Stratford-area school boards working with local partners to combat child exploitation

Two local school boards are working together with provincial police, local victim services and 25 community agencies and partners across Huron and Perth counties to prevent and combat child exploitation and human trafficking.

Earlier this week, the Avon Maitland and Huron Perth Catholic district school boards hosted their annual school service advisory council symposium after a three-year hiatus.

“The symposium itself is a collaboration of all the community partners who have staff working in our (school) communities, so those providing either one-to-one support or group support or classroom-based presentations,” said Avon Maitland mental-health lead Heather Hirdes, who co-chairs the school service advisory council with Kaitie Westbrook, her counterpart at the Catholic school board.

“This year, we focused on child exploitation and human trafficking,” Hirdes added. “Last year, the (Education Ministry) mandated that the school board do some prevention work around human trafficking in schools. So Avon Maitland had partnered with victim services to work on a curriculum for grades 7 and 8 students, and the Catholic board is looking at that program for this year. And then for children’s mental-health week in May, we did a caregiver mini-series, and one of those presentations was for caregivers around human-trafficking prevention. So really the audience we hadn’t targeted yet was our service providers. It really made sense… to make sure we had a common understanding of our local context and a common framework for which we were going to address it.”

At the symposium, service providers had the opportunity to learn about child exploitation and human trafficking in Huron and Perth counties from provincial police and victim services, and gain a better understanding of the programs and services in both counties that address those issues through awareness and education .

With a total of 60 people in attendance, Hirdes said the discussion allowed the service providers to identify opportunities to work together on education and awareness issues while also identifying current trends and gaps in programming that need to be addressed.

“The one piece that came up was, ‘How do we work with our youth around consent and understanding consent, and when is it too early to start those conversations?’ ” she said. “You had each of the different agencies coming up with ideas, so there was some really good next steps and collaboration that came out of the discussion. … (The) OPP also told us there’s been an increase in young men being victimized through online gaming. … They’re all online and they have these friends or partners who engage in relationships with them, ask them to share explicit photos … and then it’s extortion.

“They end up being blackmailed. …We do a lot of work around our young women, but we need to concentrate more about creating that online safety in the gaming world.”

The idea behind the symposium and the ongoing collaboration between the school boards and their community partners is to give those service providers the tools and knowledge needed to create safer, more supportive environments for young people while also giving them the information and support they need to stay safe online and in the community.

“We’ve seen a move towards social media and online life, essentially, for our young people,” Hirdes said. “The repercussion from that is we see explicit images being shared all the time and children being victimized that never would have been before. … So how do we do that education so there isn’t this exploitation of our young people and that they know those risks and they’re doing those pieces to protect themselves?

“The intention of the discussion was child exploitation and human trafficking in our local region, but what came out of it was online safety, consent, those gaps that we haven’t addressed yet, collaboration and those pieces around what’s happening in our everyday practice to combat the fallout as we move to a more technology based society.”

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