York Region District School Board (YRDSB) was the first school board in the province to develop an anti-sex trafficking protocol and now they're sharing resources with other school boards across the province.
When Minister of Education Stephen Lecce announced the Keeping Students Safe policy in July 2021 — a mandate that school boards have an anti-sex trafficking protocol in place by Jan. 31, 2022 — YRDSB was already way ahead of the game.
After a presentation and information session around sex-trafficking was made to secondary school teachers in 2017, the board began to develop training, resources and a curriculum to address the issue.
"We knew that as soon as we started educating students around what sex trafficking was all about, we would potentially have students coming forward, so we wanted to make sure we put the right supports in place for them and that the educators, as well as the administrators, did everything that they needed to do in order to support the students," said Dawn Laliberte, principal of Caring and Safe Schools.
The board formed advisory groups and worked in collaboration with community partners 360 kids, Bridgenorth, Covenant House, Women’s Support Network, Aura Freedom, U R Home and York Regional Police to create a framework.
Since then, a curriculum for students in grades 7 to 12 has been developed. All principals and vice-principals have received training, with specific training provided to guidance counsellors and social workers who work with vulnerable students in understanding sex trafficking, recognizing the warning signs and how to respond appropriately if a student is being trafficked.
The board made "a conscious decision" to make sure all staff were properly trained first before implementing the curriculum and moving forward with presentations to students provided by the community partners, said Laliberte.
Also deliberate, she added, was the board's decision to forgo large assembly presentations in favour of classroom-sized ones.
"We recognize if you were to do a big assembly how that can trigger and actually harm student . . . We're talking about a very sensitive topic where a student is being sexually exploited. We need to be very mindful, especially if students experienced past sexual trauma, even if they weren't trafficked necessarily but were a victim of a sexual assault that those pieces may end up triggering that student."
According to the province's website, the average age of recruitment into sex trafficking in Canada is 13 years old, making educators "ideally placed" not only to recognize warning signs but to assist with healing by connecting students with the support and community resources they need.
" . . . . Where do we see most of our young people? Where do we have a captive audience? The school system," said Bonnie Harkness, director of operations, 360 kids. "As parents and as a community, we worry about giving young people too much information, we don't want to scare them, but at the same time if the average age of being recruited for trafficking is 13 years old, then we have to make sure that kids that are 11, 12, 13 years old are aware of what those signs are or else we're not protecting them."
Knowing that YRDSB had "done so much of the leg work" already, the province asked its third largest school board — comprised of more than 125,000 students — to be part of an advisory group when it decided to move forward with the mandate, according to Laliberte.
The government also announced a $2.4-million investment in funding for training, resources and to help school boards implement the protocols.
The framework policy builds on the updated health and physical education curriculum for grades 1 to 8 announced in 2019, which includes mandatory learning related to sex trafficking so that students can develop skills to protect themselves against trafficking and sexual exploitation.
A misconception surrounding trafficking is that the risk of exploitation is higher for runaways or kids in foster care, but students from average, middle-class, two-parent homes who attend school are equally vulnerable, said Det. Ricky Ho, York Regional Police Special Victims Unit, human trafficking section.
"In this day and age, unfortunately with social media, people post their life online. So it's not difficult for traffickers to find that information openly from our victims, especially our youth. Long gone are the days where traffickers try to pick up kids in a park. I'm not saying that still doesn't happen, but a lot of them switched to digital."
According to a July 2021 provincial news release, in 2019 Ontario had the highest number of police-reported human trafficking cases in Canada — 55 per cent.
Though human trafficking is an umbrella term that includes forced labour, 99 per cent of all human trafficking cases investigated by York Regional Police are related to exploitation of individuals related to the sex trade, said Ho.
The high percentage of cases in the province is not necessarily a bad thing because it indicates a high number of these crimes are being reported.
"Ontario is doing a very good job compared to other provinces that we have a provincial strategy. That helps bring awareness to the public with this type of crime and now that we're moving forward to schools I think it's the right step. Having educators and administrators aware of some of the indicators and risk will also drive the number (of reported crimes) up in the future," said Ho.
The policy framework is the first of its kind in Canada.
