FROM AVERAGE JOES TO AVERAGE JOHNS
Sean’s request to the escort agency was simple: He asked for a woman to be sent to his Toronto hotel room. He didn’t plan on cruising the streets, and wanted to avoid the tackiness of having sex in a car. This way he’d discreetly have an hour with a woman he’d never met—and who’d ever find out?
The person who arrived at his hotel room door was young. In fact, she was fifteen at most, and delivered by a couple of burly men who kept her under their control. When Sean was alone with the girl, she extended her small hand and nervously gave him a folded bit of paper. It contained just two words: Help me.
Sean reacted swiftly. By his own account, he “got the hell out of there,” leaving the young girl to be found by her handlers. For whatever reason—the shock brought on by the girl’s plea, or the shattering of the myth that paying for sex was a victimless crime—he’d lost interest.
Once out of the hotel, Sean had to tell someone what had happened, but he didn’t want to make himself known to the police. Instead, he told the story of the frightened little girl to his friend Chris. The girl had begged Sean to save her. And he hadn’t.
Chris could hardly believe the story and his friend’s refusal to act. Well, if Sean wouldn’t get involved, Chris would. He called Crime Stoppers and gave the operator the details of Sean’s experience, including the name of the escort agency. Crime Stoppers relayed the information to the Toronto Police Service, which recognized the name of the individual associated with the agency’s telephone number, a man already known to be running a prostitution ring.
A police officer called the escort agency, posing as a potential client looking for a young Asian girl and hoping that the girl who had been brought to Sean’s hotel room would arrive in the company of her traffickers.
Detective Sergeant Mike Hamel of the Toronto Police Service, Sex Crimes Unit, picks up the story. “We had the phone number of the escort service he called, so we set it all up,” Hamel recalls. “We were hoping the same thing would happen, but we got an older female. We ran into problems.”
Lacking first-hand evidence of an underage girl being sold for sex, the officers had no choice but to rely on a statement from Sean. With that in hand, the police likely could obtain search warrants to investigate the escort agency and try to find the terrified girl.
However, the refusal of Sean to contact police meant that the investigation could proceed no further, and the young girl who’d appealed for help almost certainly would continue to be sexually abused.
“We never found her,” says Detective Sergeant Hamel with sadness in his voice. “We go from one fire to the next. To me, that’s not good enough.”
Escort agencies: Selling sex through thinly veiled language
Escort agencies represent the twenty-first-century evolution of nineteenth-century brothels. The only difference is location; instead of choosing women and rooms within the same establishment, johns now determine the environment, usually a hotel or motel room.
An obvious front for selling sex, escort agencies have played a role in several documented human trafficking cases, including those of Svetlana and Dina, detailed earlier. Fees collected from the women support the agencies’ owners and managers, some of them associated with criminal gangs who frequently control many of the agencies within a single city or region.
The opportunities for the profiteers don’t end there, however. Escort agencies couldn’t attract the sizeable number of johns calling them, virtually 24/7, without widely accessible outlets for advertising their services, including weekly newspapers published and distributed in virtually every major Canadian city. Such papers are rife with ads incorporating thinly veiled promises of paid sex acts. These publications shouldn’t be able to accept cheques for advertising from “sexually oriented businesses” without exercising some due diligence to ensure they aren’t actively marketing criminal activity. Instead, the publications remain wilfully blind to the problem and little, if anything at all, is done to make them think twice.
The sheer number of advertisements for escort services confirms that the industry indeed represents big money to those who control the women being sold. “When you look at all those ads, you have to ask yourself: Are all these people, from all these countries coming to Canada to do this job?” wonders Detective Sergeant Hamel of the Toronto Police Service, Sex Crimes Unit. “It is just incredible how many escort services there are. If you spend the time to investigate some of these people, you’ll find that a lot of the women are not here voluntarily.”
“Rub and tug”: More than a massage
Massage parlours are places of suspended disbelief that our society has somehow come to accept. You drive past them knowing that, more often than not, they’re bawdy houses where sex is for sale.
Operators of massage parlours have been profiteers who’ve controlled women to a degree that qualifies as enslavement in several cases. Once again, however, as with escort services and the advertising media they use, other people and organizations are collecting proceeds from the racket while pretending to be innocent of the brutality inflicted on the women employed in the “parlours.”
Chief among the profiteers from massage parlours are the landlords who accept their rent. An even more egregious sector, though, may be the municipalities that collect licensing revenue from these “businesses,” rarely conducting any due diligence or subsequent inspections after receiving their cut.
Police officers in cities across Canada confirm that escort services and massage parlours commonly are fronts for selling foreign victims of human trafficking, and the operators legitimize their bogus businesses by purchasing valid licences. Canada’s mayors, city councillors, and by-law officers need to remove the licensing from these illegal enterprises and find less dreadful means of filling the community coffers.
Sergeant Jeff Danroth of the Vancouver Police Department believes that the Vice Unit has interacted with “hundreds” of foreign women, mainly from Asian countries, who are being sold for sex in bawdy houses in the city. Typically they’ve replied to advertisements for work at massage parlours, but no one knows whether the women are fully aware before arriving in Canada that they’ll be required to provide sex acts, or whether they can leave the situation if they so choose.
Authorities worldwide recognize that traffickers recruit and control women who are already being sold for sex in developing and oftencorrupt countries by promising better conditions in developed ones. In one of the most extensive studies of sex trafficking in the United States, Dr. Janice G. Raymond, emeritus professor at University of Massachusetts, and Dr. Donna M. Hughes, professor at the University of Rhode Island, found that “[i]nternational women, formerly in the sex trade in their countries of origin, are particularly vulnerable to recruitment in sex industries in the United States.”
When sex trafficking victims in Canada appear to have been sold for sex in their home countries, some Canadians—and even some sectors of the media—tend to blame the victims. In September 1997, news reporter Rosie DiManno said of the women involved in a major trafficking operation in the Toronto area, “Indentured sex trade workers, yes. Exploited concubines, possibly. Self-conscripted whores, apparently.” DiManno’s point of view was telegraphed effectively in her Toronto Star story, titled “Sex slave ‘victims’ weren’t captives chained to beds.”
This willingness to blame victims of sexual exploitation is uninformed and misdirected. It’s easier to blame the victims than to ask tough questions about who profits from their suffering and to identify the men who pay for sex acts with these women. In commenting on this attitude, one law enforcement officer says, “Our approach to these women is wrong. These people are victims from day one. They are being exploited and we label them as prostitutes. We should look at them as victims of exploitation.” Sadly, the women being sold aren’t the only victims of the actions of johns.
Collateral damage: Families, wives, children
Jennifer suspected that her husband, Jeff, was cheating on her. She had no real proof yet, and with two young children to care for, she didn’t want to do anything drastic that might weaken the marriage.
Everything unravelled, however, when Jennifer’s doctor informed her that she’d tested positive for an STD. Jennifer hadn’t been with anyone but Jeff since her marriage to him several years before. Clearly he’d been unfaithful. After the initial trauma, she set to work rummaging through her husband’s dresser drawers, the desk in his small office, and his other belongings, exposing the brutal truth.
Jeff had been frequenting strip clubs, massage parlours, and escort agencies. Worse still, he had multiple credit cards in his name that were billed to his office address and showed outstanding balances totalling tens of thousands of dollars.
After an explosive confrontation with Jeff, Jennifer decided to file for divorce. As more details emerged about Jeff’s wide-ranging and long-term patronizing of sex services, Jennifer realized that her husband’s secret addiction would ultimately destroy her and her family. Creditors began calling every day, demanding payment for Jeff’s sex bills. Eventually, Jennifer was forced to file for bankruptcy, leaving her devastated.
Jennifer, along with others who’ve become collateral damage of the demand for paid sex, has told her story to hundreds of men at Toronto’s “John School.” This education and awareness program run by Streetlight Support Services allows first-time offenders who’ve been arrested for communicating for the purpose of prostitution in a public place to avoid a criminal record; the only requirement is that they successfully complete the program. Jennifer hopes that the men will make a fresh start and not destroy their lives and families as her husband did.
Human trafficking meets a demand
The simple reality is that sex trafficking would not exist in Canada or abroad without demand from men who feel entitled to engage in paid sex acts of their choosing. Yet in tackling the problem, concerned parties frequently ignore the powerful role of the purchaser.
“Why is there tolerance for buying another person?” asks Linda Smith, founder and director of Shared Hope International. “Why aren’t clients going to jail? If there weren’t a buyer, there wouldn’t be a procurer, and there wouldn’t be a victimized woman or child.”
The cases of sex trafficking documented in this book reveal that traffickers have sold their victims to purchasers through various outlets, including strip clubs, massage parlours, escort agencies, internet bulletin board services, street-level prostitution, hotels and motels, house parties, and truck stops. The thousands of Canadian men who purchased these sex acts either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were renting victims of human trafficking, many of them minors. If we can better understand who these men are and why they behave this way, we can develop strategies to intervene.
As the executive director of Streetlight Support Services, John Fenn has met thousands of such men over the last decade. Would these men have known if they were paying for sex with someone who was in reality a victim of human trafficking? Probably not. “They go for whatever they can get,” says Fenn.
A 2004 study by University of Rhode Island professor Dr. Donna M. Hughes, entitled Best Practices to Address the Demand Side of Sex Trafficking, found that “whether or not the woman or child is being compelled to engage in prostitution seems irrelevant to men when they purchase sex acts.... When the focus shifts to the primary level of the demand, there is no evidence that men distinguish between women and children who are victims of trafficking and those who are not.” Therefore, in addressing the demand side of sex trafficking, “it is not possible to distinguish between men’s demand for victims of sex trafficking from men’s demand for commercial sex acts.”
Purchasers of sex acts rely on multiple, often contradictory, justifications for rationalizing their behaviour. John Fenn provides some examples:
“If nobody knows about it, how can it be wrong?”
“If my wife doesn’t find out, then what she doesn’t know isn’t going to hurt her.”
“I deserve this because I’ve just got a new job and I feel good about myself and I deserve a little reward.”
“I lost my job, my wife hasn’t given me sex for three weeks, and I’m a man. I need this, I deserve it.”
Compare these fanciful justifications from johns with this statement from Eve, one of the teenage girls exploited by convicted human trafficker Imani Nakpangi:
“I have low self-esteem. I feel like I’m only good for one thing, sex. I don’t see why someone, a man, would be interested in me and try to get to know me because I feel unworthy, dirty, tainted, nothing.”
Purchasers of sex acts attempt to convince themselves that they’re helping the prostituted/trafficked person by giving her money, further rationalizing their actions on the grounds that they “are not hurting anyone.” Some claim that the woman has chosen this “line of work” and enjoys it. However, studies have found that purchasers of sex acts generally do not believe that the women make a lot of money or enjoy the experience at all.
The idea that masculinity automatically implies an uncontrollable need to buy sex is a popular myth that creates false permission for purchasers of sex acts to carry on as they do. As one European study has pointed out, human beings are not born wishing to buy sexual services any more than they are born with specific desires to play the lottery or drink Coca-Cola. While having sex is a basic biological function, men have to be socialized or induced to feel that it would be pleasurable to pay a stranger for sex. Where commercial sex is concerned, they also have to be taught to feel that consuming such services is a sign of “having fun”—a marker of their social identity and status as “real men,” “adults,” or whatever. The conclusion: paying for sex is a learned behaviour, not a natural and uncontrollable urge.
By confronting the demand for paid sex, we can ensure that purchasers are held accountable for the tremendous harm that they inflict on their victims, both directly through their individual acts of abuse and, together with other purchasers, indirectly by contributing to the entire process of victimization. Seen in that light, the purchasers of sex acts are as morally responsible for the suffering of their victims as are the traffickers who meet their demand.
Johns in high places: The scandalous case of Judge David Ramsay
Lab tests on rats have yielded information about the precise dose of ethylene glycol required to bring about death. Mixing the odourless anti-freeze with orange juice may help it go down more easily, before it viciously attacks the liver and kidneys. As a provincial court judge in British Columbia, David Ramsay was likely familiar with this means of death discussed in criminal investigation textbooks or used in murder cases. On a spring day in 2004, the former judge put this knowledge to personal use as he drank the deadly cocktail. How far he’d fallen. How much he’d given up. How great the suffering he’d caused.
The allegations against Ramsay had surfaced in the summer of 2002 in Prince George, the self-proclaimed Northern Capital of British Columbia, where many of the seventy thousand residents are Aboriginal. Ramsay enjoyed a reputation as an outstanding member of the community. Prior to going to law school at the University of British Columbia, he’d been an elementary school teacher, and after being called to the bar he opened the first legal aid office in Prince George.
Despite his busy private legal practice, Ramsay made time to volunteer on the boards of various charities, including a home for troubled youth, a shelter for abused women, and a crisis centre. Appointed to the Bench in 1991, Judge Ramsay travelled from his base in Prince George as a circuit judge to various remote communities. He appeared to be a respected judge and a doting father of four children—”a decent and caring individual.“ But a few knew otherwise.
Between July 1992 and December 2001, at least four girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen came to know a very different side of Judge Ramsay, a side that was callous, predatory, and violent. One of them was fifteen-year-old Cynthia.
When Cynthia entered Judge Ramsay’s courtroom to face various minor charges, he made the First Nations teenager a ward of the province. Several months later, Ramsay encountered Cynthia on a Prince George street, picked her up in his vehicle, and drove her to an isolated road six kilometres outside of town, where he parked and ordered her to perform oral sex on him for sixty dollars. During the sex act, he grabbed her by the hair and demanded his money back. The girl managed to escape and Ramsay drove off, leaving her alone and naked on the abandoned forest road, but not before warning that he’d have her killed if she ever told anyone about the incident.
Sometime later, fourteen-year-old Audrey, a First Nations girl described as having a “fragile mental state, low self-esteem, limited education and [a] past with abusive adults,” was taken by Ramsay to the same remote forest road and forced to perform various sex acts for him, an incident repeated a number of times over three years. Because the girl was facing criminal charges as a young offender, Judge Ramsay promised that he’d “let her off sentences” if she kept his acts secret. As the presiding judge on eight separate occasions when Audrey appeared in court, he was able to make good on his promises.
At just twelve, Hannah was Judge Ramsay’s youngest victim, a girl with a troubled past who, like Audrey, appeared in the judge’s courtroom facing several criminal charges. Sometime after her appearance in his court, Judge Ramsay picked up Hannah on the street and told her he wanted to “simulate aggressive sex” with her for one hundred and fifty dollars. When she became scared, Hannah pushed Judge Ramsay away and escaped from his vehicle as he yelled at her that no one would believe her if she went to the police. Remarkably, court records refer to this twelve-year-old victim as a “juvenile sex trade worker.” A more appropriate description would be a “sexually exploited youth” or “sex crime victim.”
Judge Ramsay’s most violent behaviour was directed at Sandra, a Métis girl of sixteen. Following the pattern, he picked her up off the street and drove her to a remote area, where he demanded sex acts in exchange for money. When Sandra removed her clothes and reached for a condom, Judge Ramsay became enraged, and according to court records,
[h]e slammed her head on the dashboard, causing her forehead to bleed. After some struggle, she made it out of the truck. However, he caught up with her and pinned her to the ground. He slapped her across the face and proceeded to penetrate her with his penis as she cried. He got up, threw her clothes out of the truck and left. No money changed hands. She made her way back to the highway and hitchhiked back to town.
This was not the last that Sandra would see of Judge Ramsay. A year later, during a custody battle for her son, she was shocked to find him sitting on the bench, presiding over the hearing and deciding the fate of her child. In fact, the shock was sufficient to motivate Sandra to report Judge Ramsay’s actions, launching an investigation that, over the next two years, revealed the extent of his actions and the number of victims.
Judge Ramsay’s suicide attempt failed, and he was sent to hospital for twelve days before his trial could begin. Although he resigned as a judge when the allegations came to light, it was widely anticipated that he would launch a vigorous defence. Surely the allegations couldn’t be true, could they?
Just before his trial, Ramsay shocked his friends, his children, and his wife by admitting that Cynthia, Audrey, Hannah, and Sandra were indeed telling the truth. Rather than endure the girls’ testimony in court and cross-examination by their lawyer, Ramsay pleaded guilty to sexual assault, breach of trust, and three counts of obtaining the sexual services of a minor for money.
His statement to the court satisfied few people in understanding how he could have acted as he did. “I’m at a loss to explain to you, the complainants and my family, how I could work so hard in all other aspects of my life, yet fail by engaging in such disgraceful conduct,” he said in the same courtroom where he had sat in judgment of others for years and now stood as a confessed criminal. “I cannot undo that which has been done, nor take away the pain or the indignity I’ve contributed to their lives.”
At Ramsay’s sentencing hearing, Associate Chief Justice Dohm called his colleague’s conduct “utterly reprehensible,” finding that Ramsay had treated the teenage victims in the same manner that
one might discard a pair of old shoes.... He freely engaged in sexual activity, including violence, with young women who were highly vulnerable because of youth, disadvantaged backgrounds and addiction. He sat in judgment on them for the very behaviour in which he himself was instrumental in causing them to engage, when he had full knowledge of their personal circumstances.... [T]he accused used his office both to solicit satisfaction of his perverted lusts and to shield himself from their consequences. In our society judges are the trustees of the administration of justice. One can hardly imagine a more infamous breach of trust.
On June 1, 2004, Ramsay was sentenced to serve seven years in prison for his crimes. Justice Dohm, in giving his reasons for sentencing, commented on the stark contrast between Ramsay’s brutal actions and his reputation in the community: “It is difficult to imagine a more astounding example of the split personality phenomenon....He has brought shame on his former colleagues, on the judiciary generally, his family and on himself.”
During the trial, it was revealed that police had probed Ramsay’s actions several years earlier but had been unable to find anyone willing to testify against him. Ramsay would never have been held accountable for his actions as a purchaser of sex acts and an abuser of vulnerable girls if not for their courage in coming forward despite his threats. Encouraged by the victims’ bravery, more than twenty other young women began preparing complaints against Ramsay.
Ramsay would never answer those additional allegations. He died of cancer in January 2008 while serving his sentence in a New Brunswick prison. Despite fears from several quarters that he might be released within two years of a seven-year sentence, he was denied parole on the grounds that he had made “no meaningful attempt at remorse or rehabilitation on his part since arriving at federal penitentiary.”
A demographic of Canada’s johns
Purchasers of sex acts, including those who select vulnerable children, may include powerful and upstanding members of the community like Judge Ramsay. Researchers have concluded, however, “the average client is the average man.” A 1988 Gallup poll estimated that 7 percent of Canadian men have paid for sex; more recent estimates are lacking.
From time to time, news reports reveal that many “ordinary johns” may not be so ordinary after all. A Quebec City investigation called “Operation Scorpion” rattled the community and captured international headlines because of the diverse array of men arrested for purchasing sex from underage girls. Their sellers were a street gang called the “Wolf Pack.” The seventeen “johns” arrested included an aide to former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard, a popular radio host, the former president of the winter Bonhomme Carnaval festival, the owner of a pharmacy chain, the owner of an upscale patisserie on Cartier Street, and a flea market proprietor. Yet the prosecutor described the number of prominent men implicated in Operation Scorpion as “the tip of the iceberg.”
Patrons of these trafficked women can find themselves in unexpected situations. One social worker heard that some of the women, having escaped the pimps and traffickers, had gone to job interviews only to discover that their potential bosses were former “clients.”
Older psychological studies on the patrons of purchased sex tended to characterize them as having social or physical inadequacies that drove them to seek out the women. More recent research has revealed that purchasers of sex acts generally share no special distinguishing features, instead displaying characteristics that transcend all categories of income, education, and social standing.
In Canada and the United States, studies of men arrested for attempting to purchase sex found that 60 to 72 percent of participants had some post-secondary education, and most were gainfully employed. From 1996 to 2008, over seven thousand men in Toronto who were caught attempting to purchase sex were sent to the John School at Streetlight Support Services. Officials at the school noted that the attendees represented all ages and walks of life, and most were married and employed. A 2005 study found that nearly 50 percent of sex act purchasers were fathers; whether the majority of these men were satisfied with their sexual relationships with their partners is undetermined—the research points to conflicted feelings among the respondents.
Some commonalities appear to exist among purchasers of sex acts. For example, the average age of a man who purchases sex acts for the first time is between twenty-four and twenty-seven. Additionally, in one study, the men who reported a history of purchasing sex acts averaged forty-two paid encounters.
Casual and habitual users of paid sex may differ significantly. One international study describes habitual users as “deeply troubled” men who relate to women only in a sexualized way. They “suffer from heavy sexual dependency problems and whose excessive involvement in prostitution and pornography results in a number of difficulties including financial, occupational, relationship, as well as personal [They] project their own psychological problems on the women by using more or less excessive violence to humiliate and degrade them.”
Many studies list and explain the wide variety of motivations that prompt men to purchase sex, yet a common attribute informs them all: A sense of power arises when the sex act purchaser can seek out a woman or girl, enter into a “business transaction” with her that’s designed exclusively to satisfy his urges and fantasies, and walk away with no strings attached. For some men, the motivation may include a lack of interest in establishing relationships with women, an inability to do so, or the craving for sex acts that they’re unable to enjoy with their partners.
For the majority of purchasers, sexual behaviour becomes a transaction like any other, devoid of intimacy. The desire always to be in control and to have a variety of anonymous partners, without consequences or responsibility, has even been dubbed “McSex.” “It’s like going to McDonald’s,” one john suggested. “It’s satisfying, it’s greasy, and then you get the hell out of there.”
To a small minority of men, sex for purchase replaces intimacy that’s unavailable elsewhere. “Some of them fall in love,” explains one man associated with Toronto’s John School. “Some of them come back and only look for Susie, week after week, or month after month, whatever it may be, whatever their cycle is, or day after day, who knows. But they’re looking for her, and they want her to leave the pimp, they want her to come and be with him, be his girlfriend. Some of them fall in love with these girls.”
In contrast, some purchasers of sex acts seek a more sadistic hold over their victims. Driven by a desire for physical control, a man of this kind will incline to “forcing sex acts that were not agreed on, for longer than the allotted time, or holding the woman against her will; verbally, physically and sexually abusing the woman; and, enjoying power and control, believing that they own the woman and can do whatever they want to her while she is with them.”
The sense of power extends to verbal abuse. “[H]e tells you that you are a dirty whore, a nasty skank, that fucking and sucking are really all you’re good for,” says Terri-Lynn, a member of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network in Vancouver. “You are nothing more than a sexualized ... collection of body parts to him. This is the so-called work of prostitution. It demeans, humiliates, and devastates women who are used in this way.”
Responding to “market demand”—why traffickers recruit younger and younger women
The demand for younger girls and women is causing traffickers to recruit them, in many cases, when they are under eighteen. Why do men insist on paying for sex acts with minors in violation of the law and society’s values?
Adolescents and children are easier for men to dominate, less able to defend themselves physically, and more susceptible to manipulation by their traffickers, including enforced silence. Another factor is pop culture, advertising, and the entertainment media generally, all of which tend to project a hypersexualized vision of young girls.
The availability of child sexual abuse imagery and videos on the internet contributes significantly to men seeking to purchase sex or sexually abuse underage boys and girls. Some law enforcement officials and counsellors who assist the victims of sex trafficking believe that people who wouldn’t otherwise physically act out or assault a child, or seek victims in underground markets, do so through the internet because the risk of getting caught seems lower to them. According to multiple studies, habitual purchasers of sex acts view pornography significantly more often than first-time purchasers.
Gambling with their lives
Purchasers of sex acts often think of their crime as “victimless” and of themselves as invincible. They’re wrong on both counts. In addition to harming the victims they visit, men who pay for sex acts gamble with their own careers, finances, family life, intimate relationships, reputation, health, and even their lives. These men can be subject to criminal prosecution and, in some provinces, police seize and impound vehicles used in street-level prostitution.
Serious health risks are always present. Purchasers may demand to engage in sex acts without the use of condoms, and some will pay extra for this even though STDs are on the rise. Studies in the United States have shown a rate of HIV infection of prostituted persons ranging from 2.5 percent in Los Angeles County to 28 percent in New York City. A recent study found that 26 percent of prostituted females in Vancouver were infected with HIV, a rate that has been increasing over the last decade.
As johns attending programs so often recount, the cumulative impact on their status in the community, career opportunities, family relationships, and financial security can be life altering. Here’s one tale from a participant in a recent session at a Toronto John School:
At the height of my addiction I was spending tens of thousands of dollars on sex, drugs, and gambling every year. There was a lot of shame … porn movies, strip bars, pimps, and drug dealers. The addiction cost me my business, my wife, my children and my freedom.