Fighting Traffick: The keys to stopping human trafficking

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

When Jackie McLennan was around six years old, she said her father started selling her to men and women in hotel rooms and homes.

“The first memory I have of being sold was actually to a woman. I remember her breath,” McLennan said. “I don’t know how long I was there, really, it felt like forever.”

“I was a different kid when I left that room.”

She said the sexual abuse continued for a decade, even though McLennan said teachers and others should have spotted something was wrong.

“The signs were daydreaming. I wasn’t really an angry child,” McLennan explained. “Depressed. Quiet. But as I got older, there was definitely a lot more anger, depression and anxiety attacks.”

McLennan’s father denies ever abusing her. She argues that if communities and caretakers are trained to spot the signs of sex trafficking early, there is a greater chance of saving lives and holding traffickers accountable.

Anti-human trafficking advocates add that along with early intervention, Canada must build a robust support system for survivors, and a justice system that delivers accountability, without further trauma.

Spotting the signs of sex trafficking

“By the time I was 14 or 15, I was stealing alcohol from my parents’ liquor cabinet. I would go to school drunk,” said McLennan. “The teachers never said anything, and they had to have known.”

McLennan now works as a Salvation Army counsellor for other survivors of human trafficking. She believes there would be fewer of them if more people knew what to look for.

Ontario recently included human trafficking in its school curriculum and Uber offers its drivers training. The Women’s Trucking Federation also just launched a national course.

McLennan said it’s not enough. “Small-town family doctors, even, should be educated,” she said. “They need to do it in the smallest places. It happens everywhere, not just in big cities.”

Anti-human-trafficking advocate, Megan Walker, said greater education boosts the chance of crucial intervention.

“Sometimes it’s one person who approached the girl or woman and said, ‘Is everything okay?’” said Walker who has spent decades working with victims of violence.  “Somebody reaching out and asking a question could change her life.”

Deterring the perpetrators, not the victims

“If you are committed to ending human trafficking, you must go after demand,” said Walker. “That means women are less likely to be lured into trafficking.”

Canada follows what’s known as the Nordic model of prostitution laws, meaning that it is illegal to purchase sexual services, and illegal for a business to profit from them.

Still, police country-wide have laid few charges against buyers. Over 18 months, police in Halifax and Moncton laid zero charges. Montreal charged 59 people. Peel Regional Police laid 39 charges. In Winnipeg, that number was 44, while in Victoria, there was just one charge.

Of the people charged for sex purchasing, very few end up with a conviction. Only one in seven accused johns were convicted, according to research published by Statistics Canada. 

When it comes to trafficking, the numbers are equally disappointing. Of the 511 human trafficking incidents reporting to police in 2019, only a third resulted in charges, and even fewer resulted in convictions.

Morgan Sowerbutts is one of the few survivors whose case made it through the justice system. She wants trafficking sentences increased and enforced.

“When I initially spoke with the human trafficking officer, she told me that I could expect to see [my traffickers] in jail for five to eight years, that the courts were taking this as seriously as murder,” she told CityNews.

Though two people were charged with trafficking her, they eventually pleaded guilty to lesser offences. One was sentenced to 18 months, and the other was given probation.

“I don’t feel like anything less than five to eight [years] would have been fair,” Sowerbutts said.

For people who bring their cases to police, the search for justice can take a toll, say anti-trafficking advocates and survivors.

“The process from the very beginning is excruciating,” said Walker, who explained that a victim will be made to tell their story of abuse over and over again, from the initial investigation, to pre-trial meetings, to the trial itself.

The executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre Jennifer Dunn agrees.

“Often times, the justice system relies on the woman’s testimony as evidence, which is extremely harmful to the woman herself,” said Dunn. “Having to be tied up in the court system for years and having to face her trafficker makes it a long and difficult process.”

“It’s too much because every time a woman tells her story, she’s traumatized,” Walker added.

Walker wants preliminary hearings to be streamlined, to make it easier on the victim, who is likely already struggling.

Support to build a new life

A few months ago, victim support worker Caroline Pugh-Roberts was working the phones, trying to arrange a safe place to sleep for a woman who is trying to escape her trafficker.

“If we don’t get her into a safe house, we could lose her,” said Pugh-Roberts, who works for the Salvation Army. “We need her to get far away.”

The woman she was hoping to help was trying to escape a trafficker from the Niagara Region. Pugh-Roberts is desperate to get the victim as far from the trafficker as possible, ideally out of province, but at least out of the area. There weren’t many options.

“We need far more beds for these women,” Pugh-Roberts said, but demand far exceeds supply.

The Centre to End Human Trafficking reports that in its trafficking hotline’s first year of operation, more than a quarter of their referrals were housing related, most of which were for short-term emergency housing.

“Traffickers tend to track them down, bring them back,” she said, speaking from first-hand experience with her own former trafficker. “Or sometimes, they get scared and go back first, thinking it’ll be worse if he finds them.”

Pugh-Roberts, who was trafficked for eight years, spent her first few months on her own living in a Salvation Army shelter.

“I had to learn to sign my name again,” she said. “I had to learn my name again. That’s how indoctrinated I was and how others are,” said Pugh-Roberts. 

Pugh-Roberts helps her clients rebuild their lives on several fronts. She said it’s critical to have financial, psychological, and practical support for survivors, and it needs to last.

“The first pillar is building transformational relationships, which means they have relationships with people who want nothing from them,” she explained.

“The second one is to broaden horizons,” she said. CityNews attended an outing Pugh-Roberts organized, taking survivors to a farm to do a yoga class with baby goats.

“A lot of these women, their worlds are very small. It’s just doing what he [the trafficker] makes them do,” she explained, while petting a horse at a rehabilitation farm in Ancaster, ON. “So we bring them to places like this and show them that there is more to life.”

The third pillar of her work is to help survivors transition back into mainstream society, including the workplace.

“We built collaborations with Goodwill to give them work experience on the retail floor, because many of these women have never held what they call a square job.”

Even with all this, many survivors still struggle. Richard Dunwoody, the executive director of Project Recover, said he’s helped hundreds of survivors with their finances and reclaim their financial identities.

“A lot of these victims leave with their trafficker owning thousands of dollars to creditors,” he explained. Dunwoody retired from his job in finance to work with survivors. Project Recover is a not-for-profit, Dunwoody said he takes no payment from the victims, and only aims to give back to women who have already lost so much.

Dunwoody walked CityNews through the process, explaining that traffickers will often open multiple credit and mobile accounts under victims’ names, even securing auto loans, and worst yet, student loans.

In his work, Dunwoody combs through survivors’ finances and calculates that between the hotels, flights, car rentals, the federal and provincial government earn about $14,000 in HST revenue, per victim, per year.

He can usually get creditors to erase the fraudulent activities from the victims’ records, but he says a few creditors that won’t work with him.

“The federal and provincial governments are the worst with this,” he said. He calculates that more than 51 per cent of the fraudulent debt that survivors face is owed to the federal and provincial governments.

“A trafficker will often get a girl to apply for a student loan, but the money will go into an account that he controls,” he explained. “So she never gets to finish a semester or even start school, and when she does escape she has a student loan to pay back.”

If down the road, the survivor wants to go back to school, the arrears on the prior debt block their way.

“You can’t get a new loan,” Dunwoody said. He’s been working with different levels of government to remedy this, but says he’s made little progress. This year, he and a good friend decided to fund over 50 women’s tuition. Like a proud parent, he’s eager to share their marks.

“The mid-term marks are starting to come in and so far, they’ve all been in the mid-high eighties,” he said. “These victims are smart. They just need a chance.”

Dunwoody and the other advocates hope their work will one day no longer be needed.

“As much as this horrible job is my dream job, I’m trying to work myself out of a job, because I don’t want this happening,” said Pugh-Roberts.