Fighting back against sex trafficking

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This article was published 12/03/2015 (3997 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The voices of those who have been sexually exploited, trafficked and lived to tell about it will be heard today in Winnipeg.

Survivors and people with first-hand experience are taking part in a Winnipeg Sexually Exploited Youth Community Coalition forum on how to end sex trafficking in Canada.

A packed house of social services, political and business delegates has signed up to join elders from the indigenous community at an airport hotel for the annual All Children Matter: Protecting Sacred Lives forum. They’ll hear the most “in-depth consultations and recommendations” from a national task force on how Canadians can work together to stop it, said co-organizer Diane Redsky, executive director of Winnipeg’s Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre.

The keynote speaker, Anupriya Sethi, is a researcher who published the first study on the domestic sex trafficking of aboriginal girls in Canada and the risk factors that make them vulnerable to exploitation. Other than talking about it, little has been done to address the problem since she first began researching it a decade ago, she said.

“At least a conversation is happening now,” said the Ottawa-based researcher, whose study Domestic Sex Trafficking of Aboriginal Girls in Canada: Issues and Implications ran in the journal First Peoples Child & Family Review in 2007.

“Back then, people would look at me and say ‘What are you talking about?’ ” said Sethi. Today, people are talking about sexual exploitation and trafficking and Canada’s growing list of murdered and missing indigenous women, she said. The problem has roots in colonization, poverty and racism and will take a concerted effort to resolve, she said.

“We still have a long, long way to go.”

Manitoba has a strategy and funding to fight sexual exploitation, but the problem persists.

“High-risk victims are getting younger and younger,” said Macdonald Youth Services spokeswoman Jocelyn Greenwood. “Nine- and 10-year-olds should be playing and having fun,” not being exploited by pimps and sexual predators, said the member of the Winnipeg Sexually Exploited Youth Community Coalition and a conference organizer. Preteen victims are showing up at Winnipeg’s crisis-stabilization unit, and every day young women are reported missing, she said.

Recruiters who exploit are online, on reserves and using places such as Portage Place and Polo Park, she said.

“They like to get young girls who’ve come off the reserve mainly because they’re quite naive,” said Greenwood. “The traffickers use really handsome young men or girls — the kind who they’d like to be their best friends — who go up to them and connect by asking if they want to go see some Winnipeg things or to party.” By the time the youth is reported missing, he or she may already have been taken to Saskatchewan, said Greenwood, who’s seen a pattern of sexually exploited youth being taken to “the oilpatch” in Alberta and Saskatchewan, she said.

“They brand these girls — literally,” said Greenwood. A “pimp stick” — a wire coat hanger bent and heated on a stove element — is used to beat sex-trade workers. “Nobody chooses that kind of life,” she said.

‘High-risk victims are getting younger and younger. Nine- and 10-year-olds should be playing and having fun’

— Macdonald Youth Services spokeswoman Jocelyn Greenwood

The “pimp stick” is in the glossary of terms in course material on sexually exploited youth offered by the province, said Greenwood. Families and schools would be wise to keep their ears open for the jargon, she said.

Greenwood thinks it’s time for schools to start talking to children as young as 10 about sexual exploitation.

“Parents are not wanting their kids subjected to that, but I’d want them to know about it before rather than after it happens.” Middle-class, suburban kids aren’t immune to sexual exploitation either, said Greenwood, recalling the case of a 17-year-old girl who worked at a restaurant on Kenaston Boulevard.

She was lured by a man who offered her $20 an hour, a car and a chance to work in California. “She did not think ‘This guy’s exploiting me,’ ” said Greenwood. “You don’t think people are like that. It’s not just happening in the core. It’s happening all over the city where these guys are trying.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca