Truckers Against Trafficking expands mission to Canada

September 19, 2019

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A new partnership aims to fight human trafficking in Canada.

Truckers Against Trafficking is partnering with the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking to raise awareness of both the issue and a new hotline for reporting trafficking to Canadian authorities.

As trafficking is a global problem, and with the natural industry overlap between the U.S. and Canadian borders, TAT is indeed expanding its programming into Canada,” said Kendis Paris, executive director of Truckers Against Trafficking.

Paris said the groups plan to have a coalition build event from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Thomson Reuters Customer Care Center on Oct. 29 in Toronto.

Paris says the groups will “call on all of our U.S. partners with Canadian counterparts to help us bring the critical stakeholders to the table.”

“It is imperative that just as the private and public sectors have united here in the States to combat this crime, that the major Canadian players follow suit,” she said. “We are already excited by the interest our launch announcement is generating.”

In May, the Canadian Centre launched a hotline to provide resources for victims and survivors. According to the Centre’s website, people should contact the hotline “if they are victims/survivors of forced prostitution or forced labor, think they might be or think someone else might be.”

Hotline Response Advocates also take tips, answer questions and forward information, when appropriate, to law enforcement. The hotline number is 833-900-1010, and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Human trafficking involves the recruitment, transportation, harboring and/or exercising control, direction or influence over the movements of a person to exploit that person, typically through sexual exploitation or forced labor. The victims, who are mostly women and children, are deprived of their normal lives and coerced to provide their labor or sexual services all for the direct profit of their perpetrators. Exploitation often involves intimidation, force, sexual assault and threats of further physical violence to themselves and even their families.