Invisible Chains (3 page)

More than fifty criminal charges were laid against twenty-eight people as a result of Operation Relaxation, but the outcome of those prosecutions is much less impressive than the number of charges suggests. Anthony Lee, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-Canadian and the alleged owner of Cloud 9 Body Care, managed to evade police during the initial sweep. Police believed that Lee had links to organized crime in Vancouver. After a forty-one-day manhunt, Lee turned himself in to police, who charged him with a series of offences under the
Criminal Code,
including conspiring to procure a person to enter Canada for prostitution, conspiring to direct or take a person to a common bawdy house (i.e., a brothel), and two counts of keeping a bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution.

Human trafficking had not yet been made an offence in the
Criminal Code,
so Lee could not be charged with that more serious crime. He spent one evening in custody and the following day was released on bail. Two years later, while Lee's case was still making its way through the justice system, Crown prosecutor David Torske told a Calgary court that an “equipment malfunction” had damaged key wiretap evidence implicating Lee in the sale of the Asian women. And since none of the victims were available as witnesses—they'd either been deported or disappeared—all of the charges against Lee, except one, were dropped.

When fines are mere business expenses

In March 2006, Lee pleaded guilty to the only remaining charge: keeping a common bawdy house. Prosecutor Torske told the court that Lee was engaged in “a modern form of slavery,” yet the sentence handed down by Justice Bob Wilkins was a paltry fine of ten thousand dollars. Moreover, Lee was given two and a half years to come up with the money.

Calgary police estimated that each woman exploited in the massage parlour scheme could bring in up to ten thousand dollars per month. On that basis Lee's punishment was nothing more than a business expense, and a petty one at that. In effect, it was like buying a city permit rather than receiving a proportionate penalty for committing a serious crime.

Lee's accomplice and girlfriend, Noi Saengchanh, was a thirty-three-year-old Thai woman with a sixth-grade education who in October 1998 had entered Canada illegally under a false name. Prostituted in Thailand, she drew on her knowledge of the sex trade, joining the other side of the “business” as a facilitator of human trafficking. In July 2004, Saengchanh pleaded guilty to three prostitution-related offences and was sentenced by Justice Catherine Skene of the Alberta Provincial Court to two years imprisonment. After serving one-third of her sentence, she was released and deported back to her native Thailand.

Operation Relaxation did more than confirm that human trafficking could occur in a typical Canadian neighbourhood. It also demonstrated how Canada was ill-equipped to confront modern-day slavery in its own backyard.

“This was before human trafficking was really on the radar,” says Detective Brooks. “We had a great opportunity to further this investigation, going even so far as to get an undercover operator to Thailand. Unfortunately, there was an issue around cost and jurisdiction. We met with the RCMP a bunch of times, trying to facilitate this whole thing. It was frustrating. And it never worked out.”

Staff Sergeant Houben tried to describe the scope of the problem, and the challenge of dealing with it, to the media. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “It takes a more determined and broader investigation rather than local police forces. It's very difficult [for us] to focus on federal issues. We concentrate on our own turf.”

Traffickers and the men who pay to abuse these victims know all too well about the lack of police coordination in confronting this crime, and they use every means available to exploit the situation. Soon after Operation Relaxation and its achievements became public knowledge, several online discussion boards warned men who frequent massage parlours to avoid them in Calgary for a while, recommending that such patrons “go to Edmonton” instead.

Operation Relaxation opened the eyes of law enforcement officials and the courts to the realization that human trafficking can occur anywhere. It also exposed the renaissance of “new” forms of slavery, more clandestine than the traditional slavery practised in many regions of the world through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but just as loathsome and dehumanizing.

A slave in wartime Africa and peaceful Canada

The evil of the new slavery can only be fully assessed through the experiences of its victims, one of whom is Thérèse.

For almost half of her life, Thérèse was a slave. She grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a civil war that various human rights groups have labelled a “war against women.” Parties in the conflict perpetuated the war by recruiting young boys as child soldiers and forcing girls to become “bush wives.” Sexual violence commonly was used to terrorize the population and destroy families. At fourteen, Thérèse became a casualty of this war when her family sold her to traffickers, and for the next eleven years she was forced to provide sex acts to hordes of men.

“She was basically a commodity, sold from one person to another person through all those years,” says Sherilyn Trompetter, assistant executive director of Changing Together, an Edmonton-based
non-governmental organization (NGO) that helps immigrant women. “Since she was a young child, she did not have control over any aspect of her life.”

Thérèse's trafficker controlled five other women, two of whom he eventually beat to death. At one point, Thérèse became pregnant and gave birth to a baby who, when just three months old, was taken away, never to be seen again.

Thérèse's “owner” eventually realized that he could profit more from her exploitation in North America than in Africa, so at twenty- five she was brought to Canada with two other women to be sold for sex. Ironically, a country that continues to pride itself on its role in supporting the Underground Railroad for freed slaves of African origin in the nineteenth century had, by the early twenty-first century, become an attractive destination for traffickers in slaves from the same continent.

In Thérèse's case, however, the move to Canada proved advantageous. Shortly after arriving here in April 2008, she gathered the courage to escape when her trafficker let her use a public washroom. The other women who were brought to Canada with Thérèse weren't so fortunate—authorities appear unable to find them.

New versus Old Slavery

The slave trade has been illegal in Canada and the rest of the British Empire since 1807, when the U.K. Parliament passed
An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
after a twenty-year campaign led by William Wilberforce. First elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-one, Wilberforce is the subject of an extraordinary story told two centuries later in the film
Amazing Grace.
The title comes from the hymn written by John Newton, himself a former slave trader who became a passionate proponent of abolishing slavery—an “abolitionist.”

Under international law, slavery is defined as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” More simply, a person treated as property constitutes a slave to be sold, traded, used, abused, and
disposed of. International law takes slavery seriously. A slave trader can be prosecuted anywhere in the world that he or she is apprehended, regardless of where the crime took place.

Treating people as property offends our most deeply held beliefs in human liberty. On that basis alone, ending human trafficking deserves to be a priority for modern governments. Too often, though, advocates for better laws prohibiting the practice and calling for stiff penalties against those convicted of human trafficking are treated as though they are trapped in the eighteenth century.

The cruel reality is that slavery continues to exist, albeit in an evolved form. Author and researcher Kevin Bales has even estimated that more people are in bondage today than during any other period in history. While many factors distinguish these old and new species of slavery, the catastrophic impact on the lives of the victims has changed little.

For example, “Old Slavery” owners paid high costs to acquire their slaves and earned relatively low profits from their labour. In contrast, “New Slavery” owners avoid legal ownership but earn high profits from slaves whose cost is often minimal. During the period of Old Slavery, owners usually provided at least basic necessities for their slaves in hope of reaping profit from their labour over the long term. With New Slavery, the exploitative relationship is comparatively shorter, the slaves are considered disposable, and the care they receive is minimal, if any. Finally, ethnic differences were important to slave owners of yesteryear. Today, ethnic origin is not important—slavery has become an “equal opportunity” form of exploitation.

Despite these distinctions between Old and New Slavery, some fundamental similarities remain: the targeting of disadvantaged individuals to reap ill-gotten financial rewards, the resistance of profiteers to exposing these systems of exploitation, the complicity of governments either through corruption or inaction, and the crucial role of individuals and civil society in championing its abolition.

Shock and outrage are often the first reactions from people in Canada and throughout much of the rest of the world who bear
witness to human trafficking. Arousing a sense of determination and effective action to address human trafficking is more challenging. In some cases, as in Canada until very recently, no law specifically identified human trafficking as a criminal offence. To deal with the problem, some jurisdictions dusted off old anti-slavery laws as a means of convicting contemporary traffickers, proving, among other things, that our society is generally uninformed about the scope and nature of the problem.

Human trafficking is an affront to our most fundamental rights and freedoms. It destroys lives, undermines democracy, and fuels criminality. Literally a man-made disaster, it affects millions of victims worldwide, funding a lucrative global criminal enterprise.

Most people in Canada, including me initially, assume that trafficking in humans, while it may occur within our borders, exclusively exploits newcomers whose primary objective is to make a new life in Canadian society. However, criminal investigations, including multiple cases documented in this book, are proving this assumption to be hopelessly naive. Human trafficking does not require an international border to be crossed, nor does it necessarily involve movement or transfer of the victim.
Human trafficking in Canada involves the sexual exploitation and forced labour of a diverse array of victims: Canadian citizens and newcomers, adults and children, women and men.

While film and television often portray “extreme” forms of human trafficking, they rarely reveal the more insidious methods employed by traffickers, who often resort to controlling their victims by means ranging from psychological manipulation and deception to threats of violence and physical assaults. Yet some trafficked persons do not necessarily consider themselves to be victims. Not all of them are kidnapped, beaten, and forcibly confined. Some may have known about the exploitation they would be expected to endure but were unable to leave owing to deception, psychological manipulation, coercion, debt bondage, and threats. Physical violence may be used as a last resort, or routinely. However, the most sophisticated traffickers
never use physical violence because they do not have to. No two cases are identical, but all share the core elements of human trafficking recognized by the international community.

The
Palermo Protocol:
Defining the methods of outrageous evil

In 2000 a United Nations conference in Palermo, Italy, established a common definition of human trafficking in the
Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.
The
Palermo Protocol
has widespread international support, with 117 signatories, including Canada. All the signatory nations agreed upon a multi-layered definition of the crime and committed to
preventing
human trafficking,
protecting
and assisting victims, and
prosecuting
the traffickers (the “3
P
s”).

Under the Protocol, human trafficking occurs when

1  an individual recruits, transports, transfers, harbours or receives people

2  by means of deception, fraud, coercion, abuse of power, payment to others in control of the victim, threats of force, use of force or abduction

3  for the purpose of sexual exploitation, forced labour/services, removal of organs, servitude, slavery or practices similar to slavery

If the victim is under eighteen, there is no need to show that any of the “means” have been used to facilitate his or her exploitation. Additionally, under the
Palermo Protocol,
any alleged consent of the victim is irrelevant where any of the means are used. There cannot be free and informed consent when someone has been deceived, defrauded, coerced, controlled by another person, threatened, forced, or abducted.

The women discovered through Operation Relaxation meet this definition of human trafficking. Recruited in Southeast Asia, they were transported to Canada and transferred to massage parlour owners who used fraud and coercion and paid someone in control of
the women to sexually exploit them. Another device used to control the women was debt bondage, a practice considered to be similar to slavery. The
United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery
defines it as a promise to work as security for a debt where the value of the work is not reasonably applied to pay down the debt. The term
debt bondage
applies, too, if the nature of such work is not defined and its duration is not limited.

Wherever debt bondage is present, human trafficking likely is occurring. For the victims of Operation Relaxation, the actual costs of their travel, accommodations, meals, and personal effects were far less than the amounts demanded by their traffickers, which the victims were told they had to earn to gain their freedom. Moreover, the extent and nature of the sex acts they were expected to provide were not defined—and the amounts paid were not reasonably applied against the supposed debt. Simply put, traffickers use debt bondage to exert a form of financial coercion, often enforced with threats and physical violence, to add another layer of control over their victims.