WORKING TOGETHER TO STOP YOUTH SEXUAL EXPLOITATION
by Katherine Dodds Photo is from Onyx youth photography project
Good Company has been working on youth programs and we’ve featured some of them before. Like our partnership with Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) to prevent gendered violence through The Super Power Project. Another of our recent clients has been the Vancouver Community Action Team Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth (VCAT), facilitated by The Onyx Program of the Vancouver organization PLEA.
Onyx provides support services to youth who are or have been sexually exploited in the Vancouver area. The VCAT is a collaboration of community professionals working towards increasing public awareness and creating distribution materials to help stop sexual exploitation. Last year we launched a micro-site for them: www.ASaferSpace.com that featured the results of their youth music and photography projects. We’ll be helping update content from their recent quilting and graphics projects soon. These are wonderful positive initiatives, much needed to showcase a point of view most of us don’t want to see.
Hello Cool World’s Katherine Dodds spoke to Wilf Leung, PLEA Onyx Program Manager and Diane Sowden, Executive Director of the Children of the Street Society (COS). Onyx does more one-to-one work with youth, while COS focuses on parents and caregivers. Last year, COS gave over 500 presentations at schools, from grade 6 to 12.
“When it comes to something negative, like sexual exploitation, in general people think, this is not happening in my back yard,” says Leung. “There is a separation that occurs where people just don’t think that a significant issue like this affects their communities. But it does. And often no one starts paying attention until a crisis occurs.”
Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is a graphic drama that illustrates how sex-trade recruiters lure teens away from friends and family, gain their trust, then coerce them into an often violent life on the streets - sometimes in only 24 devastating hours.
Citing the NFB film as realistic portrayal of what can happen, Leung encourages parents to educate themselves so that they can pass this knowledge on to their kids. Understanding there is a problem will hopefully have an impact in preventing the problem. “It is tough to say what the warning signs are,” Leung adds. “There are trends.” Often it’s unhealthy relationships, youth recruiting youth, and pimps will use girls to lure other girls with drugs, alcohol, promises of expensive clothes and a glamorous life. Films like this can help open people’s eyes to the harsher reality.
Says Sowden, “I know youth who have been recruited exactly like is portrayed in that video. It’s realistic but it's only a portion of the way that youth get recruited. More and more we are seeing the internet and social networking sites being use for recruiting. It happens in every community. It happens differently in smaller communities. Through these summer months of June and July I’ve worked with 13 families that have lost youth to the sex trade.”
She adds, “The average person is not aware of the amount of recruiting going on. We hear a lot about the gangs and drug trade, but what we don’t hear is about how much of this is linked to the sex trade, and that is not getting out to the general public.”
She agrees with Leung that one of the keys to prevention is for parents to know the facts. “Youth will know you don’t know what they you are talking about unless you show that you are informed. It’s very important to show you are capable of talking about this with your children, because most parents and youth are not talking. You need to start young.” (Check out the COS website for a list of warning signs.)
The youth sex trade is not a problem unique to Vancouver, where the NFB film was also made. However, with the Olympics coming to Vancouver, many groups who work on the issue of youth sexual exploitation are concerned about Vancouver becoming even more well-known as a sex tourism destination. This shady side of the city is one not many Vancouverites are aware of.
Says Sowden: “With the Olympics, no one can predict what kind of increased demand there will be for youth. But there is always an increased demand for the sex trade with Hallmark events, and Olympics is such an event. There needs to be education for tourists, about what the laws are, and a clear message that Vancouver will not be a community that will turn a blind eye to this.”
MORE WEBSITES TO CHECK OUT
The Code is an international ‘Responsible Tourist Industry’ initiative in collaboration with ECPAT International, funded by UNICEF and supported by UNWTO. We’ll take a closer look at this in future issues and profile other organizations we’re in touch with on this topic.
We also encourage folks with kids to check out SafeOnlineOutreach.com essential reading now that EVERYONE is online. Including predators, whether sexual or merely corporate (which we also find quite obscene around Hello Cool World).
