Robin De Angelis

It looks like a simple business card. Red on one half, white on the other. The Salvation Army crest sits in the centre of the white half. On the red half, the card reads “Outreach Support.” There are no names, only a cell phone number and the direction to, “Call or text.” On the back of the card there are five bullet points: crisis counselling, basic needs, emotional support, advocacy, assistance and transportation. And again, the phone number, urging you to call or text. At the bottom of the card is a thick red band, highlighting four words: “You Are Not Alone.”

This is the card Samantha Gee hands out around London, Ont. – at libraries, at Tim Hortons, and at community centres – to prostituted and sex trafficked women and girls.

Gee is an outreach counselor with the Salvation Army Correctional and Justice Services in London.

“Before I was hired for this position, I didn’t really think that it happened in London. I was kind of oblivious to it,” she says.

Gee isn’t alone. Many people have preconceived ideas of human trafficking as something that happens elsewhere. But in January 2017, the London Police Services released statistics showing a spike in the number of women and girls being trafficked in and around London. Although the department considers London a “hub” for human trafficking in Ontario, these statistics reflect a growing trend across the country. According to Statistics Canada, police-reported instances of human trafficking nearly doubled between 2009 and 2014.

In the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking the government of Canada defines trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, harbouring and/or exercising control or influence over the movements of a person, in order to exploit that person, typically through sexual exploitation or forced labour.” Human trafficking for the purposes of selling sexual services is further defined as sex trafficking.

“Wherever the women is at, that’s just where we start working with them.“

Sex trafficking – and human trafficking in general – is defined by a lack of consent. In London, one program is aiming to restore women’s ability to choose.

The Choices program is coordinated by Heather Wharram, a program manager with the London Abused Women’s Centre (LAWC). The program, now in its third year, was launched with the aid of a five-year $700,000 grant from the Department of Justice, and is a partnership between the Salvation Army and LAWC.

The grant provides for additional services and programming through both organizations, for prostituted and trafficked women and girls.

LAWC offers counselling and advocacy for individuals, families and groups, including groups for girls who may be at risk of being trafficked, while the Salvation Army focuses on outreach.

“Wherever the women is at, that’s just where we start working with them. There’s nothing set in stone, there’s not a sheet of paper that says you have to do this, this and that,” says Gee. “Sometimes we even take them grocery shopping.”

The program focuses on women and girls as the primary victims of sex trafficking and prostitution. The Plan to Combat Human Trafficking identifies women as the majority of victims in Canada. While the Salvation Army will work with both women and men, LAWC provides services for women exclusively.

“The typical woman that we work with has been trafficked by a pimp that is pretending to be a boyfriend – a ‘Romeo pimp’ – so there’s a tremendous amount of crossover between intimate partner violence and sex trafficking,” Wharram explains. “Some of the stories are that they have been lured online. Some have been pimped out by their parents.”

Other women have been coerced by drug dealers to exchange sex for drugs, while in some cases a boyfriend may use prostitution and trafficking as a tactic of abuse. Gee points to online escort agencies as another source of sex trafficking.

In London, the website Backpage includes listings for “escorts, body rubs, strippers & strip clubs, dom & festish, transexual escorts, male escorts, phone & website, [and] adults jobs.” Dozens of postings for sexual services can be found on any given day.

“We have clients who have been transported from London to Toronto, and then just abandoned,” says Aura Burditt, a restorative justice outreach worker with the Salvation Army Correctional and Justice Services. “So the escort agency is pimping out these girls, and transporting them using a limo service to parties on the weekend, and leaving them.”

“Sex trafficking is all about prostitution and the selling of sexual services.” 

The connection between prostitution and sex trafficking can seem tenuous, with so many conflicting popular culture narratives about both.

“I think when people think of [trafficking], they think of the movie Taken. Somebody’s abducted, they’re taken to another country, and they’re basically shackled in a brothel. That’s not really the face of sex trafficking in Canada,” says Wharram.

In contrast, the “hooker with a heart of gold” image presented in movies like Pretty Woman and TV shows like The Secret of a Call Girl frame prostitution as a choice. Wharram explains that while LAWC acknowledges that some women do choose to work in the sex trade, the vast majority enter prostitution as a result of exploitation and trafficking.

This philosophy isn’t always shared by other organizations who work in the areas of human trafficking and prostitution. The Salvation Army prefers to use verbs like “prostituted” or “trafficked,” as opposed to nouns like “prostitute” and “sex worker,” to a highlight a lack of consent and agency. Burditt says that many people don’t see the true impact of prostitution.

“They don’t realize what that costs personally – the physical costs, the emotional costs,” she explains. “The women tell us that they have to shut down, they have to be a completely different personality, they distance themselves from the act. We’ve had women say that they have to take a drug in order to deal with it.”

Burditt draws a straight line connecting prostitution and sex trafficking.

“Sex trafficking is all about prostitution and the selling of sexual services,” she says.

She offers a chilling analogy of supply and demand: prostitution creates a demand for sexual services, which is supplied through sex trafficking.

“They were battling so many different barriers to being able to succeed and our laws – in my opinion – were just keeping them subjugated.”  

Prostitution laws in Canada have always been complicated. While the act of exchanging money for sex was not illegal according to the Criminal Code of Canada, almost every offence related to prostitution was. Many of these offences targeted prostituted women and girls.

Burditt saw the impact of these laws first hand, working with many women whose long criminal records were filled with prostitution-related charges.

“In my meeting with these ladies, and understanding more about their stories, I became more aware of the injustices that our current laws, at that time, were imposing on the women,” Burditt explains. “That they were battling so many different barriers to being able to succeed and our laws – in my opinion – were just keeping them subjugated.”

This all began to change in December 2013, when three women brought a case against the attorneys general of Canada and Ontario, challenging three key prostitution laws. The women argued that the offences of keeping a bawdy house, living on the avails of prostitution, and communicating in public for the purposes of prostitution violated their constitutional rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Known as “the Bedford case,” this challenge was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

The three laws were struck down, but with a condition: Parliament would need to take on the task of revising prostitution laws. The following year, Bill C-36 was was tabled to amend the Criminal Code, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision.

The act has been compared to the Nordic model, a piece of legislation that came out of Sweden in 1999, which focused primarily on criminalizing the buying of sex. The Nordic model and other similar legislation reframe prostitution as form of exploitation, disproportionately experienced by women and girls. When Bill C-36 was enacted in December 2014, one of its goals was to protect the people who sell their own sexual services.

Burditt credits Bill C-36 for changing the ways organizations are now able to help women and girls in the sex trade, but she says that more work needs to be done.

“The next hurdle, in my opinion, would be for them to have all of those previous criminal charges erased,” she says. “That would be huge, for the women to be able to have an opportunity to succeed.”

Wharram points to several institutional changes that she believes are important to end prostitution and sex trafficking, including funding for transitional homes, a government-led national awareness campaign aimed at sex buyers, and school curriculum to help young people identify the risks and consequences of trafficking and prostitution.

She also encourages police departments across the country to focus on charging johns – men who buy sexual services. In London, the newly-created human trafficking unit recently released the details of an investigation called Project Equinox, arresting 78 people across southwestern Ontario. Among those charged, were 35 alleged customers. Wharram hopes London police continue to actively pursue these kinds of cases.

“Everything that tells men that it’s not okay to buy sex shifts the culture, in terms of not viewing women as an object to be commodified.”