Rahab’s Daughters expands to Niagara

‘‘ The most important thing for our call centres and our outreach teams is to build that trust back.

SHARMILA WIJEYAKUMAR RAHAB’S DAUGHTERS CREATOR

A team of volunteers will soon be making thousands of calls, responding to suspicious ads throughout southern Ontario, in an attempt to root out human trafficking rings and offer support to survivors.

They’re the phone calls Sharmila Wijeyakumar wished she received when she was a teen.

“I ran away from home and I became an immediate statistic. Within 24 hours, I got a job at I what I thought was a nightclub,” said Wijeyakumar.

She recalled a childhood of social awkwardness and the schoolyard bullying she received that eventually resulted in her fleeing her home and ending up in a human trafficking ring in her home country of Britain.

Fortunately, Wijeyakumar survived and escaped. After years of healing and recovery, and realizing there were limited survivor-led anti-trafficking organizations, she created Rahab’s Daughters.

With Wijeyakumar as chief operating officer and her husband, Denardo Ramos, as executive director, Rahab’s Daughters is now moving beyond its American borders, opening a chapter in Canada that will start by serving southern Ontario. The organization offers several programs and services to support survivors, and make it more difficult for traffickers to operate. Wijeyakumar has used technology and data science to develop software that tracks and highlights potential trafficking sites and rings. Trained volunteers then try to directly reach individuals being trafficked to offer support. It’s challenging work.

“Human trafficking victims have zero trust … For most of them, they ended up lied to or coerced into this. And so it depletes the trust immediately,” said Wijeyakumar. “So the most important thing for our call centres and our outreach teams is to build that trust back.”

Rahab’s Daughters also runs a support hotline and will hand out roses or hygiene kits in places such as airports that include the hotline number. Wijeyakumar said the organization tries to offer help to people who need it while also being innocuous enough that it’s not potentially escalating a situation or putting someone in danger.

On top of all that work, she said volunteers will be working to raise awareness in several other ways, whether it’s teaching women and younger people self-defence or what potential grooming for trafficking can look like so they notice when it’s happening to them or their friends.

Ramos runs programs that encourage men to be a part of the solution.

“Because, unfortunately, we’re the cause of the problem. If we stop supporting, I can literally say that 99.9 per cent of sex trafficking would end,” he said. “And so we essentially just educate the men, they go back in the community and they start a positive cycle to try to alleviate that negative.”

Given their delicate work, Wijeyakumar said volunteers often defer to police when it becomes a situation for officers to handle, but she always wants to make sure survivors have a place to be supported.

While it’s still early in the expansion, Wijeyakumar said Rahab’s Daughters is planning a 10-day call centre program Feb. 3 to Feb. 13. Large events, like the Feb. 12 Super Bowl, can provide cover and opportunity for traffickers, she said. As they settle in the area, she said the organization will be looking for other similar large-scale events.

In coming months, Wijeyakumar said, Rahab’s Daughters looks forward to reaching out to other organizations in the field.

For more information, visit rahabsdaughters.ca.