An online creation: middle-class hooking
Victims often don’t fit the stereotype; they could be from a suburban family, being sold through the Internet, not on a street corner. They could be your daughter
She poses on a bed, wearing pink lingerie and staring into the camera. “I’m young, I’m willing and I’m waiting for you,” reads the pitch in the online ad. “I love to please.”
Any suggestion of glamour vanishes quickly inside the seamy Scarborough hotel.
The hallways are fetid; it’s unlikely the rooms will be any better.
Brianne answers the knock, expecting to see the anonymous man with whom she negotiated sex-for-money over email about an hour earlier. Instead, two police officers step inside the room — floral polyester bedspread, stained carpet — where the tattered beige curtains are drawn and a filmy camisole is draped over the lampshade in a sad attempt at atmosphere.
“It’s sad. They (the pimps) find the vulnerabilities of these girls and use it against them. It’s exploiting weakness.” DET. MARK BENALLICK WHO HEADS THE SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, PART OF THE TORONTO POLICE SEX CRIMES SQUAD
“We’re not here to arrest you,” the officer says to Brianne. “We’re here to help you.” Women who are victims of human trafficking don’t fit the profile you might imagine. Women like Brianne.
Many, like her, are more likely from a middle-class family in Richmond Hill or Mississauga than a poverty-stricken village in Romania or Moldova. And they’re more likely to be sold online rather than on a street corner.
As difficult as it may be to believe, these girls could be your daughter, says Det. Mark Benallick, who heads the Special Victims Unit, part of the Toronto Police Sex Crimes Squad. The unit deals almost exclusively with sex workers.
“What begins as a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship progresses to increasing control, until these women are treated as slaves,” Benallick says. “These pimps have the ability to spot vulnerable girls in a crowd at a bus station or on a downtown street and instantly know which ones can be manipulated with promises of affection.”
‘I’m still a child’
Brianne — not her real name — knows she could probably use some help. She has been on the move since she was 11, when her parents divorced and she left home.
Three years later, she was in rehab for alcohol abuse. There, Brianne met a man — 30 years older and now the father of her child — who would groom her and force her to earn a living in hotel rooms like this.
In the corner sits a ratty stuffed toy. Brianne says it belongs to her toddler, who was taken from her by child protection authorities. Now she sleeps with it.
“I’m still a child,” Brianne says, admitting that she moves the floppy-eared dog off the bed when she has a client because they think it’s “creepy.”
“I can’t drink . . . I can’t buy alcohol,” she says. “But I feel, like, 50 years old.”
Brianne is 18 now — old enough that police can’t prevent her from working as a prostitute. She’s legally an adult, but not old enough to do many of the other things that comes with being grown-up, like buying her own booze.
On the day Detective Constable Aaron Akeson, an officer with the Special Victims Unit, meets Brianne, she has already had four “dates.” It’s not even 8 p.m. She’s made $310.
Brianne’s family wants her to come home to Barrie, where she grew up. She misses her son, and takes solace in encouraging text messages from friends who know what she’s doing and are desperate for her to get out — “When I see (Brianne), I see a girl with endless possibility.”
Where friends see possibility, her pimp sees a commodity. Detectives see another victim of human trafficking.
Most people think of human trafficking as being an international problem, but people don’t need to be moved across borders, or even across the street, to be trafficked.
The Criminal Code says if someone “exercises control, direction or influence over the movements of a person, for the purpose of exploiting them or facilitating their exploitation,” that is trafficking, and they could face 14 years in jail.
But human trafficking in Canada reaches well beyond prostitution. In 2010, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began laying charges in one of the country’s biggest-ever human trafficking rings, centred on an extended Hungarian Roma family living in Hamilton that lured their victims to Canada with the promise of good jobs.
Upon arrival, the Hungarian newcomers, all claiming refugee status as they were coached to do, had their passports, welfare payments and bank accounts seized and were forced to work in construction for virtually no pay.
Canada’s National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking, launched last year, says “it is often described as a modern form of slavery.”
Low self-esteem
The mantra for those who work with women who have been trafficked — those who are trafficked for commercial sex are mainly women — is “force, fraud, coercion.” If those elements are present, in a relationship with a pimp, for example, then legally it is a case of human trafficking.
Michele Anderson agrees. The girls she works with at Covenant House in downtown Toronto share common traits: “They’re vulnerable. There’s low self-esteem, they’re disconnected from the family, they’re not doing so well at school, they’re disengaged from a positive peer network.” And then, she says, they meet someone. “A man who pays attention to them. Compliments them. Tells them that they’re pretty. Offers to take them for dinner. Spends money on them. Buys them makeup. Takes them shopping to buy clothes. And very quickly will say to the youth, ‘You’re my girlfriend. You’re my best girl. And I’m your boyfriend, ” Anderson says. “She will believe it.”
“She’s been looking for approval, she’s been looking for someone maybe to take care of her, she’s been looking for attention.”
The man will likely introduce drugs into the relationship and the girl may not have to pay for them at first. But eventually, Anderson says, the bill comes due and she is asked, then told, to do certain things. Pretty quickly, any pretence is gone, and the girl is working in the sex trade.
That is exactly what happened to Layla, which is not her real name, but the name she asks the Star to use. She is now 24 and studying social work. Next up is nursing school. But when she was 16, and living in Brampton, she met a man.
“I thought he was my boyfriend,” she says, simply. Almost a decade later, she still refers to him — two decades her senior — as her ex. “He was very nice at first, of course.”
But then it changed: he moved her from Brampton to Georgetown. He fed her drugs. And the sexual demands started: he asked her to have a threesome with his friends, then to have sex with him in front of other people.
“He would get drugs or money,” she says. “And I would never see it.”
He kept her isolated from her family. When she tried to leave to visit her father one morning, he dragged her from the car. If she tried to get away, he pursued her.
“I would leave in the middle of the night, and he would chase me, and throw me over his shoulder and drag me back to the house,” she says. “Or he would lock me in a room.”
Despite what she has been through, Layla is warm and friendly. She is in therapy, doing volunteer work in the community. She understands this man harmed her, yet she still can’t call him what he was: a pimp.
“I look at him as an ex-boyfriend. I accept that he exploited me. But pimp — it’s such a big word,” she says. “I’m sure I’ll come to that some day, but I’m not there yet.”
Skilled traffickers
Jolene Stowell, who runs an outreach program for sex workers at All Saints Community Church, is working with nearly two dozen women who have been trafficked — even if it’s not a word they recognize.
“Nobody has ever walked in here before and said, ‘I’ve been trafficked, ” Stowell says, as Layla nods. But the women she works with eventually understand that they have been exploited — even if it takes time to arrive at that realization.
She agrees with Anderson that the women who end up as victims of trafficking are vulnerable. But when asked, by Layla, what characteristic the trafficking victims she has worked with have in common, Stowell pauses.
“There really isn’t one,” she says. “People ask that a lot, because they want to understand it and prevent it. They assume there’s something wrong with you. But it’s the skill of the trafficker.”
Forget the stereotype of the velvet-clad pimp: these are shrewd entrepreneurs with a sophisticated understanding of complex grooming techniques designed to gradually assert control. The most exploitative are like psychology PhDs without letters after their names.
Professional pimps openly peddle their secrets of success in books that are steady sellers on Amazon, with titles like The Pimp
Game: Instructional Guide and Pimpology: The 48 Laws of the Game.
“Prey on the weak,” explains Pimpology author Ken Ivy, a veteran American pimp, noting accurately that most young women vulnerable to exploitation “have low selfesteem” and often are victims of some kind of trauma or abuse.
“A pimp looks for that weakness,” he advises. “Weakness is the best trait a person can find in someone they want to control.”
Life-changing moment
Tara Riley was13 and changing subways at the Yonge-Bloor station when she heard someone — a grown man, 23 years her senior — shouting to her. Turning back to speak with him would change her life.
“At that time, I was like, ‘What? I’m fat, I’m ugly, I have red, curly hair, and you’re calling to me?’” Riley, now 40, recalls. “And I went up, and I spoke to him, and I gave him my number, and that’s how it all began.”
Riley grew up in an affluent home in the Beaches. She even had her own telephone line — which made it easy for her exploiter to court her, and which is why, as a mother herself now, she pays close attention to her daughters’ cellphones.
Riley’s experience is different from that of Layla and Brianne. While she was exploited — beaten, raped, her jaw broken by the man she thought she loved — she didn’t do sex work, though he tried to force her. The voice of her beloved great-grandmother echoed in her head: “Don’t do this.”
Instead, she found other ways to survive by doing things for him, and keeping the rent paid and the fridge stocked. She stole. She’d run scams on the street. She’d work the phones, setting up dates for other girls he was pimping.
“I’m sure that I lured other girls without knowing it,” Riley says. “And that devastates me.”
She now works in harm reduction, is a
“It (online prostitution) allows younger and younger girls to be more vulnerable. It’s far more anonymous for the pimps and more difficult to track.”
PATRICIA ELKERTON WHO CO-ORDINATES A STREET OUTREACH PROGRAM CALLED PROJECT 417
lioness of a mother, and wanted her name used in this story because, she said, she is reclaiming her history as her own.
In Toronto, the Special Victims Unit is focused on helping women out of prostitution and into safety. Rather than arrests and charges, as was once the protocol, they now try to educate and assist, urging women to help prosecute their pimps. Other jurisdictions, such as London, Ont., are carefully watching their work, and setting up their own units.
Since January, 2012, Benallick and his team have worked on 32 investigations with elements of human trafficking, most of them still before the courts. (They’ve also investigated 27 incidents where sex trade workers said they were physically or sexually assaulted. Police are certain these are under-reported offences.)
RCMP figures show 46 convictions in human trafficking cases since 2005, involving offences such as procuring, living off the avails of prostitution and assault. Another 86 human trafficking cases are currently before the courts. The majority are domestic trafficking for sexual services along with five international human trafficking for forced labour.
But police investigators all agree the statistics fail to paint an accurate portrait of the problem. Human sex trafficking is a dramatically under-reported crime, they say, largely because of the reluctance of victims to come forward.
The isolation that comes with Internetbased sex work adds to that weakness.
On the streets, prostitutes can look out for each other, jot down the licence plates of johns, and maybe even feel safer under the watchful eye of their pimp, hovering nearby .
Working online, all they may have is a cell number or an email address, and no one to watch their backs — or report their absence when they don’t come back.
On New York’s Long Island, the skeletal remains of four women who had been advertising sex for sale on Craigslist — which has since eliminated the category — were found last year. And in suburban Vancouver, the deaths of two women who both worked in the sex trade and advertised online are being investigated by homicide detectives.
Brianne says she has tried to get out of the business for a while, get her high school equivalency, and make something of herself. But a tumultuous relationship with her father drove her from his house with her young child last year.
And with no financial support from the child’s father, she ended up having to surrender her baby to Children’s Aid. Shortly after, her profile returned to backpages.com, where she distinguishes her services with discounted rates — $60 for “full service.”
She claims she has no pimp — Brianne knows he’s really who the officers would like to arrest — but can’t hide how she lives.
“I was moved here last month,” she says, catching herself. “I mean, I decided to move here.”
Had she been under16 — even a day under 16 — the officers could have forced her into protective care. Girls between the ages of16 and 18 fall into a grey area: they can’t be allowed to continue to work, but there are no social services for them, so often they go back to their “boyfriends,” the same ones who take the money they make selling themselves.
‘They’re alone’
The explosion of online sex trafficking is fraught with dangers, say the veterans of the more traditional street trade.
“They don’t know what they are doing,” says Trixie, a petite blond who says she is 50 and has been working the streets on and off since she was 19.
She’s at work on a desolate stretch of Carlton St., near Jarvis St., at 3 a.m. on a rainy night.
“Here, you’re safer, you’re more in control,” she says. “They don’t have any guidance, they’re alone.”
Patricia Elkerton, who co-ordinates a street outreach program called Project 417, which operates out of a downtown Salvation Army centre, says she worries about the younger girls getting into the online prostitution world.
“In any level of prostitution there is violence, there is risk, but when it comes to online, there are real problems with the isolation,” she says. “On the street you have the option of turning a man down if you want to. Online, someone shows up at your room, you are now trapped with that individual.”
Elkerton also says that online prostitution makes it easier for pimps to traffic underage girls who would be more noticeable on the street.
“It allows younger and younger girls to be more vulnerable,” she says. “It’s far more anonymous for the pimps and more difficult to track.”
Arranging a meeting
Outside Brianne’s hotel, Benallick’s eyes scan three parked black cars with men staring back at him.
“This place is a nest of pimps. They’re watching us there. And there,” he says, gesturing to the cars. “It’s sad. They find the vulnerabilities of these girls and use it against them. It’s exploiting weakness.”
The evening began in the team’s office at police headquarters. Two of Benallick’s officers — Akeson and Detective Constable Peter Brady — scanned profiles on backpages.com looking for women who appeared particularly young.
When they identify a possible target, Brady picks up the squad’s shared cellphone — it’s so old it doesn’t even have predictive text — and sends a message. This time, it’s to a woman who calls herself “Alexis Fox,” a “Super Hot Russian brunette, clean and discreet.”
Is she available? Brady texts (slowly). The response — probably via an untraceable pay-as-you-go phone — comes in seconds: “Hour or half-hour?”
Half-hour, Brady replies. A meeting is arranged at the upscale InterContinental Hotel two hours later, giving the team time to get in place.
Ninety minutes later, they’re standing on Bloor St. W. on a sultry summer evening. The officers see Alexis emerge from a cab, wearing short pink shorts and a low-cut tank top. A lollipop hangs from her mouth; her long brown hair is in a ponytail.
Afew moments later, a text appears on the police phone: “Come to room 327.”
The squad troops through the lush lobby and up to the third floor. As officers enter the room, Alexis starts yelling — she doesn’t sound Russian — and calls a friend. More likely, the officers say, it was her pimp.
“The cops came to my room,” she screams into her phone. “They tricked me. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.” Benallick asks who she’s speaking with. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, crying. “I’m 18. I’m old enough to be doing this. Get out. And don’t cause any problems downstairs (with hotel management) either.”
The officers check her ID and confirm her age. They then make their pitch about getting out of the game, and offer her their business cards and brochures describing the help available to her. She rejects them all.
In the lobby, Benallick asks hotel management for details on who rented the room. It was booked by a man an hour earlier and paid in cash, he’s told. Rooms here start at more than $200 a night.
Alexis wasn’t frightened of being arrested, Benallick surmises. She was scared because “she’s worried about the billable hours.”
“She told (her pimp) she has a date and she isn’t going to get paid. She’s going to be blamed for the cops coming, for not getting the money. It’s the first call she made,” he says, as the team leaves the hotel for their next “date.”
“That’s the power they have on these women.”