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Victims of Trafficking in Persons: Perspectives from the Canadian Community Sector
3. Findings (cont’d)
3.1 Characteristics of Trafficking in Persons (cont’d)
3.1.3 The Trafficking Process
Interviewees were also asked to describe the trafficking process they had been exposed to through their work, including recruitment, transit and forms of exploitation, all of which varied according to whether the trafficking was international or internal.
Overall, the study participants reported a wide range of techniques to recruit victims. Internationally, employment agencies, recruitment agents, personal contacts and newspaper ads were used. Internally, traffickers seemed most often to rely upon developing a personal relationship and dependency with their victim.
Internationally, illegitimate and unscrupulous employment agencies and immigration consultants appear to be a particular problem in the Philippines, recruiting people to be exploited in Canada under the guise of the LCP:
These recruitment agencies sometimes also arrange for their victims to enter Canada on foreign diplomatic staff visas or as tourists. Recruitment agencies and immigration consultants were key players in trafficking for domestic work; match-making agencies sometimes trafficked mail-order brides.
Illegitimate employment agencies are also used to recruit for the sex trade, relying on newspaper and radio ads for service industry jobs overseas, as well as word of mouth to reach their victims. This is done mostly through international prostitution circuits and venues that any person can get to know and use. It was noted that clubs in the United States and Canada communicated with each other. They also communicated with clubs and the so called "employment agencies" in Central and Eastern Europe. Asian and Russian gangs were identified as important elements in this type of trafficking. The major trafficking networks are overseas, but said to be connected to networks within Canada. According to respondents these networks were new, not associated with the traditional forms of organised crime.
Both internationally and internally, respondents said that traffickers approached people who appeared to be vulnerable and offered them jobs, opportunities, or education. Subjects are approached and engaged in conversation and the trafficker "informs" them about Canada: the "goodies" and "freebies" they could have access to, and opportunities to make money, to own material things and to move out of poverty. Young women are offered jobs as waitresses or hairdressers; they talk to their parents and the family provides the money that the trafficker demands. Traffickers arrange for all travel documents.
Victims are sometimes referred to the trafficker by friends and relatives who may or may not be fully aware of the traffickers’ intentions. Often, families will sell everything they own to pay for the trip of one family member, whom they never hear from again, leaving the entire family impoverished. In other cases, agents in rural areas and villages may kidnap children and transfer them to broader networks which exploit them. Traffickers maintain the exploitation of their victims through control and coercion, increasing their vulnerability:
Some people believe they will get a job here so the family sells their land and their jewellery. They sell everything the whole family has to get this money to pay to come here. Then they lose everything and they don’t even have news about what happens to the person who comes here. It is the poverty on the other side that creates this. Most of them don’t go back. Their lives are lost. They are murdered. All these are aspects of trafficking.
Recruitment agents or "immigration consultants" also go to bars, sex trade venues and coffee shops in poor villages or towns to seek women and subsequently get them involved into forms of sexual exploitation. Potential victims are met in public places. Most of these recruiters are men, although some recruiters are women who were previously involved in the sex trade.
Other types of traffickers reported by respondents included crime bosses or civil servants in other countries who take bribes and furnish passports. Lies, manipulation and blackmail are often part of the recruitment process, as traffickers tell the victims: "I will get you there but you have to pay me back
". This holds true for recruiting both within Canada and internationally.
In Canada, respondents pointed out that recruitment happens in bus shelters and depots, malls, and rural villages. Personal relationships seem to be the key to recruitment, with many victims reportedly lured away from their hometowns by "boyfriends" who later lead them into a trafficking network. The use of computers was also mentioned as a new tool being used to lure younger people.
Trafficking in Canada is said to be primarily controlled by biker gangs. At another level, individuals, organized paedophiles, and small businesses involved in drugs and the sex trade were also mentioned. In BC and Idaho, extremist Mormons are identified in the trafficking of girls and women for marriage in polygamous communities.
Most workers interviewed had limited information on the form of transportation and the route of trafficking in persons. Internationally, the main distinction seems to be whether or not a victim has legitimate papers for entering Canada. Those with visas or those for whom visas are not required came directly to Canada by plane. When visas were issued, they were usually LCP or temporary worker visas, especially for exotic dancers. Those with false papers or those who entered Canada clandestinely took more circuitous routes, combining different forms of transportation. Within Canada, or between Canada and the United States, transportation seems to be mostly by private car or bus.
Respondents shared a variety of anecdotal stories related to them by victims of trafficking:
- Romanian victims were moved by trucks to a Mediterranean country, from which they cross to Africa on cargo ships or are flown into a European country where an official can be bribed to allow entry. Italy and Britain are important points of transit. Once there, it is easier to get a visa to Canada. Once in Canada, victims may remain in the country or be illegally transported across the border into the United States.
- Those that remain are often "sold" to traffickers in another city, after a certain time – for example, after the age of 18 when the girls are considered old. Girls are often rotated from Winnipeg to Vancouver to Calgary to avoid staying in one place for an extended period of time.
- Those from Africa are frequently transported through Germany or Italy, while those from the Philippines often pass through Hong Kong or Singapore.
Internal trafficking is becoming an increasingly important issue in Canada:
We certainly get Aboriginal women lured from the north as well as young women from all the provinces. And sometimes American women were brought up in the circuit. That’s true about my centre. Other centres in the country are dealing with women across the American border but also coming from rural areas into urban areas. We also are dealing with women introduced to the circuit which exists between Toronto, Montreal and New York, Seattle, Vancouver, Edmonton, those commercial trafficking circuit. But also there is a big one between Vancouver and New York, and Northern centres like Prince Rupert and Vancouver. So we know some routes.
Respondents from Western provinces raised a real concern, stating that a trafficking corridor from north to south was emerging and developing in Alberta. It was noted that Manitoba was a crucial point for trafficking in Aboriginal youth and that Aboriginal women were transported both across the Pacific coast between Canada and the US, and across Canada. "Experiential workers" report that some Aboriginal women and children are trafficked out of Canada, ending up in Japan, Mexico, or elsewhere.
According to interviewees, trafficking victims are often involved in a debt bondage relationship. They are brought to Canada and required to pay from $5,000 to $10,000 US in addition to what they owe for their flight, immigration fees, training courses, etc. Those to whom the victims are indebted force them to work in exploitative conditions in terms of hours, salary, health and safety, until their debt is paid off, which may take twenty years or more. The exploitation was described by one respondent as follows:
Yes. Slavery. Like, making them work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without paying them. They treat them like machines. They don’t have feelings. … These women are expected not to get sick. Even if they are sick they have to work.
Many of the victims identified by respondents worked in the sex trade as night club dancers, strippers, or prostitutes on the street, in closed houses, in brothels or in massage parlours. But trafficking victims were also reported to work as domestic workers, restaurant or garment industry workers, drug dealers, or farm labourers. Some are forced into marriage and/or exploited in their roles as a "mail-order bride". Despite the fact that women were most often identified as trafficked for sexual exploitation, respondents suggested that this might give a false impression that persons are not trafficked for other purposes. Those exploited in other forms of work, however, may be less likely to be intercepted by authorities, less likely to view themselves as victims and less likely to be considered so by service providers.
Trafficking was also found to be related to major public events, as with the women who were reportedly brought from elsewhere in Canada as sex workers for forced prostitution to Vancouver during Expo ’86. There are concerns that there may be another mass importation for the 2010 Olympics.
What happens to the victims of trafficking after they leave community services seems to depend on the level of marginalization of the victims. According to the respondents, women trafficked into prostitution who have exited the system sometimes find employment with agencies such as Prostitution Alternatives Counselling and Education (PACE) or Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society (PEERS), trying to help other women to get out of the same exploitive situations.
In other cases, the degree of exploitation has been so extreme – both psychologically and in terms of health – that the victims are unable to recover. Vancouver respondents in particular spoke of the Downtown Eastside as the end of the road for women having been severely exploited through domestic trafficking and now living with drug and alcohol addiction, HIV, AIDS or Hepatitis-C. Early deaths result from poor working conditions, exposure to violence or serious health problems. There were similar examples among international trafficking victims in other cities. Respondents also reported that mental health problems sometimes result from the exploitation experienced by victims.
- voluntary repatriation,
- attaining permanent status in Canada,
- involuntary repatriation (i.e. deportation),
- going underground within Canada,
- moving on to another country,
- particularly the US,
- or falling back into the hands of traffickers.
Voluntary repatriation was rarely reported and seemed to occur most often in cases where young women and youth were kidnapped, sold or otherwise completely unaware of the situation they were entering, especially in terms of the sex industry. Cases of voluntary repatriation reported in interviews occurred through the financial support of charitable or activist organisations. For those who wanted to stay, some were able to achieve permanent status through Humanitarian and Compassionate applications for permanent residency, successful refugee claims or marrying a Canadian.
Involuntary repatriation was also common. This was reported to be especially likely if the victim had first been intercepted by police or immigration officials. Respondents from Vancouver and Toronto spoke of nearly immediate deportation after discovery and detention with the question of whether the person had full access to enforcing their rights:
Often, even if they have the right to a lawyer, the practice right now is detention. There is the practice of a shift in policy. Because the policy means when someone comes to a port of entry, they should have access to a fair hearing, access to legal aid to deal with that. Now the practice is they are detained and deported quickly. Women aren’t having the opportunity to talk to a lawyer to know what their rights are. They are detained, which contravenes our own policy. They are often deported without having access to advocacy.
For trafficking victims who leave the country or are deported, little information is available on their outcomes. Many of those who fail to obtain refugee status are reported to move on to the United States, where a wide variety of outcomes are possible. For some who have kept in touch with the agencies, there is evidence that they are still involved in sex work or some type of debt bondage in restaurants or other industries. In such cases, women get room and board in exchange for 10-12 hour working days, six or seven days a week. Most of their pay goes to those who "smuggled" them in, and the rest goes to their family.
For those who remain in Canada, they largely work in the garment industry or in restaurants. Some move up in the restaurant business, from dishwashing to food preparation, for example. Other survivors marry and have children. Several women trafficked for the sex trade were reported to have returned voluntarily to sex work but under better conditions. For trafficked women who entered the country under the LCP, most who have sought help from agencies have eventually successfully settled in Canada. For most survivors, family reunification is only just beginning, and is difficult because these women are extremely poor and are unable to pay the fees and other expenses related to the process of bringing relatives to Canada.[13]
- voluntary return to their community and
- choosing a new home for residence,
- or otherwise escaping the sphere of influence of their trafficker.
Lastly, several respondents spoke of women who had come forward for help but who, for a variety of reasons, fell back into the hands of their traffickers. Examples include a group of foreign exotic dancers in rural Quebec who were moved to another, unknown location when their trafficker realised they were in contact with a sexual assault centre. The psychological control of the trafficker or threats of violence to family members were said to be a factor in several women returning to their trafficking situation and breaking contact with service-providers. Lastly, several organisations expressed their frustrations in trying to help women on temporary work visas for exotic dancing. When they were forced to choose between staying with their exploitative and abusive employer and returning to their country of origin, many chose to stay in their abusive situation with the hope of being able to eventually improve their situation.
[13] Fees for a sponsorship application vary depending on the age of the person to be sponsored and the number of people to be sponsored, but are over $1,000 per person (CIC, 2005). Of the other related expenses, air and ground travel are the most significant.
