‘Shameful’ and ‘embarrassing’: government neglect leaves women’s social services sector hanging by a thread 

Daughters, sisters, mothers and friends are being increasingly targeted by sex traffickers around the world. But powerful decision makers in governments across jurisdictions including in Canada have failed to connect the rapidly rising rates of human trafficking with the girls and women being preyed upon. 

A conference room in Vaughan was recently filled with people dedicating their time and energy to changing this. 

Hosted by Aura Freedom International, the full-day symposium entitled “Disrupting the Tides”, aimed to educate and empower advocates who can forge connections with different sectors. From law enforcement to educators and those working in legislative arenas, the key to confronting global human sex trafficking is getting people to care. 

Across Canada, all forms of human trafficking are increasing—sex trafficking is by far the most common. Though hard to quantify the number of charges has steadily increased since 2013. It’s the same for other forms of gender-based violence. 

Between 2018 and 2024 there was a 26 percent increase in the number of women and girls killed by a man, with 187 murdered in 2024. Other forms of violence against women are also increasing in Canada: intimate partner sexual assaults increased 163 percent between 2014 and 2022; physical assaults increased 14 percent (it’s difficult to estimate how many assaults and other types of crimes against women are actually occurring due to historic under-reporting of these crimes, while male-dominated police forces around the world have been criticized for failing to consistently follow up even when incidents are reported). 

Despite the disturbing numbers, and the claims of elected officials who pledge to act on gender-based violence (but do little more than make public declarations of support), government funding has not matched the demand for service from survivors or those looking to escape these crimes.

The partners in the room on February 20 all had the same goal. As the name of Aura Freedom’s symposium states, it’s about “disrupting the tides”; changing the systems that allow sex trafficking to continue and leave survivors hunting for scarce resources. 

“The women’s sector has been hanging by a thread for decades,” Marissa Kokkoros, the founder and executive director of Aura Freedom International, told The Pointer after the event. 

“These funding streams are patriarchal at their core, they create this environment where I'm in the same room as my colleagues who I love and adore and we go back to our desks and we’re writing proposals against each other for the same funding, and it sucks.”

In 2023, the first year of Ontario’s bilateral agreement with the federal government—which provided $162 million between 2023 and 2026—the Province doled $18.7 million in federal funding to approximately 400 service providers. The agreement is meant to be matched with equal funds from the Government of Ontario, but it's unclear how and if that money was divided as no breakdown has been made public by the PC government. Looking at the federal allocations alone, on average, each of the 400 organizations would have received just $46,750 if the funds were divided evenly. 

This is simply insufficient for service providers attempting to assist survivors of human sex trafficking and other forms of gender-based violence to deal with complex trauma. 

“The lack of funding is embarrassing. To me, it’s shameful and at some point, those of us who do this work have to ask ourselves if it’s intentional,” Kokkoros said. “The scrutiny that non-profits go through, the jumping through hoops that we have to do for funding, and then reporting back when we’re doing work to uplift communities and that actually puts money back into the pockets of governments, it’s crazy.”

The event included a number of speakers, including survivors like Callie Love, who is working through her non-profit Phoenix Arise Foundation to educate the public and assist other victims and survivors and Taisia Scobeleva an advocate and frontline crisis worker; Pamela Hart, the executive director of the Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto and Jude Oudshoorn, a restorative justice mediator and professor in the Human Services Department at Conestoga College who works with young men and boys, including those who have been incarcerated for gender-based violence crimes, teaching them about healthy relationships. 

Despite having the same goal, many advocates and service providers who attended Aura Freedom International’s event on February 20 will find themselves fighting over the same pots of government funding.

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer)

During a panel discussion, Scobeleva said real progress on issues like human sex trafficking is slow because the systems meant to prevent and deter these crimes have historically been built up by men and have undervalued and oppressed women. 

“It’s actually the foundation of many of our institutions but we can start to dismantle it by doing this work,” she said, pointing to the often low sentences offenders receive when they are found guilty. This is incredibly rare for human trafficking with only 10 percent of cases since 2012 resulting in a guilty finding. 

Scobeleva, a survivor, said her trafficking was only given two years in jail. 

“This reinforces the idea that violence against women and girls isn’t being taken seriously, not just by our social circles, but by the people who are in place to protect you when it does happen,” she said. 

Including survivors in the policy-making progress for things like training or new accountability measures to be implemented in the justice system is crucial, she said. 

“They know best and know more.”

These reforms are especially crucial for Indigenous women and girls who are overrepresented in the number of victims and survivors of human trafficking in Canada. A 2016 report found that while Indigenous women only make up 4 percent of the Canadian population, they accounted for 50 percent of trafficking victims. 

“Through the Indian Act we were targeted to lose our identity, to lose our roles, to lose our status as Indigenous people,” Hart explained, noting that women play a vital role in Indigenous communities, and when colonizers identified that fact, the women were targeted.

“The systematic issue that contributes to the harm our women face still lives on today, the intergenerational trauma still lives on today and so when you think about human trafficking, you can bridge it back to the narrative that we were oversexualized, we were less-than, so it didn’t matter what happened to us.”

Aura Freedom was founded by Kokkoros in 2013, and has been working ever since to eradicate men’s violence against women through education and advocacy.

Sometimes the latter can impact the former.

As an outspoken organization against government failure to prioritize these issues that are killing and traumatizing thousands of women annually, Kokkoros has seen how that can impact Aura’s funding. 

“We are underfunded, or the funding will go to an organization that is not so outspoken; an organization that has certain people on its board,” she says. “When you are outspoken, we like to think that in Canada we would still receive funding from the powers that be, but that’s not always the case.”

Marissa Kokkoros founded Aura Freedom International in 2013. (Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer) 

Even when Aura does receive funding, it’s always for short-term projects that are not conducive to successful programming for survivors. 

“We need core, sustainable, long-term funding that trusts us to know what we need to do.”

The clear message from the symposium was funding needed to begin flowing upstream. 

“At the prevention end we are constantly pleading for resources. We know it works, we know that for every dollar spent on prevention we save $7 downstream,” Oudshoorn said. “So I think we really need justice reinvestment. I think we overinvest in police, corrections and prisons and we underinvest in prevention.”

It’s a message not new to the Aura symposium. Advocates in Peel and many communities across the country—including police organizations—have recognized the need to try to push funding toward prevention instead of enforcement. 

Politicians in Ontario have not responded.

“No one cares enough,” Kokkoros says of the lack of political will. “You need champions at the provincial level, we truly think they feel it, they know it, they have the education, and we do have some of those, but not enough.”

She pointed to the recent provincial election campaign. 

“Have you heard any of them talk about gender-based violence?”

A CTV News and NANOS Research poll of the top 10 issues among voters did not even include gender-based violence. 

Kokkoros said gaining traction is a constant struggle.

“We are collectively working against the current.”

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