Sex trafficking happening in plain sight

WARNING: This story contains graphic content related to violence and abuse, and may be disturbing to some readers. If you or someone you know may be a victim of human trafficking, you can call the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-833-900-1010

On a quiet residential street in a London, Ontario middle-class neighbourhood, Morgan Sowerbutts stares at a basement window.

“See that window right there? That’s where it happened.” Patting her dog, a major source of therapy, she shudders to think of what went on in that apartment. “Sometimes half a dozen johns a night,” she remembers.

That is not where most people would expect sex work and sex trafficking to take place. But it does.

It happens in apartments, in parks, hotels and motels, bars and cars. According to Statistics Canada, since 2014, sex-related offences have increasingly moved from charges laid in public spaces, to private and commercial units- like hotels and motels.

“So many of those places are complicit,” said Megan Walker, the recently retired Executive Director of the London Abused Women’s Centre.

She is referring to a motel located about 50 kilometres down Highway 401, where the manager was found to be getting kickbacks from traffickers. “He had the cleaning service going into the rooms to clean them after every John.”

Although the Hotel Association of Canada has come out strongly against human trafficking and points members to the Ontario Restaurant, Hotel and Motel Association’s anti-human trafficking training, it doesn’t always translate into action at the front desk.

Over the course of several weeks, Walker escorted the “VeraCity: Fighting Traffick” crew through several hotels and common trafficking haunts.

Armed with hidden cameras, Walker was able to identify several instances where sex purchasing – which is illegal in Canada – and even trafficking appeared to be happening. When the front desk staff at one hotel in particular was alerted to the findings, they refused to call the police on two separate occasions.

“Who is benefiting from the money?” Walker asks. “”What hotel is maybe getting a kickback to come and clean the sheets between, you know, johns? This is a rot in every community across the country. Its like a spider. Its rotten to the core and it has long legs and it impacts community centres, homes, schools.” She said one trafficking victim can earn a trafficker about $250,000 a year.

Businesses are also benefitting from trafficking; even the illegal ones.

“Watch, He’s going to ride up and down the track making deliveries,” Caroline Pugh-Roberts said as she watches a man on a bicycle while driving down a well-known street for prostitutes and prostituted women. “He’s a drug dealer,” she said of the man.

“The girls, they need it,” she explained. Pugh-Roberts is a trafficking survivor and was once forced to service men out of the motels on that same street. She now works for the Salvation Army’s human trafficking unit – trying to help victims get out, while providing long-term support for survivors trying to reclaim their lives.

“With the pimps or traffickers’ permission, the girls can buy a little drugs,” she explained. “They may take a couple Percocet before the night, just to make it tolerable.”

“A lot of victims develop drug addictions, it’s the only way you can tolerate what you have to do.” The man on the bike rides past Pugh-Roberts’ car several times before she pulls out.

With sex work – and by extension, sex trafficking, moving more and more off the street and into hotels and homes, Pugh-Roberts describes those still working the track as the most desperate.

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The women and men who not only have to feed their traffickers’ demands, but also their addictions. She said many of the victims live in the low-end motels that line the road, often with their trafficker.

“This whole stretch, walking up and down, was big, big, big for a lot of the trafficked women,” Pugh-Roberts explained. “The ones still here are local, but the ones on the circuit, that are being taken from town to town, they will be advertised on the Internet that they are here.”

“Traffickers will advertise the sale of girls online and specifically mention various activities that they will participate in,” Walker said. “And I can tell you that they are horrendous activities, like some involve bodily fluids like urine or feces. Other are around being tortured. It’s very sad.”

CityNews tracked sexual services ads from one popular website over a six-month period in several cities across Canada, between January to June 2021 and counted over 17,000 posts.

Nearly all included photos, many without faces. Although many of the photos were selfie-style, others were clearly taken by somebody else.

In many cases, the women were wearing elements of bondage, including collars or handcuffs. Often the ads would list different rules or a lack of rules. “Condom-free sex,” or “I like it rough” were all potential warning signs of trafficking, according to Walker.

Many times the women would appear in ads for London, but the next week in Toronto or even Moncton. Moncton and Halifax, for example, often had the same women advertised. Phone numbers listed would often correspond to regions outside of the post. An Edmonton phone number was used in ads for Windsor, London, and Montreal while a surprising amount listed intersections, hotel names or even addresses.

But even armed with that information, police laid very few charges against those that advertise.

In Montreal, the Service Police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) laid 124 charges under section 286.4 (advertising the sale of another person’ sexual services) in the 20-month period between January 2020 and August 31, 2021. Toronto police laid 26 charges while Peel Regional Police levied just 28 charges between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

The RCMP in Halifax and Moncton didn’t lay any charges – despite hundreds of ads, many of which were questionable – being posted. The BC Prosecution Service didn’t lay any charges either, despite over 1,500 ads being posted in just six months between Vancouver and Victoria.

London Police used the charge 10 times in 18 months. Over the course of six months, on just one site, there were 655 advertisements.

 

“We are watching websites. We get intelligence from the community and sex trade workers. We rely on reports from other police services, our members, incidents that go on at the hotels and motels. We get that. We review all of that,” explained the former sergeant in charge of London Police Services’ Human Trafficking Unit.

CityNews is concealing his identity because he works undercover.

When it comes to trafficking charges vs police-reported incidents, the numbers are even more dismal.

Despite a 44 per cent increase in police-reported incidents of human trafficking in 2019, only a third of those translated into charges.

Walker says police are having mixed results, because they aren’t all following the same rule book.

“There’s no consistency, there are few charges,” she said, explaining that when Canada adopted the Nordic model – where it is not illegal to sell sex, but its illegal to buy it—it took a while for police forces to adapt.

 

“Without having a victim come forward or someone come forward and talking to us about it, it is very difficult to locate traffickers,” the former head of London Police’s Human Trafficking unit added.

Sowerbutts did come forward. Her traffickers were charged and they pled guilty to lesser offences. “My initial experience with the police was good,” Sowerbutts said. “Everything (the officer) said would happen, happened.”

Until her case went to court where Sowerbutts said she no longer felt like a priority, or even important.

Parts of her victim impact statement was redacted by the defence and she said she didn’t get to truly have her say. “I’ve never been allowed to actually say how bad it really was.”

Walker said police and the justice system have to start treating trafficking as serious as other major crimes, in terms of law enforcement resources and times.

“Think of the number of men that have paid to rape those girls and women. Shouldn’t that be enough to draw us into making it a priority to end this horrendous atrocity against women and girls?”

The Ontario government provides a free legal service for survivors of human trafficking, including confidential advice, helping complete a restraining order application and representing the applicant in court, among other services. You can access these services by calling the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-833-900-1010.