Authors: Benjamin Perrin
An obvious front for selling sex, escort agencies have played a role in several documented human trafficking cases, including those of Svetlana and Dina, detailed earlier. Fees collected from the women support the agencies' owners and managers, some of them associated
with criminal gangs who frequently control many of the agencies within a single city or region.
The opportunities for the profiteers don't end there, however. Escort agencies couldn't attract the sizeable number of johns calling them, virtually 24/7, without widely accessible outlets for advertising their services, including weekly newspapers published and distributed in virtually every major Canadian city. Such papers are rife with ads incorporating thinly veiled promises of paid sex acts. These publications shouldn't be able to accept cheques for advertising from “sexually oriented businesses” without exercising some due diligence to ensure they aren't actively marketing criminal activity. Instead, the publications remain wilfully blind to the problem and little, if anything at all, is done to make them think twice.
The sheer number of advertisements for escort services confirms that the industry indeed represents big money to those who control the women being sold. “When you look at all those ads, you have to ask yourself: Are all these people, from all these countries coming to Canada to do this job?” wonders Detective Sergeant Hamel of the Toronto Police Service, Sex Crimes Unit. “It is just incredible how many escort services there are. If you spend the time to investigate some of these people, you'll find that a lot of the women are not here voluntarily.”
“Rub and tug”: More than a massage
Massage parlours are places of suspended disbelief that our society has somehow come to accept. You drive past them knowing that, more often than not, they're bawdy houses where sex is for sale.
Operators of massage parlours have been profiteers who've controlled women to a degree that qualifies as enslavement in several cases. Once again, however, as with escort services and the advertising media they use, other people and organizations are collecting proceeds from the racket while pretending to be innocent of the brutality inflicted on the women employed in the “parlours.”
Chief among the profiteers from massage parlours are the landlords who accept their rent. An even more egregious sector, though,
may be the municipalities that collect licensing revenue from these “businesses,” rarely conducting any due diligence or subsequent inspections after receiving their cut.
Police officers in cities across Canada confirm that escort services and massage parlours commonly are fronts for selling foreign victims of human trafficking, and the operators legitimize their bogus businesses by purchasing valid licences. Canada's mayors, city councillors, and by-law officers need to remove the licensing from these illegal enterprises and find less dreadful means of filling the community coffers.
Sergeant Jeff Danroth of the Vancouver Police Department believes that the Vice Unit has interacted with “hundreds” of foreign women, mainly from Asian countries, who are being sold for sex in bawdy houses in the city. Typically they've replied to advertisements for work at massage parlours, but no one knows whether the women are fully aware before arriving in Canada that they'll be required to provide sex acts, or whether they can leave the situation if they so choose.
Authorities worldwide recognize that traffickers recruit and control women who are already being sold for sex in developing and oftencorrupt countries by promising better conditions in developed ones. In one of the most extensive studies of sex trafficking in the United States, Dr. Janice G. Raymond, emeritus professor at University of Massachusetts, and Dr. Donna M. Hughes, professor at the University of Rhode Island, found that “[i]nternational women, formerly in the sex trade in their countries of origin, are particularly vulnerable to recruitment in sex industries in the United States.”
When sex trafficking victims in Canada appear to have been sold for sex in their home countries, some Canadiansâand even some sectors of the mediaâtend to blame the victims. In September 1997, news reporter Rosie DiManno said of the women involved in a major trafficking operation in the Toronto area, “Indentured sex trade workers, yes. Exploited concubines, possibly. Self-conscripted whores, apparently.” DiManno's point of view was telegraphed effectively in her
Toronto Star
story, titled “Sex slave âvictims' weren't captives chained to beds.”
This willingness to blame victims of sexual exploitation is uninformed and misdirected. It's easier to blame the victims than to ask tough questions about who profits from their suffering and to identify the men who pay for sex acts with these women. In commenting on this attitude, one law enforcement officer says, “Our approach to these women is wrong. These people are victims from day one. They are being exploited and we label them as prostitutes. We should look at them as victims of exploitation.” Sadly, the women being sold aren't the only victims of the actions of johns.
Collateral damage: Families, wives, children
Jennifer suspected that her husband, Jeff, was cheating on her. She had no real proof yet, and with two young children to care for, she didn't want to do anything drastic that might weaken the marriage.
Everything unravelled, however, when Jennifer's doctor informed her that she'd tested positive for an STD. Jennifer hadn't been with anyone but Jeff since her marriage to him several years before. Clearly he'd been unfaithful. After the initial trauma, she set to work rummaging through her husband's dresser drawers, the desk in his small office, and his other belongings, exposing the brutal truth.
Jeff had been frequenting strip clubs, massage parlours, and escort agencies. Worse still, he had multiple credit cards in his name that were billed to his office address and showed outstanding balances totalling tens of thousands of dollars.
After an explosive confrontation with Jeff, Jennifer decided to file for divorce. As more details emerged about Jeff's wide-ranging and long-term patronizing of sex services, Jennifer realized that her husband's secret addiction would ultimately destroy her and her family. Creditors began calling every day, demanding payment for Jeff's sex bills. Eventually, Jennifer was forced to file for bankruptcy, leaving her devastated.
Jennifer, along with others who've become collateral damage of the demand for paid sex, has told her story to hundreds of men at Toronto's “John School.” This education and awareness program run
by Streetlight Support Services allows first-time offenders who've been arrested for communicating for the purpose of prostitution in a public place to avoid a criminal record; the only requirement is that they successfully complete the program. Jennifer hopes that the men will make a fresh start and not destroy their lives and families as her husband did.
Human trafficking meets a demand
The simple reality is that sex trafficking would not exist in Canada or abroad without demand from men who feel entitled to engage in paid sex acts of their choosing. Yet in tackling the problem, concerned parties frequently ignore the powerful role of the purchaser.
“Why is there tolerance for buying another person?” asks Linda Smith, founder and director of Shared Hope International. “Why aren't clients going to jail? If there weren't a buyer, there wouldn't be a procurer, and there wouldn't be a victimized woman or child.”
The cases of sex trafficking documented in this book reveal that traffickers have sold their victims to purchasers through various outlets, including strip clubs, massage parlours, escort agencies, internet bulletin board services, street-level prostitution, hotels and motels, house parties, and truck stops. The thousands of Canadian men who purchased these sex acts either didn't know or didn't care that they were renting victims of human trafficking, many of them minors. If we can better understand who these men are and why they behave this way, we can develop strategies to intervene.
As the executive director of Streetlight Support Services, John Fenn has met thousands of such men over the last decade. Would these men have known if they were paying for sex with someone who was in reality a victim of human trafficking? Probably not. “They go for whatever they can get,” says Fenn.
A 2004 study by University of Rhode Island professor Dr. Donna M. Hughes, entitled
Best Practices to Address the Demand Side of Sex Trafficking,
found that “whether or not the woman or child is being compelled to engage in prostitution seems irrelevant to men when
they purchase sex acts.... When the focus shifts to the primary level of the demand, there is no evidence that men distinguish between women and children who are victims of trafficking and those who are not.” Therefore, in addressing the demand side of sex trafficking, “it is not possible to distinguish between men's demand for victims of sex trafficking from men's demand for commercial sex acts.”
Purchasers of sex acts rely on multiple, often contradictory, justifications for rationalizing their behaviour. John Fenn provides some examples:
“If nobody knows about it, how can it be wrong?”
“If my wife doesn't find out, then what she doesn't know isn't going to hurt her.”
“I deserve this because I've just got a new job and I feel good about myself and I deserve a little reward.”
“I lost my job, my wife hasn't given me sex for three weeks, and I'm a man. I need this, I deserve it.”
Compare these fanciful justifications from johns with this statement from Eve, one of the teenage girls exploited by convicted human trafficker Imani Nakpangi:
“I have low self-esteem. I feel like I'm only good for one thing, sex. I don't see why someone, a man, would be interested in me and try to get to know me because I feel unworthy, dirty, tainted, nothing.”
Purchasers of sex acts attempt to convince themselves that they're helping the prostituted/trafficked person by giving her money, further rationalizing their actions on the grounds that they “are not hurting anyone.” Some claim that the woman has chosen this “line of work” and enjoys it. However, studies have found that purchasers of sex acts generally do not believe that the women make a lot of money or enjoy the experience at all.
The idea that masculinity automatically implies an uncontrollable need to buy sex is a popular myth that creates false permission for purchasers of sex acts to carry on as they do. As one European study has pointed out, human beings are not born wishing to buy sexual services any more than they are born with specific desires to play the
lottery or drink Coca-Cola. While having sex is a basic biological function, men have to be socialized or induced to feel that it would be pleasurable to
pay
a stranger for sex. Where commercial sex is concerned, they also have to be taught to feel that consuming such services is a sign of “having fun”âa marker of their social identity and status as “real men,” “adults,” or whatever. The conclusion: paying for sex is a learned behaviour, not a natural and uncontrollable urge.
By confronting the demand for paid sex, we can ensure that purchasers are held accountable for the tremendous harm that they inflict on their victims, both directly through their individual acts of abuse and, together with other purchasers, indirectly by contributing to the entire process of victimization. Seen in that light, the purchasers of sex acts are as morally responsible for the suffering of their victims as are the traffickers who meet their demand.
Johns in high places: The scandalous case of Judge David Ramsay
Lab tests on rats have yielded information about the precise dose of ethylene glycol required to bring about death. Mixing the odourless anti-freeze with orange juice may help it go down more easily, before it viciously attacks the liver and kidneys. As a provincial court judge in British Columbia, David Ramsay was likely familiar with this means of death discussed in criminal investigation textbooks or used in murder cases. On a spring day in 2004, the former judge put this knowledge to personal use as he drank the deadly cocktail. How far he'd fallen. How much he'd given up. How great the suffering he'd caused.
The allegations against Ramsay had surfaced in the summer of 2002 in Prince George, the self-proclaimed Northern Capital of British Columbia, where many of the seventy thousand residents are Aboriginal. Ramsay enjoyed a reputation as an outstanding member of the community. Prior to going to law school at the University of British Columbia, he'd been an elementary school teacher, and after being called to the bar he opened the first legal aid office in Prince George.
Despite his busy private legal practice, Ramsay made time to volunteer on the boards of various charities, including a home for troubled youth, a shelter for abused women, and a crisis centre. Appointed to the Bench in 1991, Judge Ramsay travelled from his base in Prince George as a circuit judge to various remote communities. He appeared to be a respected judge and a doting father of four childrenâ”a decent and caring individual.“ But a few knew otherwise.
Between July 1992 and December 2001, at least four girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen came to know a very different side of Judge Ramsay, a side that was callous, predatory, and violent. One of them was fifteen-year-old Cynthia.
When Cynthia entered Judge Ramsay's courtroom to face various minor charges, he made the First Nations teenager a ward of the province. Several months later, Ramsay encountered Cynthia on a Prince George street, picked her up in his vehicle, and drove her to an isolated road six kilometres outside of town, where he parked and ordered her to perform oral sex on him for sixty dollars. During the sex act, he grabbed her by the hair and demanded his money back. The girl managed to escape and Ramsay drove off, leaving her alone and naked on the abandoned forest road, but not before warning that he'd have her killed if she ever told anyone about the incident.