Invisible Chains (2 page)

I asked, through the Khmer translator, what Sevey hoped to do now that she was receiving care and education and was free of the people who had purchased her. Her reaction was a flood of tears. Had I said something wrong, perhaps crossed some cultural barrier?

No, I was assured. Sevey had begun to cry because her future was a scary unknown. She came from a tiny remote village deep in the jungles and rice paddies of rural Cambodia. She had never learned the name of the village, if indeed it had one on a map, nor did she know the last name of her parents or how to find them. Clearly she had no hope of ever going home.

The young girl's experience was tragic but hardly unique. According to a 2000 study by UNICEF, 30 to 35 percent of sex trafficking victims in Cambodia are children, many taken from their homes to major urban centres where they are sold for sex. Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Laotian, and Filipina girls have also been brought to the country to be sexually exploited. Our research during our hundred days in Cambodia framed these crude estimates in dreadful detail. The “owners” of sex slaves search for poor, unassuming, disease-free young girls, preferably between thirteen and sixteen—sometimes much younger to satisfy the demand of foreign pedophiles. These girls on the threshold of adolescence are forcibly sold for sex acts to between ten and twenty men per day, seven days a week.

Each of these child sex slaves is maintained by a
mama-san
who exercises control over every detail of her life. If the victims refuse to engage in a sex act, they are brutally beaten. They're often kept malnourished in order to make them more compliant and dependent
on their
mama-san.
Meanwhile, parents in distant villages may be unaware their child is being sold for sex, genuinely believing the child is working in a restaurant or selling flowers to tourists—common lies told to unsuspecting parents. In other cases, parents offer up their child either knowing or suspecting that she will be sold for sex—a decision that's difficult to comprehend, even given the abject poverty that is the legacy of the bloody Khmer Rouge period. The parents are often paid up front for the “income” their child will earn in the big city; however, that money is now a debt that the child must repay to her
mama-san.
And the debt increases as the
mama-san
charges everything imaginable back to the victim, including food, the “rent” of the room she is sold in, medical treatment, if it is ever given, and fines if men complain about the girl. The system, in other words, relies on physical and sexual violence, combined with financial coercion, to control its young victims for years at a time. As the victim ages and shows more signs of physical and psychological abuse, she's likely to be sold to a lower-end brothel. There, instead of servicing wealthy Cambodian men, foreign travellers, and expatriates, she will be sold for far less to average local men.

There are really only four ways out for most of the victims exploited in this systematic fashion. First, they may risk escape at an opportune moment, but are rarely successful. Second, they may be among the small minority that are rescued (often because their
mama-san
is not paying enough in bribes to the police). Third, they may be killed for persistent acts of resistance or escape attempts, also serving as an example to other victims of the consequences of disobedience. Or, finally, after years of being sold, they may be discarded because they are too costly to maintain or so psychologically and physically damaged that no one will pay to abuse them anymore.

In Cambodia, my team and I helped implement programs to rehabilitate these victims, deter and prosecute offenders, and identify rural villages targeted by traffickers. On more than one occasion we feared for our safety, based on threats by traffickers and others who profited from the situation. At other times we felt almost too
overwhelmed to continue, yet we found ourselves being encouraged by the young survivors whose yearning for freedom inspired us.

My colleagues and I returned from Cambodia shaken by the outrageous conditions we had witnessed and determined to alert others to the need for action, including strategies to help Cambodian grassroots organizations dedicated to ending the exploitation of children as sex slaves.

Having seen affluent male tourists from North America, Western Europe, and Australia audaciously walking hand in hand with underage girls they had rented, I knew that our own nation was tainted in contributing to the tragedy. And yet it was a tragedy confined to distant lands. My naive assumption that sex trafficking was something that couldn't happen in Canada was eventually overturned.

One day in November 2003, I received a telephone call from a reporter with the
Calgary Herald
seeking my comment on a recent human trafficking case discovered through an investigation called “Operation Relaxation.” The case had taken place not in Cambodia, Thailand, or Vietnam but in my hometown of Calgary. This was shocking enough, but the actual location where the women were being held had an even more personal impact. It wasn't in some industrial area of the city or in the rougher down-and-out locales frequented by drug dealers, but rather just a few blocks from an old-fashioned burger-and-milkshake restaurant called Peter's Drive-In, where my parents had treated me and my siblings after baseball games as kids. How could I justify addressing sexual slavery only in far-off places when it was occurring practically in the neighbourhood where I grew up?

I couldn't. And I didn't.

Over the next several years I researched human trafficking in Canada, intent on learning how it could happen here and what we as a nation were doing about it. Operation Relaxation was like a thread I began to pull, quickly revealing a vast web of exploitation that reached across Canada and, indeed, around the world. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trafficking victims in Canada, but they weren't
all from abroad. On a smaller but no less shameful scale, we were guilty of tolerating systems of exploitation in our country every bit as appalling as those in Cambodia.

The response of our courts and government to the situation, whenever it was drawn to their attention, often has been nothing less than disgraceful. No system existed to help victims: Some foreign victims were even treated as criminals—detained and deported, ineligible to receive even basic medical care or counselling. In contrast, their traffickers rarely were charged and, when charges were pressed and a conviction obtained, the sentences handed out were horrendously inadequate.

Most shocking of all was my discovery of a key reason behind such inadequate punishment against the perpetrators: Until 2005,
there was no
Criminal Code
offence of human trafficking.

By the time Operation Relaxation was complete and its discoveries made public, I had abandoned my plans for a business career in favour of the law. Working within the legal system appeared to be the most effective method of dealing with modern-day slavery and, perhaps, would afford a means of healing the scars I had acquired from my time in Cambodia.

In 2006, after spending more than a year and a half seeking answers from the federal government about Canada's failure to protect trafficking victims—as it had promised to do in an international treaty—I enlisted the help of some exceptional law students to draft a report evaluating this country's treatment of enslaved individuals. Canada got a failing grade.

Fortunately, our report received a flurry of national and international media attention, prompting Monte Solberg, the new minister of citizenship and immigration, to promise to make the system more responsive to victims. And he did. Just two weeks later I received a telephone call from Ian Todd, his chief of staff, inviting me to join them as a senior policy adviser. Within eight weeks the minister had approved new guidelines for the treatment of trafficking victims. These guidelines granted victims temporary residence permits
to remain in Canada to help them recover and access interim federal health care and emergency counselling.

The minister's efforts led to the creation of a basic framework for granting foreign trafficking victims legal immigration status in recognition of their suffering at the hands of others—an important initiative, but only the first step toward shaping an effective government response.

The word that best describes Canada's record in dealing with human trafficking is
lethargic.
The United States, the European Union, and many other countries have been active in protecting victims as well as prosecuting traffickers and travelling sex offenders for at least ten to fifteen years. Scholars and public policy experts have been studying human trafficking in their own countries the world over for more than a decade, but Canada has yet to draft a comprehensive response to it within its own borders. In 2007, when I began the research for this book,
not a single person had been convicted ofhuman trafficking in Canada.
Only a handful of victims had been helped, and only one Canadian pedophile had been convicted under Canadian laws that make it an offence to sexually exploit children overseas.

Yet human traffickers in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, and numerous smaller cities and towns are preying upon foreign victims and Canadian citizens alike. Many of these cases are described in this book, documented with interviews by those on the front lines, along with evidence from police and government records released under the
Access to Information
Act. Many of these stories are being told publicly for the first time—to educate, to inform, and to inspire action that will address this hidden national tragedy.

Beyond raising awareness, in this book I propose concrete recommendations for how Canada can become an international leader in the abolition of human trafficking—not only at all levels of government and law enforcement, but with the help of nongovernmental organizations, communities, companies, and individuals. Together we can defend freedom and end modern-day slavery.

INVISIBLE

CHAINS

1

THE RENAISSANCE OF SLAVERY

O
n Wednesday, November 5, 2003, immigration officials and armed police officers descended on Cloud 9 Body Care, a massage parlour just a few blocks from Rosedale Elementary and Junior High School in Calgary. The raid was part of a carefully orchestrated law enforcement mission targeting more than a dozen locations across the prairie city that chilly morning.

The Calgary Police Service assigned the code name “Operation Relaxation” to their eighteen-month undercover investigation into massage parlours throughout the city, which began with an anonymous tip that women from Southeast Asia were being forced to sell their bodies to repay inflated debts for their travel to Canada. The women, some of whom had already been ensnared in the sex industry in their home countries, were lured with promises of a better life. A Thai woman who was living illegally in Calgary obtained travel documents from corrupt officials in the victims' home countries, and then secured student or visitor visas enabling the women to enter Canada. Once they'd arrived, the women were forced to hand over their travel documents, which were destroyed to prevent anyone from tracing their identities and whereabouts.

The traffickers covered their tracks by using bogus identification to obtain real driver's licences for the women in British Columbia. For an average of twenty-five hundred dollars, a “Wellness Centre” in Richmond, British Columbia, issued certificates stating that the
women were trained massage therapists. The fake certificates were sufficient evidence for local municipal officials to issue massage therapy licences. In Calgary alone, at least forty-three people were granted licences based on the fraudulent Wellness Centre documents.

Once in Canada, the women were sold to massage parlour owners in Vancouver, Calgary, and other cities for between eight and fifteen thousand dollars each—not hired or employed, but instead
sold.

In the hands of her new “owner,” each woman was required to pay off a “contract” of at least forty thousand dollars to the massage parlour operator through sex acts with customers. To generate the amount needed to secure their release, the women had to service numerous men almost every day. Most of the women didn't speak English.

Was Cloud 9 Body Care unique or did it serve as a model for similar ventures in other areas of the city? To determine the answer, Calgary police officers went undercover as men wanting to set up their own massage parlour offering sexual services. Within a short time, they had negotiated the “purchase” of several women, along with advice from the traffickers on how to maximize their profits and minimize their problems in handling the victims.

Any amount of money deemed appropriate, the traffickers suggested, could be imposed on the women as the price for their freedom. “We were looking at an eighty thousand dollar contract per girl before their obligations were concluded,” says Detective Cam Brooks of the Calgary Police Service. The traffickers even advised the undercover officers on how to ensure that the women did not attempt to flee or alert authorities to their situation.

“You can't let them go out,” the traffickers said. “You have to keep them separated so that they don't start talking among themselves about how they can get out of this before their contract is fulfilled. You must watch their every movement.”

Based on secretly taped conversations, police obtained arrest and search warrants to raid massage parlours implicated in the criminal network. The owners and operators of the parlours were arrested, and the women found on the premises taken into custody for questioning.
As the dust settled in Calgary after the raids, questions arose about the fate of the exploited women in the massage parlours and the alleged traffickers.

“We see these women as victims, as anyone in the sex trade is,” Staff Sergeant Joe Houben told the media. We now know, however, that the foreign women captured in the dragnet who did not have legal immigration status were detained and deported by federal officials, further traumatizing them and exposing them to the risk of re-trafficking or reprisal. The few women who were legally in Canada were released and soon vanished; police suspect they were sent to other locations in Calgary or moved to Vancouver and Toronto.