Invisible chains, p.11
Invisible Chains, page 11
On various occasions, each of the victims tried to escape Emerson’s control and paid dearly for it. One was so desperate for freedom that she ran into the frigid Gatineau River until Emerson caught her, dragged her back to the condominium, and beat her severely. The other victim slipped away after a meeting with her probation officer. Days later Emerson spotted her and dragged her into her Cadillac Escalade. She ordered two of the victims to beat the young woman while she was trapped in the trunk, a tactic used by some traffickers who seek to have their victims “enforce” the traffickers’ commands to harm each other. The tactic also prevents victims from trusting each other or helping each other escape. They punched her, struck her with a bottle, tore off her false nails, and ripped out pieces of her hair. Back at the condominium, they cut off what was left of her hair and tied her to a table, leaving her there for two days. It was during that assault that they forced her to smoke crack cocaine to try to get her addicted. Each victim feared not only Emerson and her associates, but also the other victims. They could trust no one.
Remarkably, Emerson’s audacity in victimizing these teenage girls and young women didn’t end when she was arrested. While Emerson was being held in police custody awaiting her trial on human trafficking charges, one of her victims was unwittingly placed in the same cell after an arrest on unrelated charges. “Don’t testify,” Emerson allegedly threatened the victim. “You won’t be safe forever. I’ll find you.”
Emerson and Kingsbury don’t appear to be independent criminals. Police believe they are affiliated with the Ledbury Banff Crips, a violent street gang that formed in the late 1990s in and around a housing project in old Ottawa South, less than fifteen minutes by car from Parliament Hill. In recent years, LBC members and associates have been publicly implicated in serious criminal activity, including attempted murder and other violent crimes, as well as trafficking in cocaine and prohibited firearms. They have spread not only across Ottawa and the provincial border into Gatineau, but also into Western Canadian cities such as Calgary.
“Members of the LBC are known to exploit and control young females for the purposes of sexual relations and ... for the purposes of financial gain through the sex trade,” warned Ottawa Chief of Police Vince Bevan in a May 2004 report to the Ottawa Police Services Board. Chief Bevan classified the LBC as a “hard core” street gang with an estimated twenty-eight members averaging twenty years of age and with “a significant number of female associates.” In other words, they are relatively unknown to the public and small but deadly.
The LBC is such a serious threat to the community that children of five and older have become the focus of an early intervention program in Ottawa’s Ledbury/Banff area—a preventative measure to discourage them from becoming involved in gang life. To complement the program, cash has been invested to improve community housing.
On April 9, 2009, Emerson pleaded guilty in a Gatineau courtroom to charges of living off the avails of prostitution, assault, forcible confinement, and human trafficking. The woman wore a dark-grey turtleneck over her white prison jumpsuit and sat slumped in her chair, rising only to confirm her pleas. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and her long black hair hung loose around her shoulders as Judge Lapointe sentenced her to serve seven years imprisonment in addition to the eight months and ten days spent in pretrial custody, for which she received two-for-one credit.
Emerson also was ordered to have no contact with the victims during her sentence, required to provide a DNA sample, and, on release, prohibited from owning a firearm for ten years. She forfeited $28,150 in cash and her 2007 Cadillac Escalade, which the Quebec General Prosecutor seized upon her arrest. Judge Lapointe’s sentence is the strongest handed down by a Canadian court in a human trafficking case to date. Unfortunately, other sentences for human trafficking in Canada have been far more lenient, as discussed in a later chapter.
In December 2009, Kingsbury, Emerson’s male partner, pleaded guilty to living off the avails of prostitution and sexually assaulting one of the victims. Sentenced to three years and ten months’ imprisonment, he was given credit for pretrial custody to reduce the amount and, as a result, will serve fourteen months in jail followed by three years of probation.
Kingsbury’s final words as he was taken away to serve his time were chilling. According to Gatineau’s French-language newspaper Le Droit, he threatened to kill when released from prison. “I have three of them on my list,” he said.
8
FIRST NATIONS, LAST CHANCE
Honouring the Spirit of Our Little Sisters is a safe house in Winnipeg for Aboriginal youth between thirteen and seventeen who are at risk of sexual exploitation. The facility is managed by the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre, which was founded twenty-five years ago to provide help for Aboriginal children and their families in Manitoba’s child welfare system.
Comprehensive holistic programming at Little Sisters fosters a safe, welcoming, and respectful environment that includes support for family decision-making, cultural development, education, employment, training, mentoring, and life skills. The facility provides a unique opportunity for First Nations girls to escape the brutality of sexual exploitation and enables them to grow up free of threats from the men who pay to abuse them. But as the experience of Crystal and Sabrina reveals, even Little Sisters is vulnerable to sophisticated human traffickers.
In early 2004, the girls, both wards of the province, were living at Little Sisters when two young South Asian men befriended them. For three months, the men treated Crystal and Sabrina generously, picking them up from school and taking them for dinner or to a movie. One Friday afternoon, the men invited the girls to a party in Regina, over five hundred kilometres away. Little Sisters staff advised the girls not to accept, and Crystal and Sabrina agreed. When the girls suddenly left Little Sisters without warning, the staff grew alarmed and ran after them.
“As we got outside we saw the vehicle just turning from the back lane,” recalls Jackie Anderson, a children-in-care coordinator at Little Sisters. “We did get the licence plate and the colour of the vehicle so we immediately phoned the police. We were told that, because [the girls] just left and it was a rumour at this point that they were going out of the city, that we didn’t have proof of it, they couldn’t respond to it.”
About two hours later, the girls called Anderson from a gas station outside Brandon, Manitoba, to say that they were doing fine and were heading to Saskatchewan. The safe-house staff immediately notified the RCMP, who said the police could do nothing.
For some unknown reason, highway patrol officers pulled over the car with Crystal and Sabrina in the back seat. Up to this point, the young men had been plying Crystal with cocaine and alcohol and tried the same tactic on Sabrina, who refused. Not only were the highway patrol officers oblivious to the drugs and alcohol in the car, but also they hadn’t been told about the missing girls. Police found no reason to detain or search the vehicle, which continued westward to Saskatchewan.
In Regina, a Caucasian man with long grey hair joined the young men and the girls. The newcomer appeared to be about forty years old, was carrying a briefcase, and claimed to be from Vancouver. The five transferred to a new vehicle and headed north to Saskatoon, a further two hundred and fifty kilometres away. Once they’d arrived, the older man purchased some “kinky underwear” for the girls, and on the way to a hotel, the men picked up an older woman from off the street—likely a prostituted woman.
Inside the hotel room, Crystal passed out from all the drugs and alcohol she’d consumed on the trip. The two young men, the man from Vancouver, and the woman from off the street began engaging in sexual activities. Knowing the door to the hotel room was locked, Sabrina was terrified of being sexually assaulted. She seized a cellphone, locked herself in the bathroom, and called Jackie Anderson in Winnipeg, desperate for the social worker’s assistance.
Anderson, relieved to hear from the young girl, asked where she was being held.
Sabrina had never been to Saskatoon before. In fact, so limited was her knowledge of Canada that she’d never even heard of the city. All she could repeat over the phone to Anderson was “Kakatoon! Kakatoon!”
“I asked her to look around the bathroom to see, because in hotels you have soap bars,” says Anderson. Letter by letter, Sabrina, who could not read, spelled out the name of the hotel: Howard Johnson.
While Anderson kept Sabrina on the phone, another staff member called the Saskatoon Police to report the situation. Police officers immediately asked hotel security to begin dealing with the matter until they arrived. Then, without warning, Sabrina’s call went dead.
“She thought the men in the room were going to try to come in, so she opened the bathroom door and ran out of the room,” Anderson says. “By the time she reached the end of the hall, Security was there.”
They were soon joined by Saskatoon Police officers, who arrested the entire group on charges of drug possession. According to Anderson, the police said that they could hold the girls for only a maximum of six hours before releasing them with directions to a local shelter. Anderson pleaded with the police to keep Sabrina and Crystal until she could arrive, but the police could make no promises. When Anderson finally reached Saskatoon, she was relieved to find the girls still at the station. The girls’ “friends,” however, had been released.
“All of the factors were there,” Anderson says, still incredulous that the men were gone. “These guys were recruiters. They were bringing the girls there to trade them, to sell them to this guy who was going to take them to Vancouver. Who knows what would have happened from there? We may never have seen them again.”
“At the end of the day the police system, the child welfare system— everybody just pointed fingers at each other,” suggests Diane Redsky, acting executive director of the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre. “The systems could not react fast enough when our girls were taken from Winnipeg into another province.” Indeed, traffickers know that the easiest way to avoid detection is to move a victim from her hometown, both to isolate her and to capitalize on the lack of national coordination to address the problem.
The vulnerability of First Nations women and girls
According to Dianna Bussey, director of the Salvation Army’s Anti– Human Trafficking Network, Aboriginal girls are known to have been transported from reserves in rural Manitoba and sold for sex in Winnipeg. Another scenario involved rural Aboriginal girls from a particular reserve being hired as “nature guides” in their community, only to be sold to men for sex.
A 2001 study found that between 14 and 60 percent of Aboriginal youth in British Columbia have been sexually abused. Providing another view, an earlier study revealed that 75 percent of Aboriginal girls under eighteen had experienced sexual abuse of one kind or another, 50 percent under fourteen had encountered the same treatment, and almost 25 percent under seven had been sexually abused. Some First Nations advocates have described the extremely high prevalence of sexual abuse suffered by Aboriginal youth as a factor in “conditioning” them for more egregious long-term exploitation in the sex industry.
Sexual exploitation of Aboriginal girls and women is more common than anyone has been willing to admit, according to NGOs and governmental officials, whose members have expressed particular concern over the growing use of trucking routes to exploit the girls.
Vancouver Rape Relief’s Lee Lakeman describes the vulnerability of Aboriginal girls at truck stops: “[Often they are] very young girls who were forced into hitchhiking for lack of transportation and once they’re on those hitchhiking routes, they are lured by men with small amounts of cash, small amounts of drugs, small amounts of gifts.” Or by other more violent means, as in the case involving Judge David Ramsay, detailed in Chapter 13.
At least five hundred First Nations girls and women have gone missing in Canada over the last thirty years. No one knows at this point how many of these disappearances are linked to the flesh market and, perhaps, domestic sex trafficking, but some believe that the two likely are related.
“Aboriginal girls are being hunted down and prostituted, and the perpetrators go uncharged with child sexual assault and child rape,” reports the Vancouver-based Aboriginal Women’s Action Network. “These predators, pervasive in our society, roam with impunity in our streets and take advantage of those Aboriginal children with the least protection.”
“Men see Aboriginal women not as women but as things to use and dispose of,” adds Redsky. She believes the problem is largely being ignored because of racism and sexism.
The Little Sisters safe house run by Ma Mawi is, for some, a last stop. One fourteen-year-old girl had been in sixty-seven placements in foster care and a succession of group homes before arriving there.
Yet Little Sisters, whose work is important and in many cases life-saving, has just six beds. Due to a lack of funding and facilities, they’ve had to turn away more than one hundred teenage girls in the last six years. In need of help and protection, the girls were failed by the system and left to take their chances on the street.
What’s behind the high incidence of sexual exploitation of Aboriginal girls in this country? Are the causes economic? Social? Geographic? Historical?
A landmark study in 2007 found that they are all of these and more. The root causes named in the study are myriad and complex, and are linked to other persistent social challenges facing Aboriginal communities; these include the legacy of colonization and residential schools, domestic violence and crime, poverty, substance abuse, lack of awareness and acknowledgement of the problem, isolation of Aboriginal youth, racism, and inadequate services and laws to combat the problem.
Drugs and death
While drugs often play a role in attracting and controlling young women within the commercial sex industry, their use is not universal. In some instances, traffickers may even forbid their victims to use hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin because once addicted, the girls may become too volatile and hard to control.
Staff at the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre have found that many victims controlled by their addiction are especially vulnerable to their drug dealer’s becoming their de facto trafficker. Once addicted to methamphetamine (“meth”), crack cocaine, or heroin, victims may sell their bodies for sex acts to pay their drug dealer for the next hit, used both to satisfy their intense addiction and numb their physical and mental suffering. While under the effects of these narcotics, victims experience severely impaired judgment and a relaxing of inhibitions.
The stories of Aboriginal young women falling prey to drug dealers and sexual exploitation are almost too numerous to tell, and far too many of them end in tragedy. Such was the short life of Fonessa Bruyere (her real name), an Aboriginal girl in Manitoba who first was sexually exploited when she was only eleven years old. As well, Fonessa and her older sister soon became addicted to crack cocaine and meth. When Fonessa was just twelve, she sought help at a residential youth shelter in Winnipeg, but because all the beds were full, she was turned away. Her substance abuse and the lack of support contributed to her being sold for sex acts.
Fonessa returned to life on the street with her sister, managing to survive for five years. She was last seen alive getting into a car on a Winnipeg street corner near Selkirk Avenue on August 9, 2007. A few days later, she was found dead, her body dumped on a roadside at the city’s outskirts. She was seventeen years old, and her murder has never been solved.
“Police were notified but we were greeted with indignance and disrespect to the extent that her grandmother was refused an incident number after reporting her missing,” says Carla Bruyere, Fonessa’s aunt. “We also made attempts to contact the press to get her picture out there as a missing child, but there was no interest at the time.”
Tragically, two of Fonessa’s friends, also young Aboriginal girls, were last seen alive in the same area, went missing, and were later found dead. A group of men reportedly were using them for sex acts, plying them with crack cocaine, and giving them food and clothing. Fonessa’s friends were Hilary Wilson, eighteen, and Cherisse Houle, seventeen.
9
FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS
Often when the justice system fails victims of crime, it is said that they have been victimized twice—first by the perpetrators who harmed them and later by a system that failed to redress that harm. Even if human trafficking victims are finally freed from their exploiters, they face formidable obstacles in trying to rebuild their lives.
Unfortunately, Canada cannot claim an enviable record in its treatment of trafficking victims. In too many cases, they receive treatment of the kind that should be meted out to their traffickers. While some important progress has been made, the majority of provinces in Canada do not have a system in place to coordinate services required for trafficking victims, and vulnerable women and children pay the price. Canada also lacks a national plan to ensure that victims of human trafficking are given the protection and assistance they need to recover and rehabilitate. Combine this with a bureaucratic attitude to dealing with circumstances that are not clearly delineated in policy books and injustice is sure to follow, as it did in the case of eleven-year-old Natalie.
Free from traffickers but confined by the state
Natalie arrived in Montreal from overseas in the summer of 2008. Border guards with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) believed that the little girl was a victim of human trafficking because of the mysterious circumstances of her arrival. Authorities placed Natalie in the immigration detention centre just outside of Montreal, a prison-like complex surrounded by barbed wire. Her confinement was allegedly for her own safety.
During a routine weekly visit to the detention centre, representatives of Action Réfugiés Montréal noticed Natalie and were alarmed that such a young child was in the facility. The following week they found out that the terrified eleven-year-old was still there, now segregated from the adult population. The isolation may have enhanced Natalie’s physical safety but contributed to her feeling frightened and alone. And although she’d met with a psychologist and had a social worker designated as her representative, she remained in detention.
