3

INTERNATIONAL TRAFFICKING TO CANADA

Many 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.

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.

Canada continues to appear reluctant to recognize smuggled migrants as trafficked persons where indicators of potential exploitation on arrival become evident. True, the challenge is significant. On one hand, countries such as Canada need to prevent human trafficking and protect potential victims at the earliest stage possible. On the other hand, becoming more accommodating of smuggled migrants increases the potential appeal for traffickers and other criminals to profit from illegal entry, undermining the security and integrity of Canada’s borders.

Where children are involved, a cautious approach is clearly necessary, as demonstrated by the United Kingdom. The alternative is for Canada and other countries to tolerate the potential for severe abuse of children.

Hope after decades of sexploitation

Lawlessness and collapse are the two words most appropriate, and most frequently used, to describe Ukraine through the late 1980s. As the country’s economic malaise deepened and the Communist hold loosened, organized crime stepped in to fill the power vacuum.

During this volatile period Katya, a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl, was abducted to be sold for sex. For more than two decades, Katya served as a slave, devoid of comfort, rewards, or freedom. After having been sold to traffickers in Africa, Europe, and North America, she was brought to Canada by her newest “owner,” who expected to reap more profit from her body. His venture did not succeed. The countless acts of rape that Katya had endured from the age of nine to her midthirties had made her so volatile and hard to control that her trafficker dumped her outside a hospital in Edmonton in 2005.

In addition to being diagnosed with schizophrenia, Katya was suffering from severe depression. She still walks with a noticeable limp, a persistent reminder of the brutality she suffered over much of her life. The treatment prescribed for victims like Katya is almost identical to that for victims of extended and substantial torture.

“Imagine you’ve been kidnapped when you’re nine years old, in one of the developing countries, and then sold to a developed country,” suggests Tracey Campbell, a consultant with Alberta Employment and Immigration who’s assisting Katya in her recovery. “Imagine the damage it would do, how devastating it would be, and how much work a psychologist would have to do for you.”

Three years after her release, Katya was continuing to improve. She completed a course in English as a Second Language (ESL) and began to dream of becoming a nurse. The first independent choice she is making in her adult life is to care for others.

“The humiliation experienced by the victims is deep and profound,” says Loly Rico. “At one point they felt used, they were raped. But some begin to believe that this is their role as women. And for them to change that role is very hard.”

Rico has had difficulty finding qualified counsellors to assist foreign victims of human trafficking, in particular professionals who speak languages other than English. Some victims resist counselling because they want to “forget about that life,” an understandable reaction but one that delays their long-term rehabilitation.

Mumbi—a story of resistance, courage, and survival

Like many young women in Kenya, Mumbi was eager to travel and work overseas. In 2001, she accepted an offer that proved too good to be true—help with her travel costs to Canada. On arrival, Mumbi was locked inside a Montreal-area hotel room and told that she would be sold for sex to repay the “investment.”

The traffickers tried to break Mumbi’s resistance. Keeping her confined, they forced her to watch pornographic movies, a “grooming process” used to eradicate sexual inhibitions and “train” victims for the services they would be expected to perform. Withholding food, Mumbi’s captors kept up the pressure for four days while she resisted their orders despite threats of severe physical abuse. Then a chance at freedom presented itself. In a moment of inattention by her captors, Mumbi escaped and made her way to a women’s shelter, where she sought comfort and assistance.

Soon after Mumbi arrived at the shelter, however, staff became concerned about men lurking nearby in parked cars and telephone callers demanding to know Mumbi’s whereabouts. For her safety, Mumbi was moved to another location and later granted refugee status that permitted her to remain in Canada. The situation in Kenya was too perilous for her to return.

Although cause for joy and celebration, Mumbi’s escape from traffickers in sexual services is atypical. Linguistic and cultural barriers, combined with isolation, keep many foreign women trapped in operations where they are exploited “under the radar” of law enforcement agencies and society at large.

In September 2009, police in Edmonton uncovered a human trafficking operation at the “Sachi Professional Massage and Spa” where, they alleged, three women from Fiji and one from China were “forced to eat, sleep and perform sex acts for money in the same room.” Many massage parlours in the Vancouver area cater only to an Asian clientele, promoting themselves exclusively in a foreign language and hanging up if a caller speaks English. These barriers make it more difficult to access potential victims.

Dancing slaves in a strip club near you

Enslavement as a means of forcing women to perform sex acts with strangers isn’t restricted to massage parlours and brothels. Whatever one may think of strip clubs and their activities, the reality often includes young women living and performing under coercion.

Federal officials in Canada express grave concerns about the exploitation of foreign women as exotic dancers, particularly women from Central and Eastern Europe. For some time these women were being brought into Canada legally and expeditiously under the federal government’s “exotic dancer visa program.” Concerns about trafficking caused the program to be largely shut down, but trepidation persists.

A March 2007 email to the Canadian Embassy in Romania from a regional intelligence officer for the Canada Revenue Agency in Niagara Falls, Ontario, identified aspects of the problem. “I have read some dancer contracts and a couple of clauses really troubled me,” the officer wrote. According to her report, one clause stated, “[T]he club owners have the right to hold all ID until the terms of the contract are fulfilled,” while another required “that monies will be held until terms of the contract are fulfilled, less disbursements. These two clauses themselves smack of slavery.”

Frederick Matern, one of Canada’s top immigration officials in Bucharest, replied in a detailed, but heavily censored, email obtained under the Access to Information Act. Among other things, Matern raised concerns about women from the region being brought to Canada to work as exotic dancers, including evidence of blatant deception by the contractors. “In order to conform to HRSDC [Human Resources and Social Development Canada] requir[e]ments,” Matern noted, “we are getting shown very different contracts by people seeking work permits. I suspect that the contracts that conform to HRSDC are nowhere close to the truth.”

Indeed, in a case documented by the Canada Border Services Agency, a woman from Romania came to Canada under a work permit as an exotic dancer. Soon after arriving, she was reportedly “forced to do things that she did not wish to do ... was unable to take sick time when required ... [and] there were elements of coercion and threats against her from the bar owners and supervisors.” CIC officials subsequently found the woman to be a victim of human trafficking and offered her assistance.

Micro-brothels—the (trafficked) girl next door

In November 2006, two investigative reporters from the Toronto Star uncovered a new and disturbing development in Canada’s sex trade: The practice of providing sexual services through massage parlours, which were too easily identified and raided by police officers, largely had been abandoned in favour of rooms in high- rise apartment buildings. These “micro-brothels” are often right next door to apartments occupied by families, many of them with small children. While low-income neighbourhoods have been home to “trick pads” for decades, “micro-brothels” represent a recent migration of the sex industry into middle- and upper-class communities.

Micro-brothels are set up in hotel and motel rooms, as well as apartment units and luxury condominiums. Their secret locations are disclosed to men who respond to advertisements for “escorts” or more explicit advertisements on internet bulletin board websites and weekly newspapers. Embedded in our communities, they become venues for the sexual exploitation of victims of human trafficking. Because they “hide in plain sight,” micro-brothels are quickly becoming common outlets for purchasing sex and keeping trafficking victims concealed, constantly on the move, and difficult to identify and assist. Once again, these victims are forced to meet the demands of the traffickers without recourse or opportunity for help.

A law enforcement officer in Peel Region, a suburb of Metropolitan Toronto, has participated in several raids on micro-brothels in his jurisdiction and constantly is appalled at what he discovers. “When you look around,” he explains, “what do they have in there? A little bit of food. There are no pictures of their family. The first thing you notice is this does not look lived in. You might see a little suitcase in the closet, with just some clothing. No personal effects at all. They don’t live there. They are taken somewhere every night.”

The benefits of micro-brothels to human traffickers are significant. Massage parlours, as noted earlier, practically identify the true nature of their business and attract attention from law enforcement and citizens’ groups. Escort services may provide the women with a measure of temporary freedom, increasing the risk that they may flee and turn against their captors. Micro-brothels involve neither disadvantage. If, as anticipated, law enforcement officers more actively investigate and prosecute human traffickers in Canada, these secretive outlets for exploitation are expected to multiply rapidly as traffickers take their victims even further underground.