Invisible Chains (6 page)

Additionally, travelling sex offenders choose countries with high levels of corruption and poor law enforcement. When Thailand
began strict enforcement of its laws against the sexual exploitation of children, pedophiles flocked to neighbouring Cambodia, where they were much less likely to be charged, convicted, and imprisoned. This inadequate law enforcement results from two main factors: the dependency of many governments on revenue produced by child sex tourism and the prevalence of corruption.

Transparency International placed both Cambodia and the Philippines in the top quintile of corrupt countries, where more than 32 percent of citizens had paid a bribe in the last year. In 2005, the Filipino police force was found to be the most corrupt institution in the country. The police in Cambodia are also notoriously crooked, and the country's judges are among the least-trusted government officials. Corruption of this magnitude enables foreign tourists to sexually abuse and exploit vulnerable children with impunity, despite local laws prohibiting such practices.

Inside the minds of travelling child sex offenders

Psychologists have identified two categories of child sex tourists: preferential and situational abusers. Preferential offenders are predatory, actively seeking out children for illicit sexual activity. Some abusers ruthlessly target the most vulnerable victims.

For example, after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the Queensland Police in Australia identified sixty convicted child sex offenders who left that region to volunteer in tsunami-affected areas. Very likely, the offenders were looking for opportunities to be near children and to use money, food, or gifts, along with flattery, compliments, and affection, to persuade them to engage in sexual activities. If necessary, the pedophiles would employ threats, blackmail, and even physical abuse.

Preferential offenders are more likely to be caught because their actions are frequent and habitual. In a sample of thirty-six offenders, the Protection Project at Johns Hopkins University found that almost half had jobs with responsibilities that placed them in daily
contact with children or involved children through some other related activity. Fully two-thirds of American men convicted of committing child sexual abuse abroad have done the same at home; they are repeat offenders who target children wherever they can.

It is not surprising that habitual child sex offenders expand their abuse beyond their own borders to evade criminal prosecutions. Incentives to do so are all around them. For years, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) has been encouraging pedophiles to visit poor developing countries as a relatively safe means of satisfying perverse sexual urges. The invitation in this excerpt from a NAMBLA newsletter is blatant and direct:

Weigh the pros and cons of becoming involved yourself in sex tourism overseas. Seek and find love from [boys in your home country] on a platonic, purely emotional level. For sexual satisfaction, travel once or twice yearly overseas. You might get arrested overseas for patronizing a boy prostitute. But the legal consequences of being caught patronizing a boy prostitute in a friendly place overseas will be less severe.

Enticements to pedophiles such as this, along with cheaper international travel, have brought child sex tourists directly to vulnerable children.

In contrast, situational abusers may choose to sexually abuse minors only when opportunities arise. They may also deceive themselves about the true ages of their victims. In most cases, these men either don't know or don't care about the circumstances of the people they're abusing, or that others control the people they've paid for sex.

Whether preferential or situational, these abusers have an identical impact on their victims, and neither group can legitimately claim a moral high ground regardless of where or under what conditions they practise the abuse.

The victims of sexual abuse suffer severe psychological effects, including depression, low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress disorder,
and suicide. Trafficked children in developing countries who are victimized by Western sex offenders are deprived of their childhood. Often they cannot attend school, socialize, or engage in other normal developmental activities. Many contract HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and girls who become pregnant are at risk from inadequate (or nonexistent) medical care before, during, and after delivery. The fate of their babies represents another sad and harrowing situation.

Any sense of self-worth among child victims vanishes with the knowledge that they have no value beyond the passing pleasures they produce for untold numbers of strange men and the money they generate for their traffickers. Most will never see their traffickers or the men who pay to abuse them brought to justice.

Meanwhile, the sexual tourists return to the comfort and security of their homes in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, or, in too many cases, to British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia…

3

INTERNATIONAL TRAFFICKING TO CANADA

M
any Canadians are dismayed
but not surprised that some of their own countrymen engage in sexual tourism, often pursuing children or supporting a practice that depends on enslaved women. They are frequently astounded, however, to learn about the extent of the reverse flow of victims brought from abroad to Canada.

Canada has been very slow to recognize its human trafficking problem. The first major report by the RCMP,
Project Surrender
(2004), estimated that approximately six hundred foreign nationals are brought to Canada for sex trafficking every year, with an additional two hundred being brought for forced labour trafficking annually. Obtaining enough reliable data is difficult, and the RCMP no longer cites such estimates so as not to overstate or understate the problem.

In 2010, a “threat assessment” by the RCMP instead sought to identify the criminal organizations and networks involved in human trafficking. While the full report is classified, the RCMP has disclosed that it identified over one hundred and fifty human trafficking cases between 2005 and 2009. This is just a glimpse into the problem. The assessment does not include cases identified by NGOs that were not reported to police. Authorities concede, “[T]he number of victims reporting trafficking-related crimes significantly under-represents the actual incidence of TIP (trafficking in persons).”

The United States–Canada
Bi-national Assessment of Trafficking in Persons
(2006) report noted, “[T]raffickers are often of the same ethnicity as the victims they control. . In Canada, Asian and Eastern European organized crime groups have been most involved in trafficking women from countries such as China, South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Russia and from the region of Latin America.”

Canada's relatively open immigration policy and its active support of confirmed refugees inspire pride in many citizens. As well they should—most Canadians are descended from immigrants, and while our record in welcoming them is far from perfect, it serves as a model for many familiar with the often intolerant positions of other countries. However, it also allows for appalling incidents of human trafficking, such as the one that ensnared young Manuela.

Manuela was born in the throes of El Salvador's “high-intensity” civil war, one of the twentieth century's longest-running conflicts in Latin America. By the end of the war, in 1992, an estimated seventy-five thousand Salvadorans had died and over a million refugees and internally displaced people had fled their homes to escape the violence.

In the shaky peace following the armistice, Manuela found herself working as a domestic servant. Life was better than during the war, but political instability, corruption, and rampant crime impeded El Salvador's progress.

The environment was ideal for the kind of mistreatment favoured by Manuela's “employer”: He forcibly sold her for sex. Manuela's employer transported her north, first to neighbouring Guatemala and then farther afield to Mexico, where she was introduced to Paulo. In Manuela's words, Paulo was “treating her better than the other guys.” One day he promised Manuela that if she came to Canada with him, he'd stop selling her for sex. He'd even arrange all of the immigration papers and she could pursue a life unavailable to a girl of her status in El Salvador.

Just sixteen, Manuela was young enough to be Paulo's daughter. In 2006 they flew together to Canada, using fake documents to convince
border inspectors that Paulo was Manuela's loving father. Once in Toronto, Manuela realized that Paulo's promise was a lie. Confined to a residence in mid-Toronto, she was forced to have sex with dozens of men daily.

Some weeks later, she managed to escape and flagged down a taxi. In Spanish, Manuela tried desperately to explain her plight to the confused cabbie. Thankfully the driver understood that she was in serious peril and quickly took her to a drop-in shelter for exploited youth.

Because of conditions in El Salvador and her young age, Manuela was granted refugee status and allowed to remain in Canada. Today she lives in a safe place and is enrolled in a Toronto-area high school. She remains burdened with shame and guilt, however, because of all of the sex acts she was forced to perform with complete strangers.

To those who work with women like Manuela, her reaction comes as no surprise. “It happens most of the time in the cases I have seen,” says Loly Rico, co-director of the FCJ Refugee Centre, an organization serving refugees and other newcomers to Canada. By addressing issues that newly arrived refugee claimants face in Canada, including lack of resources, marginalization, and discrimination, FCJ volunteers smooth the transition from refugee to citizen.

Manuela's recovery will be long, but she is safe and free to decide her own future.

Courage to make a desperate call for freedom

Manuela is fortunate to have escaped. Less so are unknown numbers of enslaved women brought into Canada, who continue to suffer in silence. Detective Wendy Leaver of the Toronto Police Service, Special Victims Unit, fears she has encountered one such victim. The SVU has earned a reputation for helping victims of the city's sex industry, and its telephone number is a closely guarded secret among exploited women in need of immediate help.

When she answered the SVU telephone one day in April 2007, Detective Leaver heard a woman speaking broken English interspersed
with Chinese. Despite the language barrier, Detective Leaver immediately knew something was terribly wrong. “My boss will kill me, my boss will kill me,” the woman kept repeating. “She told me she was lodged in what she believed was a warehouse in the west end of the city, the place divided into rooms,” says Detective Leaver. “She informed me she was forced to work as a sex worker. She was terrified. She had no other information about where she was.

“She was promised a certain amount of money when she arrived,” continues Detective Leaver, “but when she got here she became a prisoner. They told her she would have to pay them back for her transportation for bringing her here, and also for her food and lodging, by performing sex acts for men who were brought to her. She received no payment for doing this.” The victim's family back home in China was also threatened.

“Just as I was giving her my cellphone number, the line was cut,” Detective Leaver recalls. Police immediately initiated a trace of the call but were unable to identify the source. Detective Leaver never heard from the woman again.

“There was nothing that we could do,” the detective explains. Years later, Detective Leaver still thinks of that call. “The fact that she called was quite courageous. I still have dreams about that woman. She must have been totally desperate to call me.”

Welcome to Canada—a destination for human trafficking

It is difficult to imagine that stories such as the one related by Detective Leaver are happening in Canada. The fact is that foreign victims of human trafficking have been essentially invisible to our immigration officials for years. Analysts at Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) were unable to provide any statistics or information on the number of suspected trafficking cases in Canada before May 2006, when Monte Solberg, then minister of CIC, approved a range of measures to assist foreign trafficked persons; as well, a special field was added to immigration databases to flag individual cases. Even with the field, however, senior officers at CIC
readily admit that in known cases, “some potential victims… were not identified.”

Between May 2006 and November 2008, CIC databases flagged fifty suspected foreign victims of human trafficking in Canada, involving both sexual exploitation and forced labour. These statistics do not include unreported cases, which can be expected to make up a significant number of total human trafficking cases. Nor do they include victims who were transported through Canada to be exploited elsewhere; victims who voluntarily returned to their home countries without seeking to remain in Canada; Canadian victims involved in domestic trafficking cases; or unidentified victims like the Chinese woman who called Detective Leaver. While the CIC data offer only a glimpse into foreign trafficking in Canada, they provide an important snapshot of the crime's victims and its geographic reach.

Women represent 74 percent of all reported instances of suspected foreign trafficking victims, although an increasing number—one in four—are men, likely victims of forced labour trafficking. Only three cases, or 6 percent, involved individuals who were minors at the time.

The spread of foreign trafficking victims in Canada is virtually national. CIC officials identified cases in British Columbia, Prairie/ Northwest Territories Region (which includes Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), Ontario, and Quebec.

The home countries of the victims proved just as diverse. Individuals from Brazil, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Peru, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Vietnam, and Ukraine were all among the victims recorded by CIC. By continent, a majority of 59 percent originated in Asia and a substantial 33 percent in Central and Eastern Europe. The Americas and Africa accounted for roughly 4 percent each. Almost three-quarters of all suspected cases of foreign trafficking to Canada stem from just four countries—the Philippines, Moldova, China, and Romania—which rank among the worst in the world for their inability or unwillingness to combat this crime.