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Schools use church’s pilot program to help students

Jolene Heida, PROS program manager (right) with Deborah Belcourt (left) and Janet Lyons outside All Saints, Sherbourne Street in Toronto. Ms. Belcourt and Ms. Lyons provide street-based outreach to sex workers and co-facilitate the prevention workshops in schools. Photo by Michael Hudson
Jolene Heida, PROS program manager (right) with Deborah Belcourt (left) and Janet Lyons outside All Saints, Sherbourne Street in Toronto. Ms. Belcourt and Ms. Lyons provide street-based outreach to sex workers and co-facilitate the prevention workshops in schools. Photo by Michael Hudson

By Carolyn Purden

In 2012, All Saints, Sherbourne Street, piloted a program to teach school children about the dangers of commercial sexual exploitation. Now, two years later, and with financial support from the Diocese, the program is widely used in schools across Toronto.

The prevention program is led by the parish’s Providing Resources Offering Support (PROS) project, which offers counselling, support and services to people who have been sexually exploited for commercial benefit.

The program is run by Jolene Heida, who is a social worker at All Saints, and Deborah Belcourt and Janet Lyons. They visit schools and train guidance counsellors, teachers, social workers and community liaison officers (police officers who work in schools). The training has several components, including understanding the culture of the sex trade, becoming aware of the risk factors for young people, and learning the four stages of exploitation – luring, grooming, exploitation and coercion.

Once the training is completed, Ms. Heida and her partner go into the schools – usually Grade 8, since the target age for prostitution is 12 to 14. They show a 15-minute video, which features four young people, two male and two female, who have experienced sexual exploitation and who tell their stories in an age-appropriate way.

“They share some of the precursors to being lured and groomed into this life and they highlight the stages, so the kids can see the manipulation that happens as part of the cycle of abuse,” says Ms. Heida.

The video is followed by a PowerPoint presentation and group discussion. The entire program is designed to arm the students with information and a realistic picture of what sexual exploitation looks like.

Ms. Heida says a lot of kids have recognized being in situations where luring has been attempted, but until the prevention program came to their classroom, they did not have the language to understand what was happening.

“They haven’t really seen it as boundary-crossing or an exploitative relationship, but they’ve had the experiences that the youth describe in the video,” she says. “So it’s been really eye-opening for young people.”

So far, the project has trained 520 law enforcement officers, teachers, guidance counsellors and social workers, and has made presentations to about 350 students, most of them in the Toronto Catholic School Board.

PROS partners with a number of other agencies, not only in prevention work but in frontline work that supports women and young people who have been in the sex trade.

“There are dozens of agencies that we partner with,” says Ms. Heida, and they are across the province. In Thunder Bay, for example, PROS worked with the government of Manitoba and the Alliance Against Modern Slavery to train RCMP officers on how to recognize trafficking and the increased risk for aboriginal women in the area.

Currently, PROS is developing an online web and smart phone app to reach young people who are not in school, but who are at risk or are involved in the sex trade.

“People who have been exploited have phones and they advertise online or they’ve been bought and sold online,” says Ms. Heida. “So we’re trying to increase our presence online because that’s where a lot of the exploitation is happening.”