My name is Janet Gobert, and I am of Ojibwa descent from the Peepeekasis first nation in Saskatchewan.

I currently serve as the community initiatives coordinator with the Bonnyville Canadian Native Friendship Centre located in Bonnyville, Alberta, which I acknowledge is Treaty 6 territory and is a traditional gathering place for many indigenous people.

The Bonnyville Canadian Native Friendship Centre is dedicated to bridging the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people culturally, socially, economically and recreationally by promoting communication and delivering effective programming within our community.

In 2020, I acknowledged a gap in service provision that could be addressed by a project called Iskwew Iskowtew, or “where women heal by fire”. It implements promising prevention and intervention practices that advance knowledge and enhance empowerment supports for at-risk populations and survivors of human trafficking in the Bonnyville and Lakeland region.

The objective of this program is to reduce violence against women and human trafficking through evidence-based programming, which includes, but is not limited to, providing a safe haven where clients will have access to relevant programming and support services. Utilizing a wraparound approach, our holistic crisis support mentor, peer support worker, indigenous wellness worker and critical incident stress management coordinator deliver consistent programming with traditional knowledge keepers who share their understanding on site in addition to providing access to land-based activities and cultural ceremonies.

During the development of this program, I acknowledged that assisting indigenous women and girls transitioning out of sex work would require the support of numerous organizations within the community to address issues such as education, housing, employment, mental health and substance abuse issues. Hence, a board indicative of the aforementioned was established.

It was noted within our meetings that there are three essential components that are necessary to the creation of social and political change within the sex trade. These are social services, law enforcement and community education. I would like to address the latter.

With regard to our service area, it was identified that our program needed to concentrate on community education. Within our community and surrounding area, human trafficking is not acknowledged, and this is a barrier that we need to overcome. It was duly noted that opening this Pandora's box within the community would need to be navigated with accurate information, education and promotional tools in order to be effective. This component of our program will be executed no later than September of 2021, with continued ways of change in its wake.

The debate that surrounds laws and regulations placed upon prostitution-related offences is rooted within a framework that distinguishes prostitution as either sex work or sex trafficking. As the former represents a choice in regard to prostitution, the latter represents forcible containment within the sex trade. As legal responses to prostitution-related activities vary depending on a community's social, political and economic commitments, criminalizing sex trafficking victims renders their experiences of violence and labour exploitation less visible, thus producing a tendency to discount the human rights of women involved in sex trafficking.

As sex trafficking in Canada is inherently harmful and dangerous, specifically towards indigenous girls and women, a public policy change must be enacted in order to address such issues. The issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is a sociological phenomenon in Canada that is entrenched within Canadian policies, laws and institutions. In Canada, indigenous women and girls form only 2% of the total population, yet they constitute 16% of the total population of women who are murdered or go missing.

Traffickers choose vulnerable, exploited women because they are perceived as expendable, thus reducing them to the status of a mere sex object rather than an actual human being. Often we have victim-blamed these women for their own murders due to their high-risk lifestyle, such as working in the sex trade, whether by force or by choice.

By creating a program in the Lakeland region that addresses issues such as education, employment, housing, mental health and treatment services, we make it much simpler to create an exit strategy for women within the sex trade. As indigenous women and girls in Canada face these socio-economic issues, this project could help to reduce the rate at which these women are involved in human trafficking, go missing or are murdered.

Finally, the lack of knowledge surrounding sex trafficking and the laws that pertain to its origin are why it is so difficult to detect the sex trade as well as to exit from it. It is integral to understand that these women live their lives in the community as grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters and friends.

I would like to thank each one of you for this opportunity to share our new program initiative with you.

Thank you.

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