Invisible Chains Read online

  INVISIBLE

  CHAINS

  CANADA’S

  UNDERGROUND

  WORLD OF

  HUMAN

  TRAFFICKING

  INVISIBLE

  CHAINS

  BENJAMIN PERRIN

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Benjamin Perrin, 2010

  Epigraph by Margaret Meade used with permission.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated by the author to initiatives to end human trafficking.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-670-06453-3

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  For Sevey and You.

  You know who you are.

  Slavery is a weed that grows in any soil.

  –EDMUND BURKE

  Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,

  committed citizens can change the world. ®

  Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has

  –MARGARET MEAD

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 The Renaissance of Slavery

  2 Travelling Sex Offenders Fuelling Demand Abroad

  3 International Trafficking to Canada

  4 Across the Undefended Border

  5 Buying Local—Canadian Victims

  6 The New Technology of Trafficking

  7 Breaking the Bonds That Enslave Victims

  8 First Nations, Last Chance

  9 Falling Through the Cracks

  10 Homegrown Human Traffickers

  11 Justice Too Often Denied

  12 Ending Impunity, Offering Hope

  13 From Average Joes to Average Johns

  14 Doing the Dirty Work: Forced Labour

  15 Battling Trafficking Across Canada

  16 Dealing with Trafficking on a Global Basis

  17 Building a New Underground Railroad

  Appendix: Organizations Combatting Human Trafficking

  Methodology

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  In the midst of peace and beauty it is unusual to turn your thoughts to images of abuse and ugliness, but that is precisely what happened to some university friends and me late in the summer of 2000. We were staying at a lakeside cottage in Muskoka, Ontario, a region where the lakes are cool and placid, the granite rocks are as Canadian as a Group of Seven painting, and the cry of the loons at dusk can raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

  As we watched the sun begin to set on a day that was nearing the end of another cottage season, we joked that it looked just like a beer commercial.

  We weren’t nostalgic, however. We were eager for the future and, some would say, idealistic. After all, we were on the brink of our professional lives, overflowing with opportunities and plans. I anticipated a career in business, although I had not sharpened my focus any narrower than that. Others were preparing their own vision for the future, some in accounting, some in law or public policy.

  As diverse as our goals might have been, our backgrounds were similar—young men and women from middle-class families enjoying the luxury of a beautiful setting to share dreams and laughter, none of us with a serious concern in our own lives worth expressing. All of us on that lakeside patio considered ourselves fortunate. We would enter the “responsible adult” period of our lives with an excellent education and equally good prospects for success. We could expect, with reasonable hard work, to maintain the quality of life we were enjoying at the moment, and in doing so we would represent a small minority of the world’s general population.

  Instead of talking about our own comfortable futures, however, we took turns reviewing a litany of suffering being experienced around the world—poverty, starvation, war crimes, genocide, HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the modern-day slavery of human trafficking....

  Slavery? Human trafficking? I was taken aback. These were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concerns. We had just celebrated the start of the twenty-first century. Surely these issues weren’t still in need of attention on a wide scale in foreign regions, let alone our own country.

  The idea that people continue to deal in human beings as though they were domestic animals, furniture, or a commodity was impossible for me to imagine. Yet after some discussion and contemplation, I realized that to ignore the issue was equally unconscionable. The wellworn words of Edmund Burke resounded in my head: “All that it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” I don’t know where I first heard the famous challenge, but it would haunt me for the next decade.

  We were aware of evidence that human trafficking persisted around the world. But to what extent? How did it function? Who were its victims? And how could it be addressed and eliminated?

  What began as idle chatter developed into a commitment to do something—anything. How could we do nothing and let evil prevail? I suspect that discussions similar to this one occur constantly among people of our age, as a reflection of our idealism if nothing else. This discussion was different, however. This one led to awareness followed by action. It managed, to one extent or another, to alter the lives of everybody who had gathered to relax and enjoy that quiet Muskoka evening more than a decade ago.

  We made a pledge to each other. When we got home, we would research the problem and exchange findings, we would raise public awareness of the situation, we would go abroad to help those struggling against this oppression, and we would coalesce our efforts into an organization we named “The Future Group.”

  We spent the next eight months setting our plan in motion and raising funds to cover our costs. The largest and most immediate expense would be a hundred-day deployment to an area that represented the most critical abuse of people as contemporary slaves, and we soon settled on Cambodia.

  Of all the countries in the world, Cambodia should rank among the most peaceful and abundant. Its culture extends back thousands of years, its overriding values are Buddhist, and its people are basically gentle in their approach to others . Yet few countries are as dominated by issues of slavery, owing in large part to the patronizing of the country’s sex industry by tourists from Australia, Western Europe, and North America, including untold numbers of Canadian men every year.

  If we could document and expose the problem while volunteering with local organizations that assist survivors of sex slavery, warn at-risk youth, and deter would-be child sex offenders from developed countries, we would have made a small but important difference. It was a tall order. Going up against an entrenched industry of sexual exploitation that is sustained through corruption, crime, and violence was a daunting prospect that more than once gave us pause. But we could not ignore the pull we felt to address this problem.

  Those were our intentions when, eight months after that summer evening discussion in Muskoka, I and three other members of The Future Group travelled to Cambodia to spend one hundred of the most remarkable days of our lives.

  Arriving in the capital, Phnom Penh, felt a little like arriving in a war zone. The city, once a French colonial outpost, consists mostly of crumbling low-rise buildings. Settling into our quarters, we quickly established a routine: Mornings and afternoons were spent volunteering with the local aid organizations, including AFESIP Cambodia—in English, “Acting for Women in Distressing Situations”—a grassroots group dedicated to fighting the trafficking of women and children for sex slavery. Founded by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian survivor of sex trafficking, the group takes an approach that is victim-centred, with long-term goals of achieving successful and permanent rehabilitation and reintegration.

  In the evenings, we would discuss ideas to improve the local response to the problem and write emails home to raise money to implement them. Some nights, I and two other male members of the group dressed as tourists to investigate the bars and brothels of the city along with local human rights activists, recording the number of girls, their approximate ages, and any signs of physical abuse we saw. We then returned to our room to prepare our reports for local prosecutors and police.

  This first-hand experience powerfully affected all of us. It was clear that the girls spent the daytime hours in brothels and hotels throughout the city and the evenings in the long string of bars spread throughout the red-light districts. In these situations, we recognized that the tragedy encompassed thousands of girls, women, and young boys who clearly wished only to live normal lives. Hearing the accounts of abuse suffered by survivors in the shelters while knowing that so many more were being exploited is difficult to process. A shell of sorts develops as a mechanism that permits you to concentrate on the task at hand and set aside the emotional response to all that is being witnessed.

  The shell, however, is not impervious. Not forever.

  One Friday evening I returned to my apartment and broke down. If I were back in Canada, I would have been out with friends having drinks and dinner, maybe watching a movie. Yet I had just spent this Friday evening watching young girls face another night of being sold to strangers, over and over again. They did so both to try to avoid beatings, and in the hope that someday they could return to their families.

  Each survivor we met represented a tragedy of one kind or another, some more distressing and memorable than others. One of these was Sevey, a dark-haired nine-year-old Cambodian girl whom I met at a recovery centre in northern Phnom Penh. The shelter was protected by twelve-foot walls to keep the traffickers from reclaiming their victims—something that nonetheless happened from time to time. To build trust with young survivors like Sevey, I brought a soccer ball, along with water bottles for goalposts. I still remember her bright smile and jubilant laughter as she scored a goal against “Team Canada.” Just months before, Sevey had been sold by her parents and was being sexually exploited by touring pedophiles for the financial benefit of her trafficker.

  I asked, through the Khmer translator, what Sevey hoped to do now that she was receiving care and education and was free of the people who had purchased her. Her reaction was a flood of tears. Had I said something wrong, perhaps crossed some cultural barrier?

  No, I was assured. Sevey had begun to cry because her future was a scary unknown. She came from a tiny remote village deep in the jungles and rice paddies of rural Cambodia. She had never learned the name of the village, if indeed it had one on a map, nor did she know the last name of her parents or how to find them. Clearly she had no hope of ever going home.

  The young girl’s experience was tragic but hardly unique. According to a 2000 study by UNICEF, 30 to 35 percent of sex trafficking victims in Cambodia are children, many taken from their homes to major urban centres where they are sold for sex. Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Laotian, and Filipina girls have also been brought to the country to be sexually exploited. Our research during our hundred days in Cambodia framed these crude estimates in dreadful detail. The “owners” of sex slaves search for poor, unassuming, disease-free young girls, preferably between thirteen and sixteen—sometimes much younger to satisfy the demand of foreign pedophiles. These girls on the threshold of adolescence are forcibly sold for sex acts to between ten and twenty men per day, seven days a week.

  Each of these child sex slaves is maintained by a mama-san who exercises control over every detail of her life. If the victims refuse to engage in a sex act, they are brutally beaten. They’re often kept malnourished in order to make them more compliant and dependent on their mama-san. Meanwhile, parents in distant villages may be unaware their child is being sold for sex, genuinely believing the child is working in a restaurant or selling flowers to tourists—common lies told to unsuspecting parents. In other cases, parents offer up their child either knowing or suspecting that she will be sold for sex—a decision that’s difficult to comprehend, even given the abject poverty that is the legacy of the bloody Khmer Rouge period. The parents are often paid up front for the “income” their child will earn in the big city; however, that money is now a debt that the child must repay to her mama-san. And the debt increases as the mama-san charges everything imaginable back to the victim, including food, the “rent” of the room she is sold in, medical treatment, if it is ever given, and fines if men complain about the girl. The system, in other words, relies on physical and sexual violence, combined with financial coercion, to control its young victims for years at a time. As the victim ages and shows more signs of physical and psychological abuse, she’s likely to be sold to a lower-end brothel. There, instead of servicing wealthy Cambodian men, foreign travellers, and expatriates, she will be sold for far less to average local men.

  There are really only four ways out for most of the victims exploited in this systematic fashion. First, they may risk escape at an opportune moment, but are rarely successful. Second, they may be among the small minority that are rescued (often because their mama-san is not paying enough in bribes to the police). Third, they may be killed for persistent acts of resistance or escape attempts, also serving as an example to other victims of the consequences of disobedience. Or, finally, after years of being sold, they may be discarded because they are too costly to maintain or so psychologically and physically damaged that no one will pay to abuse them anymore.

  In Cambodia, my team and I helped implement programs to rehabilitate these victims, deter and prosecute offenders, and identify rural villages targeted by traffickers. On more than one occasion we feared for our safety, based on threats by traffickers and others who profited from the situation. At other times we felt almost too overwhelmed to continue, yet we found ourselves being encouraged by the young survivors whose yearning for freedom inspired us.

  My colleagues and I returned from Cambodia shaken by the outrageous conditions we had witnessed and determined to alert others to the need for action, including strategies to help Cambodian grassroots organizations dedicated to ending the exploitation of children as sex slaves.

  Having seen affluent male tourists from North America, Western Europe, and Australia audaciously walking hand in hand with underage girls they had rented, I knew that our own na tion was tainted in contributing to the tragedy. And yet it was a tragedy confined to distant lands. My naive assumption that sex trafficking was something that couldn’t happen in Canada was eventually overturned.

  One day in November 2003, I received a telephone call from a reporter with the Calgary Herald seeking my comment on a recent human trafficking case discovered through an investigation called “Operation Relaxation.” The case had taken place not in Cambodia, Thailand, or Vietnam but in my hometown of Calgary. This was shocking enough, but the actual location where the women were being held had an even more personal impact. It wasn’t in some industrial area of the city or in the rougher down-and-out locales frequented by drug dealers, but rather just a few blocks from an old-fashioned burger-and-milkshake restaurant called Peter’s Drive-In, where my parents had treated me and my siblings after baseball games as kids. How could I justify addressing sexual slavery only in far-off places when it was occurring practically in the neighbourhood where I grew up?

  I couldn’t. And I didn’t.

  Over the next several years I researched human trafficking in Canada, intent on learning how it could happen here and what we as a nation were doing about it. Operation Relaxation was like a thread I began to pull, quickly revealing a vast web of exploitation that reached across Canada and, indeed, around the world. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trafficking victims in Canada, but they weren’t all from abroad. On a smaller but no less shameful scale, we were guilty of tolerating systems of exploitation in our country every bit as appalling as those in Cambodia.

  The response of our courts and government to the situation, whenever it was drawn to their attention, often has been nothing less than disgraceful. No system existed to help victims: Some foreign victims were even treated as criminals—detained and deported, ineligible to receive even basic medical care or counselling. In contrast, their traffickers rarely were charged and, when charges were pressed and a conviction obtained, the sentences handed out were horrendously inadequate.