Preventing human trafficking of children the focus at a Sudbury, Ont. conference

About 250 people gathered in a Sudbury, Ont. conference room on Friday to learn ways to prevent the human trafficking of children.

Chelsea Gauthier, the Indigenous trauma prevention and support co-ordinator with the Greater Sudbury Police Service, said the average age of a human trafficking victim is 13.

"Most people are shocked by that," she said.

"It seems very young and it is very young, but it's actually a very vulnerable age, right? We're looking at the tween ages and it's trying to transition from childhood into the teens and adulthood. And you're kind of not sure where you belong."

Gauthier said the majority of human trafficking victims have suffered from trauma at a young age.

"If you already have some sort of trauma, you're looking for that relationship and that love and acceptance from somebody where it makes it very easy for a trafficker to come in and exploit that," she said.

A focus at the conference was trauma-informed care.

Dr. Catherine Horvath, the executive director and founder of the Ottawa Centre for Resilience, said more needs to be done to support parents who have experienced trauma in their own lives.

If someone is at risk of not being able to parent their children, she said, then they should receive support services as soon as they become pregnant. 

Horvath spoke at the Human Trafficking - Prevention Through Connection Conference about how organizations can support children who have experienced trauma to help them recover.

She said trauma changes a young person's brain chemistry, and can lead to "behaviours that sometimes we find undesirable."

If support workers are aware of why children are behaving in that way they can be more understanding, and are in a better position to help them, Horvath said.

Tiffany Pyoli-York, an anti human trafficking co-ordinator and educator with Sudbury and Area Victim Services, said she presented on human trafficking awareness to more than 5,500 students from grades 7 to 12 last year.

"Every single one of those schools had a disclosure of either human trafficking, gender-based violence or sexual assault," she said.