‘I didn’t even understand that I was trafficked’
Human-trafficking conference hears from former victim of trade
Police didn’t recognize Timea Nagy as a trafficking victim at first. Neither did she.
“You become basically this product and you become a zombie ... The truth is I didn’t even understand that I was trafficked,“said Nagy, who moved to Canada from Budapest in 1998, thinking she’d lined up a nannying job to earn extra money. Instead, she said, she was held in a motel and forced into the sex trade for months in Toronto.
Nagy told her story Thursday, at the beginning of a four-day Ottawa conference bringing together Canadian and international law enforcement and other organizations that work with victims of human trafficking. They’re working together now to stop people like Nagy from slipping through the international and domestic cracks that allow human trafficking to flourish.
Conference organizer Kim Derry, a retired Toronto police deputy chief, said the goal of the event is to discuss the potential of an international centre, which could provide victims, police and the public with a central point of contact for concerns about human trafficking. It would also help police forces collaborate. A followup conference is planned for next year to discuss the idea’s progress.
In Nagy’s case, she didn’t understand what was happening, she told the Together Let’s Stop Traffick conference, which was organized in part by the FBI National Academy Associates.
“To my understanding, I came to Canada, it was my fault,“said Nagy, now 36. “I’ll just keep it quiet, I’ll be a good girl. I’ll do whatever they ask, make the money and go home.“
Eventually, as she began to understand the situation, she found a police officer who let her explain what happened to her. Years later, when the case got to court, the charges were withdrawn. But Nagy now helps to train officers to recognize and work with victims.
RCMP assistant commissioner Todd Shean told delegates that since 2004 the national force has become aware of 165 Canadian cases that have resulted in human trafficking charges, including sexual exploitation and forced labour. He said Canada isn’t known to be a significant country of origin for victims but is “primarily a destination country.”
Both officers and the public need to become more aware of the crime, he said, adding its scope is beyond what most Canadians would realize.
While training police, Nagy said one officer told her that he had seen her while she was held captive in an Etobicoke hotel. He was watching the area for an unrelated drug investigation and didn’t realize Nagy was being forced into the sex trade.
“He said to me, ‘How can I live with this?’” she said. “What I said to him is, ‘You know what? You didn’t know that I was a traffic victim. Neither did I.’”