Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery
Canada
Canada has enjoyed solid economic growth, and prudent fiscal management has produced consecutive balanced budgets from 1997 to 2007. In 2008, growth slowed sharply as a result of the global economic downturn, US housing slump, plunging auto sector demand, and a drop in world commodity prices. [The World Factbook, U.S.C.I.A. 2009]
Canada is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. Canadian women and girls, many of whom are aboriginal, are trafficked internally for commercial sexual exploitation.
NGOs report that Canada is a destination country for foreign victims trafficked for labor exploitation; some labor victims enter Canada legally but then are subjected to forced labor in agriculture, sweatshops, or as domestic servants. - U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2009 [full country report]
CAUTION: The following links have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in Canada. Some of these links may lead to websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or even false. No attempt has been made to verify their authenticity or to validate their content.
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Aboriginal women fair game for predators amid public indifference
Untold scores of society's most vulnerable members - young native women - have gone missing across the country only to be forsaken by a jaded justice system and neglectful media. The death and disappearance of aboriginal women has emerged as an alarming nationwide pattern, from western serial murders to little-known Atlantic vanishings. Grim statistics and anecdotal evidence compiled by The Canadian Press suggest public apathy has allowed predators to stalk native victims with near impunity.
Human trafficking in Vancouver
Women become trapped in sex trade after being lured to city with false promises. Imagine being beaten, forced into sex work, and told you’ll be killed if you try to escape. The constant threat of violence means you’re too scared to go to the authorities, but even if you did, there’s little chance of retribution for your attacker. This might sound like something that would happen in a third-world country, or during some bygone era, but it’s happening now in Vancouver, and is a reality for many victims of human trafficking.
“I can’t understand why Canada hasn’t successfully prosecuted a single person for human trafficking when you look at other countries like the U.S., Australia, and the U.K.,” says Perrin. “We’ve made the same commitments and been to the same conferences, but Canada has been all talk and no action. We’re just beginning to turn the corner; we’re where other countries we consider ourselves in the same league as were 10 years ago. We’ve had a decade of inaction on this and it’s allowed traffickers to profit; we need to make it more risky and less profitable for them.”
Human Trafficking May Be Closer to Home Than We Think
INTERNATIONAL TRAFFICKING - Coming into Canada from other countries, these victims are often afraid of police authority because their police may be corrupt. This fear is exploited by captors. Trafficking is often confused with being smuggled into the country, but trafficking is unique because it requires three steps — recruitment, movement and exploitation. Women often believe they are being smuggled into the country — they want to sneak into Canada, with dreams of a better life here. But soon they learn they have been sold and must now work as slaves.
DOMESTIC TRAFFICKING - Women are first befriended by a recruiter who often becomes their boyfriend and then convinces them move to a new city. The traffickers will use threats; they may beat or gang rape the person or threaten to kill their family — anything to keep them there. "They wine them and dine them ... All of a sudden they are moving from one city to another city. Once they get there they are sold and forced to live on the street."
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Bur of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor - Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005
TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS – Thousands of persons entered the country illegally over the last decade. These persons came primarily from East Asia (particularly China and Korea, but also Malaysia), Central and South Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America and the Caribbean (including Mexico, Honduras, and Haiti), and South Africa. Many of these illegal immigrants paid large sums to be smuggled to the country, were indentured to their traffickers upon arrival, worked at lower than minimum wage, and used most of their salaries to pay down their debt at usurious interest rates. The traffickers used violence to ensure that their clients paid and that they did not inform the police. Asian women and girls who were smuggled into the country often were forced into prostitution. Traffickers used intimidation and violence, as well as the illegal immigrants' inability to speak English, to keep victims from running away or informing the police.
Vancouver and Toronto served as hubs for organized crime groups that trafficked in persons, including for prostitution. East Asian crime groups targeted the country, Vancouver in particular, exploiting immigration laws, benefits available to immigrants, and the proximity to the US border.
Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2003
[52] The Committee is also concerned about the increase of foreign children and women trafficked into Canada.
[53] The Committee recommends …
Human traffic twist
www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2008/12/26/7852636-sun.html A different picture emerged of a flesh trade often thought of as foreign nationals tricked across borders. It became apparent that Canadian women and girls were being victimized by Canadian men. The first two human trafficking convictions -- one in May, another in November, both from the Peel Regional Police vice unit -- involved domestic trafficking victims who were forced to prostitute and hand over all their earnings to pimps. The "rules" identified by police -- always checking in with their pimps, meeting daily quotas, the list goes on -- were strikingly similar across the board, when comparing the cases to the other nine human trafficking charges Peel has before the courts.
The first conviction, which involved two teenaged girls -- one just 14 years old -- who worked seven days a week and brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars for their trafficker, created "a ripple that has reached every region of the country," Perrin said.
Child prostitute alleges she was lured to Victoria streets
www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=%202f361123-b251-4fc1-97d0-2c578968d52f
A man released on bail in October is back in custody after police discovered he allegedly lured a 14-year-old female to work as a prostitute.
She alleges that she met the Victoria man over the internet. He lured her to Victoria from her family home in the B.C. Interior from where she has been missing for three weeks. Once here, he took control of her possessions, including identification and wallet. She says that when she tried to leave, he beat her and threatened her.
Why Canada has failed to deal with human trafficking
www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=815e5425-18e2-4e45-81d7-0e369203b0b5
Only one victim -- a child sold to slave traders by parents -- came forward voluntarily. Fear, threats and coercion probably kept some away. But, Perrin says, in most provinces, especially Ontario and Quebec, it's almost impossible to find any help. But since the solicitor-general's office to combat human trafficking was set up two years ago, there hasn't been a single victim rescued or charge laid. During the two years that Canada identified 31 trafficking victims, the United States found 17,000.
It's not that Canada is clean; the Americans have identified it as both a source and destination country for the victims of slave traders. It's more likely because Canada has no national strategy for finding traffickers, no national plan for identifying and helping victims and little understanding of who the victims are. Canada is obviously doing many things wrong.
Flesh trade targets natives - Young Aboriginal women used as a sex commodity in cities across Canada
www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2008/09/29/6916776-sun.html "There's a total myth that Aboriginal women either consent to or are born into the sex trade," says Jo-Ann Daniels, interim executive director for the Metis Settlements General Council in Edmonton. "The average age of Aboriginal girls who are human trafficked is between seven and 12 years old.
"It is Aboriginal girls and women who are specifically targeted in this country to be trafficked, in such huge numbers that it does not compare to any other population," Daniels says. "We believe that it is the root source of Aboriginal women ever being involved in the sex trade. We believe that Aboriginal women and Aboriginal girls have been domestically trafficked now for, I would say probably since the '50s when there began to be Aboriginal movement into urban areas or there were more contacts between Aboriginal communities and towns."
YOUNG, NAIVE - Sethi quotes an Aboriginal outreach worker as such: "Girls tend to believe in the promises of the traffickers as they are young, naive and vulnerable in a new and big city. They are unsuspecting of the motives of the traffickers, since they belong to communities that have a culture of welcoming strangers."
Foreign workers lured with lies
www.cerium.ca/spip.php?page=impression&id_article=7846 DEBT TO PAY - Like many trafficking victims who are smuggled into this country, these victims are, too, told they have a debt to pay off. We found you a job, now you owe us some money. And there is nobody telling them otherwise. "There’s nobody to check up on them," Sikka says. With no official agreement obligating the federal government to tell the provinces who, when and how many people are arriving as temporary foreign workers or live-in caregivers, employment standards branches across the country, no matter how good their intentions, don’t have the necessary information to check up on workers, Sikka says. "There’s no mandatory orientation done," she says. "It’s absolutely, 100% necessary. I think it’s the primary thing we can do to stop the types of trafficking that are going on in Western Canada particularly."
Debt bondage aside, workers can fall into a "vicious cycle" of exploitation simply by not being informed of their rights upon arrival, Sikka says. Something as simple as informing workers about the procedure of changing employers would be helpful for foreign workers who are granted visas to work at one place, but upon arrival in Canada, are shuffled over to different employers. By the time they figure out they are working illegally, experts say, these workers may be hesitant to speak out about an exploitive situation for fear of deportation. "They can change employers if they want, but they’re just not told," Sikka says. "Nobody informs them they have to go through that procedure."
UQ study looks at foreign sex worker exploitation and human trafficking
www.uq.edu.au/news/?article=16004 Australia and Canada's records in combating human trafficking were among the worst in the developed world, according to a University of Queensland researcher. Dr Andreas Schloenhardt, a senior lecturer in UQ's TC Beirne School of Law said trafficking in persons remained a phenomenon not well understood and poorly researched. "This is despite greater public awareness and acknowledgement of the problem by government agencies," he said. "Strategic policies, concerted government action, along with prosecutions and convictions of traffickers are only slowly forthcoming and the support available to victims of trafficking is only marginally developed."
One of the major obstacles to government policy making, program development by non-governmental organisations, and public awareness about the exploitation of foreign workers and the trafficking in persons was the lack of any reliable and comprehensive account of the nature and extent of this problem, he said. Anecdotal evidence and statistical estimates without a sufficient evidentiary basis were the only sources of information currently available about Australia and Canada's involvement in trafficking in persons. This was in contrast to other countries where comprehensive accounts of human trafficking were published annually by government agencies.
Exploited workers Canada's 'slave trade'
www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/488074 Skilled Filipino workers packed into filthy house, denied pay, threatened with deportation
It was 5:30 in the morning when Edwin Canilang realized he had been bought and sold. Crowded in the back of a van heading north of Toronto with four other Filipino men last summer, the skilled welder faced another unpaid day on a cleanup detail at a bottling plant.
Some were pressed into service at a water bottling plant, run by De Rosa's family. Others dug ditches or picked up garbage around a large rural estate where De Rosa lives. The workers, threatened with deportation, did every menial job thrown at them. None of the work involved welding and plumbing, the trades that brought them here.
Que. couple could face human trafficking charge in teen prostitution case
www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=2410189b-25bf-47f0-9166-82af82b3ccfe
Emerson was charged with 13 offences, including kidnapping, forcible confinement and procuring and living off the avails of prostitution after the police gangs section discovered that three teenage girls had been held captive for up to a year in a condominium building in Gatineau, just across the Ottawa River from the nation's capital.
Investigators said Wednesday that one 17-year-old girl they believed was an accomplice turned out to be a victim who had been held prisoner for a year. Two other 17-year-old girls are alleged to have been held for five to six months while they engaged in prostitution. Gatineau's Assistant Crown attorney Diane Legault said Thursday the two accused likely will face new charges, including human trafficking. In November 2005, the Criminal Code was amended to make the "recruitment, transporting, transferring, receipt, holding, concealment or harbouring of a person, or the exercise of control, direction or influence over the movements of a person for the purpose of exploiting them or facilitating their exploitation" an indictable offence.
SPECIAL REPORT: Human Trafficking - It happens more than you think in Canada
www.canada.com/globaltv/ontario/story.html?id=c7ccee8e-c196-426a-a098-fa1d426ac0feSlavery is alive and thriving in the 21st century. While human trafficking is indeed a global issue, Canadian citizens are often trafficked within their own country, enslaved, bought and sold from province to province. Every situation is different; often victims are lured into a horrific exploitive setting not by strangers but by someone they know, a relative, a neighbor, or even a friend.
Hundreds of thousands of children, young men and women have vanished from their everyday lives -forced by violence into a hellish existence of brutality and prostitution. They're a profitable commodity in the multi-billion-dollar industry of modern slavery. The underworld calls them human trafficking and it is all happening in our country.
Human trafficking a growing problem in Canada, B.C. expert says
But Perrin said Canada's first human trafficking conviction this summer did not involve a foreigner, but rather a 13-year-old in the Greater Toronto Area who was bought and sold by Canadian men on the popular online classified advertisement website Craigslist.
In May, former Toronto man Imani Nakpamgi admitted in court that he made more than $400,000 selling two underage girls for sex, according to the Toronto Star. Both girls had been reported missing, either by their family or child welfare officials.
UPDATES ON BC man charged with human trafficking sentenced to 15 months
During Ng's trial, provincial court Judge Malcolm MacLean was told Ng brought women to Canada, promising them jobs as waitresses and then putting them to work as prostitutes in his east Vancouver massage parlour. One woman, whose identity is protected by court order, told MacLean she had been brought to Canada by Ng to work in what she thought was a restaurant. Instead of a waitress job, the woman testified she was taken to a Ng's massage parlour and told she was expected to pay him $11,000 a month by prostituting herself. But MacLean said there was no evidence the woman was forced or coerced into coming to Canada.
Human Trafficking May Be Closer to Home Than We Think
INTERNATIONAL TRAFFICKING - Coming into Canada from other countries, these victims are often afraid of police authority because their police may be corrupt. This fear is exploited by captors. Trafficking is often confused with being smuggled into the country, but trafficking is unique because it requires three steps — recruitment, movement and exploitation. Women often believe they are being smuggled into the country — they want to sneak into Canada, with dreams of a better life here. But soon they learn they have been sold and must now work as slaves.
DOMESTIC TRAFFICKING - Women are first befriended by a recruiter who often becomes their boyfriend and then convinces them move to a new city. The traffickers will use threats; they may beat or gang rape the person or threaten to kill their family — anything to keep them there. "They wine them and dine them ... All of a sudden they are moving from one city to another city. Once they get there they are sold and forced to live on the street."
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Report On Sex Slave Market Prompts Recount Of Trafficking Victims
Following the rediscovery of sex slave rings in Canada, the vice chair of the Parliamentary Committee on the Status of Women assigned staff to review the human trafficking data of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The initial RCMP estimate is that 800 to 1,200 people in Canada have been victims of human trafficking, but some groups cite figures as high as 15,000 victims.
Rise in human trafficking largely unnoticed in Canada, experts say
Human traffickers peddle young girls to work as sex slaves in Canadian cities for as little as $2,000 - a situation most people believe only happens in foreign lands, activists say. An increase in human trafficking in Canada has gone largely unnoticed because Canadians think young girls choose to take up the sex trade, according to Joy Smith, a Conservative MP and longtime anti-trafficking activist. “There are girls being sold in Montreal for $2,000,” Smith said.
She pointed out that many dismiss the scope of the problem by claiming sex slaves, who are mainly women, chose to become prostitutes. “A lot of the girls in brothels never meant to be in brothels,” Smith said. “They got there because somebody threatened them and forced them into it.”
Alleged victims of human trafficking ring in protective custody
Police allege the victims were smuggled across the Canadian border using false Israeli passports, provided by "the same criminal element from overseas," and then had their documents taken away from them upon their arrival.
Victims were then allegedly brought to a safe house and held until they started to comply with their perpetrators' demands - whether through threats of violence or allegations that they owed their captors for bringing them to Canada.
Police say they believe the victims would be locked in isolated rooms, away from the general public and away from each other, each day until around 6 p.m. A driver or chaperone would then arrive to bring them to a location or locations to work as prostitutes. When finished, they'd be brought back home and locked up again, Ervick alleged.
Ervick said the sums of money exchanging hands would vary on a case to case basis, but he alleged each young victim could conceivably "bring in as much as $4,000 to $10,000 a week," but only be given a given small sum to live off.
"These women are very vulnerable, in a country that is not their own, where they don't speak the language and are isolated both from the general population and from each other," he alleged.
Cops arrest 6 people in human trafficking ring
Police say the victims came to Canada with false passports under the pretext of working as models. Once they arrived, police allege the women were forcibly confined and told they would be working as prostitutes for the ringleaders of the operation.
Human-trafficking charges dropped
The couple's lawyer, Frank Pappas, said "even Inspector Clouseau" could have done a better investigation than the RCMP, who didn't interview the couple's neighbours, or the clerk at the depanneur where the domestic bought phone cards to call overseas. "Had the RCMP investigated properly from the outset, they would have realized that her assertion ... that she was a prisoner was completely false," Pappas said. "Even Ray Charles could have seen it."
But Pappas said the whole thing was a scam in order for Manaye to avoid deportation.
Social networking sites used for human-trafficking - Hundreds of Albertans get targeted each year
They do most of their recruiting on social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace, choosing naïve or vulnerable victims for “grooming” who are right around 18 years old in order to avoid detection by authorities looking for predators after underage kids.
After four or five dizzyingly spectacular dates, the predator will invite her to a private party.
She will be gang-raped and subjected to unspeakable humiliation. She might be drugged. “Her ‘boyfriend’ will tell her what’s expected of her,” Galvin said. “She’s told the event will occur anyways. She can either fight or submit to it, but it’s going to happen.” She will be threatened with death if she goes to police. Her family might also be threatened.
Human trafficking an issue in Canada
Human-trafficking is not issue that gets a lot of attention in Alberta simply because most people think it's an international issue with international victims, Trompetter said. But it happens more often than people think, she said. "We have national trafficking of Canadian women, especially in the aboriginal communities. In the prairie provinces, there is a lot of activity going on. Girls are being recruited on reserves and brought into the big urban centres like Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton and Calgary to work in prostitution." A study by the federal standing committee on the status of women last February found aboriginal females are at greater risk of becoming victims of trafficking. Erin Wolski, of the Native Women's Association of Canada, told the committee aboriginal females are "extremely vulnerable."
Human trafficking in Vancouver
Women become trapped in sex trade after being lured to city with false promises Imagine being beaten, forced into sex work, and told you’ll be killed if you try to escape. The constant threat of violence means you’re too scared to go to the authorities, but even if you did, there’s little chance of retribution for your attacker. This might sound like something that would happen in a third-world country, or during some bygone era, but it’s happening now in Vancouver, and is a reality for many victims of human trafficking.
“I can’t understand why Canada hasn’t successfully prosecuted a single person for human trafficking when you look at other countries like the U.S., Australia, and the U.K.,” says Perrin. “We’ve made the same commitments and been to the same conferences, but Canada has been all talk and no action. We’re just beginning to turn the corner; we’re where other countries we consider ourselves in the same league as were 10 years ago. We’ve had a decade of inaction on this and it’s allowed traffickers to profit; we need to make it more risky and less profitable for them.”
Reforming Canada’s Record on Human Trafficking
A young woman answers a job ad that offers a prepaid air ticket and glamorous work as an international model. She leaves home -- perhaps from a city in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. Upon arriving in Canada, she discovers to her horror that she has been lured into the sex trade and faces “debts” that she must now pay off. Somehow she escapes her captors and looks for help. The authorities detain, interrogate and then deport her. Until recently, this was how Canada routinely treated human trafficking victims -- as illegal migrants, says Benjamin Perrin, an assistant professor who joined the UBC Faculty of Law in August.
Organized Crime and Human Trafficking in Canada: Tracing Perceptions and Discourses [PDF]
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - The review of the cases reveals that, in spite of the judiciaries’ implicit acceptance of the official and counter discourse vis-à-vis the trafficking of women for the purposes of prostitution by organized crime, judgments are, for the most part, marked by a lack of sensitivity to the cultural, economic and social reality of undocumented migrant workers generally and to the reality of exploitation, violence and stigma experienced by sex trade workers more specifically. Moreover the documents are interpreted in a manner that renders the majority of claimants outside the discourse and hence not entitled to the consideration afforded ‘victims’. In particular the extrajudicial and potentially moral question of whether the women knew they would be working in the sex trade is rendered significant. It would appear that embedded in the sex slave/sex worker dichotomy is another dualism – innocent/culpable. Therefore women who are unaware that they will participate in the trade are potentially protected while women who experience severe labour abuse are held accountable for their situation regardless of the exploitation they may experience. In short the ‘sex slave’ discourse may operate against the interests of many irregular migrant sex trade workers by obscuring their exploitation at the same time as it renders exploitation the defining characteristic of others.
Canada's New Government Strengthens Protection for Victims of Human Trafficking
The Honourable Diane Finley, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, today introduced new measures to help assist victims of human trafficking brought into Canada from abroad. The new measures extend the length of the temporary resident permit (TRP) for victims of human trafficking to 180 days, up from 120. This extension also allows victims to apply for a work permit - an option not previously available. The new measures will also continue to allow victims of human trafficking to receive health-care benefits, including medical treatment and counselling services, under the Interim Federal Health Program.
F1 fuels human trafficking, activists say
Last year, Canada was singled out in an international study for failing to meet its obligations for the protection of victims of human trafficking. The 40-page study, titled Falling Short of the Mark: An International Study on the Treatment of Human Trafficking Victims, concluded that out of the countries evaluated - Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Britain and the United States - only Canada and Britain failed to meet their obligations to protect victims under the United Nations Trafficking Protocol and international best practices.
Falling Short of the Mark: An International Study on the Treatment of Human Trafficking Victims [PDF]
CANADA - Canada has systematically failed to comply with its international obligations under the Trafficking Protocol for the protection of victims of human trafficking. There is no evidence it has considered providing for the protection of victims in the manner obliged under the Trafficking Protocol. Canada.s record of dealing with trafficking victims is an international embarrassment and contrary to best practices. This is despite being the first jurisdiction in this Study to have ratified the Trafficking Protocol almost four years ago on May 13, 2002. Canada has ignored calls for reform and continues to re-traumatize trafficking victims, with few exceptions, by subjecting them to routine deportation and fails to provide even basic support services.
The situation in Canada is so bad, with respect to a failure to provide basic support to trafficking victims, that individual law enforcement officers are attempting to approach local hospitals and NGOs to cobble together funding to provide the most basic medical assistance for these victims in major Canadian cities.
Winnipeg police to draft human trafficking policy
The average model is 14 years old, the Winnipeg-based Crawford said, and some of them are vulnerable to abuse by recruiters, agents and photographers. Crawford says she has seen or heard of girls being raped, used as prostitutes or sent to work in bars. Ewatski acknowledged that human trafficking as a crime has come to Winnipeg, although not to the same extent as larger centres such as Vancouver and Montreal.
MP calls for action to combat human trafficking
Smith explained that women from other countries are promised a better life in Canada, and once they are brought here their documents are taken away and they are forced into the sex trade. The same is true, Smith said, for Canadian women who have pursued modelling careers abroad.
Human-trafficking bill introduced
A Canadian teenager signs up for a modelling program and, unbeknownst to her parents, is forced to have sex with strangers while travelling in Europe. A Mexican woman is smuggled into Canada illegally, and turns tricks against her will above a downtown Toronto drugstore. The RCMP estimates that 800-1,200 people in Canada, the vast majority of them women, are victims of human trafficking each year, but non-governmental organizations peg the number in the thousands.
Local Sex Crime Conference Focuses On Human Trafficking
And the crime that so often happens in the background is more present than any of us would like to think. Numbers from the Mounties suggest between 600-800 people are 'trafficked' to Canada every year. Many of those being victimized are prime targets for the despicable entrepreneurs - young women from third-world countries that have high rates of poverty, violence, illiteracy and political and economic instability. But it's not just the more stereotyped "sex slaves" that you often read about. While that's number one on the list, the vulnerable can also become prisoners of domestic servitude, the farming and fishing industry and sweat shops.
Human trafficking not just a big city problem: RCMP
Human trafficking is becoming a bigger concern all the time, he said, and it often involves forcing people into the sex trade or making farm workers and nannies work long hours for little money. MacIver said it's not talked about much in small towns, so people may think it doesn't exist. "They are not aware of it and not educated about it," he said. According to the RCMP, between 800 and 1,200 people are victims of human trafficking in Canada each year, most working in forced labour or the illegal sex trade.
Human trafficking victims face immigration barriers
Hundreds of children, men and women believed to be bought and sold in Canada every year in what amounts to a life of slavery face large hurdles to stay in the country legally once they escape their captors. Conservative RCMP estimates show that between 800 and 1,200 people are victims of human trafficking in Canada each year, with most ending up working in forced labour or the illegal sex trade.
