Human traffickers are just pimps
Police charge trio, including a woman, for recruiting teenage girls
The modern name is human trafficking, among the modern particular offences “material benefit from sexual services,” or in this case, “material benefit from sexual services under 18 years.”
But a pimp is a pimp is a pimp.
“There’s no difference,” Toronto police Inspector Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, the boss of the force’s sex-crimes unit, snapped Tuesday. “It’s pimping made to look glamorous. They’re child rapists, that’s what they are.”
She was speaking at a press conference held to announce that the three young people who were arrested last month in connection with the forcing of a 14-year-old into the sex trade are facing more charges.
In that case, police were alerted by hotel staff.
After the first arrests and the attendant publicity, another teenager — this one 16 — contacted police.
She had managed to escape on her own in January, but came forward to police after the accused trio began calling and messaging, threatening her.
Both teens allegedly were held in downtown Toronto hotels, forced to provide sex — the first girl for a week, the other for two days — and forced to turn over the money they earned.
Their alleged captors now face a total of 43 charges, including forcible confinement, various trafficking offences, procuring, recruiting, exercising control and “advertising another person’s sexual services.”
The news conference itself was an equally modern business.
Long gone are the days when police merely announced arrests and, occasionally, displayed the fruits of their investigations, such as weapons and drugs.
Now, they invite along community partners, and so at the podium with Beaven-Desjardins were Michele Anderson, a human-trafficking specialist for Covenant House, an agency with shelters in Toronto and Vancouver that help homeless youth in myriad ways, and Dawn Harvard, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada.
Anderson was able to speak in a general way to the devastation wreaked upon young victims, who are “absolutely destroyed” by the abuse they experience, she said, even if they don’t always recognize that they are victims; the pimp “romances” the young women and “they may fall in love with these men.” Thus, the ties between them — a bond born of trauma, at least for the victim — may be “incredibly strong.”
Harvard, on the other hand, has seen up close the exceptional vulnerability of indigenous women, and though everyone was being a bit cagey about the reason for her presence, it seems clear that there’s some connection in this investigation to aboriginal communities.
All Beaven-Desjardins would say, in response to several questions about whether one or another of the victims or the alleged female perpetrator were of aboriginal heritage or came from a reserve, was that “the investigation indicates there may be some connection in this area.”
A 2013 RCMP report put the number of missing or murdered aboriginal women across Canada at 1,181 (164 missing, an astonishing 1,017 the victims of homicide), but Harvard said that number has certainly risen since.
She knows that, she said, “because I can’t wake up one week in this country” without getting a tweet from another family reporting a missing girl.
Reciting the litany of factors at play — isolation of some native communities, extreme poverty, reserves without proper housing, schools or even safe water — she said furiously, “Our girls are more vulnerable because they want a better life.”
The 16-year-old is from outside the city, and was allegedly recruited by the young woman, Natasha Robitaille, who hails from Orillia, Ont. The two may have had some previous connection.
Robitaille, in fact, is alleged to have been “doing the luring” for the two men, Sage Finestone, 21, and Nick Faria, 19, both of Toronto.
Her own Facebook page suggests she herself may have been lured or romanced into the oldest of games.
In the weeks before the trio’s first arrest on Feb. 27, Robitaille was raving about a “Sage Strasburg” being “the bestest” and “my man who keeps me amazing.”
She also posted several pictures of her “living like a queen,” including one with the Marriott hotel sign in the background, and on Feb. 9 wrote, “I can’t validate cheap whores who work out of $80 hotel rooms when I’m sitting in my $400 SUITE with my man LAUGHING at all of you.”
Her most recent post, on the day of the arrest, read, “Forget what it all meant, forget what it’s all worth, it will never be what I want it to I’ll have to lean on myself.”
Robitaille and Faria, who appears to have been involved in all-ages concert promotions, were released on bail on March 23, Finestone on March 18.
They are due back in court on April 16.