICC cases are being prosecuted, the trust fund has created a presence on the ground that can serve to inform the court of victims' needs and the operational realities in the relevant situations, as well as provide a mechanism to deliver reparations. The trust fund for victims is learning valuable lessons about the unique role that an international criminal court can play in addressing the rights and needs of victims of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Through regular monitoring, evaluation, and targeted research, the trust fund is documenting and sharing these lessons to inform its work.
But international criminal law is not victim-oriented, and those who expect redress through international judicial settlements have consistently been cautioned against over-optimism regarding the results. Even as victims' issues begin to take a more central stage within international human rights and humanitarian law, the remedies available to victims have been inadequate and inconsistent.
Although women have been known to play a crucial role during and in the follow-up of violence by searching for victims or their remains, demanding justice, and trying to sustain and reconstitute families and communities, most justice and reparations programs have not been designed with an explicit gender dimension in mind, and there is little theoretical reflection as to what doing so would require.
Situations formally open at the ICC include the conflicts in northern Uganda, Darfur, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya's post-election violence, Libya, and now the Ivory Coast.
Today I will only speak about one situation where the trust fund has been operational since 2007, and that is the DRC.
The eastern provinces of the DRC remain in a state of conflict and insecurity. United Nations reports indicate that five million civilians have died as a result of the conflicts since the 1990s.
In November 2003 the Congolese government requested the assistance of the ICC to investigate and prosecute the worst perpetrators, and in March 2004 the first cases were referred to the court. Trials are currently under way, with a first conviction handed down in the Lubanga case just a few months ago.
Multiple reports of mass murder, summary executions, patterns of rape, torture, forced displacement, and the illegal use of child soldiers have been documented in the DRC. It is estimated that at the height of the DRC's six-year war, more than 33,000 children were fighting with armed groups and close to 30% of the children abducted were girls. Since 1996 sexual violence has been used to intimidate, humiliate, and torture hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Sexual violence against women and girls has been found to be the most common form of violence and the most widespread form of criminality. Rape has become a weapon of war used to punish communities for their political loyalties, or as a form of ethnic cleansing.
The United Nations Population Fund has reported that 16,000 new instances of sexual violence were recorded across the nation in just a one-year period. There were close to 5,000 new cases in Northern Kivu alone. The UN also reported that over 65% of rape victims during that time were children. The majority of this percentage was adolescent girls, and roughly 10% of child victims are said to be under the age of 10 years old. Because the majority of rapes are not reported due to victims' shame and fear of social repercussions, these statistics should be taken as the bare minimum. Sexual enslavement and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence have also been perpetrated widely against girl and boy child soldiers in the DRC.
We must admit that our collective response to this type of violence has been inadequate. And our failure to respond as an international community is magnified over time because the effects of sexual violence linger long after the violent act, undermining and threatening the potential for peace, reconciliation, and security. Often the international community provides support for security, stability, and reconstruction but forgets the short- and long-term impact of sexual violence used as a tactic of war.
The long-term consequences of sexual violence are many, not only medical but also psychological and socio-economic. The medical repercussions vary and include severed and broken limbs, burned flesh, recto-vaginal fistulas, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, and urinary incontinence to death. Adequate medical care for these injuries is very hard to come by in the DRC, and many survivors remain ill or disfigured for the rest of their lives. These are all the more severe the younger the victim is. Young girls who are not fully developed are more likely to suffer from obstructed birth, which can lead to fistulas or even death.
There are also many psychological and social consequences to being the victim of sexual violence. Victims often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and suicide. This can be particularly severe in cases in which men have been forced at gunpoint to sexually assault their daughters, sisters, or mothers, and often with foreign objects.
The most common social consequence for victims of sexual violence in the DRC is isolation from their families and communities. Raped women are seen as impure, frequently leading to their being abandoned by their husbands or having trouble marrying. The most extreme versions of this stigmatization can lead to honour killings, in which the victim of sexual violence is murdered by her family or community due to the belief that she has brought them shame and dishonour. Young women and girls who are cast outside of their homes or leave due to shame will most likely become even more vulnerable to further abuse.
The psychological impact of this type of violence, added to forced conscription and enlistment, only conflates the injuries of former child soldiers in the DRC. Girl child soldier victims of sexual violence face specific consequences from their time in armed forces or armed groups. The social stigma facing these girls is fundamentally different in kind—it lasts much longer, is more difficult to reduce, and is more severe, especially if children are born out of this experience.
A report submitted to the trust fund from a psychoanalyst who supports one of our assistance projects in the DRC highlighted the intellectual and emotional trauma presented by girl child soldiers who are young mothers. Psychologists point out that the psychological effects of conflict on girls differs from the effects on boys. In addition to being, like boys, generally stigmatized and marginalized as rebels, abducted girls have typically been victims of sexual violence. As a result, they also suffer from shock, shame, low self-esteem, and further rejection by their communities and families if they return.
In 2010 the trust fund for victims initiated a study of approximately 2,600 victim survivors throughout northern Uganda and the DRC so that we could better understand the impact of the violence and could assess attitudes toward rehabilitation, reconciliation, justice, and reparations. Interestingly, our results clearly showed a gender dimension related to the impact of violence; that is, violence impacts men and boys differently than it impacts women and girls. Our findings suggest that among the trust fund for victims' beneficiaries, female victims have experienced more severe psychological and social consequences. And they showed that women approach the issues of justice, rehabilitation, reparation, and reconciliation differently than do men in the DRC.
For all questions except one, women reported experiencing more severe psychological symptoms and more negative relations vis-à-vis their families and communities. Women and girls were twice as likely to report that their families were not at all caring. Twice as many women as men reported feeling sad a lot of the time, and just under twice as many reported feeling lonely a lot of the time. A third of women and girls said that they felt distant or cut off from others a lot of the time, compared to only a fifth of men and boys. Overall, 10% of female respondents said that they did not trust their communities at all, and just as many said that they did not feel important in their communities at all.
The girl child soldiers who were raped who were interviewed for the trust fund survey also expressed it themselves: 68% of them declared that they were poorly treated by their communities of origin all of the time, compared to only 26% of male child soldiers interviewed.
In cases where the abducted girls have given birth as a result of rape, they not only suffer from marginalization in the community but are faced with their own daily torment, torn between motherly love for their child and the memory of the rape the child represents. Therefore, we must also ensure that children born out of this act of violence are accepted in the community and are provided with the basic rights and needs that should be afforded to all children.
Our results suggest that the very real and urgent needs victim survivors live with day to day in resource-poor settings, together with the violence they have experienced during conflict, influence opinions about justice, reconciliation, reparation, and accountability. When asked if they feel that they have received justice, over 70% of child mothers who were raped in the DRC said no, versus 21% of former male child soldiers and 17% of children made vulnerable by war.
Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Charges of gender-based crimes have been brought in seven of the 13 cases currently before the ICC, and there are charges of gender-based crimes in the Katanga-Ngudjolo case in the DRC situation.
The trust fund considers its assistance to victims of sexual and gender-based violence a key step toward ending impunity for perpetrators, establishing durable peace and reconciliation in conflict settings, and successfully implementing United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1880, and 1889. To do so, the trust fund has adopted three strategies. First is to mainstream a gender-based perspective across all programming. Second is to specifically target crimes of rape, enslavement, forced pregnancy, and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence. Thrid is to promote women's and girls' empowerment, a fundamental requirement of any rehabilitation, reconciliation, and peace-building process.
Currently the trust fund supports 34 projects, which reach an estimated 82,000 victim survivors and their families in both northern Uganda and the DRC. Of these beneficiaries, over 5,000 survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, including 200 girls abducted or conscripted and sexually enslaved by armed groups and 780 children of women victimized by campaigns of mass rape and displacement in eastern Congo, are supported.
The trust fund supports local and international partners, like Oxfam-Québec, to provide physical and psychological rehabilitation and material support. These are legally defined categories, which in practice can mean many things.
Physical rehabilitation may include reconstructive surgery; general surgery; bullet and bomb fragment removal; prosthetic and orthopedic devices; referrals to health services, like fistula repair, and HIV screening, treatment, care, and support.
Psychological rehabilitation may include both individual and group-based trauma counselling; music, dance, and drama groups, to promote social cohesion and healing; and community sensitization around the rights of victims and promoting reconciliation.
Material support may include access to safe shelter, vocational training, reintegration programs for former child soldiers, support for village savings and loans, education grants, and classes in accelerated literacy.
The trust fund has several projects involving war-affected women and girls as key stakeholders. One of these projects in particular captures both the scale of sexual violence experienced in the DRC and the potential for hope that these women and girls receiving support embody.
For example, the trust fund has been supporting one of our international partners in Ituri province, in eastern Congo, to run an accelerated learning program and day care centre for girls who gave birth while in captivity. Many of the girls face stigmatization from their communities because of their past as child soldiers and the sexual violence they have experienced. For these young women their babies can be an additional source of social stigma, an impediment to their education, and a constant economic burden. Their own parents also reject many of these abducted girls when they return with their children.
Rehabilitation efforts have focused on sensitizing parents of the former girl child soldiers to their responsibilities, so they can become involved in the education and rehabilitation of their daughters and grandchildren, thus reconciling the bond between these girls, their children, and their families.
The trust fund, for example, has supported parent committees and has encouraged efforts of these committees aimed at income-generation activities in order to generate the money needed to pay for school fees. This long-term effort is accompanied by psychological support, outreach, and peer education. The school, supported by the trust fund, in turn gives these girls a chance to regain the education they lost while in captivity and to develop a positive bond with their children.
Now in the fourth year, the project continues to see substantial impact, on several fronts. Perhaps the most immediate and powerful impact is on the strength of the mother and child bond. As they tend to their babies in the centre's day care, the young mothers learn they are not alone and that their babies can in fact be a source of pride. Only several months into the school year, most girls begin to carry their children in public while wearing their school uniforms. It's a very public statement that being a student and a mother is not a source of shame; rather, it is a sign of remarkable achievement.
In South Kivu, the trust fund is supporting action for living together, or ALT, a local organization that has been active in Bukavu since 1999. ALT works with Bukavu's Panzi General Hospital, where it runs the DORCAS transitional house for victims of sexual violence who are unable to return home after their treatment.
Panzi General Hospital treats at least 10 victims of sexual assault daily, averaging 3,600 cases per year. An estimated 16,000 victims of rape, some suffering from obstetric fistula, have been treated at the hospital since 2000. Survivors are often able to stay at the transitional house for as long as they need, and they are provided classes in reading, writing, and handicraft production.
Many trust fund partners supporting victims of sexual violence have caseworkers, social workers, and counsellors on staff to work with victim survivors. One partner in North Kivu, for example, employs an in-house psychologist to help build local capacity to respond to trauma associated with sexual and gender-based violence. This includes training in therapy, interview techniques, and more. As part of her assistance, the trainer works directly with some of the most traumatized of the 550 survivors receiving support from this trust fund project.
One woman who was raped by a demobilized soldier in North Kivu could not speak at first when the counsellor sat with her to hear her story. She could only communicate with gestures. According to the counsellor, she would lock herself in the bedroom and cry every day, disgusted by life. At first she refused treatment, but she eventually opened up, speaking first to the counsellor about her trauma and then to the group of women the counsellor regularly brought together to share their stories. Before treatment, she told them her heart would beat uncontrollably fast. She was consumed by panic attacks. Now, through the trauma counselling, she says her heart is healing. In her latest group session, she said that she had come to forgive the man who raped her and, with the worst of the depression and stress behind her, is now focusing on building the tailoring business she established with help from the trust fund.
It is important for the international community and national authorities in countries like the DRC to support the development and strengthening of judicial mechanisms designed to offer remedies and reparations for victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Although it is impossible to fully undo the harm caused by these most serious crimes, it is possible to help survivors of sexual violence recover their dignity, rebuild their families and communities, and regain their place as full members of their societies.
The trust fund for victims at the International Criminal Court has seen this first-hand through our rehabilitation assistance program in the DRC. Protecting current and future generations from suffering the destructive trauma and costs of war requires that the international community work together to prevent the start and spread of violent conflict. Alleviating the root causes of conflict and providing the impetus for non-violent resolutions of disputes involving women will help create a more peaceful world. The costs of prevention are minuscule when compared with the costs of deadly conflict.
The trust fund remains encouraged by our brave local partners. Many are grassroots women who work tirelessly to support and empower survivors of sexual violence. We are also grateful to governments such as Canada's that prioritize assistance to survivors of sexual violence through bilateral programs in the DRC.
The trust fund at the International Criminal Court relies on the generous donations from states' parties and others to fulfill its mandate for rehabilitation assistance and reparations. Although we have never benefited from voluntary contributions from Canada, we certainly hope that our engagement with you here today is the first step toward collaborating on behalf of survivors of sexual violence and gender-based violence in situations under the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Thank you. I'm available to respond to your questions.
View Joy Smith Profile
CPC (MB)
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm honoured to be before this prestigious committee on this important issue. I'm pleased to have this opportunity to speak to my private member's bill, C-310, an act to amend the Criminal Code, trafficking in persons.
I want to begin by thanking the honourable members for their support at second reading. Legislation rarely enjoys unanimous consent. However, the unanimous consent for Bill C-310 at second reading is very encouraging. There are a few matters of justice that require our careful and constant attention, and there's no issue more pressing than modern-day slavery.
Cases of human trafficking are beginning to appear regularly in the media. For example, last fall an Ottawa man was arrested after trafficking a 17-year-old girl from Windsor to Ottawa and starving her until she agreed to service men. This happened in a hotel just blocks from where we're sitting right now.
You've probably also heard of Canada's largest human trafficking case involving 20 Hungarian men brought to Hamilton for the purposes of forced labour. They were fed scraps once a day and locked up at night.
You may have heard of the 24,000 women and children freed over the past year in China. This is only the tip of the iceberg. This happens here in Canada daily. Modern-day slavery exists in all corners of our globe, and our resolve to eliminate it must grow stronger. Bill C-310 is a very simple bill that has only two clauses but will have a significant impact on the anti-human trafficking efforts of Canada here at home as well as abroad.
The first clause will amend the Criminal Code to add trafficking in persons, sections 279.01 and 279.011, to the list of offences that if committed outside Canada by a Canadian or a permanent resident can be prosecuted in Canada. I will also be welcoming a friendly amendment today to add to section 279.02, receiving financial benefit from trafficking in persons, and to section 279.03, concealing, withholding, destroying travel or identification documents. This will ensure that all offences surrounding trafficking in persons are prosecutable.
Extending extraterritorial jurisdiction to Criminal Code offences is rare and is typically reserved for matters of international consensus. This was noted by the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice as well as the NDP justice critic during second reading. I want to refer to an extensive report on the practice of extraterritorial jurisdiction released by the Law Commission of Canada entitled, “Global Reach, Local Grasp: Constructing Extraterritorial Jurisdiction in the Age of Globalization”.
This report states that:
...most exercises of extraterritoriality are deliberately multilateral, and those which are not are supportable by general international consensus on when it is legitimate to claim such jurisdiction. That is not universally true, however. It is open to Canada to act extraterritorially in advance of consensus having formed: in effect, to attempt to lead international opinion by example.
What is most notable is that the report provides Canada's child sex tourism laws as an example of this, and states:
...one might note that the child sex tourism provisions, though now perfectly in line with international treaties, actually preceded the signing of those treaties.
There are three primary purposes for designating trafficking in persons as an extraterritorial offence and they are as follows.
First, an extraterritorial human trafficking offence would allow Canada to arrest Canadians who have left the country where they engage in human trafficking in an attempt to avoid punishment.
Secondly, an extraterritorial human trafficking offence would ensure justice in cases where the offence was committed in a country without strong anti-human-trafficking laws or strong judicial systems.
Finally, an extraterritorial human trafficking offence would clearly demonstrate that Canada will not tolerate its own citizens to engage in human trafficking, inside or outside of Canada.
Bill C-310 is an opportunity for Canada to again take international leadership in combatting such a heinous crime. We will join countries like the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and Cambodia, which have already extended extraterritorial jurisdictions.
I want to tell you about a joint presentation on human trafficking at the U.S. embassy by Canadian and U.S. law enforcement that I attended just a few weeks ago here in Ottawa. During the presentation by U.S. Homeland Security, the officer reviewed the U.S. legislation on trafficking of persons known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. In the U.S. they have to renew this legislation every three years, and it includes funding, immigration, and criminal aspects.
It may seem tedious, but it allows them to update and tweak their laws. I have to say that the agent was particularly enthusiastic about the changes to the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which extended extraterritorial jurisdiction to trafficking in persons' offences. He expressed how this change was so important for U.S. law enforcement to be able to catch and prosecute their citizens who travelled abroad to engage in human trafficking in other countries.
The second clause of Bill C-310 recognizes that courts and law enforcement would benefit from an interpretive provision to provide clear guidance on what exploitation consists of. The heart of this amendment is to provide an aid to the courts that clearly demonstrates the factors that constitute exploitive methods. In proposed subsection 279.04(2) I have proposed including the use of threats of violence, force, and other forms of coercion and fraudulent means.
I also welcome a friendly amendment to change “fraudulent misrepresentation” to ”deception”, and to add another description of exploitation as “abused a position of trust, power, or authority”. This will ensure that the language is consistent with the Palermo Protocol and international definitions, and it will ensure that this bill accomplishes what we all want to do.
Interpretive aids are already used in our Criminal Code. In fact, the interpretive aid found in subsection 153(1.2) of the Criminal Code provides greater clarity to the courts on what constitutes sexual exploitation of a minor.
There's also an interpretive aid found in subsection 467.13(1) that provides additional guidance on what constitutes participation in organized crime. This amendment has received broad support from Canadian NGOs. For example, the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime has noted that the definition of exploitation in Canada's trafficking in persons offence requires clear and specific wording. The Canadian Women's Foundation states, and I quote:
Strengthening the definition of exploitation in the criminal code creates important clarity for police, prosecutors, and the judiciary and hopefully will lead to increased charges and convictions.
Bill C-310 will not only strengthen the definition of exploitation but will align it with international trafficking protocols.
I believe that's very important.
Honourable members, trafficking in persons is a fast-growing crime in terms of profit, and it is incumbent on all of us as parliamentarians to confront slavery in all of its forms, both within our nation and abroad. Over the past few days I've received a number of e-mails from Canadians writing to this committee regarding Bill C-310. By the way, I didn't solicit those e-mails; they came. I was even surprised at the number of them. They want to see this legislation become law.
People like Michelle Brock from the organization, Hope For the Sold, wrote:
It is essential that we waste no time to protect those who are vulnerable and abused, and Bill C-310 is a huge step in that right direction.
Saskia Wishart, a Canadian currently working for the Not For Sale campaign in the Netherlands, wrote:
Clarifying laws that define exploitation will provide members of our legal system who seek justice the tools they need to properly prosecute criminals who deal in the buying and selling of human beings for the purpose of exploitation. Similarly, Canada has a responsibility to the global community to implement extraterritorial laws that will allow law enforcement to seek out and prosecute those Canadians who exploit individuals, no matter where in the world they may try to hide.
Betty Dobson, president of the Zonta Club of Halifax, wrote:
The Zonta Club of Canada fully supports the recommended amendments to the Criminal Code in Bill C-310. We cannot allow Canadians to commit human trafficking offences in other countries, and return home to hide.
By supporting Bill C-310, each member of this House plays an important role in strengthening the tools used by police officers and prosecutors, and in helping to secure justice for victims of trafficking, both here in Canada and abroad.
Once again I want to express my gratitude for your support for Bill C-310 in second reading. By working together I know we can effectively combat human trafficking in our country, as well as abroad. I look forward to your assistance in helping me get this law through, as we have cases right here in Canada. We have Canadians right here in Canada—we know where they live, who they are, and what cities they're in—who are exploiting children abroad, and we can't touch them.
Thank you for your time.
Rosalind Prober
View Rosalind Prober Profile
Rosalind Prober
2012-03-15 11:23
Beyond Borders, Au-delà des frontières, is a national, bilingual NGO that works in solidarity with sexually exploited children.
I am president, and I founded Beyond Borders, in 1996, with Mark Erik Hecht.
Our NGO is now the Canadian arm of an international NGO based in Bangkok, Thailand, called ECPAT: End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes.
Both ECPAT and Beyond Borders were founded to combat cross-border sex crimes against children, including all forms of sex trafficking and child sex tourism.
Bill C-10 proposes that human trafficking be added to the list of extraterritorial offences. Beyond Borders early on endorsed this bill, as it includes child sex traffickers and supports the tireless work of MP Joy Smith on the issue.
Ethical cosmetics company The Body Shop raised awareness of this issue with Beyond Borders. Over half a million Canadian customers signed a petition asking the government to do more to stop child sex trafficking. This bill validates the incredible efforts of that company and its staff. Canadians clearly want child sex traffickers held accountable wherever they choose to abuse and exploit vulnerable children for profit.
Extraterritorial crimes against children committed by Canadians are the focus and expertise of Beyond Borders. Thanks to the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Lloyd Axworthy, I appeared before this committee in 1996 on Bill C-27, on child sex tourism. In its wisdom, this committee in 1996 agreed with my suggested amendments and made all sex crimes against children extraterritorial. The committee referred to the new legislation as the “Prober amendment”. At the time, there was, of course, no legislation on human trafficking, as there is now.
Today before us is another bill making human trafficking law, including child trafficking, extraterritorial. What has happened in Canada after our new sex tourism extraterritorial law came into effect in 1997? Well, it has worked to a limited extent. There are lessons to be learned from the last 15 years, which leads to the recommendations Beyond Borders is making today.
Since 1997 Canada has had four successful prosecutions in Canada of child sex tourists abroad: two in Vancouver, one in Montreal, and one in Windsor. That's four in 15 years.
I always enjoy discussing the Windsor case, as it concerns a pedophile priest who got tremendous funding from the good people in Windsor, through Hearts Together for Haiti, to bring technology, etc., to the children in the remote village in Haiti where the priest was sexually abusing the boys. Using that Canadian technology, one of the Haitian victims e-mailed the Windsor funders to inform them of the sexual assaults.
The constitutionality of the extraterritorial law—Criminal Code subsection 7(4.1)—on child sex tourism was challenged in the latest child sex tourism prosecution, R. v. Klassen, in the B.C. Supreme Court. The main issue before the court was whether it was constitutional to apply Canadian law to acts committed overseas by Canadians.
Justice Cullen decided that the child sex tourism legislation was constitutional. He ruled that Parliament has the power to enact extraterritorial legislation, adding that the majority of the world's countries, including Canada, have signed the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.
He disagreed that the rights of the accused under the charter would be infringed when the crimes were committed outside of Canada, stating that the accused was still guaranteed a fair trial in Canada under our charter.
Creating legislation like Bill C-10 is, of course, when it comes to extraterritorial crimes, the easy part. The investigations and prosecutions of our child sex tourists in Canada have been extremely complicated, costly, and a huge investment of law enforcement and prosecutors' time. R. v. Klassen took six years.
Sentencing of our child sex tourists has been all over the map, from extremely lenient to what I would call “fitting the damage done”.
A recommendation from Beyond Borders was proposed recently by another of our legal counsel, David Matas, who appeared before the Senate justice committee on sentencing. Beyond Borders proposed a sentencing commission for Canada. I am today recommending that solution as well.
Post-incarceration, the reality is that not only do our convicted high-risk sex offenders, including convicted child sex tourists and child traffickers, get out of jail, but they also get passports, allowing them access to low-cost, high-speed foreign travel. Of course, vulnerable, young, at-risk children can easily once again become their targets in foreign countries.
Today I'm recommending that Canada use our sex offender registry to have a designation for, at a minimum, all convicted extraterritorial child sex offenders to be declared unfit to travel. Canada has signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, where countries commit to putting children first, not globe-trotting convicted pedophiles and sex traffickers.
There are presently scant resources and too few liaison officers in embassies abroad to combat all global crimes. Another recommendation is therefore that if you're going to take trafficking seriously and really crack down, there will have to be more RCMP liaison officers abroad and much more focus on preventing sex crimes against children by travelling Canadians.
As of December 2011, in a landmark step for children's rights, the UN General Assembly adopted a new optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, establishing a complaints mechanism for violations of children's rights. The new treaty will enable children or their representatives to bring a complaint to an international committee of children's rights experts if they've not been able to get remedies for these violations in their countries. Canada has not signed on to this new complaints mechanism and should do so forthwith.
Presently Beyond Borders is running a national campaign supported by The Body Shop, reaching out by using Canadian male celebrities to speak to all men in an effort to sensitize them on the tremendous damage their gender is doing to children. The demand or perpetrator side of child sexual exploitation results in an endless supply of trafficked children prostituted both here in Canada and abroad. The campaign is called “Man to Man/Homme à homme”. Much more focus in Canada has to be put on child sex consumers, as stopping demand will prevent more damaged children.
It is essential, to ensure global justice for children, that Bill C-10 is supported by this committee. At the same time, it is essential that systems are in place in Canada and abroad to make sure the law will work.
One case out of Nova Scotia, Regina v. MacIntosh, is so disturbing, so full of injustice for victims in Canada and victims in India, that nothing less than a full inquiry is necessary to ensure a global child abuse case like this never happens again. Previously convicted sex offender MacIntosh, while under warrant status in 1995 for 43 new child sexual abuse charges of many Nova Scotia boys, lived in India for 11 years in flight from justice. He got passport renewals to stay there, travelled back and forth from India to Canada, and was reported by the Toronto Star to be sexually exploiting boys in India. He twice got visas, while wanted for sex crimes here, to bring an Indian boy to Canada with him. That boy, according to the Toronto Star, joins many other Indian boys who say they were abused by this Canadian, in India or here.
Every system put in place to stop sex crimes abroad, including the extradition system, was bungled. The law on child sex tourism was ignored. Officials in India were widely quoted in the papers saying they were dumbfounded that a wanted Canadian had access to Indian boys for years and years and they were never aware that he was previously convicted and also wanted. They are stunned that he, remarkably, was getting passport renewals and visas to travel with minors while under warrant status. The Canadian passport office was asleep, at best.
A first recommendation, obviously, coming out of this case is that Canadians under warrant status for sex crimes, including trafficking, should not get passport renewals.
Holding global child sex traffickers accountable wherever they exploit and not providing a safe haven for them here, if detected in another country and they flee home, is necessary at this time of globalization, cyber-pimping, and trafficking. The law is constitutionally valid.
We can no longer turn a blind eye to those Canadians who befriend, romance, control, abuse, and then traffic children in countries like the Dominican Republic, sadly a Canadian biker gang hangout.
Thank you.
Rosalind Prober
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Rosalind Prober
2012-03-15 11:55
There's an appeal to the Supreme Court. I should be clear about that. So any inquiry would be if it goes to the Supreme Court. After that.... If it doesn't, hopefully then it would carry on.
Rosalind Prober
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Rosalind Prober
2012-03-15 11:56
No. The only reason I'm really raising this case is in regard to the systems that have to be in place if you're going to do extraterritorial, if you're going to have an extraterritorial law and make it effective. Everybody has to be up to speed. Everybody has to be trained. I might turn this over to our legal counsel to talk about....
But generally that's why I'm raising this. It's great that we do it, but then let's look at a situation where things fall apart. Or there's the other case, the case of Wrenshall. He was an individual who unfortunately set up a brothel in Bangkok. That would be an instance where an individual would be held accountable for human trafficking in Bangkok and couldn't be. He was held accountable by the United States; they caught him in England and brought him back on conspiracy charges because he was actually offering the boys to American citizens. So there wasn't anything there for him at the time.
But I don't know if Mark wants to add anything.
Mark Erik Hecht
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Mark Erik Hecht
2012-03-15 11:57
I will just add that with the work Beyond Borders does, we're always very cautious not to promote any kind of amendment to legislation that would be really operating in a vacuum. So with respect to the other times we've presented in front of committees, what we always tried to raise was the fact that there has to be a more integrated kind of approach to this. It's very good if we get the legislation in. That's definitely very important and necessary. But we also have to ensure that whatever we do on the criminal side works closely with the other protocols in place, as, for example, immigration, which was raised, but also specifically with the MacIntosh case, the whole issue of the passport offices and the role they play in helping enforce extraterritorial legislation.
That's why we always try to bring it up, so people are aware that it's not only the work that's being done in this committee, but the effect the work in this committee has on work going on in other areas of the federal government.
View Sean Casey Profile
Lib. (PE)
View Sean Casey Profile
2012-03-15 11:58
Ms. Prober, you referenced another case with respect to someone who set up a brothel and was ultimately pursued in the United States.
That leads me to my next question. In terms of particular cases that we could point to, where there is a gap in our legislation that this addresses, are there particular cases that this addresses? Or is this a problem that is pervasive and can't be reduced down to individual cases that we're dealing with?
I pose that question for you, but I expect there may be others on the panel who would like to address that as well.
Rosalind Prober
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Rosalind Prober
2012-03-15 11:59
When you look at the issue of child sex trafficking, it is generally the local or national children in Canada who are trafficked. Certainly that is a reality. In fact, I don't think we have before the courts any cases involving trafficking of children that are not, at the moment, involving local children, not children brought into Canada. Generally, if you look at sex trafficking, the use of children for profit, it's a local phenomenon.
You actually mentioned the United States. Sometimes I worry about the United States getting too much of a pat on the back. In actual fact, the money from The Body Shop in the United States with our American ECPAT group went to bringing in legislation so that children in prostitution are not arrested. It may well be that the United States has looked very closely and done some good work about trafficking foreigners into the United States, but in terms of children in the United States, they are way behind the eight ball, and they still arrest them in many states.
Back to your question, is this going to address a phenomenon or is a phenomenon out there, as I think you are asking? One of the things—
View Sean Casey Profile
Lib. (PE)
View Sean Casey Profile
2012-03-15 12:00
I'm asking more whether there are specific cases where prosecutions have failed because we don't have this bill. That's where I'm going.
Rosalind Prober
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Rosalind Prober
2012-03-15 12:00
I think if you look at the polygamists in B.C., we know full well that the polygamists in B.C., the FLDS, were going into the United States and bringing back and forth child brides. That would certainly be an incidence where criminal activity was going on and there was no legislation to prevent it.
View Joy Smith Profile
CPC (MB)
We know right now of cases that are sitting there. We know Canadians right now who are doing exactly that. They have brothels. We have a man who set up a brothel in Haiti. Publicly I hate to say too much because we're just waiting for this bill to get through. His youngest victim is four years old. Not only that, he comes back to Canada and he continues what he does to Canadian children. It's a matter of putting as many tools in place for police officers so they can grab these cases.
If you look at our history right now, we had Bill C-49, our first trafficking bill, which had royal assent in 2006. That's a brand-new law. Then my bill went through, Bill C-268, mandatory minimums, and now we're getting more tools for them. If you look at the grid, we used to have no trafficking cases. To date we have 19 human trafficking cases in Canada with specific charges related to Bill C-268, and we have 55 human trafficking cases now before the courts that are related to other laws that we have here in Canada. Of the 19 cases or 55 cases, what I am trying to get across is we used to have none. Now, suddenly because we have put those laws in place, they are catching these people, and with Bill C-310.... I know right now of one case extremely close to the Hill that we've been looking at for some time.... We can't touch him unless he goes through the States, and he doesn't.
Timea E. Nagy
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Timea E. Nagy
2012-03-15 12:03
There's one area that has been overlooked, which I haven't mentioned yet.
There hasn't been any prosecution about this type of trafficking. That's simply because there is nothing for the prosecutor to even do any cases on. There's one thing that's very well-known and that has been happening for some years now and is becoming worse by the month. Our Canadian girls are being lured by Canadian traffickers to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Miami. Girls are leaving Canada to find their dream boyfriend in Las Vegas. The situation is so bad down there that the Las Vegas police have a unit called “PIMP task force”. They actually have a database on Canadian traffickers. And nobody can touch them.
Thank you.
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