Taking steps to help Manitoba kids in crisis

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This article was published 07/03/2018 (2927 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Those who are working to combat a scourge of child sexual exploitation in the city say even when they’re able to get children off the streets, there’s too often nowhere for them to go.

“We need more resources out there,” said Winnipeg Police Service Staff Sgt. Darryl Ramkissoon, who oversees the missing persons/counter-exploitation unit.

“When we have individuals that are being exploited, there’s not enough resources out there to put them into safe locations or to have counselling or to have addictions treatment.”

Ramkissoon and other members of the police force are running training sessions this week to bring together police, Child and Family Services agencies and non-profit Indigenous organizations such as Ndinawe and Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre, united in a common goal: to protect children most at risk of sexual exploitation amid a growing trend of online ads for sexual services that victimize young girls on social media and make predators more difficult to catch.

It’s the second, three-day training session to happen at WPS headquarters since last October, brought back because of demand from front-line workers who want to know how to spot the signs a child may be a victim of exploitation, and how to properly ask them questions about their experiences without risk of harming a future police investigation.

For police, it’s an opportunity to learn from outreach workers, Ramkissoon said.

“These outreach agencies, they already know or have a good inkling of who might be exploited, whereas the police, we don’t necessarily know that right off the bat. These agencies can bridge that gap for police so we can start working to identify who the victims are and, if possible, predators who are exploiting these victims,” he said.

“We’re coming across these victims, we’re trying to help them, and we try to put them in a safe location, whether it be through CFS or these other Indigenous agencies, and because they don’t have the resources, often these victims find themselves back on the street — and that was pretty much what you saw in the Tina Fontaine case,” he said, speaking about the 15-year-old girl from Sagkeeng First Nation who came to Winnipeg in the summer of 2014, and was found dead in the Red River less than two months later.

On the day she was last seen, Tina was stopped by police after she climbed into an adult man’s pickup truck while he stopped along Sargent Avenue looking for sex workers.

“If I had a magic wand, I would say we need somebody to organize all the resources we have here in the city,” Ramkissoon said. “There’s so many different agencies out there doing similar stuff and the money, the resources, the funding, is spread out unevenly and some of them don’t have the resources to fulfil what a true victim actually needs.”

Melissa Stone, an outreach facilitator for sexually exploited youth at Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre Inc., agreed Winnipeg lacks safe places for youth amid funding cuts to agencies that offered youth drop-in centres and programs. There is only one Indigenous-run safe house for children in Winnipeg, she said, and it has six beds.

“We need appropriate resources and safe homes for these kids, because if you don’t have that, then you’re not giving them what they need. They want a family,” Stone said.

“It’s horrible because we have all these girls that have been murdered that have been changing things. It shouldn’t need that. We should be preventative, we shouldn’t be reactive to a young 15-year-old girl in the care of CFS found in the river and then the accused being found not guilty to make changes. Kids have been saying this for years. Why aren’t we listening to the kids?” Stone said, noting a clear connection between young people in the child-welfare system and young people who become victims of sexual exploitation.

“It’s circumstantial — what adults have done to make these kids be this way,” she added.

“It’s so difficult to pinpoint to say what one person can do to help these kids stay off the street. It’s not going to be one person, it’s got to be all of us together, people who have the money, the agencies that know how to work with children, Indigenous children, children who are in care, like it’s got to be a collaborative (group) of people.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay