| By Michael Rappaport February 04 2011 issue |
A man far from home has no neighbours —so said the Japanese to rationalize the brutality of their soldiers in occupied lands before and during the Second World War, including the rape of women, the massacre of civilians and the beheading of prisoners. Does this explanation also account for the behaviour of Canadian men who engage in sex-tourism abroad — in particular, the predators and pedophiles who prey on indentured women and children in foreign lands? Disturbingly, this is the conclusion I arrived at after reading Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking by Benjamin Perrin, an exposé of Canada’s pitiful track record in combating sexual trafficking both at home and abroad. Perrin is an assistant law professor at the University of British Columbia and the founder and executive director of The Future Group, an NGO he created in 2000 to combat human trafficking. A modern day William Wilberforce — the British abolitionist and activist — Perrin was named a “hero acting to end modern-day slavery” by Hillary Clinton and the U.S. State Department in 2009. He is the first Canadian to receive this honour. In 1997, Canada joined a growing number of countries in making it a crime for its citizens to sexually exploit minors anywhere in the world. But until 2007, only one Canadian sex-tourist had been convicted in Canada for abusing and molesting children abroad. And Donald Bakker’s crimes were only discovered by accident — when police seized a bag from him in the course of an arrest, which contained videos of him sexually abusing minors in a Cambodian brothel. Bakker received a 10-year sentence for his crimes, minus three years for 18 months served in pre-trial custody. But for the most part, Canadian sex tourists travel freely through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, purchasing sex with underage women and children with impunity. It can be argued that prosecuting Canadians in Canada for sexual crimes committed abroad is a daunting task, given the costs associated with international investigations, complications flowing from a lack of jurisdiction and the challenges of ensuring a fair trial where victims and witnesses either cannot be found or compelled to testify. Yet Canada’s record at prosecuting domestic human traffickers is almost equally pathetic. Until 2005, the Criminal Code had no offence of human trafficking. In contrast, the U.S., the European Union and many other countries have been active in protecting victims and prosecuting traffickers and travelling sex offenders for the past 10 to 15 years. The first major report by the RCMP on human trafficking in Canada in 2004 estimated that about 600 foreign nationals are brought to Canada for sex trafficking every year. Often young women — primarily from the Philippines, Moldova, China and Romania — are smuggled into Canada or lured to Canada by fraudulent offers of employment. Upon arrival, their passports and visas are confiscated and they are forced to work in strip clubs, massage parlors and “micro-brothels,” which can be set up in hotel rooms, apartment units and even luxury condominiums. Not all trafficked women are foreigners. Domestic sex traffickers prey on at-risk youth, in particular aboriginals from reservations and teenagers from broken homes in impoverished communities. Shockingly, over 500 aboriginal girls and women have gone missing in Canada over the last 30 years. Sex trafficking is highly lucrative. The Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CSIC) estimates that domestic sex traffickers earn an average of $280,000 annually from every victim under their control.
Pimps use a combination of charisma and coercion to control their victims and push them into prostitution. Is the oily charm of pimps so potent that it causes judges to go soft? Worse, perhaps judges have succumbed to the myth of the fallen woman: that women forced into prostitution have no value or virtue, so crimes committed against them, such as rape, do not merit punishment. The sentences handed down to human traffickers have been so inadequate that Parliament introduced Bill C-268 in January 2009, which establishes a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for convicted child traffickers. All this is not to let the “johns” off the hook — the men who purchase sex at home and abroad. In 1999, the Swedish government recognized prostitution as an institution of male violence against women that cannot be tolerated or condoned. Rather than punishing the sellers of sex, Sweden implemented laws targeting the purchasers — the johns who fuel the growth of human trafficking. Invisible Chains is a brave book for shining a light on the dark, seedy corners of our communities and abroad, which most of us would rather ignore. Sadly, it reveals, a woman far from home — in particular a young, vulnerable, marginalized woman — has no neighbours either. Source:lawyersweekly.ca |
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