Invisible Chains (7 page)

While poverty is considered an “enabling factor” in many source countries for human trafficking, Professor Sheldon X. Zhang, chair of Sociology at San Diego State University, identifies the attitude and operations of each country's government as a significant contributor to the problem. In Professor Zhang's opinion, government corruption, ineptitude, collusion, and complicity remain core elements that make a country attractive for traffickers to recruit victims.

Officials can barely keep up with the constantly changing tactics used by traffickers to bring victims into Canada. “Some enter with genuine passports, entry documents, or work visas; instances of abuse of valid work visas have been reported,” says a senior policy analyst at CIC's headquarters in Ottawa. “Others use falsified or altered entry documents, such as photo substitutions, or gain entry as impostors. Fraudulent offers of employment are also being used to support applications to obtain visas and convince border and consular officials that the victim intends to return to his/her country of origin. Traffickers may also bring victims into Canada utilizing established smuggling routes and methods.”

Informants who know about the modus operandi of traffickers have made it clear to police that the criminals are always a few steps ahead: “They say there are brokers that are working in legitimate businesses bringing in the workers that are supposed to be coming in to assemble furniture or package something, and as soon as they're in, they're sold,” said Sergeant Mark Schwartz of the Calgary Police Service, Vice Unit.

In December 2008, the RCMP Criminal Intelligence Unit captured national headlines when it released an unclassified report called
Project Spawn: A Strategic Assessment of Criminal Activity and Organized Crime Infiltration at Canada's Class 1 Airports.
The report found that organized crime was active at the country's major airports, with criminals bribing airport employees, as well as getting their own associates hired as airport staff. Vancouver International Airport and Pearson International Airport in Toronto were singled out as entry points for organized crime groups bringing foreign nationals into Canada illegally.

In one case in November 2007, a foreign woman arrived at Vancouver International Airport after travelling through several other countries. She was detained by the Canada Border Services Agency as a potential victim of human trafficking. She stated that an individual who'd arranged for her to enter the country had taken her passport and given her another one to use. More alarmingly, she claimed that her traffickers had infiltrated the airline company that brought her to Canada. Officials have refused to divulge the name of this company and have provided no further information about the investigation into these serious allegations.

A nation of opportunity … for traffickers

Foreign trafficking victims in Canada encompass a diverse group of vulnerable individuals. Some are long-term victims of the international sex slave market, transported to Canada to earn greater profits for their traffickers. Others have been lured here by false promises of wealth-generating careers and even romance. Still others are seeking to escape poverty or merely hoping to find less egregious conditions within the sex industry than they experienced in their home countries.

My research team analyzed data on sex trafficking victims brought to Canada from abroad to identify common characteristics. These factors are unlikely to be observed in any one individual simultaneously. Yet by observing several of these factors, you may be able to identify a potential victim of foreign sex trafficking in Canada:

1  in Canada primarily to engage in paid sex acts

2  providing sex acts as a means of repaying a debt of an imposed or changing amount (debt bondage)

3  encountering conditions in Canada that do not resemble those promised

4  forced, threatened, or pressured to continue providing paid sex acts

5  not in possession of immigration documents or passport

6  
not free to travel where and when they want, or to leave their current situation

7  unfamiliar with the community they reside in

8  has limited knowledge of English or French

9  constantly accompanied by someone who speaks for them or monitors them

10  shows signs of trauma, including bruising, withdrawn behaviour, depression, or fear

Exporting the casualties of war

Among the most accessible sources for sex traffickers are victims already under the control of traffickers in other countries or recent survivors of similar trauma. Both groups are easily directed to Canada. Various victims of international sex trafficking have been brought to Canada after being exploited for years as modern-day slaves in countries around the world. Thérèse, whom we met in
Chapter 1
, affords a dramatic example, having been brought to Canada from the DRC after over a decade of exploitation as a sex slave in her home country.

Armed conflicts such as the ongoing war in the DRC significantly and disproportionately harm women and children. Victims of sexual violence and sex trafficking during the conflict, they are extremely vulnerable to serious human rights violations in post-conflict environments. In addition to the DRC, Chechnya, Colombia, El Salvador, and Sierra Leone represent global hot spots that tend to create an excess “inventory” of sex trafficking victims who are brought to other countries, including Canada, for further exploitation.

Like Manuela, whom we met earlier in this chapter, Luisa grew up in the shadow of one of the bloodiest conflicts in our hemisphere, this time in Colombia. The world's undisputed cocaine superpower, Colombia cultivated enough hectares of coca bushes in 2008 to manufacture 430 metric tons of cocaine, over half the global supply. Drug trafficking fuels the conflict between left-wing guerrilla groups
and right-wing paramilitaries, having contributed for decades to bouts of civil war and instability.

Luisa, a mother of two, lived in Colombia's countryside. When her common-law husband was killed in the high-stakes game of narco-trafficking, Enrico, his associate, entered the picture. Enrico may have announced that Luisa's husband owed him money, which he decided to “collect on” by selling Luisa for sex, or she may have represented an easy target because she was a widow. In any case, Enrico supplied Luisa with drugs, which generated dependency through addiction, while he profited by selling her for sex.

Luisa's father discovered what was happening and courageously stepped in, caring for Luisa's children and taking her away from Enrico. Luisa and her father agreed it would be best for the children to stay with their grandfather and for Luisa to leave the country for a few months to get her life back on track. They chose Canada for her fresh start.

After her student visa application to Canada was approved, Luisa travelled to Toronto to learn English. As a recent survivor of human trafficking, alone in Canada's largest metropolitan city, she was very vulnerable.

They say that sharks can detect an injured animal from up to one kilometre away in open water. Traffickers operating in Canada have developed similar sensory skills for detecting their quarry. When Carlos met Luisa at their English-language class in Toronto, he smelled the figurative blood in the water.

Carlos must have recognized from aspects of her demeanour that he would be able to exploit Luisa. With stealth and patience, he built trust by showing concern for her children back in Colombia.

With time, Luisa and Carlos became intimate, and after six months Carlos began applying all of his skills to turn her back into a commodity that could be sold. He began by reintroducing hard drugs, building Luisa's dependency on them once again. Next, he made Luisa an offer that she couldn't refuse. “I'll help bring your children here,” he promised, “but you need to work for me.”

Carlos took Luisa to a brothel in a pleasant middle-class
neighbourhood in North Toronto, a residence that from the outside looked like any other home. Inside, Latin American women, primarily from Brazil, were for sale. Carlos controlled Luisa's movements, taking her to and from the brothel and his house each day.

At this point, Luisa no longer had her immigration papers and her student visa had expired, raising the likelihood of immigration detention if authorities found her. Moreover, as a Spanish speaker from Colombia, Luisa had difficulty communicating effectively with the Portuguese-speaking women from Brazil. The false hope that her children would be brought to Canada, along with the influence of the drugs, Carlos's control of her movement, and the threat of immigration detention, kept Luisa firmly under his domination. In 2006, a police raid of the brothel ended Luisa's exploitation, and she was able to find support from local NGOs.

Smuggling debt and young children

Migrant smuggling occurs when foreign nationals illegally enter a country for a fee paid to criminals who facilitate their entry. Such smugglers generally make a one-time profit from fees paid by smuggled individuals to cross an international border, whereas traffickers make ongoing profits from the sexual exploitation or forced labour of their victims. However, this distinction can become blurred, especially when young children are involved.

Traffickers have used migrant smuggling schemes as a powerful tool to recruit foreign nationals seeking a better life who will agree to be transported to a foreign destination but on arrival find themselves forced to repay massive smuggling debts as debt bonds. Such individuals may be willingly smuggled into Canada, only to find on arrival that they are sent to a sweatshop or brothel. This recruiting method, which makes possible a continuous stream of potential victims, is less risky than other means such as abduction, force, and threats of force.

The most alarming cases involve children who are smuggled into Canada and become victims of human trafficking. Trains, planes,
and boats are used to this end. While few such reported cases have been uncovered here, these vulnerable foreign children are often unaccompanied by parents or relatives, owe thousands of dollars to smugglers who have transported them illegally, and have no source of income to repay the debts. Because of these factors, authorities have raised concerns that foreign children may be destined for brothels, sweatshops, or domestic servitude.

Although under-investigated in Canada, the problem has commanded major police resources in the United Kingdom, where law enforcement authorities launched “Operation Paladin” in 2007 over concerns about the number of “unaccompanied minors” arriving at major airports from abroad. Found alone in the airports, the children were placed in the child protection system but often vanished. They were previously instructed to leave their child protection shelters soon after arriving and to make contact with individuals they had never met. Unbeknownst to the children, they were destined for exploitation.

Between 2008 and 2009, Operation Paladin resulted in the arrest of twelve individuals for child trafficking. Were these children isolated cases of human trafficking or part of a more systemic problem? And is Canada witnessing the same phenomenon? At this point, we have little evidence of the latter, but Canada has yet to conduct an investigation that matches Britain's.

The British Columbia Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons (OCTIP) has expressed concern about potential trafficked children. Opened under the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General in July 2007 with a mandate to develop and coordinate the province's response to human trafficking (and the first provincial body of its kind in Canada), OCTIP works with provincial ministries, federal departments, municipal governments, law enforcement agencies, and community-based and Aboriginal organizations.

OCTIP considers an individual under eighteen to be a “probable trafficked child” if one or more of the following “significant indicators of trafficking” exist:

•  
travelling with an unrelated person posing as a family member

•  possessing neither personal identification nor travel documents

•  arriving with contact information for persons unknown

•  holding expectations of an unattainable job or education

•  travelling in unsafe and hazardous conditions

•  fearing for the safety of family and/or self

•  owing significant amounts of money to a person or group who may have arranged transportation (debt bondage)

Some of the impetus to launch OCTIP as an effective response to the problem of human trafficking dates back to the summer of 1999, when four boatloads of illegal Chinese migrants arrived on the British Columbia coast. The boats were intercepted and the B.C. Ministry of Child and Family Development took 134 children into care. The children were considered to be smuggled, and only one was allowed to remain in Canada. As an official associated with the investigation points out, “In 1999, we didn't have the trafficking language.” In retrospect, the OCTIP guidelines indicate that these children might have been intended for exploitation as trafficking victims in North America; they owed a smuggling debt of fifty to sixty thousand dollars, they were under tremendous pressure to keep moving to their intended destination, and their documents were missing. Recent cases continue to raise serious concerns about smuggled children being trafficked through British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada.

Each year in Toronto, for example, eighteen to twenty unaccompanied children arrive at Pearson International Airport. Often from India, China, Africa, and the Caribbean, the children in many instances are accompanied by adults pretending to be their parents. In other cases, the children board the planes accompanied by adults who abandon them upon arrival at Canadian customs. When these children are discovered alone in the customs hall, child protection workers are brought in to assess the situation.

While some children may be brought to Canada in an attempt to unite them illegally with family members or acquaintances, a
representative of the Peel Children's Aid Society is concerned that some foreign teenagers carrying phone numbers of unknown people whom they are to call upon arrival in Canada may be destined for sexual exploitation.