Invisible Chains (13 page)

In some instances, the psychological power of the trafficker is rooted not in the victim's seeking to protect herself from physical harm but rather in her attempt to fulfill an emotional need.

“Part of the psychology that keeps her trapped is this codependence which says: ‘I'm going to win him back, I'm going to do this,'” notes a youth intervention worker, who suggests that the mentality of human trafficking victims resembles that of many victims of domestic abuse. “[They think,] ‘If I do this, he'll love me more. You know what, if I do this prostituting for just a little bit of time then he'll love me more. I can get out of it. This won't happen again.' There's the honeymoon, there's the threats, there's the violence, there's the plea for forgiveness.”

Another individual working with trafficking victims, this time with the Salvation Army, also has witnessed the psychological control exerted over victims: “It's unreal the hold these guys have over these girls, you know, it's really hard to break that … especially if they've been in it for some time. Usually their self-esteem is so bad, they don't think they're worth anything else.”

Most people dedicated to assisting the victims of human trafficking agree that many of them don't even identify themselves as victims.
When they define their life experiences, they minimize the abuse and don't consider that they've been exploited. Even when they've been “actively pimped,” an expression used by social workers, they still refuse to define their experience in those terms.

In other instances the methods of control are much more explicit. Law enforcement officers who are battling human trafficking in Peel Region outside of Toronto have uncovered a number of rules shared by various sex traffickers. Simply called “The Rules,” they provide a means of controlling victims to extract maximum profits from them:

1  Phone the trafficker every few hours to check in.

2  You cannot use your own vehicle; all travel is arranged by the trafficker.

3  You must earn a minimum amount of money (a quota) each evening for the trafficker before being permitted to return.

4  Surrender all money earned to the trafficker without exception; if money is needed for food, clothing and hygienic products, it must be obtained from the trafficker.

5  When working on the street, the rule “ten toes to the curb” must be followed to quickly attract potential clients—no hiding in the shadows.

6  When in a strip club, you are not permitted to spend more than five minutes with a potential client without receiving money for a sexual service.

7  You are forbidden to speak with other women or black men in strip clubs, due to concerns about being recruited away by competing traffickers who in Peel Region are predominantly gang members associated with North Preston's Finest (NPF) or Haitian-Canadian gang members who are black [Yes, you can add racism to the list of wrongs committed by these traffickers].

“The bottom line is that the trafficker does not want you to have any relationship besides their relationship,” explains one Peel Region officer who describes sex traffickers in similar terms to cult
>leaders. “That's why you don't talk to girls, you don't talk to anyone in the club unless they're paying you. When you go home, you get in that car and go straight back. When you get to the hotel, you call again—they want to know that you're there with nobody. The girls are isolated.”

This description recalls the strategies of convicted trafficker Vytautas Vilutis. He controlled his victim by forbidding her to buy food without his approval, as well as requiring her to keep her motel room clean at all times and depriving her of a key—a clever tool to keep her from leaving even for a moment because she would be locked out. When Vilutis visited his victim, he demanded that she be freshly showered and have hot coffee ready for him.

Research conducted by University of Ottawa criminology professor Patrice Corriveau and Laval University social work professor Michel Dorais confirmed what earlier studies have found: The majority of underage girls sold for sex “were under the control of a pimp at one time or another” and the relationship was “generally typified by emotional dependency, intimidation, exploitation, violence, and restricted movement.”

Fourteen ways to spot a domestic sex trafficking victim

Since the victims of domestic sex trafficking are frequently unable to take the necessary steps to escape their plight, others must take responsibility for alerting authorities to any suspicions. Any combination of these observed activities and behaviours should trigger further investigation, particularly where the individual is a minor:

1  lack of control over schedule or identification documents

2  unexplained absences from school or work, or failure to attend either on a regular basis

3  chronic running away from home

4  reference to frequent travel to other cities, along with excessive amounts of cash or multiple hotel room keys

5  
signs of trauma: bruising, withdrawn behaviour, depression, or fear

6  signs of branding (i.e., tattoos)

7  lying about age and carrying false identification

8  inconsistencies in stories or explanations, along with restricted or obviously scripted communication

9  irregular physical appearance: hungry or malnourished, inappropriately dressed

10  troubled demeanour: anxiety, depression, submissive behaviour, tension, nervousness, inability to make eye contact

11  being watched or monitored by someone, or appearing to have an overly controlling and abusive “boyfriend”

12  spending significant periods of time with a new friend or boyfriend

13  displaying expensive gifts, such as an item of clothing, jewellery, or a cellphone, with no apparent source of income to justify them

14  substance abuse and addiction

The powerful hold of “trauma bonds”

The abuse to which many sex traffickers subject their victims isn't always about controlling them. Often the motive is to save face with their peers. Traffickers who can't control their victims, or who allow them to keep any of the money they earn, risk being ridiculed by their associates and lose standing in the criminal underworld. Yet traffickers who go “overboard” in the amount and degree of abuse hurled at their victims may be designated “gorilla pimps.”

Traffickers aspire to an almost omnipresent psychological control over their victims. Chantal Fredette, who specializes in street gangs and the girls they force to be sold for sex, describes a meeting with a teenage girl who was convinced that her trafficker had bugged Fredette's Montreal office so that he could listen in on their conversation. The girl, clearly deeply disturbed, explained to Fredette: “He does it because he loves me, to protect me.”

As a defence mechanism against the ongoing harm they suffer, sex trafficking victims may develop a sense of loyalty to their exploiters because they represent the only constant people in their lives. This psychological connection has been referred to as
trauma bonds
and is similar to indoctrination, brainwashing, or Stockholm Syndrome. Dr. Patrick Carnes describes trauma bonds as “a certain dysfunctional attachment that occurs in the presence of danger, shame or exploitation. There is often seduction, deception, or betrayal. There is always some form of danger of risk.”

These trauma bonds help explain why many victims are initially uncooperative or evasive during interviews with police and intervention workers, making it exceedingly difficult in many instances to identify and assist them. Police officers, social workers, and other front-line workers who come into contact with sex trafficking victims need to appreciate that the initial reactions of these victims may be counterintuitive because of defence mechanisms they've built up to protect themselves from relentless trauma.

In some instances, traffickers have even managed to control their victims while they were in foster care, group homes, or women's shelters. One teenage girl was regularly sleeping overnight at a youth centre in Quebec and participating in programs during the day while continuing to be sold for sex in the evenings.

Workers at the Ma Mawi Chi Itata Centre, which assists Aboriginal youth in Winnipeg, have witnessed a similar trend. In six separate instances, men dropped off Aboriginal girls at short-term treatment sites when they became too malnourished, unhealthy, or contracted a serious STD. Once these girls were “cleaned up,” however, their exploiters retrieved them and continued to sell them for sex.

An employee at the Salvation Army's Florence Booth House in Toronto was shocked to find traffickers continuing to control women on the street while saving money by using shelters for free accommodation. “Limos would pull up across the street,” she says, amazed at the audacity of the traffickers, “and everybody would hop in the limo and later be dropped off and come in here.”

In virtually all of these methods of control, the chains that enslave victims of domestic sex trafficking are myriad and largely invisible. Most victims are not kept physically confined—a costly, time- consuming, and risky practice. It is far more profitable, efficient, and safe for traffickers to control their victims through the less direct means we have seen.

Breaking the bonds between trafficker and victim

In sex trafficking cases, victims are often uncooperative and unwilling to turn on their trafficker, even when assaulted. Members of the Vancouver Police Department, Vice Unit, recall a case in which a female victim was assaulted by her trafficker in front of four witnesses but continued to tell police that her injuries were caused by a fall.

Melissa Snow, project director at U.S.-based Shared Hope International, suggests that police officers start by asking suspected victims of domestic sex trafficking questions such as “Do you have a boyfriend? How old is he? Does he take your money?” Snow's organization has also identified intervention responses to overcoming the trauma bonds between victims and their traffickers, particularly in domestic minor sex trafficking cases:

One example of a structured, conversational approach to interviewing sexually exploited youth is the Adolescent Forensic Interview Model, which seeks to minimize the trauma and the number of interviews victims must undergo. Interviewers gather facts in a nonthreatening manner geared to the emotional and developmental level of the victim. This requires officers to recognize that victims, especially minors, have developed a tough shell in order to survive.

Blackmail, extortion, and threats

As a relatively wealthy developed country with a reputation as a human rights champion, Canada attracts foreigners in search of a better life. Many foreign sex trafficking victims thus enter the country willingly, but on arrival find themselves unable to escape the control of their traffickers. Yelena, a girl from a small village in Russia whose sole contact with the outside world was via the internet, represents one such case.

Having encountered an internet ad offering passage to Canada and large sums of money in exchange for work as an escort, Yelena responded and soon received travel documents. Once in Toronto, she was met by traffickers who gave her a cellphone that she had to answer day and night and then took her to a condominium where she was to be sold for sex until she'd repaid her travel costs. While she was repaying her debt, she would receive thirty dollars per day.

“She wanted out of it and didn't know how to get out of it,” says the detective who investigated Yelena's case. “What concerned her most was that they threatened to tell her parents. She was from a small Russian town, and they knew where she lived and knew the name of her parents. And they said, ‘We will tell your parents that you're a sex worker.'” In a remote Russian village, the stigma of
being sold for sex would have brought enormous shame to Yelena's entire family.

Fortunately, Yelena met a health care worker who helped her contact the police and arranged for her to leave her exploiters. Her domination by the traffickers ended but provokes skepticism among some who hear her story. Many people unfamiliar with the tactics of traffickers suppose that individuals like Yelena “knew what they were getting into”—an observation that is both unfair and incorrect.

That people have some degree of suspicion or even knowledge of the possibility of engaging in paid sex acts does not prevent them from being recognized as victims. As one member of the U.S. Department of Justice put it, “They may have come here because they have a better opportunity, but that does not mean they have the option to leave.”

In other instances, newcomers to Canada who do not have strong social networks and are unfamiliar with laws that protect them from abuse make easy prey for urbane traffickers. Joyeuse, a twenty-one- year-old Haitian woman, immigrated to Montreal in August 2008. Soon after, she met Tyrone Dillon, a smooth-talking young man in the “record business” who drove a silver Cadillac CTS and a black BMW. The two began dating and eventually he persuaded her to move to Toronto with him. One night Dillon suggested that he and Joyeuse enjoy a romantic dinner together at a local restaurant, having arranged for a babysitter for her three-year-old daughter. After dinner, Dillon told Joyeuse she must prostitute herself for him and hand over every dollar she earned or she'd never be reunited with her daughter.