Human trafficking feeds the sex trade

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/03/2015 (4036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If ever you want to engage in a little myth-busting on the so-called sex trade, pop into a forum on human trafficking. That’s where I was last Thursday.

This was not a collection of international law and government poobahs, but a room filled with ordinary Manitobans, mostly aboriginal women, and a few Canadians who came loaded with the burden of experience gained right in our backyard.

Bridget Perrier grew up in Thunder Bay, Ont. While in foster care, she was lured into prostitution by her older sister.

There is confusion, the forum made clear, about what constitutes human trafficking, but the coercion of a 12-year-old into selling her body for the sick pleasures of the depraved meets every uncontested criterion in the definition.

She was preyed upon for the benefit of adults and kept compliant for 10 years by threats, fear and the fact there was no option.

“I slept, ate and breathed prostitution,” Perrier, 38, said. “It wasn’t paid service. It wasn’t paid work. It was paid rape.”

Perrier’s story is compelling, partly because it challenges Canada’s approach to battling human trafficking. First, she’s Canadian, not a foreign national caught up in organized international crime, lured here on the promise of a job. (A lot of Canada’s 2012 national action plan focuses on imported women, how to rescue, shelter and help them exit the sex trade.)

And, despite the RCMP’s contention it has no evidence of human trafficking on ships on the Great Lakes, Perrier’s narrative includes being sold, at 14, for sex parties on cargo vessels out of the Port of Thunder Bay to Duluth, Minn. “Those men were very violent.”

Perrier is a member of Long Lake No. 58 First Nation. She fits the profile of the population most at risk of domestic human trafficking. But stereotypes get in the way of a fuller understanding of this scourge.

Maroussia McRae was trafficked at 14, when she fell out of love with school and into the clutches of cool guys milling about Portage Place, who could spot a naive, sweet mark.

Raised by a loving, middle-class family in Winnipeg’s west end, McRae was a Jehovah’s Witness whose parents filled their kids’ days with wholesome activities. “I was probably too sheltered.” McRae reflects.

She spent 18 years in the sex trade, and addiction, leaving only after she gave birth to her fourth child.

Her story should give any of us who think we, and our daughters, are insulated by borders or birthright a jolt.

Much of the discussion around the missing and murdered aboriginal women and in human trafficking tends to focus on high-risk lifestyles — that it is prostitution that puts women at risk.

But a 1998 study found the average age of entry into prostitution in Manitoba was 14. At that age, girls are not choosing a job, they are lured, coerced or exploited into selling their bodies.

They are our babies, not sex-trade workers. Those who pay to have sex with them are criminals, not clients. Human trafficking can hide in plain view when the prevailing belief is that this is an imported problem, or something that happens to those unworthy of our time and effort.

Perrier, in particular, illustrates what a UN inquiry concluded about Canada’s failure to act decisively to battle a predatory culture that makes aboriginal women and girls targets for violence, murder and human trafficking.

It found “gender-stereotyping is persistent in the society and institutionalized,” including within law enforcement. “This includes stereotypical portrayals of aboriginal women as prostitutes, transient or runaways and having high-risk lifestyles, and an indifferent attitude toward reports of missing aboriginal women,” the report released March 6 said.

And damningly: “Perpetrators may count on the insufficient response of the police and the justice system and continue to operate in an environment conducive to impunity, where aboriginal women continue to suffer high levels of violence with insufficient criminal liability and without having adequate access to justice.”

This should make us all stop and think about how we frame the issues of child exploitation, trafficking and the sex trade. Pull apart the sketchy narrative of cause and effect constructed around prostitution and a harder truth appears.

The RCMP review into the 1,181 missing and murdered aboriginal women found only 12 per cent of the murdered were engaged in the sex trade. That compares with five per cent of non-aboriginal victims.

There are the stories we tell ourselves, steeped in stereotypes, and then there is reality. In Winnipeg, where aboriginal women account for 80 per cent of the sex trade, we best start relying on facts if we want to halt the onslaught of violence against women and girls.

Catherine Mitchell is a Free Press editorial writer.

 

Twitter: @wfpcmitchell